In the age of social media and influence, there are a great deal of people trying to emulate their idols—be it actors, athletes, or any other style of influencer. This often results in a lot of copy and pasting of training plans that literally make no sense for another individual. In this article, I strive to convince you why you shouldn’t copy and paste training programmes from the internet.
Training age is the amount of time you have been doing a specific style of training, including resistance training. Training age will dictate how much volume you will be able to perform in your weekly plan. If you have no experience with resistance training, following Thor’s training programme probably isn’t going to be a good idea. Training age is heavily individualised, and it doesn’t just take into account how many years you have been training, but also how many times a week you train.
Training economy is the amount of time you have available in your week to exercise. This will probably be drastically different from Henry Cavill while he was preparing to be Superman. Most likely, you have a full-time job, maybe even some kids to look after. This will probably mean you have a maximum of 4 hours a week to train. This means that you simply can’t put as much time into training as the individuals you are trying to copy.
Most people reading this article probably don’t have enough money to pay a personal trainer multiple times a week—let alone a nutritionist or, in some cases, even a private chef that is cooking for you. This level of precision makes making incredible progress inevitable, yet for someone who is leading a normal life on a normal budget, most of these expenses are out of the question.
There are a lot of sacrifices that go into being in incredible shape. This will involve following very strict training plans, eating a very intentional diet, and saying no to a lot of social occasions. If you are being paid over 10 million dollars to look like Superman, then this will make the sacrifice worthwhile. If, however, you have a vague goal and are loosely following a training plan you have copied, most of these sacrifices are not going to be worthwhile, which will mean that you won’t make them and therefore will not see consistent results.
Unfortunately, there is a huge difference in how individuals adapt to training stimulus. The celebrities that people aspire to look like always have amazing genetics. If you have low body fat naturally and also find it relatively easy to gain muscle, guess what—you’re going to have an amazing physique. If you add on top of this all of the factors above, you’re going to look like Thor. The problem is that not everyone has amazing genetics, an unlimited budget, unlimited time, and years of training experience.
If you want to design your own training programme, you need to go through all of these factors and adapt to your specific situation. Principles of training will dictate your success, not copy-and-pasting a training programme that wasn’t designed for you.
Our SEO strategy involves responding to questions that people are asking Google. This article is born out of frustration from seeing how many people are attempting to copy and paste celebrity training plans. In this article, I have outlined all the reasons why people need to be following their own programme—not Thor’s or Superman’s.
Through following other people’s training plans, you are not following principles of training but just blindly following someone else’s plan. The best way to progress in the long term is to learn the principles of training that create progress. By just copy-and-pasting a training plan that is designed for someone else, you are setting yourself up to fail. The idea that if you copy a training plan that a celebrity has used to get incredible results, you will get the same results is very misguided and will result in frustration and most likely stagnation.
Let the people you strive to be like influence you through their dedication and commitment to their training. This is what you should be taking on board when looking at their training, rather than copying their actual workouts which are out of reach for all the reasons above.
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This resource was written by Sean Klein. Sean Richard Klein has thousands of hours of coaching experience and a BSc in Sports Science with Management from Loughborough University. He owns a gym in Bayonne France, CrossFit Essor, which runs group classes and a Personal training studio.