Speaker 1: 0:01

Hello and welcome back to another episode of Train for a Great Life. I'm going to touch on something, the idea of something that I wrote about probably 12 years ago. It was an article, blog article called why Can't I PR Every Day. I had noticed people in the gym working incredibly hard and just every now and then kind of going through you know a week here and there, where everything they touched just was nowhere near what their full capability was. I've experienced the same thing. So I, while I don't remember exactly what I exactly the words I used, I know the themes Okay. So basically, you can PR every day for a while.

Speaker 1: 0:54

If you are new to something and have like this upward linear trajectory, you're just you're going to kind of be getting those newbie gains or like. There is a concept within CrossFit that, like, everything is everything, meaning like, as your hip extension gets stronger through a deadlift, your power clean should probably get better as well. Through increased force development, your pressing might get better and then when you retest handstand pushups, they might get better. There's going to be time in between all these things, but there's a lot of carryover between them. Anyway, that's kind of beside the point, but you can get better at things for a long time, especially if you have the mindset that you're going to push things. The mindset that I brought into the gym when I started CrossFit for the first years. Mean, I said it out loud. I said I am not interested in doing something that I've done before. Meaning that, if you know, I had a PR of a 250 clean. I was going in that day to hit 255 at a minimum and probably that, and then the next day would be more than that. So that mindset can take you a long way. Eventually, just training rhythms will catch up to you. Okay, so what happens? And in more like traditional strength programs I'm going to kind of bring this back around In more traditional strength programs there are deload phases.

Speaker 1: 2:17

Okay, it's very common to have like three weeks of building and then a week of deloading where your body gets to recover a little bit before you kind of ramp back up. Okay, crossfit is not necessarily meant to be that. It is a program that is keeping you kind of ready at all times. We're not necessarily trying to specialize in anything. We are looking for general physical preparedness, gpp. Okay, with that said, in our gym we do a lot of structured strength training and strength training cycles which do work quite well, but, like again, sometimes the way that your body functions and the rhythms of it will not overlay perfectly onto the rhythm of a strength cycle. Okay, an example, perfect example, if you're familiar with 5-3-1, the 5-3-1 strength training program.

Speaker 1: 3:15

So you do like a set of five, set of five and then a max, max reps at a certain weight. Then the next week it gets a little heavier. You go three, three and then three plus, meaning max reps, and then the next week a little heavier for max reps, and then you take a deload week and then you repeat, like you know, plus three to 5%. I remember years back I was just in the right mindset to like take this to an absolute max in the first week and I think I pulled a 345 deadlift for like 15 reps. It's like double body weight for a ton of reps, and the next week, like I kind of just fried myself on that and I was not recovered enough to be able to do that again. I think I had nowhere close to it.

Speaker 1: 4:03

So a couple things here. One, as so the rhythms of your own body, like you, might go through little peaks and valleys you're going to. The longer that you do this, especially if you've been doing it very consistently for like two to three years or more, you will start to notice, or hopefully notice, that you're going to go through rhythms and very likely, the week that you're having trouble hitting a PR or like, basically you're not able to do what you thought you would be able to do the week before, that was probably pretty frigging good it's. When you look back, you might recognize that, okay, and then again, coming off of that week where you were, you're kind of not able to do what you expected, you'll probably be able to do some good things again. Okay, so there's going to be rhythms of this. As you get a little bit older, like that's, there's just going to be a little bit more of that. Maybe the cycles kind of like tighten up a little bit.

Speaker 1: 5:10

Um, you know, I I've noticed that I I don't have more than probably like three or four really good, solid days of intensity, sometimes even two in a week, whereas I used to have, you know, basically every day, like there was like, okay, no days off every day.

Speaker 1: 5:27

You know that mindset that I talked about a little bit earlier. So what I'm getting at here again, just to state it more simply is you're not just going to be up and to the right all the time. Okay, there's going to be waves of things. If you zoom out, then, yes, hopefully up and to the right is the general trend. But there's going to be those ups and downs, there's going to be peaks and valleys and there's going to be little cycles within there. Sometimes you know, it's outright strength, sometimes it's explosiveness, sometimes just, you know, power production over time, like a more anaerobic type of thing. But don't be discouraged. The more that you train and the more that you've gotten yourself into like years of consistency, the more evident this becomes. And just understand it and try to keep your head in the right spot and I will see you in the gym.