How To Keep Your Summer Fitness All Year
By Robert Forster
Whether you spent the summer months hiking, biking or running, playing tennis or pickleball, swimming or surfing, it’s a good bet your fitness maybe at its yearly peak right now.
Just as there are seasons in the year, there are seasons in your fitness routine. We are typically more active in the Summer months with longer days and better weather. Too often we fall short as we try to maintain our fitness and body weight through the Winter. Some of us become apathetic and others experience plateaus and quit as their fitness grows stale or injury occurs.
If this happens to you, it’s not your fault. The basis of all science based fitness plans is that our bodies are great at adapting to exercise routines. After an active Summer you are stronger, fitter and healthier, but only to a point. If you attempt to maintain your fitness with the same routine over the course of months and months, your fitness and health deteriorate. You gain weight, performance decreases and the risk of injury increases.
The solution to this dilemma is called Periodization Training. It’s the foundation of the rapid advances in human athletic performance over the last 20 years. Periodization principles have not only guided our Olympians to gold medals and world records in each of the last 11 Olympic Games, they also have been as successful for our clients looking to reach their health and fitness potential, and maintain it year in, and year out, for life. Working around this undeniable limitation of human physiology is the key skill we have developed in training athletes to be the best in the world and it will work for you. Periodization training principles call for a rational change in the focus of your workouts approximately every three months.