My Take on the Instinctive Training Principle
For those unfamiliar with the Instinctive Training Principle (ITP), there are lots of good articles on this site with all the details. Some promote ITP, some are against it. I found the debate interesting and thought I’d put in my two cents worth based on my experience. From my understanding on what I’ve read, I’ll broadly define ITP as ‘training hard and training smart to meet your individual needs’. Some writers have said its training how you feel like training on any given day, which is true to a point, but its not as simple as that.
When I started training over 4 years ago, I had no clue what I should be doing. By starting from a position of total ignorance I guess I was the ultimate ‘Instinctive Trainer’ because I did what I felt like doing each workout. At the very start, I did follow a full-body training circuit suggested by a gym employee, and I decided the number of reps and amount of weight based on how I felt each day. I soon tired of doing the same circuit every workout, and I knew I had to do different things to maintain my motivation. By watching others at the gym and asking a few questions, over time I learned how to do different exercises for different parts of the body. As I gained knowledge and experience, my choices and results got better. At different times some things worked for me, some things didn’t. I didn’t worry about following any routine, as long as I got the gym time in, the workouts were making me feel good, and I enjoyed what I was doing, I was satisfied. Each trip to the gym was an unplanned adventure, since I had no idea what muscles I would work out until I got there. I let many things determine my choices, including who was at the gym, how crowded it was, what equipment was in use or not in use, how much time I had that session, and how tired or energetic I felt. This haphazard approach sometimes meant, for example, I did some biceps exercises three workouts in a row, and didn’t do chest for a couple of weeks. As they say, ignorance is bliss. Just getting to the gym regularly and seeing some changes to my body was enough to satisfy me, I didn’t want to make things any more complicated than they were.
I worked out in this haphazard way for about two years. During that time I became very comfortable at the gym using all the equipment and doing many different barbell and dumbbell exercises. I didn’t try to lift really heavy, just enough to challenge myself. I wanted to do the exercises correctly since I’d heard the comment ‘form is more important than heavy weight’. This seemed to make a lot of sense to me, and learning proper form has served me very well. After about two years I started to gravitate towards split training without making a conscious decision that I should train this way. I know I was influenced by others at the gym when I heard them talking about it being ‘chest day’, ‘leg day’, ‘arm day’, etc; Over the next year I started to focus on doing two or more exercises for the same part of the body on the same day. I’d do a couple of body parts. Then the next workout I’d try to do a couple of different body parts. I wasn’t totally consistent with this, and still had no real planned split, but I enjoyed working out this way because of the burn it gave me and the ‘good’ sore feelings. I also started to see some better results. So, I ‘instictively’ continued to train this way because of how it made me feel. This brought me through another year or so, until I got to the point where my interest in what I was doing really increased and I started to do a little reading, mostly from magazines lying around the gym.
Now, I’m ashamed to admit this but I never took anatomy and although I’d been working out for three years I had poor knowledge about the human body. I didn’t know my quads from my triceps, my lats from my delts, or many other basic things about muscle groups. Thanks to some reading I soon learned what all the major muscle groups were, and found out exactly what muscles were being worked by all the different exercises I was doing. I had learned a lot on my own, but a little reading made a big difference to my knowledge and I was able to work each muscle group better, and soon I was working on a split that saw me doing every muscle group about once a week, and incorporatng bench press and squats into my workouts. A couple of times I made the mistake, for me anyway, of training a muscle group without enough rest, and I had a poor workout. I knew from how my body reacted I had to give myself enough recovery time.
After about 3 and a half years of working out, I checked out this website after seeing it in a magazine add. I read for hours, and thought I should be starting to do a more structured workout routine, since it seemed like so many others were on one. I thought that was the key to success, and it probably is for those who bodybuild for competition. But I soon realized there is no agreement in the bodybuilding world about how one should train to achieve optimal results. I saw some common trends in many of the techniques, but couldn’t see any program that I thought would be practical or beneficial for me to follow for an extended period of time. When I look at my life and the time I have for training, I have to be realistic about it. I have to balance family and work responsibilities which often change from week to week. When a program calls for 5 workouts a week, but when I know that some weeks I only have 3 opportunities to work out, then its useless for me to start that program.
I learned from my reading that dedicated and successful amateurs and professionals, although at times follow a strict program, also are smart in that when preparing for a competition they adjust their programs from week to week or even day to day if something is not working for them as well as they think it should. Also, one piece of advice often given by successful bodybuilders is to regularly make changes in how you are lifting, changes in weight, reps, sets, type of exercises. They believe great results are achieved by not allowing your body and muscles to become accustomed to what you are doing. Keeping your body ’shocked’ and ‘guessing’ are two terms I always read. You can’t do this if you follow a repetitive program for a long period of time. Allowing for the flexibility to change what you’re doing do is part of the Instinctive Training Principle. I believe everyone can benefit from changing up workouts; experience allows you to do it better.
Instinctive training is not showing up at the gym and doing whatever you feel like doing that day. For success, you must have an overall strategy or workplan that you dedicate yourself to following. My strategy now is to give an intense workout to every muscle group once every 7-10 days (I call this my ‘Cycle’). This gives me some flexibility in scheduling my workouts without letting any body part lag. I also incorporate compound exercises and isolation exercises to best suit my needs. For example, an intense session with barbell squats sometimes serves as my leg exercise during a Cycle, while the next Cycle I might have one more workout so I can do Hams, Quads, and Calves in isolation. I am never tied down to any training regime so much that if I can’t do something I planned to do it makes me feel like I’m missing out on something. If I planned on doing Bench Press but the gym is crowded and I can’t use the equipment I need, I’ll do some dumbbell presses instead.
For me, a large part of the ITP is knowing how to be flexible in your choices of when and how to exercise, and not losing out on any of the benefits of training regularly and intensely. Instinctive training is being in tune with your muscles and knowing what is working best for you at any point in time. I have been a devoted follower of instictive training right from Day 1 since that is all I knew to do. It has worked to get me through injuries caused by training and by other things. For example, when I sprained my wrist it severely limited what I could do for several weeks. Instead of staying away from the gym to let it heal, I just changed what I was doing at the gym. I focused on legs, abs and cardio much more, and used bars/cables for selectedupper body exercises with low weights and higher reps. As the wrist healed I increased cable weights and started to slowly incorporate dumbbells back into my workouts. Eventually I started using barbells for chest again, although it took a long time for my wrist to heal to the point where I could get back to lifting the weight I was before the injury. But I got there eventually, without stopping my workouts or slowing the pace of my recovery. If an exercise caused me pain, I stopped doing it or lowered the weight. The saying ‘no pain, no gain’, is counter-productive for someone trying to recover from an injury. I think how I continued training while allowing my wrist to heal is a prime example of instinctive training, and I would also call it ‘training smart’.
Instinctive Training also helped me mentally, giving me the tenacity and dedication to stick with my training when the demands of everyday life could have discouraged me to the point of giving up. For example, I remember one time when my wife and I were facing a ‘perfect storm’ of family responsibilities and work pressure that consumed most of my time for several weeks. Time for me to do my own thing was severely restricted My gym visits were few and far between, and I was lucky if I could arrange to be there for 45 minutes. The split training cycle I had been following was totally thrown off by these circumstances. I knew I had to make the most of the limited time I had, so I focused on doing compound exercises and supersets to get the most out of my time and to get the most intense workout I could. I did fewer sets with higher weights and lower reps to really hit the muscles hard. An intense 45 minute session once or twice a week for a month served me very well. It relieved stress, gave me a good workout, and made me feel like I was still moving towards my fitness goals while at the same time meeting the responsibilities in my life. When I got through that difficult time and life returned to normal so I could get back to my usual cycle, I appreciated and enjoyed my gym time all the more.
When it comes right down to it, ITP is more of a mental attitude, or a state of awareness about your body, than it is a training technique. A beginner can use ITP but it’s likely results will be slower because of lower knowledge (I’m proof of that). A more seasoned bodybuilder will use ITP to their advantage because they are in tune with their body and know how to lift to get the most out of each workout. Most people are somewhere in between, and using ITP will vary in its effectiveness.
I guess my final comment is that ITP means listening to your body and understanding what it is saying to you. I’ve read the assertion that training a muscle while it is still sore from a previous workout doesn’t hinder long-term muscle growth. I’m no scientist, but instictively this just doesn’t sound right to me. I’ve done it and based on how I felt during and after the workout, I don’t think it did me any good. Overtraining is a well-documented problem that slows down the progress of many people, and I believe that by listening to your body you can train regularly and smart without falling victim to over-training.
I’m just an average middle-aged guy who has fallen in love with bodybuilding. I love how it makes me feel and look, and I’m going to stick with it for the health benefits. Bodybuilding is similar to most things in life; the more you know about something and the more experience you have doing it, the better you will be at it. I wouldn’t tell a beginner to start out the way I did. I know I could have gotten better results faster if I had followed some kind of program at first. But I think what I went through has given me valuable knowledge and tools that I can use to get the most out of my future training sessions, knowledge that I wouldn’t have had if I had been just blindly following a program or doing what someone else told me to do. I’m going to see where the ITP takes me over the next couple of years, keeping in mind the basic principle of changing my workouts regularly.
I’ve put forward lots of thoughts in this post, to anyone who’s read it, many thanks!
