Right off the bat you read that title and you are thinking to yourself, “What is ‘R’ going to stand for this time. Funny how much a letter can evoke pondering. Had I titled this the importance of Rhubarb, who knows what you would be thinking, but likely you would be thinking something about Rhubarb.  Hmm maybe my next post should be about Rhubarb Pie.

Training, no matter what the the method, has one goal. That goal is to Refine.

Be it bulk, strength, fat loss, speed, corrective, etc the goal is to raise you to another level of yourself. It is to perfect and polish your ability to the best level that you can. If you aren’t following the importance of ‘R’ then your efforts are all in vain.

The 4R list of success

Rest-”Freedom from activity (work or strain or responsibility).”
Regeneration-”Renewal or restoration of a body, bodily parts, or biological system (as a forest) after injury or as a normal process.”
Recovery-”Restoration to a former and/or better condition.”
Reality-”The quality or state of being actual or true.”

The key to drive most of those things is balance in training. If you always rest, you aren’t training. If you push too hard all the time, you are never recovering, where is the balance?

Yakovlev's Fig 1

The Pusher

In your training program you have “The Pusher.” The pusher can be any internal or external factor that guides you to excel past comfortable levels of training expression.

The Coach
The Trainer
The Competition
The Inner Montage

All of the above can be leaders of the push towards conditioning and excellence. All above can be leaders towards your demise.

The Stressors

The Stressors can exist in physical training, but they can also exist in the realm of environment and mental. Meaning running long distance in hot polluted air while thinking about the fight you got in last night with your mother, is not helping bring forth the ‘R.’

The Healers

The overall problem is that there isn’t in most cases the factor of “The Healer.” For every push and stress you need an equal ‘R’ reaction.  Time and investment in the former always leads to snubbing of the later.

The Food
The Bed
The Foam Roller
The ART specialist
The Therapist

While some of the above doesn’t have to be literal, it all goes back to investment of your craft. People constantly invest in the wrong parts of progress. You can see this in every area of life.

Example of Investing Wrongly In Progress

-Doing aggressive intervals before having the ability to do progressive increase
-Disposing of rest times before imposing pause in training
-Utilizing superset training before understanding the basics of one move at a time
-Running for endurance before decreasing body mass and reading the body for impact

This kind of training is the equivalent of buying a cell phone on the basis of being able to have 10 people in a network, but you are lucky if your mom still calls and leaves that daily message about her favorite TV show.

You must walk before you run and you must regenerate for optimal recovery. It all ties together and being cheap in the beginning will leave you with half ass results in the end.

The Side Effects of Neglecting “R”

Obviously some things are specifically dependent on goals, but overall you can look for these side effects.

-Decrease in performance
-Decrease in desired body composition
-Decrease in sleep ability
-Decrease in strength
-Decrease in immune system
-Increase in stress
-Increase in sensitivity to mental and environmental factors
-Increase in fatigue
-Increase in stiffness and joint pain vs DOMS

Regulating “R”

A few logical reactions to training and stress will help you implement the “R” factor into your program.

-Higher intensity means higher rest time and a longer need for recovery
-A push is necessary for optimum advancement, but don’t expect such a linear advancement even with a balanced drive.
-Expect your greatest improvements to come after days of recuperation.
-Any decrease in nutrient value will lead in a increase of time need for optimal recovery. Because of this nutrient timing while in a hypercaloric state is crucial to obtaining maximum “R.”
-You can greatly improve the “R” factor with an extra focus on things like longer sleep, foam rolling, and proper warm up and cool down programs.

Tie it all together

When choosing or designing a program make sure that for all your actions you have set in place a recovery reaction. In doing so you will see tremendous improvement in RESULTS.

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Tracking your training progression (or degression) is one of the simplest but most overlooked tools you can have. It’s free and with tracking you can determine if what you are doing is paying off.

Dear Diary: “Today I totally blew at Bent over Rows but nothing prepared me for the leaking gas that came out on the third set right in front of shasha. Next time less weight.

Journal-Training day 12: “Tim said while I was doing chin ups that I dipped my pelvis forward too much and that my core was weak. God he is hot.”

Running Log-Day 182: “Today I  went up further on the mountain trail and then got harassed by an anteater, it was the weirdest thing. He just jumped out and said “F**K you I’m Anteater.” Calves felt good though, love that new massage stick,

So as you can see logging in your journal can be massively important to finding clues and noting progress.

We at FLzine have found some of the best logs on the net. This is paper/print only, not software as we are still evaluating some different gadgets.

Best Bang For Buck Log: BodyMinder Workout and Exercise Journal

Best “WTF does it cost that much” log?: The Fitness Log Book for Runners

Best “Right under your nose” log: Microsoft Documents>New>Templates>Logs

Best Stylish Log: Werkit training logs

Best “Everything but the kitchen sink” log: Arnie Baker

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