Avoid These Three Rabbit Holes When Training

Watch Progress Stop and Fall into One

You can find rabbit holes in the gym, which will allow you to stay the same, doughy person. These are the three things you should avoid.

Many Methods, Much Madness

If you’ve hung around sites like this or spent time on social media, it’s pretty clear that training is a very individualized game. When you filter through the campy zealotry that permeates our strange subculture, you’ll be exposed to different training philosophies for meeting any goal.

For example, let’s say you want to be strong and lean. There’s more than one way to do that. And what others tell you to do isn’t always going to be the best method. Keep in mind, I’m saying this as an experienced trainer who makes a living telling people what methods to use.

The most important exercise for every lifter, all the time

Sometimes we get too caught up in the latest training tips that we forget to see the value of common sense. Learn your body. You can modify an exercise or quit doing it altogether if it causes you pain. It doesn’t matter if you recover from it quickly.

This is just one way a lifter could get in his own way while trying to achieve long-lasting gains. The real goal of a lifter is to feel good and look great while performing well. You should avoid any rabbit holes that may lead you to the promised land.

Rabbit Hole 1 – Becoming a Research Junkie

There’s nothing wrong with staying abreast of training research. To a degree, it’s even impOrtant to do so; it can be the difference between making serious strides and just staying your same old doughy self.

Interestingly, the number of very developed or very strong internet trolls – self-proclaimed research sticklers quick to “correct” or “challenge” other people’s content before producing their own – are few and far between. Most people are so focused on this kind of attention-seeking that it is difficult to learn how to train.

Even if you’re not a troll, you may unknowingly be using research as a way of talking yourself out of training hard and often. Find me a study that supports one method of training, and I’ll find two other studies that don’t.

Even younger lifters may find the fitness world confusing and overwhelming. The last thing we want is for something intended to be helpful – like research and studies – to be the main reason behind your inability to make progress.

It doesn’t mean you have to throw your computer in the trash and never visit PubMed again, but it helps to make yourself the subject of your own little scientific study for a while to see what really works and what doesn’t.

Many lifters spend their time searching for the best technique, but not actually trying them all. And if you’re a trainer in the fitness industry, this type of sloppy, ADD-like behavior can work against your credibility.

Rabbit Hole 2, Becoming a Broscience Junkie

There’s something to be said about the community aspect of fitness training, regardless of your goals. There’s a lot of wisdom to be gained from veteran lifters.

But, broscience lies beyond all of that. It touches on topics such as how to build strength, exercise form, safe and acceptable forms, and what supplements to use.

People who worship at broscience altars are often resistant to learning the proper ways to do things from a professional coach. These people might refuse any such gentle offers, by claiming, a little too loudly to be religious, that they don’t want to learn. “know what they’re doing.”

This is a trap you can fall into. It puts too much faith in unsubstantiated data, which is almost as bad than relying too heavily in the information in books and research papers.

Bad form, pushing through pain, and misinformation can be reinforced by encouragement from other similarly misinformed gym members. It’s easy to get encouraged to use your current, flawed methods. But the results won’t turn out in your favor.

Rabbit Hole 3 – Following Trends and The Goals Of The Culture

This is something I witness as a trainer all the time. A coach may be a powerlifter, but he or she ends up working with people who are interested in health and fitness. Slowly, but surely, fitness and health goals will lead to greater time spent deadlifting, squatting, and benching for heavier doubles and triples.

The client ends up being shoehorned into training like a powerlifter, which wasn’t what they came to their trainer for in the first place. The clients eventually shave their heads and grow thick beards to get ready to work at strip clubs as doormen. Maybe not so severe.

Training can be affected by your environment. You might find a gym that offers a lot of powerlifting, bodybuilding, and Olympic lifting. CrossFit Fans will almost invariably “infect” There were clients who came to the gym with different goals. The environment influences the trainee’s behavior.

If your goal is to be better conditioned and adding cardio to the mix, I can guarantee that’ll be a bit tougher to accomplish at a powerlifting-friendly facility. It’s important to keep a close gauge on your goals without catering to the culture of the facility you’re in. If there’s a constant clash, it may be time to find a facility that better fits your goals.

This is why I love training at commercial box gyms. You often get a little bit of everything, from the middle-of-the-road folks who are just looking to keep in shape, to the serious and experienced powerlifter or bodybuilder who’s getting ready for competition season. It makes it a bit more difficult to get sucked into a particular culture that doesn’t match up with your goals.

On a similar note, going after what’s trendy – rather than what’s needed by your body – is a surefire way to get injured, or at least miss out on gains. CrossFit was the preferred training method for average lifters in the early 2010s.

Be aware that trends in training often come with business models and branding. However, none of this should be relevant to you. If your posture, core, and posterior chain can benefit from using plenty of isometrics or slow-tempo lifting, it won’t be useful to adopt the plyo program of the most recent MVP of the NBA because you saw it in Men’s Fitness.

No Kool Aid

It’s time you get a better grasp of why you’re training and what you need. Drinking the Kool-Aid of some other entity’s training agenda is a common trap to fall into, and one that often doesn’t taste half bad… at first.