Sport Walk’s Founder – Roger Burlinson – looks at why some people shy away from calling what they do ‘training’.
I’ve always found it interesting how emotive certain terms become when applied to a health or fitness situation. The most ‘controversial’ term always seems to be the word ‘training’ – “I’m not training I’m just doing some exercise” comes the retort, as if the person’s just read the small print and realises they’ve signed up to something they weren’t expecting.
I’ve tried to understand why this might be but it’s a bit of a mystery, except for the possibility that the way we frame what we do affects whether we feel we have control over it. So often, for people starting out on a new activity or fitness plan, many of the terms that are widely used to describe processes or objectives are completely alien and can feel quite intimidating.
It all sounds more like the kind of stuff you hear being discussed on the TV by professional sportspeople and that’s daunting. All you want to do is get fit or feel more alive, you don’t want to become an Olympian!
But there’s a reason why professional athletes and their coaches view the work they’re taking on in the way they do – it helps. If you think about it, when your livelihood depends on how well you achieve your aims, how well you perform, having complete clarity around what you need to do is essential. There’s no room for avoidance or disguise – you need to see everything clearly and completely.
This approach can be incredibly valuable to us as well, even though our goals or aims are nowhere near those of high performing professional athletes. If it works for them, why wouldn’t we use it?
It’s just a word
Let’s look then at this apparently most contentious of words – ‘training’. I suspect the resistance is not so much to the word itself, it’s more that people are reluctant to place too much structure on what they do for fear that it’ll lead to pressure and, possibly, failure.
If you engage in a training program, this suggests that you’re committed to a process and perhaps you’re not ready for that commitment? Perhaps, while you want to get fit, you also want to have flexibility to do what you feel like doing, when you feel like doing it – you’re prepared for this journey to take longer if it gives you the freedom to go at your own pace and to pick and choose how and when you do something?
Whatever the reason, whatever the motivation, these fears are largely unfounded because ‘training’ is just a word. It’s just a word that explains a process – a process that’s necessary to achieve an outcome. There’s really nothing more to it than that. There’s no hidden meaning, no secret obligation that can’t be broken. It really is as simple as a set of instructions, like you follow to assemble flat packed furniture!
Every training plan or training program is personal to the individual carrying it out and this means that it’s truly yours to shape. Obviously, if you have high hopes of achieving significant gains in a relatively short period of time, then you will need to commit to following the plan religiously for that period, otherwise you’ll fail but that doesn’t mean you can’t temper your ambitions in the first place and set yourself a more achievable target.
You see, training, is simply the repetitive process of change. It’s measured steps towards a goal and every step should be achievable. There really is nothing more to it than that, it’s just that we often see and hear about quite complex stages of training that deliver some really high end performances and this can make training itself seem like a complex, high performance tool.
In fact, it might be simpler if we thought of it as practice. That doesn’t seem anywhere near as threatening does it? Even though, it’s essentially the same thing. To practice is to repeat something until it becomes natural to you. To train is to repeat a set of actions until you effect change in your body. The outcome in both cases is change – change in your ability or change in your physiology, it’s still change and training or practice is how we effect change.
The reason it’s so valuable to view what you do as training, is because it then places you in the very frame of mind you need to be in to succeed. It means that you’re in control and aware of what you’re doing, that you’re executing this change in a precise measured way, which is always necessary if you’re to really be successful.
You still have full control over what you do or how you do it but by thinking of it as training, you’re giving it structure. You can create progression by breaking down seemingly harder tasks into smaller sessions and because training gets you to see your work with that ‘helicopter view’ – with oversight – you can see how all the pieces fit together. You can see how this one action today connects to other actions next week which lead to beneficial outcomes three months down the line.
All this and you’re still just going walking – that’s the reality of it all – you’re still just walking in order to get fit, it’s just that you’re viewing the process as an athlete would and that means that you’re able to see everything and see how it’s all connected.
I really would encourage anyone who’s resistant to creating structure in their fitness goals to reframe how they view training. It really will simplify everything so that all you have to do is go out and do what you planned on any given day. It gives you a framework to help you get to where you want to be and, ultimately, it’ll help you achieve what you want more quickly.
Learn how you can create your first Sport Walking training plan in this video:
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