Personal Training Triage

After several months of lockdown and general unavailability of training equipment, existence as a fitness professional has been a unique combination of metaphoric firefighting and arguably even more fulfillment than under more normal circumstances. Helping people stay healthy and modify their training to reflect what is truly important, right now, has been an enormous part of that.

The luxury of easily accessible fitness facilities complete with resistance training and cardiovascular equipment has many trainers and clients alike forget that we are essentially all in a performance state. Regardless of your current fitness level, if these resources are available, most of us left training for health behind a long time ago.

Training for health is one of the simplest yet under appreciated benchmarks in North American society. Health can very easily be achieved under almost any circumstance and therefore it drifts into the background of other more alluring (and mountainous) goals. Body composition, increased maximal strength or hypertrophy, speed or endurance, and especially athletic training, while definitely contributors to physical fitness and quality of life, are also wildly in excess of what most people would require for improving their general health markers.

During the (ongoing) pandemic, it became easy to be unhealthily attached to what we perceived our “healthy” selves to be. An anxiety inducing desperate struggle to maintain our lifetime personal bests while performing 10,000 TheraBand chest presses. At a certain point in time, there should be acceptance and understanding that any lost progress, when intelligently and properly retrained, will return in a very reasonable amount of time. Struggling to maintain our performance goals in an unrealistic setting is wildly more detrimental than it’s worth. That is not a concession, that is just truth. “The grind” mentality (should have) died long ago in this sense. Discipline is the ability to do the correct behaviours for your goals – not the most extreme. Sometimes that includes the discipline to take stock on a situation and flow rather than dig in your heels.

I’ve written several times on the topic of muscle hypertrophy and how to tailor your training to the circumstances – and it is definitely possible to retain much of your progress for a reasonable amount of time – but it’s also reasonable to relieve yourself of some of that progress in order to retain your mental wellbeing.

Triage your goals.

Take stock. Be as water.

Focus on movement.

Focus on enjoyment.

Focus on relationships.

Focus on self.

Remember what health actually is.

Best,

Eric