Have you ever heard “I saw … doing this online so I am doing that”, “I injured myself when I did it the way they did it”, “I didnt get the same results they did” or “I train hard with the program I saw online and haven’t seen much difference”? Well I have, a lot!
I believe the reason for a lot of these comments is because people see their hero/heroine online, see them doing a workout and go and copy it. While this is great in practice the ramifications of this can be quite serious. A lot of the time people wont understand how to program for themselves. They will take what they see and apply it to themselves without adjusting for variables in their life. Now, whilst I applaud the unquestioned loyalty of said person towards their superhero, they wont always understand how much work is going on behind the scenes to get the results seen on a glossy and well filtered video.
For example:
Bob sees his superstar Dylan working out online (this can also happen when people watch one another in the gym from a far)
Dylan is an absolute machine and has been training for 10+ years.
Bob is newer to the training scene with a meagre 1 year of on/off training.
Bob makes notes on what exercises Dylan seems to do.
Bob turns up Monday morning, bright eyed and bushy tailed, ready for the first part of his ‘new’ volume training plan he has seen Dylan smashing out on the regular and performs 7 sets of squats finishing with a set of RPE 10 (because you have to be at failure to progress, right?!) followed by an accumulated 30 sets of isolation exercises. Wow, great work Bob!
Bob continues his ‘Legs, Push, Pull’ split and finds by the end of the week he is sore to levels previously unknown to Bob.
Bob starts week 2 with a less than impressive session. He turns up still aching from the previous week and is unable to lift the same as he did before. “Why?” Bob asks himself.
The week deteriorates from here.
Over the next few months Bob allows fatigue to set in further before it progresses to maladaptive overreaching which later progresses to overtraining syndrome (OTS). Now Bob is worse off than when he started. He is lifting less and now he needs an extended period of tapered training to allow his body ample recovery from OTS.
Now, Bob knew Dylan was experienced but thought that dropping the weight to something he could manage would work in his favour. Bob thought he ate well, or at least 70% of the time! He did absolutely nothing on his rest day so thought he would recover properly and he also went from a cold shower to a hot bath for 5 cycles for a total of 15mins every night (because he read somewhere that would help).
What Bob didn’t realise is that while he was gaming with his mates until 0300, Dylan would have his 8hrs sleep (MINIMUM) every night with full blackout curtains and no electronic screens at least an hour before his time for shut eye. Dylan would also be eating perfectly 95% of the time, he would weigh everything out and ensure a minimum of 3 meals a day of an appropriate mix of carbs, fats and proteins. While his diet was on point this helped reduce any inflammatory response of his eating and training and so his recovery, from a nutritional stand point, was about as good as it would get. Dylan didn’t bother with hot/cold therapy or any of the ‘fluffier’ methods of recovery due to such weak science based evidence to back up their reliability and felt his time was better spent planning meals, programs, drinking more water and prepping for sleep.
One of the biggest things that Bob overlooked however was PERIODISING his program. He assumes that Dylan was just restarting his program with a little bit more weight week on week (linear progression). Dylan was not. In fact, Dylan had been working tirelessly behind the scenes with his personal training to ensure the program he was using (based on undulating periodisation) made him ‘peak’ just in time for the amateur competition he was taking part in. This is why Dylan was recording himself at this time. The videos were the best they had ever been because he was at his current peak fitness – hence why Bob got so excited when he stumbled across Dylan’s latest videos.
If only Bob had asked Delta Fitness PT for help!!
This doesn’t just apply to weight lifting/bodybuilding but the same example can be applied to almost any sporting/fitness scenario.
Hopefully you can see from Bob’s example that just copying what you see online or in the gym can lead to less than productive training sessions and in some cases, if left unchecked, make you worse off than before. This example hasn’t even touched on mobility issues or the use of performance enhancing drugs (rife throughout social media!). Both things of which can create major issues if not considered when programming. If you are not 100% sure what you should be doing or how to take your training to the next level, seek PROFESSIONAL help. I would recommend not just asking your friend, you could get into a similar scenario. Know your limits and remember you don’t need to go to 100% effort every time.
Good luck and ENJOY your training
