Efficiency of training

Sooner or later, you’re going to have to make important decisions regarding your training. You may already have had to do this. It quite simply boils down to one principle that you should always be consciously trying to follow: what is the best option for making me a more efficient trainer?

If there’s one thing I’ve learned since moving to another country and being severely restricted by time and work, it’s that it gives you perspective on what’s important. But I’m hardly the first busy man on the planet, and compared to some, my responsibilities and commitments can be considered miniscule; I have no children to look after, for starters. I also have the envious good fortune of living only a 5-10 minute walk from work, which makes up for travel time commuting despite the longer hours. Yet I’m having to make drastic cuts into my training time as I’ve became more indepedent. There’s only so many hours in a day and days in a week that you can dedicate to training without sacrificing other things that you consider important. It’s one of the main reasons so many individuals fail and give up on achieving their ideal physique or performance level – poor time management and lack of deductive reasoning. However, if we all followed these two essential components, we’d be a lot more focused, disciplined and motivated when working towards our goals. It’d help us become more efficient.

Time management

It starts with time management. Just how much time can you honestly commit to training each day or week? Set yourself an honest, reasonable goal. Write it down and stare it in the face each day. Make sure you’re following this target and visualising it so you enforce discipline upon yourself and your own word.

This is the easy step in becoming more efficient. Now that you’ve got a feasible target that you believe you can commit to, we need to decide on what work will encompass this time effectively to ensure we’re maximising our potential and working diligently to achieve that goal.

Deductive Reasoning

What are your goals? When you wrote down your time management strategy, you inadvertently sacrificed something that can be an extremely valuable commodity not all of us have plenty of for this endeavour: time.

There will come to a point, where you cannot follow the magazine’s standard 50 set hypertrophy workout. It’s going to be squats and stiff-legged deadlifts, or giant sets between leg extensions, hack squats, leg curls, smith squats and more leg curls if you want to maintain those movements. Which movements truly produce results and are worth investing your valuable time and effort in? Do you need to work on overall mass and size? Then you absolutely need to start paying more attention to focusing on squats, deadlifts and bench press, and less attention to leg curls, back pulleys and cable crossovers. Do you need essential work on mobility to combat you sitting down at a desk all day? You are going to have to prioritise in this role and intuitively drop movements that are second-fiddle to what deserves attention.

Don’t be afraid to drop the useless crap from your routine. Go ahead without all the secondary machines and movements for a month and then come back and tell me if you’ve lost any size or impaired performance. I bet you’ll be telling me the exact opposite: that you actually improved on your goals because you were more focused on what truly works towards them!

Conclusion

So, we have two basic concepts here that are worth paying attention to in order to maximise our efficiency in training and to enhance quality of life. The first one is being realistic with time management: giving yourself a sustainable target that you can promise yourself to follow and won’t have any problem adhering to. The second is deductive reasoning: the logic we use to subtract useless crap and decide what we are going to be investing our precious time into. The second principle will involve you being honest and making changes. However, it’s nearly always for the better, and sometimes helps you to narrow down and cut out the waste which will keep you more focused and disciplined.

Follow these two simple principles right now, and I gaurantee you’ll stop being as frustrated as you were, and start seeing results again.