Healthy High Achiever Blog

Read Part Iand Part II.

This past month delivered quite a unique discovery. In this, the third part in the series called Train, Not Drain, the revelation, was about High Intensity Training, when it makes sense and when it doesn’t.

Simply put, high intensity training does not make sense when your body is under excessive stress, experiencing overwhelm, exhaustion or fatigue. If you implement high intensity training during times like this, you risk destructive catabolic effects, not the constructive anabolic effects you are seeking.

High Intensity Training as a concept is amazing and has such compelling benefits.

Here’s what Arthur Jones founder of Nautilus, one of the first lines of training equipment ever created for gyms.

Everything of any value related to exercise can be stated in less than a thousand words, can, in fact, be fairly well covered in only a few words, as follows: Train hard, Train briefly, Train infrequently, and always remember that your final results will primarily be a consequence of genetics" -Arthur Jones

…Train Hard, Train Briefly and Train Infrequently.

Now this of course is not the average person’s philosophy. The average person is taught to train 5-6 days per week and this is fine, especially when animals in nature would be relatively active 7 days a week with recuperation periods when needed. 

But here’s the point.

High Intensity Training as a fitness protocol is different than short bursts of high intensity in the natural world.

For example, just this past month, I found myself doing a Tabata Protocol - 4 minutes of high intensity training, with a 10 second rest interval in between each 20 second repetition of a particular exercise.

On top of that, I was doing multiple rounds of this protocol, across many different exercises, sometimes as high at 4-6 rounds totaling nearly 30 minutes!

This was feeling great for the first week, only 3-4 times per week, then I noticed my ability to recover was declining and my attitude was changing and my ability to perform was sinking. True to form, I briefly pushed myself through only to see even worse results. As classic high achiever mistake.

What? Yes, I was experience a catabolic effect, not an anabolic effect from all my hard work.

What else was going on at the same time? I was finishing a book and that was an emotional draining process, and launching www.MyTrainer.com, on top of the rest of life. There were even more factors and the net result is, I was getting worn down fast!

I was in "the downward trend" as we call it in the Performance Lifestyle community.

I had too much going on and my body could not recover fast enough. Too much HIT - High Intensity Training, was over stressing my body and that’s the bottom line.

Read again what Dr Chad Oler had to say about this -Part I

I was reminded of a big lesson from all this… reinforcing what I learned from Joe Friel years ago… get the result doing as little as possible - more is not better.

You also have to factor in what’s going on in your life, and your lifestyle, before you commit to a training protocol and to determine the level, frequency, intensity and duration you are going to commit to.

I would have done just fine with High Intensity Training during this stressful period, but not at the level I was doing. Less frequency and duration would have changed things.

So, I have had to take a few weeks off and now, I’m back at it only with a much different approach.

John Allen Mollenhauer is the Founder of Performance Lifestyle Solutions, the better healthier ways to achieve your goals in life, business and sport. As a former worn down workaholic turned healthy, high achiever John Allen (aka “JAM”) will teach you how to Live Like a Pro, optimizing your lifestyle the way athletes do. He is the creator of the Healthy High Achiever - Unleash the Full Potential of Your Lifestyle to Look, Feel and Perform Better!