Training is a Highway

Thanks to Tom Cochrane, we all know that life is a highway. But did you know that training is also a highway? In last week’s article, we discussed the three phases of training - novice, intermediate, and advanced - as well as the rates of progress that we see in each phase. This new analogy - that of training as a highway - is closely related to that discussion.

Training - or getting stronger - is the act of driving down a highway that you are simultaneously constructing. You go into the gym on Monday, you warm up, and you do the hard work of completing your work sets. You then repeat this process on Wednesday, then Friday, and then you begin it anew the following week. This is you - driving down that highway. The more weight you add to the bar over time, the farther down that road you get. If you add weight faster - adding 10 or 15 lbs between workouts instead of 5 lbs - you are driving faster.

Now, to ensure that you don’t run out of road (going off-road is not cool in this analogy), you are also continuously constructing new highway in front of you - this is the process of recovery. If you want to travel a long way down that road, you need to keep driving, and you also need to keep building highway. If you want to keep getting stronger, you need the stress of regular training, you need the recovery of food and sleep, and if you get both stress and recovery - if you both drive and build - you get the adaptation of strength.

There is, however, a catch. This highway is going up a slowly steepening mountain. When you’re brand new to training, you are far from the top of the mountain, and the road is going up so slowly that you almost don’t even notice it. When you’re on pretty level ground, you can construct new road pretty quickly, and you can drive pretty quickly, too. At this stage, the weight on the bar goes up fast. This is the novice phase of training where the weight on the bar goes up every time you enter the weight room. You’re cruising down that road, and life is glorious.

Then the road starts getting steeper. Construction on a steeper grade takes more time, and driving uphill is more taxing as well, so things slow down somewhat. The weight on the bar is still going up, but slower now. This is the intermediate phase of training - now, you are making progress and setting PRs on a weekly basis.

If you continue building and driving, you reach truly steep regions of the mountain. Construction here is very slow indeed, and your car has to work extremely hard to keep creeping up the mountain. This is the advanced phase of training where you are trying to make progress and set PRs on a monthly, quarterly, or even yearly basis.

Looking at the process of getting stronger in this way allows us to see why we can add weight quickly to the bar at the beginning of our training careers, and it also allows us to understand that this type of progress will slow over time, and our programming will change to reflect this. So, keep driving up that mountain, and put some Tom Cochrane on while you’re at it.