Is Your Training Making You Worse?

Since we took a break from talking about fitness and physical preparation last month, I figure it’s time we get back to it with a simple and straight-forward concept: How your dumb ass training leaves you less prepared than you were before you started.

What is dumb ass training? Dumb ass training is training that leaves you incredibly sore, injured or in some other way beat up to the point where it affects your ability to do your job or to train you skill specific work. On the mat, in the ring or out on your shift are where you need to be at your best; make sure your physical training reflects that.

Now, am I trying to imply that a person who trains often and hard should never be sore or a little beat up? Hell no. What I mean is that if your programming or exercise and set/rep selection gets you too sore to move or gets you hurt, you are now LESS physically capable of performing and LESS physically prepared than you were; until you recover and heal.

Examples: High Rep KB exercises that rip your hands up, squat/lunge til you drop-sets, shoulder destroying bear-crawl races on hard surfaces or injury monsters like high-rep box jumps or weighted box jumps. Or doing dumb shit with no spotter and smashing your big toe into oblivion while some of your clients watch and laugh...but I digress.

Remember, our physical preparation and development is meant to enhance our ability to utilize our skill training and to allow us to impose our skill and our will on our adversary. This doesn’t mean we need to train like pussies or avoid the tough stuff, what it means is we can be smarter and not get sucked into fads and thinking that training only works if it hurts and makes us incredibly sore.