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 By: Charles Staley
The most successful athletes have a proactive procedure to keep themselve on track when problems arise in their training. And trust me; we all have problems to overcome. I'd even go so far as to say that the most successful athletes are those who most effectively manage their bad workouts - not those who simply have great intensity and consistency when things are going well. With that in mind, there is a set of principles that govern success in the gym, or during any attempt to acquire a new skill. Almost everyone reading this already knows what these principles are, but the more pertinent question is - do you comply with them when you're under the bar? In other words, is your training always specific and progressive? Does it respect your unique individual peculiarities, such as age, genetics, leverages, and orthopedic history?
  Click Image To Enlarge.Most Successful Athletes Are Those Who Most Effectively Manage Their Bad Workouts. It's one thing to cognitively understand the principles of specificity, progressive overload, and individuality, but it's quite another thing to successfully apply them to your training, especially when you're in a slump. Let's consider a problem that we all face from time to time - you're not getting stronger. Despite your hard work 4 times a week in a well-equipped gym, and despite the confidence you have in your program, your numbers just aren't moving. And it's not like you don't know what you're doing; let's assume that as well. So what gives?
During times like these you've got to go back to the bedrock principles. You need to look at your program through "beginner's eyes," as if you're looking at someone else's workouts with a critical, unbiased eye. It's only then that clues begin to emerge. Incidentally, how many times have you heard trainers say something like "Man, my programs work great for all my clients but they never work for me!"? That's a clue that you need a more objective analysis of what you're doing. If you don't think you can rely on yourself to do this, find someone else.
 Click Image To Enlarge.You Need To Look At Your Program Through Beginner's Eyes. Since a lot of you reading this are lifters, let's tackle the issue of specificity for a moment. If you're a powerlifter, you're required to perform 3 heavy attempts each on the squat, bench press, and deadlift. If you're a weightlifter, ditto for the snatch and clean & jerk. And if you're involved with highland games and/or throwing, a similar requirement holds true. The common denominator here is that you're performing 3 or more single attempts.
This being the case, the principle of specificity demands that most of your training consists of heavy singles - particularly when you're close to a competition, but I'd argue that heavy singles should dominate the overwhelming majority of all your training. Now that's easy enough to understand, so let's now turn to the flip-side of this question, which is: "What circumstances (if any) warrant the inclusion of relatively non-specific work?" Because let's face it - all of you do perform non-specific work, right? So the question is, "Why?" Some legitimate answers might include:
 Click Image To Enlarge.Non-Specific Work Helps To Provide A Psychological Break From Monotonous Heavy Training.
Some more questionable reasons might include:
Now be honest - just looking at these two lists, which category do you tend to fall under? And regardless of which category best describes you, are you becoming more clear about why you shouldn't be coaching yourself?
I hope it may have dawned on you that your individuality is at least the co-author of specificity. After all, your individual characteristics dictate, often in large part, what methods you should be using. For example, if you're short, you have a lesser chance of sustaining lifting-related knee problems, as compared to your taller peers. This impacts your training protocol- if you're tall, you may need to pay more attention to patellar tracking, hamstring length, and IT-band health. If you're shorter, these decisions will be closer to the bottom of your list. Related Injury Prevention Articles: As another example, if you're overly reliant on the stretch-shortening cycle, your training should reflect this through the inclusion of a pause immediately prior to the concentric phase of the lift. No matter how many examples I choose to cite, it always comes back to the same inescapable truth: "Exploiting your opponent's weakness starts with identifying your own."
 Click Image To Enlarge.Exploiting Your Opponent's Weakness Starts With Identifying Your Own.
If you believe that a chain is only as strong as it's weakest link, you'll be compelled to prioritize the identification and correction of weaknesses in your training. As we saw earlier, this cannot always be achieved in a highly-specific training context. As a weightlifter, you need enough pulling strength to accelerate the bar high enough to rack in on your shoulders (in the case of a clean) and also enough squatting strength to stand back up after you catch the bar in a squat position. Whichever component is weakest will determine how much weight you can clean. If you can pull 275 high enough to rack it, only to become crushed in the squat because you lack enough squatting strength to stand up with it, no amount of heavy cleans will correct this imbalance. Instead, you'll need to focus on front squats until your squatting strength matches your pulling strength.
If you're an MMA competitor with poor hand-striking skills, no amount of competition-specific fighting will ever improve your weak-link, because under intense pressure, you'll of course revert to your strengths in order to "survive." Instead, you'll need to spend time in drills that require you to solve problems with your hands. Such drills are less than 100% specific, yet they are necessary to overcome your weaknesses.
The training of boxers provides a useful analogy for those hoping to better understand the continuum between specificity and generality. Hard, competition-intensity sparring for several 3 minute rounds, using regulation gear is the most specific form of training a boxer can perform. Add in some canned applause on the PA system and put a little money on the line, and it becomes even more specific.
Now, if you didn't have a firm grasp on the foundational principles of training, you'd rightly assume that this would be the most productive type of training a boxer could do. Following that, you'd also assume that he should simply spend all of his time doing hard sparring. But you'd be wrong of course, and here's why:
 Click Image To Enlarge.The Most Specific Training Is Also The Most Intense, And That Certainly Holds True For Boxers.
The principles of progress are like an abbreviated musical scale consisting of only 3 notes - you know what the notes are, you know what they sound like, you've figured out how to make a few chords, but you're likely unaware of the almost limitless ways they can be applied in order to create a successful outcome. The best musicians work from the same notes that the worst ones do - it's just that they find ways to synthesize them into amazing new compositions that inspire their less-skilled peers. Start thinking of training principles in this way, and you'll be well on your way to strength-training mastery. Related Beginning Bodybuilding Basics Articles: About The Author:
His colleagues call him an iconoclast, a visionary, a rule-breaker. His clients call him "The Secret Weapon" for his ability to see what other coaches miss. Charles calls himself a "geek" who struggled in Phys. Ed. throughout school. Whatever you call him, Charles' methods are ahead of their time and quickly produce serious results. His counter-intuitive approach and self-effacing demeanor have lead to appearances on NBC's The TODAY Show and The CBS Early Show. Find Charles online at http://www.CharlesStaley.com. Recommend this article to a friend by e-mail here! Visitor Reviews Of This Article!
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