How To Sustainably Increase Performance

To increase your performance, you need to push the boundaries… You need to lift heavy, heavier, and heavier still. You need to complete the work out quicker, run faster than yesterday, more reps than last week. You need to consistently force adaptation… Or do you? The following bullet points have been lifted straight from google… The Risks of Training at High Intensity for Too Long:

• Overtraining Syndrome (OTS): This serious condition occurs when the intensity and volume of exercise exceed the body's ability to recover. Symptoms can be physical and psychological, and recovery can take weeks or months.

• Increased Injury Risk: High-intensity workouts place significant stress on muscles, tendons, and ligaments. Without enough recovery, this can lead to sprains, strains, tendonitis, and other injuries.

• Hormonal Imbalances: Prolonged strenuous training can disrupt hormone levels (like cortisol, testosterone, and growth hormone), which can negatively affect metabolism and muscle growth.

• Decreased Performance: Paradoxically, overtraining leads to a decline in performance, strength, and endurance despite consistent effort.

• Mental Burnout: Pushing your limits constantly can result in a lack of motivation, irritability, anxiety, and a general loss of enthusiasm for training and other activities.

• Cardiovascular Stress: For individuals with underlying heart conditions, consistently pushing the heart rate beyond its maximum can trigger serious issues like arrhythmias or even heart attacks. 

Always forcing will lead to burnout and, I’d like to add, shitty technique. Not as scientific as google would have put it, but it’s true.

Reps with sub-maximal weights are typically completed with better form than max efforts. Sub-max weights allow you to reinforce good technique and focus on precision and speed. They will also keep you from getting injured and allow you to stay fresh and better able to deal with all of life's other stressors… They are your foundations, if you will, and they allow you to consistently build. And that’s the point of training. To build.

There’s certainly a time and a place to push the limits, but I think too many people spend too much time trying to raise their ceiling (test themselves / push their boundaries) and not enough time building their foundations / raising their floor. If you raise your floor, your ceiling will also go up. If you only try to raise the ceiling, you either reach a point you can’t seem to get past, or you get shot with one of those bullet points… 

For the most part, you should be building your base, not testing your limits - allowing adaptation, not trying to force it.

Cheers,

~ Collins Haven't got a decent photo for this, so here's one of Kilo...