By: Sean Emery
Last week Jordan K. asked a pretty awesome question that was essentially this:
What’s the difference between exercise and training and how do I transition from the former to the latter?
Jordan went on to say “I’m of the ‘show up and work hard’ attitude, which I want to change to ‘I know what I’m doing, why I’m doing it, and see it paying off’ attitude.”
First off, it’s important to understand the difference (in my mind at least) between exercise and training.
Exercise is what you do when you generally want to get healthier and more fit.
Training uses exercise to achieve a specific goal.
Said another way: when you’re exercising with a goal in mind, you’re training.
With these definitions in mind, it’s really important to understand that both training and exercise are okay. One isn’t necessarily better than the other. Training for something shouldn’t always be your pursuit, and sometimes a little bit of exercise is all you need.
That said, if you’re doing CrossFit (especially with us at Old City), you’re training. 🙂
You’re training because you should have a goal. And since goals come in all shapes and sizes, here is a fairly simple hierarchy to goal setting that I hope you’ll find useful:
1) Start with Attendance based goals. Always pick something achievable like: “I’m going to show up to the gym 2 times per week.”
Once two trips to the gym becomes easy, increase the number of workouts. In this goal category, I don’t really care too much with how you perform in the workouts. I don’t care too much how heavy you go, or how fast you do something. I will always care about your pursuit of perfect technique, but just showing up to class is a great place to start.
This level of goal setting is where you start developing the life-changing habits that you’ll rely on for more specific #gainz down the line.
2) Performance based goals are next. Once you’re working out 3-5 times per week consistently, there’s not really a whole lot more room for improvement in the attendance department.
This is the point we start looking at how hard you’re pushing yourself during each workout and where you’re finishing relative to your normal workout performances. In this phase of goal setting, you should start pushing your limits with what weight you use.
Goals like “Use Rx weights for every KB movement” or “I will finish in the top half of the whiteboard for each workout this month” are good places to start when you’re in this goal setting level.
Ultimately, you should be moving towards consistently selecting challenging weights for yourself (Rx weights even!). I want you to start trying to be one of the fastest times on the whitebaord for each workout while maintaining perfect movement quality.
3) Weakness based goals are the tip of the goal pyramid. Once you’ve mastered attendance and performance, you’re ready to start assessing yourself as an athlete to figure out exactly what weaknesses are holding you back from being an even better athlete.
Are your barbell movements at the Rx level, but your bodyweight movements are not? Are your squatting barbell movements significantly weaker than your ‘power’ barbell movements? Is your hip mobility restricting your squat depth? Can you not do a pull-up?
If you think you’re in this category then talk with one of your coaches on ideas for how to best turn a weakness into a strength. Doing this will start taking your #gainz to whole new levels.
So where are you?
What are your goals?
Are you interested in Training with us? Click here to get started.
