Nutrition, nutrition, nutrition is constantly hammered into everyone’s heads, 24/7. And it is true—for optimal health and body composition, your nutrition must be on point. There’s an even more important aspect that seems to take a backseat, and that’s training. Lots of training.
Jack LaLanne used to say, “Exercise is king; nutrition is queen; put them together, and you’ve got a kingdom”. The reason Jack put exercise first is because you CAN most definitely out-train a bad diet—to a certain point. My mentor loves pointing out to me that when he was training professional athletes, mainly NFL and MLB players, most of them had terrible diets, but they were training virtually ALL day, EVERY day. Combine that with some great genetics, and you’ve got some amazing physiques.
Give me a group of five girls and five guys, an environment where we don’t have to go to work, don’t have to worry about a family, have no outside stress of any kind, where we can train 24/7 as a team, where we can spend our time recovering from training and laying out on the beach, and we will all get in PHENOMENAL shape. We can even do that eating pepperoni pizza and donuts for dinner EVERY night. We might not be winning a bodybuilding show, but I can guarantee a six-pack and looking better than 99.9% of the population.
Now, let’s keep the pepperoni pizza and donuts for dinner constant and start stripping away other variables.
Everything stays the same (daily pizza/donuts included), but we have the added stress of having to take care of our family again. We get fatter.
Everything stays the same (daily pizza/donuts included), but we lose our morning training session because we now must go to work. We get fatter.
Everything stays the same (daily pizza/donuts included), but our training sessions go from 7 sessions a day to 3 sessions a day. We get fatter (we’re not going to get fat, but we won’t be as lean as when we trained more).
Everything stays the same (daily pizza included), but our training goes from a 24/7 all-day affair to one-hour sessions, 3 times per week. We get fatter—noticeably fatter than when we were training more.
As we strip away from our utopian scenario, nutrition becomes an increasingly important factor in achieving our results because we aren’t offsetting it with more training.
Now, most of us are not professional athletes, and the above is an extreme example. We have jobs, families, stress, and certainly don’t have 24/7 to train. The great news is, you don’t need 24/7 to achieve incredible results. For optimal body composition, 4x per week is the real sweet spot. Some get more, but what happens when you start getting less?
If you’re training 3x per week, while this is still awesome, that is less than half of the week. Now let’s say you’re feeling unmotivated one day and just don’t feel like training, so you skip it. You’re now down to two out of seven days of training for that week. How can you seriously hope to see the results of the magnitude that you want?
Let’s say you’re going out of town. You train one day and are then gone for a week. You’ve gone eight days without any serious training. How can you hope to see any results?
Your body is in a constant flux of either building muscle or losing muscle, building fat or losing fat. If you break your foot, do you think your body is going to put fat gain on hold until you recover? Or do you need to get your ass to the gym and train your upper body plus your non-injured leg until you recover?
I was back in the gym the day after my Achilles surgery, crutches and all. My father-in-law came with me to help me navigate from exercise to exercise and set up dumbbells and barbells for me. What choice did I have? It hurt, and it sucked, but it didn’t hurt and suck half as much as if I just laid around getting fatter until my Achilles got better. Funnily enough, my recovery would have taken a longer time if I did just sloth around. Some people love when a doctor tells them to “rest”. Rest = code word for lay around, watch television, eat like shit, and prolong your recovery.
Susan, pictured here, just underwent surgery and shambled her way into the gym on crutches, with a puss-filled foot, and actually picked up some extra training sessions to help offset any backseat her progress may take while also improving the efficacy of her recovery.
One guy I train just underwent surgery, and another has a potential surgery scheduled, and they have missed exactly ZERO training sessions, are improving, and are seeing results even while being injured.
We would all be better served by being a little tougher with ourselves. You want to see results? Don’t miss training. Train more.
You have a headache? Ignore it. Go train.
You had a tiring day at work? Go train. You’ll feel better in both the short term and long term. Plus, you’ll be in better shape and get less tired in the future.
Life got in the way? Go train. Life will always “get in the way”. You should treat your training as seriously as the “life” that keeps getting in the way.
You’re going away on a trip? Go train extra before you leave and train extra when you return. Then do some bodyweight exercises in your hotel while you’re away.
You didn’t sleep last night? Go train. You’ll sleep better tonight.
Why are you still reading this? Go train.
The more you train, the more you offset many of the negatives in life that zap your energy, health, and body composition. Not everyone wants to be a pro athlete, but everyone I know wants to look better, feel better, and most importantly, live a long healthy life. Treat the time you set aside for training with the same respect you treat the time for appointments that you never miss. It may very well be one of the most important appointments you ever set for yourself.
About the author
Chris Rombola
Chris is the owner of Fit House. He's run the training departments at several commercial gyms, and after years of seeing how awful those environments were for his clients, he opened his own studio. He is devoted to getting people strong, lean, and healthy.
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