One of my clients asked me a question during a TOUGH session the other day. Referring to the difficulty of the workout, she asked me “When does it get easier?”
I’ve been training her for years, so I'm sure she could’ve answered her own question. My answer was of course, “NEVER!”
The problem with letting our training get easy is that once we’ve been training consistently for a while, there will be no progress without keeping the difficulty of our workouts up. Let me explain that a bit more…
When we first start training, almost anything will drive results... Because we’re going from doing nothing to something. Our bodies automatically have something to adapt to because we weren’t doing anything before. Once we get to the point when we’ve adapted to our training though (the point when things get easier), we won’t see any progress without increasing the volume or intensity of our training. The increase in volume or intensity is what makes our workouts feel hard.
So at this point, we’re left with a decision…
1) We can let our workouts get a bit easier, keep volume and intensity the same, and allow our fitness to plateau.
OR
2) We can keep the intensity in our key workouts high, progress volume or intensity, and continue getting fitter.
The only situation when training should get easier is if you are content with your current fitness level and have no interest in improving anymore. I’m guessing that is less than 1% the people reading this. Even the fittest people in the world want to be more fit!
Remember though, consistency is a prerequisite to increasing volume or intensity. I’ve written a couple articles that are very relevant to this email topic. Check them out below: