Many of us, the vast majority, do not dedicate ourselves in a professional way to the practice of a specific sport. That is, we do not make a living by competing. Precisely for this reason, it is sometimes difficult to progress, yet no one says it is impossible. That is why today we are going to give you some tricks to progress your strength training the right time.
I want to emphasize that this article is not focused on obtaining the maximum performance or real progress, but rather to obtain or try to obtain the maximum yield in relation to the daily life that in many occasions we must carry. It is possible to increase our strength and progress with having to deal with daily chores, work, family, etc.
Adapt training to your life
In an ideal world, in order to increase our performance in any sports discipline in the most optimal way possible, sufficient time would be needed. In some sports like triathlon, it takes even eight hours a day for it, and if we think of sports of strength, at least three or four hours to perform a truly efficient training.
When we talk about improving our strength, we understand that during the training heavy series, in which, we get very close to our 1 RM. This implies that the breaks between sets should be quite high, which inevitably leads to a complete workout, even for a single exercise, that is excessively long.
However, we do not always have enough time to perform such training, so what we must do is to find the formula that allows us to continue progressing in the best possible way, although it is not the most optimal way to obtain performance if we think we are The best in our sport discipline.
In these cases, we must think that it will be much better to perform a training, even if we have to do it in a short period of time and not optimal, not to train because we do not have enough time. You can always progress , even if it is done more slowly, shaping the training to our daily life.
How to adapt a strength training
If we think about following a specific strength routine, it is possible that due to the stress of the day to day, to the excessive hours of work or study that we have, we are not able to go to the gym to train 100% of our possibilities. For this reason, the best way to train with a lower risk of injury and with the possibility of progress.
The variables with which we must work when planning our workouts or improvising our workouts are mainly the frequency, volume and intensity of loads, and in this specific case, another important factor in each workout is that of breaks between Series.
One way to progress as far as force is concerned is to decrease the breaks between sets with a high load. I repeat, it is not the most optimal, but it is a way to progress training in less time.
A symptom that we increase our strength over time is to be able to lift the same load, a certain number of times in a shorter time , ie if a person performs 10x1x125Kg in a squat (ten sets of A repetition with 125Kg, assuming that this is a load between 85% and 100% of the 1RM) in fifty minutes and over two months is able to perform in just twenty minutes, probably increased its RM 1 significantly.
Tips for adapting strength training to a shorter version
After giving some general guidelines on strength training and explaining that the best way to train strength is to spend the time that is really needed to do breaks and effective series, then I comment on the different variables to take into account to adapt the strengths Strength training to a more tight training time:
- Frequency of training: If we are going to perform short workouts, it is better that at least the training frequency is higher, that is, if we want to progress in squatting, it would be advisable to do the maximum number of days possible a squat training.
- Volume and intensity of training: The volume of training and the intensity of the loads, should be the “maximum” possible within the time we have to train, always taking into account that we should not overwhelm the musculature or the central nervous system.
- Warming up and approach series: An example of a short strength training, you might be thinking that we only have 40 minutes to perform the warm-up and the actual series. In this case, the heating should be relatively fast. Not all people are able to perform a warm up in a short time, but it is possible and sometimes the body adapts to that type of warm-ups, even if they are not optimal.
- An example of short strength training: A session could consist of fifteen minutes of warm-up series and twenty-five minutes of effective sets. At that time, series could be made with only one or two minutes of rest depending on the load used, so that, after finishing the training, we could finish with approximately nine to fifteen effective series.