A conversation

"Dang it Nick, now that you had to take some time off from the Pain Cave, I do not know how to work out."

I love this. Not the reliance on me for a good workout, but the plateau breaking that is the essence of what this statement relates to. This guy has been bodybuilding for years, essentially he knows how to train. What he doesn't accept is the fact that workouts do not have to fit neatly into a box so the rest of the world can see or you can feel.

We need to think of training as the long term approach to fitness, workouts just being singular activities on that road to success.

I do not workout, I train. You can fuss about the terminology till you are blue in the face and for what? So you can be right? Let people call it what they want, let's just get them to understand the principles at work. Once you understand the principles, you can formulate the methods.

To get a response from training, you have to manipulate 1 of 3 things:

Time
Volume
Intensity

Each manipulation has a different outcome, meaning you train for different goals. BUT, if you compose your methods to attack all 3 things over a period of time, the results are compounding, meaning they all create change synergistically.

Get it?