The 3 Hour Exercise

I remember it like yesterday, I was TOTALLY blown away!

I was asked to help teach at a certification about seven years ago. Any time I get to teach I generally love it, but this time it was horrible. My heart sank as I watched an instructor teach an exercise to the group for three hours straight! YES, three hours!

At first you might think, “man, he was really detailed!” Unfortunately, the reality is that the reason it took so long was that he wasn’t following any form of progression. It was just, here is an exercise, let’s learn to do it. Sadly, that is how a lot of things are taught in fitness. 

Why is this such a problem? Mostly because it doesn’t have to be this way. Learning more complex movements should actually be easy, not painful for coach and client alike. That is if you follow a path of progression. Yes, that dirty word that if you understand how to do it, it is a game changer for how successful you can be. 

Why do I say progression is a dirty word on fitness? Again, because people don’t know how to layer movement. They jump from exercise to exercise and if one is harder than another then they think they are progressions, but that isn’t how it works. 

Real progression requires you to have a system, one exercise should feed into another. That is how you become successful. So, it isn’t about how many exercises you have, it is how one feeds into another. If you approach strength training that way you find yourself moving and performing better in record time! 

Sounds too good to be true right? If you think about it though, most people just work off of random exercises and not systems. Yet, anything successful in life functions off of systems and principles, not a frankenstein construction of parts. In order to demonstrate this point I wanted to show you how you layer movement to become more and more successful in your workouts. 

**some names of our progressions may have changed, but the concepts are the same:)