Why fitness training follows the same logic as piano practice.
Some people think the distinction is pure semantics, but Coach Kevin Don sees a big difference between “exercising” and “training.”
Get-Fit Guy is hosted by Kevin Don. A transcript is available at Simplecast.
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I’m Kevin Don, the Get-Fit Guy. I’m a coach with over a decade of experience in all aspects of strength and conditioning training and I’m here to bring you the best fitness information every week.
Today I want to talk about a distinction some people see as pure semantics, but for which I will make a case for both being VERY different: What is the difference between exercising and TRAINING?
Let’s look at two non-fitness scenarios and see if we can draw some comparisons.
You decide one day that you finally have time in your schedule to develop a new skill. You have always wanted to learn to play the piano. So you sign up for lessons, buy a piano keyboard and some books, and practice for an hour every day for a month. Do you think that at the end of the month, you will be better at playing the piano? I think that the answer is obvious… it's a resounding YES.
Now, what if, instead of investing the time into the piano lessons and specific equipment and dedicated practice, you join a “music club” and each day for a month, you are exposed to a different instrument. At the end of the month you have had some time on the piano, but also the harp, the guitar, the flute, the saxophone, the oboe, the sitar, and the xylophone. How good would your piano playing be? Or your guitar, flute, oboe, or saxophone playing?
Fitness training follows the same logic. We all evolved from more simple organisms by external stress. The environment placed demands on an organism and over time the organism adapted to the external stress. We are dependent on stress/recovery/adaptation to acquire any new skills. But the stress has to be designed properly—it has to be sufficient to force a biological response and it has to be repeated.
Your squat doesn’t adapt and improve according to the number of times you walk through the front door of the gym. It adapts to the stress imposed upon it by performing the squat. Not only that, but it adapts to the specific stress imposed upon it. If you only train sets of 15 reps, you will become very good indeed at performing sets of 15 reps. If you perform only heavy single reps, you will become great at performing those. But sets of 15 and sets of 1 are very different in terms of long-term outcomes. You can’t get better at one by doing the other. Your muscles, joints, and nervous system work very differently in each situation. Therefore, the body will adapt differently.
You also need to recover from the stress being applied appropriately. It is said that you don’t get stronger by lifting weights, you get stronger by recovering from lifting weights.
The stress we undergo during training can be split into 2 categories: eustress (latin for “good” stress) and distress (“bad” stress). When we apply eustress, we are falling between two critical points in our training: the minimum effective dose and the maximum recoverable dose.
In the former, we are failing to create enough stress to force any adaptation and therefore never improve. In the latter, we create too much stress and we cannot recover in time before the next training session; we become overtrained.
Understanding this is the central principle of program design. We can therefore define exercise and working out as something you do purely for how it makes you feel in the gym at that moment in time but has no pain for a long term specific adaptation. Training, on the other hand, is a plan undertaken with the goal of applying and recovering from a specific stress. If you go to the gym and do random exercises, you will have random outcomes and irrespective of your effort level, it’s not training.
So, how do we make sure we are training and not working out? The key is to make sure you are following a specific program of exercises with an end-goal in mind. For example, if you want to run a 5K, you could follow a couch-to-5K training program to build up your fitness level to the point where you can complete the race. Even if your goal is general fitness or to just feel healthy, you should pick specific training goals that target your weaknesses.
The lower the training age of the person, i.e. someone less experienced, the simpler the training program will be. Conversely, the higher the training age, the more complex the program will be. If you are new to training or are currently detrained, you can take advantage of the novice effect to get stronger quite quickly. This will begin to slow down the stronger you get. It’s the law of diminishing returns. So we should spend our efforts in the novice phase using exercises which will give the most gains or the biggest bang for our buck. If you’re strength training, these would be the big, compound lifts of squat, overhead press, bench press, and deadlift. Your training program is less likely to involve complicated single leg, single arm stuff at this point, although as training age increases there will be a role for these.
Don’t forget: for a successful training program, you want to ensure that you are above minimum effective dose and below maximum recoverable dose. For example, in strength training, you need to add some load every time you train at the beginning. This is the basic tenet of progressive overload. If you can add some load then it means you are getting stronger and therefore above the minimum effective dose. If this suddenly stops, then the dose response is no longer working and it is at that point you can begin to think about more complex training protocols, which we will touch on in future episodes.