Working smart can be hard…
During the webinar this week we talked a lot about training smart vs just training hard. Some of you got a little confused, you thought I meant that you didn’t have to work hard.
That is NOT the case at all.
You WILL have to work hard. There will be days when you just cannot wait for the workout to be over, your lunch will come back up, your legs will feel like they are going to give out – it will be awful. Your goal will just be survival
But there is a purpose and a dose for those days.
The goal of those days is to develop your stamina, boost your anaerobic threshold (or at least your tolerance to working at that threshold) and for some mental toughness training.
And you are given other days to train other systems and outcomes – like your speed days that will require a lot of focus and concentration to get your most explosive muscle actions and you may feel the onset of fatigue as you get to the end of your set, but you will be given sufficient time to recover between sets so you never need to go into ‘survival mode’.
Even in the gym – some phases will include slow tempos and high volume. Your legs actually may give out, your muscles will shake, you will barely be able to walk down stairs.
Then there will be phases where you are using relatively light loads, but focusing on accelerating the load as quickly as possible. Those days won’t feel as hard, but they are the days where your explosiveness is transformed.
So, I am not saying you should not work hard. I am saying you need to know when to go hard and why you are going hard – that is the hallmark of athlete training compared to some of the fitness training regimens out there like Cross Fit or P90x.
Now, if you love CF or P90x – that is totally cool, just really pay attention to your technique because there are high volume, high speed in some of those programs, which increases the risk of injury, so just be careful.
What I am saying is that style of training is not the BEST way for a hockey player to maximize their performance on the ice. It is the difference between training for hockey and just training for fitness because you like a certain workout.
Make sense?
Cheers,
M
PS – if you missed the webinar the first time around, you can watch the replay for free HERE (no optin required)