Being Fooled By Your Increasing Exercise Performance
Written by Kyle Ligon - MovementLink.FIT Head Coach
When starting an exercise program, there’s an extremely common trap that can delay achieving the results you’re after for years - The Performance Trap! You may be currently falling for it without even knowing it?!?!?!
Improving functional performance may be the single greatest thing you can do for you life. Not only do those ability transfer into more current opportunities, but performance metrics are also the best indicators of how long someone is likely to live. Check out my article, The Best Short Game is the Long Game, to explore specifically what those are, how they inspire the MovementLink workout program, and why they should be the target of your program.
The MovementLink Method balances goals of improving:
functional performance,
body composition,
joint and tissue health, and
overall health and wellness.
The problem with an exercise-only approach is that each of these areas is impacted in different proportions by exercise.
Which leads us to the Performance Trap:
When someone starts a new exercise program, exercise alone will provide many positive benefits to functional performance, body composition, tissue and joint health, and overall health and wellness. But, it does not provide these benefits evenly and over time it becomes more and more evident that it biases functional performance improvements. So, people who are 100% exercise focused for their strategy to reach their goals can be fooled by their ever-increasing performance.
Starting out, people will make some progress on everything, falsely affirming peoples’ misconception and hope that exercise alone will be enough. Eventually, usually about 6 months to a year in, body composition improvements plateau, but, with a quality workout program, someone will continue to make big performance gains…which can continue for years and years and years. The trap happens because people incorrectly assume body composition and performance are directly correlated and that if they just keep pushing their performance forward, their body composition will follow.
An additional part of the trap is that in the beginning, performance progress is extreme- what is called “beginner gains”. People may be able to lift 100 more pounds a few months in than they were able to when they started. But, as time goes on, the performance progress slows dramatically. Although we can continue making progress year after year, at a point, 5% gains each year are not just typical, but are great. So, the trap is exacerbated by performance gains slowing down. Because performance gains are slowing down, people don’t recognize that their body composition progress hasn’t just slowed down some with it, but it has practically stopped all together a long time ago.
To sum up the Performance Trap - improvements in body composition (which is a major goal of most people) from an exercise-only approach will stall out about 6-12 months in, but performance can continue to improve for years. People’s views of their progress towards their goals gets distorted as they ignore their lack of body composition improvements and only focus on their performance improvements giving them the false sense of being on the right track. Peoples’ typical journey then includes adding more and more exercise as an attempt to push their body composition past the plateau. This performance trap leads to years of frustration and ends in either 1) quitting, 2) giving up on any body composition goals, or 3) finally getting the results they are after once they embrace the reality that lifestyle factors play a non-negotiable role.
The great news here is that addressing the other areas not only doesn’t detract from performance, but actually enhances it. So for even bigger performance gains, in addition to actually getting the body composition, tissue and joint health, and overall health and wellness, all aspects of a healthy lifestyle need to be addressed - nutrition, sleep, and non-exercise activities (like walking) - which is why MovementLink’s methods are not just exercise based and instead focus heavily on the specifics of a healthy lifestyle. I cannot stress enough the fact that when these things are working together, results are profound and they happen quickly!
What it comes down to is that exercising 4-6 days a week (How Much Exercise is Enough?) in a way similar to the MovementLink Program is not only plenty, but enough to make you a superhero…as long as you additionally integrate healthy sleep, non-exercise activity, and nutrition habits. You will achieve astronomical results in performance, body composition, tissue and joint health, and overall health and wellness, even relative to what you would get if you followed an extremely hardcore, exercise-only approach. You don’t need to be perfect within these categories, simply have a strategy that you can commit to most of the time most weeks.
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