GUT CHECK Learn to use your training instincts, and blaze a path to more muscle growth starting with your very next workout By Lee Labrada, IFBB Pro Competitor 1985–1995 You’re in the gym, pumping out a set of biceps curls. With each set, your arms swell as the muscle stretches your skin tight. A rush of testosterone and adrenaline buoys you through to the last rep of the last set. You feel full of energy, better than on most nights. Despite the fact that you’ve had a hard day at work, it feels good to be in the gym with the other gym rats. As your hormone levels climb, you’re feeling pretty indestructible. With all that in mind, do you stick with your game plan or do you go on your instincts and tack on a few more sets? Good question. And the answer isn’t a simple yes or no. It’s time you learn what “training by instinct” really is, how to strike a balance between sticking with the game plan and going on instinct, and why the answer isn’t always the same for everyone. MISSING THE POINT Training by instinct conjures visions of big, heavily muscled bodybuilders walking into a gym asking themselves, “Hmmm, what do I feel like doing today?” then proceeding to jump into whatever exercise, set and rep combination that pops into their heads. That couldn’t be further from the truth. Show me any athlete with a well-developed physique and I’ll show you someone who has spent countless hours training according to meticulously planned workouts using specific routines. “In athletics, we need to gear things to peaking, whatever sport you’re in,” says Denny Bonewitz, a strength and conditioning coach and president of The EDGE Extreme sports-performance facility in Flower Mound, Texas. “We have to time when performance is going to peak based on our goals and what results we want. So we control things through sets and reps and periodisation.” So what is this “instinct” that we’re supposed to have in the gym? I think a better name for it is physical IQ. Having a high physical IQ means you possess the know-how to interpret physical factors — energy levels, muscle soreness and mental fatigue, to name a few — that determine when and how to train for optimal effectiveness. The ability to process both sensory and physical feedback from your body to determine whether to push yourself is learned from experience. Instinctive training without this knowledge leaves you at risk of overtraining (doing too much for your body to recover from) or undertraining (not doing enough to stimulate muscle growth). Both will limit the gains you enjoy from your training. DEVELOPING INSTINCT To develop a training instinct, then, you must have experience to draw upon. “If you were to walk into the gym for the first time and pick up a set of dumbbells and do a chest press on the bench, it’s going to feel really unusual,” explains Chere Schoffstall, a US National Academy of Sports Medicine educational representative. “It would be difficult for people who are new to the gym to train by feeling or instinct because they don’t have that mind-body connection yet.” You need at least one year of training on planned exercise regimes to know how different training variables affect you. Going into the gym without a defined workout programme, especially as a beginner, is setting yourself up for failure. If you wing it, you may get results for a while, but you’ll never reach your full potential. Start with a planned training routine, like the workouts printed here in muscle & fitness each month. Write your routine into a training log — this can be as simple as a spiral-bound notebook — and follow your programme to a T. Every time you go to the gym to train, take notes on the following variables in your training log: ›› Weights, sets and reps ›› Rest between sets ›› Date and time of day you trained ›› How you felt physically before and after the workout ›› How you felt mentally before and after the workout. Write down all of your observations as you work out. After you train, sit down for a few moments to assess the workout. In time, you’ll begin to see patterns emerging. For instance, you may notice that every time you reduce your rest between sets of squats, your training poundages suffer and you get nauseous. This may be one of the more obvious patterns, but you get the picture. Don’t be surprised if these patterns also relate to life stresses and your nutritional habits. “You may find connections early on that really affect your progress in the gym,” Schoffstall notes. “So if you’re very tired and really sore, you can go back to day one and say: ‘Day one’s plan didn’t work, so I need to do something: I need to change the workout and I need to eat better. Or, I need to have more rest.’ Using a journal is a very important way to achieve success.” Logging your workouts helps you develop a working knowledge of the cause and effect between the variables of your workout and lifestyle habits and the results you get from your training. It also provides you with the knowledge of your body you need to make good instinctual decisions in the middle of future workouts. STRIKING A BALANCE During your first year of training, always plan your workouts. And once in the gym, stick with the plan. That includes days when you don’t really feel like training — keep at it, modifying your pace and intensity if necessary — as well as those days when you feel like you can keep going — don’t. Remember, you don’t want to fall victim to overtraining. If you already have several years of training under your belt and still don’t feel like you’ve mastered the concept of training by instinct, go back to the basics and train for several months using a fixed training regime (your choice on the workouts) and a logbook to record how different variables affect your body. Once you’ve put in your time, you’re ready to take off the stabilisers. Yet don’t throw the framework of structured workouts out the window, thinking you can train whenever and however you feel like it. You should always step into the gym with a blueprint of what you’re going to do, at the same time remaining flexible enough to change on the run if the conditions dictate it. Let’s say you’re at the end of a leg workout. You’re completing your fifth of six sets of lying leg curls. Your hamstrings are pumped. But on the last rep of the fifth set, you feel a slight twinge. You’ve had this happen before, so you know it’s time to stop — because the last time you pushed it, you suffered a major strain that lasted several weeks. You might also decide to try an alternate exercise like stiff-legged deadlifts or seated curls. Start out light and if it feels good, advance through another set, then call it a day. Here’s another example: you’ve had two heavy workouts — back and legs — on two consecutive days. You feel okay, but not great. In fact, you have no desire to train, you’re tired and your nose is stuffy. You feel somewhat run down. Rather than barrelling through today’s workout, you decide to take a full day off, because you realise you’re overtrained. You know because last time you felt like this and trained anyway, you came down with a whopping cold. A day of rest later, you feel great again. You have another strong workout. Life is good. THE OVER/UNDER What happened here? In the first case, you used instinct on the micro level: “Do I continue training my hamstrings?” In the second case, you used instinct on the macro level: “Should I skip this workout?” In both cases, you introduced instinctive training when you had to, resulting in the balance you want. “If you don’t listen to your body, you’ll get injured,” Schoffstall states simply. This balance should keep you injury-free and keep your physique progressing at an optimal rate. As we’ve seen, training by instinct works better in the context of a specific programme. What would happen if you trained solely according to a regime with no flexibility or, on the flip side, a regime of purely instinctual training? The former allows no wiggle room for adapting to situations as they arise in the gym, which can lead to injury and overtraining. And a routine that’s loosely structured on an erroneous interpretation of training by instinct can result in undertraining on those occasions when you feel lazy and overtraining when you’re overzealous. Often, the result is stagnation. The take-home message: “Have a good plan, but be willing to negotiate that plan a little bit based on how your body feels,” Schoffstall remarks. Otherwise, you’ll never reach that peak you’re striving for, and isn’t that what all your hard work is about? M&F Lee Labrada is a former IFBB Mr. Universe and IFBB Pro World Cup champ. The winner of 22 major bodybuilding titles, he is one of only four men in history to place in the top four in the Mr. Olympia seven consecutive times. You can sign up for Lee’s free Lean Body Coach e-newsletter at www.leanbodycoach.com Test Your INSTINCT Try this quick quiz to see if you have a killer training instinct. 1. You’ve decided to try a new chest workout that’s high in sets (24 total). As you finish the first workout, you feel like it wasn’t that tough and you could do more. Do you — A) Stop the workout, as prescribed. B) Do another chest exercise to really blast it. 2. You get to the gym feeling tired and a bit run down, but you aren’t feeling sick. Your workout starts off slowly and you decide to do only two sets of each exercise as opposed to your usual three. But by the end of your workout, you feel great and want to do another exercise to make up for the lower volume. Do you — A) Stop the workout and go home. B) Do the extra exercise for 2–3 sets. 3. You’re training biceps and, after the third set of your first exercise, you notice pain in the front of your shoulder. Do you — A) Stop your workout immediately. B) Try another biceps exercise that doesn’t hurt, but go light. 4. You and your training partner planned on a heavy leg day, with squats as your beginning exercise. But all the power racks are taken. Do you — A) Do your lunges, leg extensions and leg curls first, and come back to squats when a rack opens up. B) Do the squat portion of your workout on a Smith machine, or replace squats with heavy leg presses or hack squats. ANSWERS: 1. (A) Since it’s a new programme that involves more sets than you’re used to, that in itself is enough of a shock to your muscles. Any more work isn’t going to help you make more progress, and may actually hinder it through overtraining. 2. (B) Because you kept your volume lower than normal and you don’t seem to have any symptoms to suggest you’re getting sick, you can go ahead and do the additional exercise. 3. (A) or (B) In this case, it depends on the pain. If it’s acute, sharp and doesn’t go away, you should rest the area and see a doctor if the pain doesn’t subside (or returns every time you try to work out or move the shoulder joint). If it’s more of a dull muscle ache or a less-intense pain, you can do biceps exercises that don’t aggravate it. Try moves in which your arm is supported, such as preacher or concentration curls. 4. (B) If you do your other exercises first, you’ll compromise your strength on your important anchor exercise. While not quite as valuable as a barbell squat, the Smith machine, leg press or hack squat are viable alternatives you can work heavy on.