Training Economy

Wasting your training economy is a polite way of saying wasting your time. Let’s imagine you are a typical 40-year-old with a family, who hasn’t moved their body in 10+ years and has miraculously managed to carve out two hours of your week to exercise. This in of itself is a huge win. Now let’s imagine that you’re going to spend one hour of this time learning how to perform an extremely complex hinge variation, a handstand or a snatch, or any other form of complex movements that requires high levels of skill learning. You have taken away 50% of your time through the style of exercise you have chosen to perform. When you are not in good health, you do not need complexity, you need simplicity and to use every second of your training time effectively. In a perfect world, we would all have 6+ hours of training economy per week and we could divide our time up between resistance training, endurance training and complex skill learning. Unfortunately this just is not the reality for most individuals.

Lack of Physical Results

Complex training requires a great deal of skill learning. Skill learning is often done with very light weights or more generally with very little resistance. Using little resistance is required in order to perfect different aspects of technique and also avoid injury. This means that very little physical adaptation will take place in terms of hypertrophy (muscle gain) or strength gain. When someone is in the gym to get strong or to gain muscle it doesn’t make sense to focus on complex skill learning as it doesn’t move them towards their goals.

Frustration (Deliberate Practice)

Learning technical movements like complex weightlifting, hinging variations and gymnastic variations requires a lot of deliberate practice. Deliberate practice is where we take a specific task and we try and improve our ability to perform that task, it requires us to learn new things which is often accompanied with frustration. This is because the things we are trying to learn are usually not very easy, meaning it requires a lot of concentration but also a great deal of failure.

This is an amazing process, the process of deliberate practice to perfect skills and task performance. However it isn’t what we are looking for when we are trying to find health initially. Taking the initial steps towards health simply doesn’t require this level of deliberate practice. Learning to squat, basic hinge variations, pushing, pulling etc, all these movements are very simple and can be learnt in a couple of hours if done with a good coach and your current levels of mobility allow it. The order in which you learn skills and gain physical characteristics is important, you can get into extremely good shape and health without ever performing much deliberate practice.

Habit Creation

The frustration and lack of physical results that come alongside performing complex movement can easily end up with the cessation of practice through preventing the habit forming process. When physical exercise is associated with negative connotations of frustration and the feeling of not moving forward toward your goals, it is understandable that people are unable to form the exercise habit.

Ingraining Poor Technique

When we perform exercises that we have not built up to progressively, it is almost certain that they will be performed with poor technique. Due to their complexity fixing this technique using the complex exercise will be to challenging. If you use poor technique and you continue to perform the exercise you are just shooting yourself in the foot through ingraining poor movement patterns.

Keep it Simple and Effective

All the best coaches know that simple physical training is the most effective. It is those who are trying to market themselves to financial success through differentiating themselves from the crowd who are trying to convince you that you need a complex method or a new exciting exercise. Simple means performing all the movement patterns on a regular basis in a way that effectively creates your desired adaptations.

The Case for Highly Technical Training

Although the vast majority of the time, simple training is the way to go, sometimes performing complex movement variations can be beneficial.

Passion / Motivation

When you are passionate about a topic and it is the style of training that is going to get you moving, then complex training is the way to go. I once had a client who was in very poor health, but she only wanted to learn to perform handstands, it was the one movement that motivated her to get to the gym. In this scenario it makes sense to perform complex movements in order to motivate individuals to get moving. However it is important that the individual can make an informed decision about how they are going to spend their time exercising.

Beyond Health

Some individuals are already exceptionally healthy when they step in the gym. They can squat their body weight in a few month, perform 10+ press ups without batting an eyelid etc. These individuals will need complete skill learning to make training fun and dynamic. This is not the majority of the population but it is a good subsection.

High Training Economy

If you are someone who has 5+ hours to exercise in the week and your curious about learning technically difficult movements even if your not in great health, then this is by no means a waste of time. Once you have performed 10–15 sets of most of the key movement patterns and performed your cardiovascular sessions, these complex movements will help you become more athletic and the process of learning new physical tasks is also good for the brain not only the body. We just need to be very clear about first things coming first when we are striving to become healthy individuals.