When the new year comes around most people make a resolution or two and abandon them within a week. That’s not me and I hope not you either.
I find the new year is always a time for reflection as well as forward planning. And I spend significant time doing those things. Seriously, right now there’s a list of several plans on a wide variety of topics (life, business, fitness and more) that I need to get done in the next couple weeks.
Why do this?
Well, as the saying goes “If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.” That’s enough reason for me to do the planning.
But today I want to talk about reflection. And I ain’t talking about looking at yourself in the mirror.
The very first lesson in my Keys to Successful Training Course is to keep a workout journal. Without this key tool you will not get very far. The primary use of this is to know what you did in your last workout and what you need to do to beat it, and thus make progress.
But another use is going back over the year (or whatever time period you want). You can look at what your most productive periods of training were. You can find where your weak points lie.
Training is a continually adapting creature. One workout is never exactly the same as another. Because there are so many factors involved you will have times of great progress and others where you’re not gaining (or even sliding back!).
By consulting your workout training journal you can see what the patterns where. Every single person is different and you’ll find what works best for you. Which exercises, which set and rep schemes, different methods of strength and conditioning and more.
When you have this knowledge you are better prepared to move forward in the future.
Your homework is to do just what I’ve said. Post your comments below on what you find.
And if you aren’t keeping a workout journal START NOW! You can thank me later.
In strength,
Logan Christopher
P.S. Another important aspect of success is to get coaching from those who can do what you want to do. On that note I’ll be interviewing one of my mentors, as far as doing insane feats of strength goes, tomorrow night. Want to listen in and even ask your own questions? Go to Register for the Dennis Rogers call here.
Filed under Strength Training Concepts by on Dec 14th, 2009. 2 Comments. 
An important part of a complete training program is to do some sort of conditioning work. Of course, this can come in many shapes and sizes.
Sprints, kettlebell swings and snatches, skipping rope, and high rep bodyweight exercises are a few of my favorites.
And just like in any other training, your conditioning work should be made progressive. The thing is its not so easy as just adding more weight like you can with a barbell.
In these cases you’ll most often be working with volume and time. That is to do a certain amount of work (no matter the exercises or tools used) in a period of time.
If you can do the same work in less time, or more work in the same amount of time you’re doing better than before. Since this is a conditioning based activity progress means you’ve improved your conditioning.
You can change up what you do to condition yourself from session to session as long as you have a ‘test’ workout. That’s a specific workout you come back to again and again to see if you’ve improved.
I’ll share with you what I use later on to test out my conditioning levels, later on. But for now just make sure you do progressive training when it comes to strength AND conditioning.
In strength,
Logan Christopher
Filed under Conditioning by on Aug 11th, 2009. Comment.
