Most clients join our program because they weren’t seeing results with what they were doing previously, and were stuck for one reason:
They were exercising, not training.
This blog might sound like semantics, but if you take the time to understand this concept, it will forever change how you see your workouts. And the five minutes it takes to read this blog is a small price to pay for how much better your results will be.
Let me define both terms:
Exercise – any intentional activity to move the body in a way that increases heart rate and stimulates the muscles.
Training – exercise that is set up with the goal of creating a specific outcome.
Before I tell you why you need to be training, not just exercising… let me just say this: exercise is extremely beneficial for you. Exercise is great for your health and will likely improve strength, muscle mass, and aerobic fitness to some degree—maybe even to a very good degree.
But it doesn’t compare to the results that you can get from training.
With exercise, the goal is largely just to move your body. And if you ask somebody how they know they had a good workout, they will likely say something about being sweaty, sore, and tired. And if they’re really crazy, they might even use being nauseous or throwing up as a gauge of a great workout.
People focus on these things because they provide immediate feedback. Being sweaty, sore, and tired happens either during the workout or within a day or two after the workout. And it makes perfect sense that if your exercise doesn’t have anything specific you’re trying to achieve, you’ll grab onto the first tangible piece of feedback to decide if you had a good workout or not.
The wild thing about exercise is that sometimes people put way more effort into it than they would if they were training, yet they get worse results.
That sounds crazy on the surface—until you understand the science of progress.
To see the best results, the goal is not to just work as hard as possible. If that were the case, most of our clients never would’ve signed up for our program because they’ve worked really, really hard in other exercise programs but still didn’t get the results they wanted.
When they join our program, they aren’t signing up for a program that’s going to train them as hard as we possibly can. No—that’s not the secret behind our client success.
The secret is that we train, not just exercise.
As I said earlier, training is an exercise that is intentionally set up in a way to achieve a specific outcome.
Of course, this can apply to cardio. But we are going to focus on strength training, as that’s our primary focus at Steel Strength Training.
When it comes to strength training specifically, the goal is to get stronger. So everything is optimized for that. At least that’s the case with what I would call true strength training.
The problem is that everybody is talking about how important strength training is these days, but very few people actually understand what strength training is. Even many personal trainers can’t clearly define how to strength train.
What most people call strength training today is really just exercise using weights. Is there a benefit to that? Absolutely. But it’s not the same as true strength training.
True strength training involves putting tremendous thought into every exercise you do—how many sets you perform, how many reps you do, how close to failure you get, how much rest you take between sets, how many days per week you work out, etc. Every part of the program is given consideration.
But once the program is designed, the client just has to execute the plan, and the results will happen.
The program is not set up to be as hard as possible. Yes, you need to work hard in your training sessions. However, hard work alone is not going to get you the results you want. It’s working hard at the right things, in the right doses, that gets the results you want.
Another problem with exercise is that because it’s short-term focused, people end up working out way too hard, and then their bodies can’t recover. It’s actually during the recovery process that your body makes progress.
So again, the goal is not to work out as hard as possible. The goal is to work out in the right dose so your body gets enough of a stimulus to make a change—but not so much that it can’t recover and come back better.
When you train properly, you give the body a stimulus to grow and change, but you also make sure it’s small enough that the body can recover and come back stronger for the next workout.
For many people—especially those who have tried dozens of exercise programs over the years—they find that training is actually easier than any of the workouts they’ve done in the past. Most people don’t have a problem working hard in the gym. They just aren’t working hard at the right things.
So what are the right things?
Here are a few general rules to get you started:
- Choose a dozen or so exercises that train all the major muscle groups in the body and allow you to train hard, pain-free.
- Split those exercises over the course of 2 to 4 workouts per week. For most people, 2 to 3 workouts per week is plenty. Expect the workouts to last roughly 45 minutes.
- Set your workouts up in a way that you hit each muscle group at least once per week—but ideally twice per week. You can do this with a full-body workout program or by alternating between upper body and lower body.
- Do one exercise per muscle group in a workout, and start with 2 to 3 sets per exercise.
- On every rep, use good form and a full range of motion. Do anywhere from 4 to 10 reps per set and take those sets to about one rep shy of failure—meaning you could still get one more rep if you absolutely had to. Stop your set right before that last rep.
- Rest 2 to 3 minutes between sets. Make sure you start each set feeling rested and recovered—you shouldn’t feel exhausted, and your heart rate shouldn’t be super high going into your next set.
- Write down how much weight, how many sets, and how many reps you do in a note on your phone or in a notebook.
- Over time, you should be able to increase your reps and eventually the weight you use on each exercise.
And don’t worry if you are sweaty, sore, or tired after your workouts. Sometimes you will be, sometimes you won’t. But that’s not what matters.
What matters is whether you’re getting stronger over time.
If you’re ready to stop wasting time with your workouts and start getting results, start training today. Stop focusing on how you feel today and start focusing on the results you’re getting—and set up your workouts accordingly.
And if you’re ready to do this with the help of an expert personal trainer, you should join our 12-week program. We give you everything you need across strength training, nutrition, and walking/cardio to get the best results possible—so you can look, feel, and perform your best while becoming your healthiest.
Just click here, then click the consultation button and fill out the form. We’ll reach out within 24 hours to schedule your phone consultation and see if we’re a good fit to work together.