Leave Room for Improvement

I had several clients start new program this week.

My advice to many of them was: leave room for improvement.

When you’re on the first week of a plan, and everything feels new and exciting, it can be easy to do too much.

Even when it goes well, it can come back to bite you.

Here are a couple of examples of leaving room to improve.

• A. Deadlift x5, building to challenging set in 5-7 sets

On week one, don’t go to the heaviest weight you can do, leave room for next week and see what happens. More than heroic efforts, we want replicable efforts. I fell into this trap a lot while olympic weightlifting. I would crush some big weight on week 1 of my plan, but when week 2 and 3 rolled around and I needed to repeat those weights it felt impossible. As I gained more experience, I learned to take 10% off of what I could do the first week, and build on it in the coming weeks.

• B. 3-5 rounds of:

8/s split squat

10/s one arm db row

8b low plank hold

When you see a range for rounds, you don’t have to do the highest number! On week one, maybe you do 3 rounds, everything else will likely take longer too, so this option should take the pressure off of cramming too much in. In the coming weeks, you can add these rounds to increase overall volume.

• Conditioning

10-12 sets:

30 sec @ fast pace

30 sec @ slow pace

On an interval day, or even a finisher at the end of a workout, we’ll sometime leave a range too. Start low on this and add rounds each week. You can also use the first week to gauge proper intensities or paces on your machine of choice. You can leave room to improve with volume or intensity (speed of the interval), or even both. So many ways to progress!

The name of the game here is to realize it’s not just one workout that’s important, but all of them compounded over time. The more sessions you get, even with less volume or intensity, the better you’re doing, period. Once you start leaving room for improvement, you’re playing the long game!

Justin Miner

@justinminergain