When it comes to training,we tend to set very specific goals: lose a certain amount of weight, gain a certain amount of muscle, look a certain way, be able to perform a trick or movement, or lift a some specific weight
It is common, and even more so now that the beginning of the new year is approaching, to see people with goals such as “lose 10 kilos”, “gain 5 kilos of muscle”, “have squares in the abdomen” or “manage to do the muscle up, the plank and the front lever.”The problem with this approach is that our ability to achieve these specific goals depends on multiple factors, some of which are under our control, such as our discipline, our training, our diet, our rest times, our habits. But there are alsomany that we cannot control, such as our genetics, our starting level, injuries, illnesses, stress, studies, work, social and family obligations, etc.
This means that if your goal is something as specific as “gain 5 kilos of muscle” or “doing the straddle planche in 3 months” that involves so many factors that you cannot control,the difficulty of achieving it is unnecessarily high.
Furthermore,these goals encourage the use of more aggressive and therefore more unsustainable strategies, making the probabilities of failure increase considerably. It is very common to see people who go from having no control over their diet and eating all kinds of processed foods to suddenly having a super strict and restrictive diet, and we all know how that ends. It is also common to see people who go from never training or minimum training to wanting to train 5 days a week with specific hour and a half routines, and we all know how that ends too.
These examples are very clear cases, so you understand what I am proposing, but if you think about it, it also happens with more subtle cases.
For example, the person who wants to "master the straddle planche, or the front lever, or the muscle up in 3 months.” It is very common that when faced with such a specific objective and so influenced by factors that we cannot control, the person adopts a fairly aggressive strategy of training planche, starting with more advanced progressions than what corresponds to their level, putting in some very hard training, forcing his joints beyond what they can bear… and not allowing his body to recover properly.
This inevitably leads to problems with: injuries and pain, frustration with the lack of progress, accumulated fatigue and many comments and messages sent to me telling me that they are stuck or that their forearm hurts.