Lessons From Gymnasium

And, whoops, Street Sense (last post) won the Derby in 2007 instead of 2008. Time flies.

Given the latest status of yours truly as a dedicated gym rat where I spend generally 2 hrs. per day towards my goal of duplicating 6 miles at a rate of 7 min. per mile of my late age 20s, thought it might be interesting to document a few lessons from the YMCA learned or relearned.

So here it is, without particular order these principles of training/exercise physiology will be posted one by one as they enter the consciousness.

Today's thought concerns my lack of progress. After initially noting significant improvement in physical condition and some in terms of bodily appearance in starting my program January 1, now at the start of month #4 I seem to be repeating workouts instead of moving forward. I hit 5 mph for 1 hour a month ago. Yesterday my distance for the hour on the treadmill was only 3.5 miles. Similar with weights. Failing to make progress right at the moment. Why?

Here is principle #1--avoid backing off of workouts/missing workouts/or failing to move the exercise program forward.

The first hiccup in my own program was a week in late February where I skipped a couple of days due to lack of sleep and sluffed off some more in that week due to circumstances. I workout out that week, but far lighter than is the habit. The result of this was taking the whole next week to get back to where I had been--i.e. over the course of two weeks zero progress was made in terms of improving performance, and thus on about March 5 I was physically exactly where I had been on February 20. This was repeated with another bad week in late March and then again this last week when I entertained a visitor from Germany. And although I have worked out through much of this at lesser intensity the result has been to be in lesser condition on April 4 than I was on February 20. A month and a half essentially treading water.

Transfer this idea to TB training and you've got Todd Plecher going through the same routine with his horses month after month year after year. Has anybody ever seen a Plecher horse improve off the Plecher program? My idea on the race track is improvement. Unknown to me what Plecher's ideas are except my own recent gym experience would indicate a Plecher type program is insufficient to achieve improved performance.