One reason why regular high-intensity training is a problem for your movement and your body
One of the things you'll notice about our training is that we don't incorporate a lot of really high intensity training into our programs. Yes, we get our heart rates up and sometimes we do hit high intensities (breathing hard, pushing our limits) but more often than not we back it off a notch. In this blog post I'm going to explain why.
Before I do, I just want to mention a couple of things.
Firstly, this post isn't saying that intensity in your training is bad for you. This post is all about why doing it regularly is a problem.
Secondly, this post isn't about high level athletes. It's about people wanting a high level of fitness and movement capacity, but not people at the very pinnacle of a sport. The reason is simple. Sports are a war of attrition. If you don't go hard, someone else will, and they'll use that extra intensity to get better than you. We are not talking about that. We're talking about quality fitness for life. It can be high level, but we're not talking about pushing the extremes.
Next, we need to define intensity. If we're going to have an informed conversation about this, we need to have an informed conversation about the same thing!
When we say 'intensity', we mean things like:
pushing to your limit in a Crossfit style workout
lifting weights to failure or close to it (whether that's a 1 rep max, or a higher number of repetitions)
a bootcamp instructor encouraging their client to squeak out one more rep when they're all but exhausted
Okie dokie, so why is regular high-intensity exercise a problem for your movement and your body?
To understand this, we need to understand what movement our bodies evolved for. Our bodies evolved in a far more varied movement environment. Our ancestors walked a lot. It was off-road. Every step was different. They squatted, knelt and sat in a huge number of different ways, and regularly. They climbed, regularly. You get the idea. The modern world however, is different.
The modern world doesn't match up with the world that we evolved in, and our bodies development movement imbalances because of it. A classic example might be an office worker who sits all day and developments right hip flexors, excessive curvature in their lower back, and probably lower back tightness and pain eventually. However there are many examples.
In the office worker example, they will likely have some movement patterns and groups that are over worked and over developed (e.g. quadriceps, erector spinae etc) and others that are under active and possibly excessively weak, although that often a misnomer of other things (e.g. glutes).
Now think for a moment, what will happen if someone with movement and bodily imbalances does exercise at a really high intensity (i.e. where they are pushing at the limit of fatigue). Specifically, which muscles and movement patterns will fatigue first, the ones that are dominant and they are strong at, or the weaker ones? It's the weaker ones of course.
What that means is that if our office worker goes to the gym and does a high intensity workout, even if they start with theoretically perfect technique, where everything is working optimally, their weak patterns and muscles will fatigue before the stronger patterns and body parts will, and before they feel completely fatigued overall. When the weak patterns fatigue, they will default into their existing bad habits (i.e. their existing strong, but dysfunctional patterns). As a result, their existing strong body parts and patterns will do more work and get stronger and more entrenched, and the weak patterns will do relatively less work to catch up. The gap between strong and weak will widen, and the imbalances will get worse. Do that regularly and you have a real problem.
Now, some people might say "oh that's ok, because I'll do this accessory work to strengthen my weak links etc". Unfortunately, it doesn't work like that, for two reasons.
First, think about the stress that you put your body under during a high-intensity workout, then think about the stress it receives in your accessory work. They're not even close to being even. You accessory work will not come close to making up the distance.
Second, your body doesn't work like maths. In maths, 0 + 1 = 1 and 0 + 2 - 1 = 1, so the result is the same. But your body doesn't see it that way. For your body, a (pleasant start to your day) + (a high intensity workout) - (a perfect mobility session) is not the same as a (pleasant start to your day) + (quality movement at a variety of reasonable intensities).
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And that's it. That's why we don't do regular high intensity work, because even if you start out with the best intentions of using great form, you end up reinforcing existing poor movement patterns and making your situation worse.
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