The ultimate goal for any hard training athlete is to find a weight training program that produces significant and consistent gains in lean muscle mass, strength and an increase in fat loss. A program that fails to deliver results shouldn’t take too long to send you back to the old drawing board.
It’s easy enough to sit down and put pen to paper devising a set plan of attack for your training not knowing what the result will be but hoping it will be very advantageous to your efforts. Or you could very easily follow the guidelines outlined in the Max-OT training schedule which will indeed induce superior gains when compared to other training programs which are what many people out there and I have chosen to do. But in all of this, one key aspect of training is sometimes lost upon us, and that one key is paying close attention to our instincts.
I am a firm believer in listening to what the body is telling us in response to whatever stimulus we put upon it. For this reason, I think it is imperative to find that one program that will work for you and then inject your instincts deeply within that plan making for a unique yet highly effective weight training schedule. Here’s how you do that.
Make Sure Your Head is in the Game
Weight training is as much of a mental pursuit as it is a physical one. There’s no question that if your head is not in the game, your results will suffer.
Intensity levels need always to be at an all-time high for significant progress in the gym. Extreme concentration and focus are a must for each and every rep within each and every set. The mind to muscle connection and rhythm of all the parts working together in synergy is an unconscious phenomenon that occurs when you are locked into the zone. High motivation levels are essential for long-term success.
If you ever find yourself lacking in any of these departments once you step out onto the gym floor that’s your instincts telling you something is off.
In cases like this, to avoid injury, to avoid simply going through the motions and completing a lackluster workout and to perhaps ignite whatever is mentally missing, don’t be afraid to veer off the chosen path for a bit. Maybe start with a different exercise than what you had previously planned. Maybe jump on the bike and pedal it out for a bit to clear your head first. Take a few minutes and listen to some music or simply turn around and leave the gym for another day.
I would rather listen to my instincts and take the day to figure out what I need to do to come back at full throttle than waste a workout or worse, get hurt.
The “Non-Routine” Routine
I have written a couple of times before about people who just saunter into the gym completely void of any real purpose and wander aimlessly around doing a set here and there on a bunch of random machines. I see no real use in this type of approach and spend much of my time educating people on the benefits of putting together a plan of attack so that they walk into the gym with a purpose. With that said, and this is no word of a lie, some of the biggest and in shape guys I know “train by feel” or by instinct.
They will tell you they have a rough idea of which body part(s) they want to train that day but have no clue as to which exercises they’ll be performing, how many sets they’ll be doing or what type of training principle they’ll be following. They just follow their guts and make it work.
Then there are other guys that step out onto the gym floor and when asked what they’re training that day, they’ll kind of roll their shoulders around a bit, stretch their arms or shake their quads and then reply with, “Well my quads aren’t sore today, so I guess it’ll be legs!”
This type of non-routine training can work (I’ve seen it for myself) but what I didn’t mention is that these guys have been training for years and have a ton of experience under their weight belts. And regardless of what they choose to do on any given day, all the mental aspects I mentioned in the previous paragraph are on point for them, so basically anything they decide to do is going to work.
How You Respond to Your Weight Training Program
Probably the most significant aspect of the instinctive weight training strategy and one that will serve you very well as you travel along your training journey is your ability to manipulate the training stimuli by following the feedback your body is providing you.
For example, if you are scheduled to complete maximal or near maximal lifts for your training that day, and you’ve failed to eat enough food to supply the necessary muscle energy for those lifts, you’ll know fairly quickly that “maximal” is now going to be relative to your current energy levels. In which case you back off a bit or postpone training with your max lifts to the next day.
Or let’s say your weight training program calls for you to complete incline bench presses using a 30-degree bench angle but when you do that you don’t feel it enough in your upper chest and so rather than continuing you adjust the bench height to 45 degrees and feel it where you should be feeling it.
Another example, let’s say it’s shoulder day and for whatever the reason your rotator cuffs are stiff, tight and a bit sore. Do you power through the pain ignoring the little signs or do you switch gears and train legs instead and have a great workout versus a painful one.
Perhaps, biomechanically speaking, the exercises on your list don’t quite fit right with your body type and musculature. Do you waste your time completing exercises that everyone says must be a mainstay in any program or do you play around with them a bit and make the exercise fit you versus trying to make yourself fit into an exercise?
You see, all of these things significantly contribute to your long-term and overall success, and if you’re not paying attention to your instincts, you’re missing out.
I like having a set program in place to follow, and I see a tremendous benefit in putting a plan together that breeds consistency and allows for the opportunity to see if what you are indeed doing is going to work. But I also full heartedly believe in trusting yourself and following your instincts when it comes to training. You know yourself better than anyone and once you put two and two together (in my case Max-OT with instinct) what you create is an incredible environment conducive to massive gains!
