Intensity rules

For my second blog I wanted to touch on something that keeps popping up in my mind whilst training in the gym. There has been a increase in gym users venturing into the weights room in the last 18 months and i expect even more to start in the new year. Which is great because it means mainstream media has caught up with science and people are getting the message that lifting weights is an important part of training.

With fitness marketing always wanting to make everything look cool and sexy, a lot of gym users are exposed to exercises that are very complex like a clean and snatch (the ones you see in the olympics) or training systems that involve a lot of different exercises, usually under the badge of HITT (High Intensity Interval Training).

My issue is that complex lifts take months, sometimes years to perfect and if you do too many strength exercises in circuits then its hard to keep the intensity high. Im not saying its not hard work because it is, however intensity is the amount of physical power that the body uses when performing an activity. So as you get tired the ability to lift a decent amount of load decreases.

The truth is pretty much everybody can get into great shape by nailing the basic lifts (deadlift, squat, chins, bench press etc), and training to the point of overload (the point of failure). Weight lifting should be about gradually building the base or framework of strength, with good program ming, it hasn’t got to be too fancy. Perfect the movements and get strong before moving on to complex olympic lifts or using them in a HITT system. Remember that intensity and overload beats volume, duration and over complexity for pretty much every training goal.