You Reap What You Sow; How to Get Better Results From The Gym

You reap what you sow. Let me preface this by saying that I'm not a farmer. In spite of this fact, I'm going to confidently make a statement related to farming. Are you ready? Here it is: The seeds you plant have a direct correlation with the crops you grow... No one thinks that’s crazy right? Would it blow your mind if I suggested that the same thing applies to your physical training?

Here are three areas that you may not have thought about how this applies to you when it comes to your training. 

1. Practising poor movement will create poor movement patterns

A lot of people will train until failure on a regular basis. They’ll work as hard as they can and strive to “feel the burn”... Unfortunately, a lot of the time this ends up with people focusing so much on finishing the movement that they sacrifice how they do it.

Dave Whitley, a performing strongman and motivational speaker from Nashville Tennessee has been known to make the statement that, “no one cares how many crap reps you can do”. At the end of the day, most people who are training to increase their well-being and quality of life, can’t afford bad reps. Bad reps increase the likelihood of injury both while doing them, and because they make the good patterns you’ve been painstakingly practicing ‘fuzzy’. Fuzzy in the sense that your brain might view the compensations as something that we do when something is difficult, and default to that on a more regular basis, ultimately resulting in an inferior, less safe, and efficient movement that you might repeat automatically when you’d rather default to the good stuff.

Every time we train is a chance to deliberately create the patterns that we want to carry with us throughout the rest of our lives. It’s theorised that it takes 3000-5000 movements to lock a pattern in (and that assumes that we aren’t muddying it up by deliberately allowing the quality to drop off). By sowing good movement every time we train, it allows us to get those movements cemented into our brain so that they are our default, both in and out of the gym.

2. Practising getting fatigued all the time will create ongoing fatigue

Pavel Tsatsouline in The Quick and The Dead talks about the benefits of what he describes as Anti-Glycolytic training. The goal of this training is (in quick, dirty, and slightly inaccurate terms) to spend as little time as possible in states where our cells are being filled with inefficient, highly acidic fuel sources. The opposite of this style of training? HIIT. High-intensity interval training is a powerful tool that has great application in the short-term, however, if you are regularly exhausting yourself using this style of training, you may find your long-term outcomes are not as exciting as the training itself...

Our cells are driven by an organelle known as mitochondria. It is essentially the power station of our cell and is responsible for creating energy for us to use. When we constantly deplete ourselves and get ourselves into a state where we are gasping for air and suffering on the floor, we make heavy demands on the mitochondria and fill their environment with acid. While doing this periodically leads to positive adaptive outcomes (every 1-3 weeks), if you are pushing this button multiple times per week, you are going to end up with fewer and less efficient mitochondria. This means you are going to get less power for less long from your mitochondrial power stations, and this is being linked with premature ageing, excessive fatigue, and several other factors that diminish quality of life. Feel free to google mitochondrial health if you’re interested, you’ll see a laundry list of undesirable outcomes linked to poor mitochondrial health.

3. Practising poor breathing will reinforce poor breathing

There are very few things that you’ll ever do that are as important as breathing... Aside from being critically important for staying alive, it’s a movement we do literally thousands of times every day. It’s helpful with mood regulation, digestion, stress control, muscle activation, and a whole host of other similarly important activities. It’s also something that we often don’t give the time and attention that it needs.

Strength training or movement practise, or whatever active discipline you enjoy is both a great opportunity to practise breathing and almost definitely something that is likely to be enhanced by a deliberate focus upon it. Allowing one’s breathing to become ragged and uncontrolled is a trap. It feels like you’re allowing yourself a chance to recover, but in reality, it’s hindering your performance as well as your recovery. For us at QLD Kettlebells, the vast majority of our breathwork falls into two categories; the first is power breathing, and the second is controlled, natural, diaphragmatic breathing.

Power breathing creates deliberate compression of our midsection on both the inhalation and exhalation. On a swing, this looks like a sharp inhalation through the nose as the hips hinge back and receive the bell, followed by a tongue against the roof of your mouth ‘tss’ sound as the hips explosively snap forward. On a press, this looks like a strong nasal inhalation to fill the lungs and stabilise the midsection, followed by a longer ‘tsss’ or, alternatively, a series of short sharp ‘tss, tss, tss’s’. Natural diaphragmatic breathing on the other hand is typically through the nose with the tongue on the roof of the mouth, with the belly appearing to inflate before the chest.

Power breathing is desirable in that it facilitates extra tight muscular contractions and can facilitate speed and/or stability. Diaphragmatic breathing is desirable as it facilitates reflexive stability, which is essentially our body’s ability to react to stimulus appropriately and without our deliberate intervention. Both extremely important for life with supercharged power breathing working best from the reflexively stable, strong, base provided by natural diaphragmatic breathing.

Think about all the benefits outlined here around breathing, and think about how much you might be giving up by either letting your breath quality deteriorate or by not even thinking about it, and sowing the practice of bad breathing into your life. 

Reaping what you sow is a fairly sound life principle. It’s not foolproof, but as a general rule, what you do, practise, repeat will have a heavy bearing upon what outcomes life visits upon you. As you go about your business, and particularly, in relation to the topics in the article, take a moment to think about how you can sow better seeds in order to reap more of the outcomes that you want.

In the book, Grit, Angela Duckworth talks about how one of the easiest ways to build good habits (sow good seeds!) is to be a part of a community that already practises those behaviours. If you’d like to shortcut your journey a little bit and make forming the above habits a bit easier, we’d love to have a chat and see if you fit in with our community.