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Success in training comes from continuity, and leads to limiting injuries by properly dosing the workload and maintaining motivation.
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Motivation is maintained through variability of stimuli and fun workouts, avoiding monotonous and repetitive habits.
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Training without a coach requires finding personal motivation, choosing different paths and training with positive people.
Inmy many years of coaching non-professional athletes, I have learned one important thing: The most important results do not come from completing difficult or very long training. Your success comes from consistency and continuity in your training. But it is not so easy. Being able to train without interruption basically requires two requirements:
- you must avoid incurring injuries and thus be able to dose a proper workload;
- you must have great motivation to succeed each time in finishing your planned workout.
If you want to train continuously and effectively while avoiding periodic stops for overload or injury, you need to know what volumes and intensities you can sustain without wearing yourself out physically and/or mentally. Alternatively, you can hire a coach who will follow you with passion and set up a work plan based on your possibilities and time availability.
Where to find motivation
The part related to motivation is even more difficult to manage as the years go by. The reasons may be many, but I realized that few are naturally predisposed to successfully self-motivate. How do I support my athletes in this respect? How do I keep your motivation high day after day? Of course, I cannot be continuously present at every practice for each of the athletes. Of course I can be there physically or mentally when you feel the need or when I understand that you may need more support. But it is not the everyday. What I can do is make a major contribution to making sure that your training is metabolically, muscularly, and mentally stimulating as well as fun. That’s right. It is not true that running is boring and repetitive or that hard training is necessarily just fatigue and “suffering.”
The fun workout
Part of the fun comes from the variability of stimuli. It is one of the cornerstone principles of training but also a prerequisite for making your workouts less repetitive and boring. The problem is that often when you go running you tend to be habitual and monotonous. You choose the usual routes and commit to rhythms and distances that are always very similar to each other. This choice, over time, leads you to a performance stall. As your body adapts to this kind of exertion, you no longer really benefit from it. So the first goal, after understanding and studying your characteristics, is to adopt a comprehensive and challenging training system that improves your performance from all points of view. Muscle-level stimulation with running work aimed at increasing strength. Technique and speed work to improve push, stance and running frequency. Longer work to increase endurance and the ability to burn fat as an energy source. In other words over the course of a month you will not have one week the same as any other.
The key word is “variability”
The variability of stimuli is carried as a consequence variability in work, variability in duration and distance traveled within each workout. When you acquire new stimuli and discover different sensations each time you exercise, you can never run the risk of getting bored. Your training week will never be monotonous. This will ensure that your motivation and willingness to train consistently will remain constant over time. Your regularity will make a difference from others.
How to do it if you don’t have a coach?
This training system represents my vision of sport at the amateur level. But if you train without the support of a coach, how can you manage the organization of your workouts on your own? How can you manage the succession of workouts to get the enthusiasm you need to start your workout each time? The difficulty sometimes is just that. You know even at the end of the workout you will be satisfied because of the production of endorphins. But before you start you carry the fatigue of a day’s work, stress, and perhaps discomfort from weather that doesn’t always make things easier. Motivation must be strong at such times. When you need that extra cue that makes you sit up to put on your running shoes and take that first step that is the necessary and indispensable prerequisite of every run. Even of the longest and most challenging ones. The key role your self-motivation must play is just that. It has to be the lever that every day you have to train makes you take that first step that makes the difference between a great workout and an evening spent on the couch complaining about your bad day. So many first steps taken each day at the end of the year will be your strength. You have understood this concept through your own experience. Once you start your training you will never go back before you finish it. The ability to finish your workouts will be stronger the more you enjoy and get gratification from your results. Running for you is not and should not become a job. Try to favor ever-changing routes that can stimulate your curiosity and, above all, distract your brain’s attention from fatigue by leading it to observe its surroundings. Train with positive, cheerful people who are an added reason to go to training. If you don’t have a goal-oriented program, which in itself is a very motivating factor, training together allows you to share the commitment and effort and, above all, to have a specific date that when you train alone you don’t have. There are many systems for working independently on these aspects. Lots of little tricks or ploys that will help you day by day to overcome initial resistance and get you on the road or on your treadmill right away. https://runlovers.it/2020/economia-di-corsa-limportanza-del-gesto-e-della-tecnica/ Main image credits: GaudiLab on DepositPhotos.com