How to make your exercise work for you.
Categorizing training to get the desired result.
Last week I talked about making exercise matter. The short and long of it was that for exercise to be effective, it needs to have meaning to the exerciser. This week we’re going to talk about how to translate that meaning into an exercise program.
Exercise is a tool that can aid us in our pursuit of doing stuff (aka fitness). But to gain those trainable qualities that make up fitness, we need to know what we want to get out of our training time.
Enter the 4 categories of training: these 4 categories act as buckets into which we can divide our training time and effort, and guideposts that we can use to direct our training while detaching the useful tools from some of the more oppressive fitness stuff.
The 4 categories of training
To more effectively elicit desired training effects, training can be divided into 4 categories:
Capacity: the ability to do more stuff
Strength: the ability to do harder stuff
Flexibility: the ability to do stuff in greater ranges of motion (ROM)
Exploration: the process trying new or different stuff
These categories are another way to organize the qualities or experiences that we can gain from intentional physical training. For our purposes, capacity is an attribute, while strength and flexibility are trained skills due to the specific nature of their training. Exploration is a whole other thing—more of a lens or way to approach training than a trainable quality or skill.
Often these qualities manifest through skill training: the intentional pursuit of specific qualities that support specific activities (ie, being able to dunk a basketball, run a marathon, do a kickflip, etc), but exercise is slightly different: it is training for the aforementioned qualities without a direct skill intention: it’s the work without any real result, other than attempting to change the way the body looks or moves, or just getting better at exercise.
Most of us desire some sort of ambiguous “fitness” - an undefined quality that allows us to be able to do whatever physical activity we want whenever we desire. There’s no problem with this basic concept, other than that often it becomes quite unrealistic: people wanting to be able to hike 10 miles at the drop of the hat, do a backflip, and have six pack abs, all while exercising for 30 minutes a week.
The truth is that developing the ability to do stuff takes time and effort. The more demanding the task, the more time and effort it will take to be able to do it. However, the more specific the goal, the more clear the path of training will be. If you know exactly what you want to do, then all you have to do is manage your time, effort, and training principles toward that end.
But, if like many people, you don’t have a definite goal, and you just want to feel and move better (like many people), the path is much less clear, and there are many more possibilities - something that is at the same time exciting and defeating, as too many possibilities can be overwhelming and frustrating.
So what can you do?
To make it easier to figure out how and where to direct your efforts when exercising, we can divide the qualities needed for physical activities into these categories of training (capacity, strength, flexibility, exploration).
All physical activities require the first three qualities (capacity, strength, flexibility) to varying extents. The amount of each needed depends on the demands of the activity - if you have a specific goal - or more generally by individual needs or preferences.
Exploration doesn’t directly correspond to a tangible training effect, but acts as a lens through which training can be viewed and experienced.
Capacity, Strength, Flexibility, and Exploration are ways that we can categorize and organize training in an intentional movement practice. Each leads to a different training result:
Get tired too quickly?
Increase your capacity by doing more reps or longer time intervals.
Need to be stronger?
Direct your training toward building strength.
Can’t get into a position?
Work on flexibility to increase your Range Of Motion (ROM).
Want to try new things? Explore new ways to move by asking questions, playing, and experimenting.
This, of course, is a simplification of the process, but it is an integral step that can help make exercise time both more efficient and effective—know what you want to get out of it and you’ll have a much easier time knowing what to do when the clock hits exercise time.
Over the next few weeks we’ll dive into the categories categories of training and talk specifics, so make sure to check your inbox come Thursday morning!