The Importance of Keeping Your Training Simple

It's extremely important that you keep your training simple. When I say simple I do not mean easy. Everyone I assume has heard of the KISS approach. If not let me tell you that KISS stands for 'Keep It Simple Stupid'. The K.I.S.S approach has been around for a very long time and used by people from all walks of life in generating success. There is absolutely no need to complicate things in order to become successful. You simply need to incorporate things that are easy to understand and implement, but you must also understand that keeping things simple does not mean making things easy.

"Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler." Albert Einstein

When it comes to training you need to KEEP things SIMPLE, in the sense of keeping your training...

Structured: Training must be organised and well planned.
Intense: Training intensity is of paramount importance.
Monitored: You must monitor and evaluate your training.
Progressive: Training must be progressive and you must control your progression.
Lifestyle Oriented: You must look at the 168-hour week as opportunity for progress!
Exclusive: When you TRAIN you MUST train. STOP socializing and FOCUS!

Training Structure: You must have structure to your training and creating structure means planning. You must spend some time in planning your workouts in advance if you want results. Training for results requires you to train with structure, to train with a plan. As it has often been said 'failing to plan, is planning to fail'.

Training Intensity: Training intensity is of paramount importance. When you train you should train with intensity, not for duration. Think about the athletes with the best bodies, the athletes with the kind of body you would like to achieve. Is their training primarily high intensity based or low intensity? YES their training is based around High Intensity Training activities. You should likewise base your own training around HIT methods.

Monitoring Your Training: Monitoring your training is a must. Not only should you be monitoring your rest intervals within a session, you should also be monitoring your form (technique) on all exercises and also keep track of how much weight you are lifting, how many repetitions you are performing and what speed you are doing your intervals at. It is 100% up to you to monitor your own training. Monitoring your training will let you evaluate your progress and let you know when to step it up a notch, as we will now point out below.

Training Progression: The main reason for monitoring your training is so that you'll know how and when to progress or advance your training. You can't keep lifting the same weight forever, as your body will quickly adapt to the load. Something will need to change. You will need to progress your training by manipulating one of the following training variables: Load, set-rep scheme, and rest interval or training window. It's up to you to continually monitor your training so you can implement these means of progression.

Keep Your Training Lifestyle Orientated: You must start thinking 'outside the workout' as opportunity for progression. There's 168 hours in every week to move you closer or further away from your goals. Lifestyle is going to greatly impact on your level of progress. Training for 3-5 hours a week is not going to do much good if the other 163-165 hours are spent doing things that are counterproductive, undoing all the good work you did whilst training. There is no training program that I personally know of that is powerful enough to overcome poor nutritional practices. So start seeing training as more than just the time you spend in the gym and you'll start seeing some real progress being made. When you rest, you are training, when you eat (eat well) you are training and when you are sleeping you are training. All these things will help bring you closer to your goals.