Training should be hard, but physical activity can be enjoyable

Balancing progress and adherence within your fitness strategy

Striking the right balance of training and physical activity is often overlooked when developing a fitness strategy. While all training is physical activity, not all physical activity is training.

Training is physical activity with the intent of developing strength, fitness, mobility or some other functional capacity. 

Physical activity is the act of moving, which often includes training but also extends to other activities such as mowing the lawn or walking around the office.

An example to differentiate them is parking your car further away from the office to increase your walk. This is physical activity and not training for most people unless you continue to overload by parking further from the office, walking faster or doing the walk more often. 

Simple training examples are running, cycling, swimming or any other activity with the intent of increased duration, intensity or frequency. 

Any activity can be training or physical activity. You could golf faster, for longer or with heavier clubs to turn it into training, if you really wanted to. Likewise, many keep running at the same distance and speed, or lift the same weights at the gym, and these activities cease to be training.

Why training matters

Training is critical when the objective is to progress strength, fitness or mobility. Without training specific to the goal/s and that is progressively overloaded, there will be no stimuli for adaptations.

Seeing progress in strength, fitness and mobility is important for adherence to the strategy as it reinforces the benefits of training sessions, which aren’t always enjoyable. 

This is noticeable in the early stages of a body recomposition strategy, where body composition changes can be small as the strategy ramps up. However, adaptations in strength, fitness and mobility are often rapid at this time, as you become more proficient at the activity and start to build your capacity.

The noticeable progress can help adhere to the strategy and give the base for further body composition changes.

The same is true at the other end of the body recomposition journey. When people have achieved their initial goals and switched the emphasis to maintaining their body composition, training objectives become important.

Most people are leaner and have a base level of strength and fitness that they can build upon, often with a more specific focus. They might start training for a marathon, get into triathlon or build their strength in the gym.

Now that much of the body recomposition progress has been made, the training must be able to sustain adherence to maintaining physical activity (and energy expenditure). If the training drops off, and energy intake remains the same, body composition progress can plateau or even reverse.

What makes training hard

Effective training requires progressive overload of frequency, intensity (speed/load) or duration. For most people, these are increased resistance in their strength training and either going hard or longer during cardio.

This is challenging because it involves training much closer towards your thresholds. Training towards your strength thresholds mean weights feel heavier and move slower, and cardio training means burning lungs and muscles.

Some people enjoy this side of training but for the vast majority, it’s something that’s tolerated because the outcome is worth it. But that doesn’t mean it’s appealing and makes it hard to do on days when you are low on energy, tired or otherwise not feeling it.

Maintaining progressive overload is essential to continue building strength. If you keep doing what you currently are, you will maintain what you currently have. This isn’t a bad thing, but it becomes an issue when you have expectations or goals that require training to be achieved.

How to balance training and physical activity

Here are a few ways to help you maintain the right amount of training alongside physical activity.

Pick activity you want to be good at

This seems obvious, but it’s commonly overlooked when people adopt other people’s training plans or are motivated by how someone else achieved a goal.

Running is a great form of training if it’s something you want to get better at. But if you don’t care about running faster or for longer, it doesn’t have to be the form of cardio you do. You can jump in the pool, on a bike, start rowing, or hike on the weekends.

Resistance training requires a wider range of exercises to target the full body, but you can pick one or two exercises that you really want to progress and then take it easier on the other exercises in your program. Not everything needs to be done to maximal effort, every session.

Set training goals

Having targets that align with your larger goals keeps each training session relevant. It’s easy to back off the intensity today or this week if your goal is to improve body composition over the next 12 months. But if you have the shorter-term goal of running 5km before the end of February, this can help keep you motivated and get today's session done.

You don’t need to set training goals for every part of the program, but having 1-3 goals to work towards over the next 4-6 weeks, or whatever the typical duration of your training program is, can make a big difference.

As you get more experienced with training and develop a consistent routine, these goals become less important. 

Measure progress

Assessing progress is a great way to validate your training program and give you the drive to continue when it’s hard because you know the work pays off. Body composition goals might be assessed with body composition scans, photos, measurements or using scales. All provide useful insights into progress, and even if none are completely accurate, they tend to be consistent.

Seeing the progress from previous measurements can be valuable. You can simply measure to assess progress or set targets. However, if you set targets, be sure to use longer timeframes (i.e. 4+ weeks) because there can be significant fluctuation over short periods which can mask long-term trends. 

Focus on duration and frequency

I won’t call it a hack, but there are ways to increase strength, fitness and mobility without simply pushing intensity to the max. 

There is a strong evidence base for low-intensity running with longer duration to increase cardiovascular fitness. For many people, this is slow jogging or a combination of walking and running in lower heart rate zones.

Increasing frequency is also useful for strength training. During the first two years of covid, I had a number of clients use training programs where they would exercise 2-4 times per day, for 5-10 minutes at a time. 

It started as a way to break up the routine during lockdown but ended up being a popular training option for people who continued to work from home. 

While it’s not practical for everyone, if you are working from home or over the weekend, it could be an option to split up your resistance training into smaller bites.

The benefit is the break between efforts allows the body to recover and minimise the accumulated fatigue that occurs during the session

Hating the process destroys adherence

If you hate the routine you are doing, chances are you stop doing it as soon as you can. Be that a minor inconvenience or something else.

Adherence is a critical component of fitness strategy design. If adherence drops off, it becomes very difficult to create the stimulus required for progress, which can lead to questioning whether the strategy is working at all.

So if you’re building your own plan, think about how to strike the right balance of training and physical activity to hit your strength, fitness, mobility and body recomposition goals.