Asides

Lost in the land of mediocrity

Lyle McDonald has been one of my favorite “smart” people I’ve enjoyed reading over the years…ever since I first discovered him on a weightlifting news group (remember those anyone?). His brain needs to be put in a jar when he croaks to see if the soft grey matter was actually a series of computer chips from the future. While I’ve been catching up on my reading the past few days, I came across this gem from Lyle’s blog (Lyle McDonald Speaks) which perfectly explains how I used to train before I got serious about monitoring my HR: “Then there’s intensity. Proper ‘easy’ training should feel utterly easy, like there’s no effort at all. And the obsessive don’t like that, not at all. It doesn’t feel like it’s accomplishing anything (No pain, no gain, right) so the intensity starts to climb. Where it should be an easy 130 heart rate or lower, it’ll start climbing to the aerobic range or higher. Suddenly, what should have been easy days start becoming medium days.¶ But it’s even more insidious than that: these medium days end up being too easy to really stimulate fitness, but too hard to allow complete recovery. It’s this weird no-man’s land that doesn’t accomplish anything good. ¶ Which has another major consequence, without the ability to recover sufficiently, the hard days can’t be as hard. Because you can’t do a quality session when you’re tired. So the hard days start becoming medium days as well. And it all goes wrong. ¶ The hard days can’t be hard enough, the easy days are too hard and the whole week ends up being this weird sort of medium intensity across the board.

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