Four Ways to Transition From Training For Sport To Health
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At some point, everyone who steps foot inside the gym will be doing so with the purpose of training for life rather than sport. Whether it be on day one or after a long career of competing in a sport of their choosing.
This transition is something I feel that I excel with in helping my clients do inside of my 1:1 Pain-Free Performance Program where I help my clients optimize their fitness in 90 days without dealing with aches and pains in the gym.
Training for sport is not inherently bad but it is simply just different than training for health and wellness.
Contrary to what the fitness industry will lead you to believe.
The transition from wanting to “win” to wanting to feel good, look good, be strong, be functional and get or stay healthy is inevitable.
The purpose of sport is to pursue victory at all costs and will include physical, mental, social and emotional costs.
Eventually, these costs either catch up to us once we phase out of being competitive or are not worth the competitive pursuit in the first place.
But how do you go about transitioning from a competitive landscape to training with the intention of health and wellness?
If you are someone who wants to train for health and wellness, than at bare minimum, the factors listed below should be considered in your program design.
1) Structure your year accordingly
Training can be broken down into individual sessions, then weeks of training, then cycles of several weeks, then mesocycles of several months and then finally a full macrocycle or yearly plan. These can then also be broken down into accumulation, intensification, pre-competitive, competitive and deload phases. These segments should be outlined whether you are an athlete or someone training for health and wellness. The difference between the two will be the presence of the pre-competitive and competitive cycles as well as the frequency and duration of deload and intensification periods. The actual definition of these phases are out of the scope of this blog post but just know that they exist. They may just not exist in your program.
For someone who is training for health and wellness, the majority of the year will consist of accumulation periods where volume and work capacity is built followed by intermittent periods of intensification where weights get heavier and paces on aerobic work increase. The intensification periods serve to realize the gains that are made in the accumulation periods and serve as testing times for future accumulation phases. Deloads for someone who is training for health and wellness will be few and far between. The reason being that if you are training for health and wellness, the intensity of training shouldn’t be to the point where frequent deloads are necessary. Also, life tends to throw unplanned deloads at health and wellness clients anyways. Think vacations, upticks in work duties family obligations etc.
2) Train Sustainably
Once we decide that our training will now begin to support our health and wellness, sustainability within our training will be paramount. Not only long term sustainability which is also important, but sustainability within our training sessions. Meaning, everything you do should be able to be repeated for an additional set. For aerobic work, if your first round of a workout takes a two minutes, then each round thereafter should take 2 minutes. Similarly, if you are able to complete three sets of ten reps in the back squat then there should be enough juice left in the tank to perform another set of ten reps, if you wanted to.
Training sustainably ensures a few things. First and foremost is that we are not entering into a state of under recovery. Training should provide just enough of a stimulus for our bodies and nervous system to slightly breakdown but then rebuild and recover for the next session. Secondly, unsustainable training within aerobic work creates a high degree of lactate. This type of stimulus is not only absent within everyday life, but, it also promotes faster aging, decreased proprioception and takes significantly longer to recover from. Lastly, training unsustainably within strength training can lead to an over trained state that comes with a host of health issues as well as can expose the body to injury.
For more info on how to ensure you are training sustainably, check out this blog post “3 Signs You Are NOT Training Aerobically“
3) Adhere To The Training Lifecycle
Whether we want to admit it or not. Our bodies will move through a life cycle when it comes to training. Where we sit on this life cycle will be predicated on our training age and our biological age. The stages of the lifecycle include: Novice, Intermediate, Advanced, Master and Grandmaster. As you begin training for the first time, you will obviously begin at the Novice stage. Then as sessions are accumulated and experience is gained through time spent in the gym you will begin to move from stage to stage.
But why does this matter? Well, each stage also comes with its own abilities on what the individual will be capable of expressing. For example, most people would agree that it would not be a great idea to take a beginner on day one and see how much weight they could deadlift for one rep. This is because the individual has not developed the appropriate degree of motor control to perform the movement safely and fully. Additionally, they have not progressed to muscle endurance and then finally the ability to even create the force capabilities necessary to perform the one rep max accurately. Any single rep that they would complete would be a poor representation of what they would actually be capable of. It is generally accepted that Novice trainees develop motor control, Intermediate develop muscle endurance and maximal contractions, Advanced continue to develop all three, Masters move back to muscle endurance and motor control and then Grandmasters work to hold on to as much motor control as they can for the rest of their lives.
Adhering to this lifecycle ensures that you are doing what you are capable of and that your training is supporting your life, health and wellness.
4) Emphasize Structural Balance and Essential Patterns
In sport, especially sports that resemble training, such as Power Lifting, Olympic Lifting or CrossFit, you do not get to decide which motor patterns you emphasize. The sport is the sport. Thus, the training you engage in must develop what is demanded of the athletes. This can and most likely will create imbalances and movement deficiencies that are actually desirable… to the athlete. Hence, the physical costs we spoke about earlier. If our goal is health and wellness these imbalances are to be avoided.
We can avoid muscular imbalances by including all of the six fundamental movement patterns – Squat, Hinge, Lunge, Push, Pull and Carry. Then program them in your training based on not only an assessment, but also to counter activities you as an individual perform most frequently in your day. For example, if you have a desk job and frequently are leaning forward and sitting. You would need to include a higher percentage of hinging, pulling and carrying exercises since they involve muscles that counter the leaned forward and sitting positions. These patterns are also present in any program for health and wellness because any movement you find yourself doing within your day will be a derivative of these six movements.
These factors are what I consider to be crucial in the transition of training for sport to training for life. The fitness industry today promotes a performance mindset when it comes to fitness. The harsh reality though is that training for performance does not equal health. It does not move people towards the healthiest version of themselves for various reasons. By taking these factors into consideration for your training you can effectively make training support the life you want to live and not the other way around!
