Bridging the Fitness Chasm: How to Move From Beginner to Intermediate
In fitness, as in any business, you will not remain a beginner forever. I have seen many people leave the fitness novice territory without even knowing it, and this leads to problems. Let’s take a look at how to recognize when you are no longer a beginner and what to do next.
There are advantages to being a beginner
Nobody likes being called a “newbie” because that means you’re at a stage where – essentially – sucks . Coaching, which is a form of practice, sucks too. You don’t know if you are doing the lift or your stride correctly, you are not sure if you should worry about little things like where to put your hands on the barbell. The workouts are monotonous, and you can’t do anything cool, like run a marathon or lift a heavy butt over your head.
But there are also advantages. If you exercise properly, your results will grow faster than at any other stage of your fitness life. For example, if you’re just starting to lift weights , your muscles grow rapidly as their ability to store glycogen – stored carbohydrates – increases. At the same time, your central nervous system becomes accustomed to weights and modes of movement, resulting in a dramatic increase in strength.
With any skill, fitness or whatever, the first few times you practice will bring the greatest improvements in your life if you do a few things right:
- You learn as much as possible about the skill you are trying to improve. For example, / r / fitness is a great resource for beginners (caveat: I would only recommend it for beginners as it contains many pitfalls, which I will point out later in the article). Be open-minded about everything, because a lot of what you think is probably wrong.
- You are following a T program, such as Starting Strength for lifting weights or the 5K couch for running. Don’t give the program your own perception, because you think you know what’s best. You won’t. This is why you are new. Follow the program exactly as it is intended, and do not do anything differently unless you get advice from an experienced person.
- In everything you do, you must focus on why and how. At this stage, treat fitness like a science. For example, many trusted experts say that when it comes to losing weight, it is important to increase your protein intake . Make sure you know why this is recommended and how you can achieve it.
As you improve your skills, each training session will yield fewer improvements due to what economists call diminishing returns .
If you are new to something, try to rethink the word “beginner”. Yes, you don’t like what you do, but most people do the same when they first start. Instead, take it as a magical period of rapid growth. You are unlikely to see it again.
How to tell you’re not a newbie anymore
There are two ways to determine if you are still a beginner. The first way is to find objective positions depending on the skill you are trying to improve. For example, in ExRx have a guide, which divides you for beginners, intermediate, expert and elite based on a variety of exercises such as bench press or squats.
But this definition can be a little problematic. Being “in between” is subjective and there is a wide range of starting points. For example, two men of the same height and weight can squat 350 pounds. However, maybe someone started with 225 and it only took him a year, while his colleague only started from the bar and it took him four years and a lot of crying to fall asleep.
It’s harder to define an intermediate by absolute numbers alone, so here’s a better definition: you stop being a beginner when you stop seeing linear progress.
Beginners should see exponential, or at least linear, progress. This means that the amount you can bench press, the time per mile, the number of pounds you can easily lose, and so on, all improve weekly. At some point, productivity will start to stagnate or even decline from week to week.
It is now possible that this is due to external circumstances, such as lack of sleep or stress at work. However, if you are starting to see a lack of predictable weekly progress, chances are you are no longer a beginner.
What to do if you are no longer a beginner
Okay, that’s why this part is really important. I’ve literally seen people trying for decades to improve their fitness, and despite knowing all the basics, they are the same year after year in all aspects – they are still the same size, the same weight, the same strength. … Of course, their consistency is admirable, but the lack of attentiveness – not being able to think about whether they should be doing something else – is not all that important. (This, of course, is not the case for those who don’t care about progress and are just trying to keep it going.)
By far the most common reason for their stagnation is that they continued to train as beginners. Ironically, the very guidelines I listed above for newbies are what keeps people from crossing the chasm: they’ve been focusing too much on facts and the basics, spending too much time on Reddit, and treating fitness too much like science.
At this stage, fitness becomes more of a hybrid of art and science. You will find that in order to overcome the plateau, you need to find what works for you – and often it is not what works for everyone, but what you will hear from the “experts.” For example, you may find that instead of the volume squats recommended by Mark Rippeto in the Starting Strength article, you will perform much better with low volume and high intensity, or perhaps even squatting every day.
Here, mindfulness becomes paramount. Regular practice of mindfulness can help you better understand yourself, specifically how your body responds to various stimuli (whether it be training or life in general). This insight can be more valuable to your progress than facts and strong guidelines. For example, perhaps instead of a set number of sets and reps, you use autoregulation to determine how much volume and intensity you should be doing on a given day. On some days you will be able to do less and on others more.
At this stage, knowledge is not only less important; in fact, it can be a hindrance. Stop going to Reddit and listen to the debate about whether mixed or whole oats have higher glycemic indices for muscle protein synthesis. Use this time to mindfully lift weights, prepare meals the next day, or sleep. All of this would be a much more efficient use of time for an intermediate learner.
The only knowledge you should listen to comes from one or two experts you trust now. Of course, there are many experts, but they have competing ideologies, each of which is true in its own right. If you follow them all, you will simply fall into analytical paralysis. Having reached the intermediate stage, I began to follow exclusively the philosophy of Martin Berkhan and Lyle MacDonald . As I moved on , I started listening to Ben Tormy and Matt Perryman .
Use all of this to shift your questions from “what” to “what if” to create a mental model of how fitness works for you. Rather than asking “what is the optimal number of meals per day for weight loss and muscle growth,” you should ask, “What happens if I only eat twice a day, which makes my work schedule and social life easier.”
Try to see what works – both physiologically and in terms of adherence – through experimentation and try to have fun with it. If you find that something is working – it makes your mile time, strength, or weight loss see linear progress again in the short term – and you see yourself doing it in the long term, stick with it and don’t change a damn thing while it does. will not happen. stops working. You can add this to your mental model.
There is one thing in common that everyone crossing the rookie chasm has in common. They know their journey is not to become fitness experts. Rather, it is about becoming an expert in your physical fitness.
Image courtesy of HuHu .
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