To progress well you really have to know yourself.
Me personally, I’m impatient when it comes to physical progress. I feel stifled if I do what most think of as methodical, have a set routine spelled out with accountant like preplanned precise progression.
This mental roadblock is entirely bypassed by either/and/or :
•Having no plan past guidelines.
•Milking a few things for all their/they’re worth.
I am zero or one hundred, black and white, passionate or indifferent.
So instead I play.
I need to.
Training is a game.
I’ll do whatever I feel like.
I may hit something daily for nearly a year. I may epitomize “muscle confusion” and seemingly never do the same thing twice.
Training is best by design as fun.
The fun CAN be physically challenging, tough, or whatever.
(Though sports and labor 99% of the time allowed me/had me/force(d) me to push harder than the gym which is really a hobby/leisure/pasttime activity. With that outlook you’ll always enjoy the gym, and never suffer the “gym dread” oh so common.)
When necessary I revert to nothing required past doing some pushups daily.
I internalized the K.I.S.S. principle in regards to the gym.
It may look like a clusterfuck, chaotic, pell mell, grab bag, yet the madness has method.
Randomized by feel…on purpose.
Or entirely repetitive (squat every day, years of daily pushups, etc).
I actually use the gym as meditation where my brain mostly turns off.
I’ve sat on the seated row for over 100 sets of 10 before because because because because because. It’s what I felt that day, and I went til it was time to stop.
I’ve done a single set both as minimal requirement in certain phases, or in others because one set was enough to know that I’d done enough on it and moved on.
I’ve kept a squat every day phase alive with a single meaningfully weighted cold single.
I’ve walked into the gym, took my boots, and hoodie off, pulled a deadlift 20rm cold, put my boots, and hoodie back on, stopped to explain to a shocked buddy that I was in fact leaving (I had far more interest that Sunday morning in the steak on sale at the grocery store, even telling him so), and left.
It’s a very Zen Eastern approach to a Hard Western thing.
The gym is where I have the mind of no mind, the program of not program, the principle is and of itself.
Mind bogglingly simple to me.
Possibly complicated to another.
The randomness makes “complicated” yet I can milk a few movements to a degree that causes involuntary shudders and severe cold sweats in those turning dollars in the gym/fitness industry.
Over The Years :
•A heavy clean and press.
•Pushups
•High rep light overhead squats.
•Clean for reps.
•Jerk for reps.
•High volume bent rows.
•Lunges/Swamp Lunges
•Isometrics
•Jump Rope
(To name some.)
Find a push, pull, and leg exercise and milk them for all they’re/their worth.
There’s bound to be a movement (or a few) in each category that you are high response to.
Don’t think. Just do.
And always be willing to make whatever you have available work.
Your psyche is the only major detail towards your gains.
Persistence & Tenacity