Do Just Enough

     I’ve recently come across a realization amongst many veterans in my industry that I find interesting. It reinforces the fact that no matter how much you know about a specific topic, you can still fall prey to human emotional tendencies. A certain tendency is that more is always better. Some of the leaders in strength, conditioning and fitness have been forced to find alternative methods to maintain their fitness levels outside of resistance training. They have opted for outdoor cycling, swimming, and/or Yoga as their means to stay fit. Why have they substituted lifting heavy weights overhead and squatting with a kettlebell for laps in the pool? Did they become bored? Did the challenge of lifting iron become stale?

     You’ll hear a term of minimal effective dosage (MED) used in different arenas. MED is the smallest amount of input required to achieve a desired outcome. I’ve heard Mark Zuckerberg mention this as the amount of people he predicted would have to use Facebook before it spread like wildfire. Another example was the prediction of initial iPhone sales by Steve Jobs before they would be the dominant phone in the US. These are both technology examples, but the person who created the term was a pioneer in the fitness industry, Nautilus fitness creator, Arthur Jones. For Jones, this was the minimum

amount of effective load, where any additional load added to the bar would be either redundant or counterproductive to a person’s strength and fitness goal. Counterproductive can be wear and tear to connective tissues, such as ligaments or tendons.

     For example, say you’ve spent more than 6 months in a strengthening program of which, you were delighted with early on, only to later learn that strength isn’t linear. The longer you do it, the slower the gains. I think we can all remember the early days of when we felt like we’re getting stronger every time we entered the gym. There in lies the challenge for many trainers and coaches. It’s after years of learning various ways of stimulating the outcome you desire, that you learn the lesson that your body only has so many reps with excessive load.

     Now, I don’t want you putting the kettlebell you bought during quarantine up for sale just yet. It’s after 30 years plus of performing solely weight training that many of my contemporaries are now substituting other means of fitness. If you’re 1 year into swinging your bell, you’re safe. This feeds into the concept that more isn’t always best with resistance training. Your goal should be to do just enough training that you create a stimulus for strength or spark your metabolism to burn fat depending upon the goal. Connective tissues such as ligaments and tendons don’t experience hypertrophy like muscles, they improve in density over time, but they can wear down from excessive usage. This can lead to tendonitis, tendinopathy, and arthritis. Like the tires on your car, they will eventually wear down, no matter how many times you rotate. Just ask any ultramarathoner what put an end to their running career. It wasn’t that their love for running started to diminish, but rather the injuries to their lower body started to mount up. An ultramarathon is any race

that exceeds 26.219 miles. Running is a great source of exercise. Running is a high impact activity that produces 3-5 times your bodyweight in force on your joints. You can enjoy a lifetime of 3-5 mile runs injury free for the most part. Too much of any good thing isn’t beneficial long term. Coaches and trainers who love throwing around the iron are not excused from this. It’s their love of weight training that attracted them to coaching. It was their love of lifting that distracted them from noticing they were performing an excessive number of reps on their joints. This is one of the reasons I became a fan of marrying suspension training (the TRX) with kettlebells and sandbags years ago in my training. The mixture of bodyweight and load bearing exercises were a better recipe for longevity on the body. The key is to do just enough and move on.

    I’ll see you at the studio.