In this installment of Fitness Edda, we explore the difference between training and just “working out.” The difference is subtle, but it has tremendous practical implication when it comes to what YOU do in the gym. You only have so much time in your day to dedicate to exercise, and we want to see you spend it wisely. Enjoy!

Chapters:
00:00 Introduction
02:24 Definitions
03:57 Homeostasis and Adaptation
07:21 Supercompensation
13:28 Training Volume
17:50 A Time to “Work Out” Rather than Train
22:38 The Unique Case of CrossFit
28:26 The Big Takeaway

Transcript: Alright, in today’s episode of Fitness Edda, we’re going be talking about training versus working out. There’s a subtle difference, but it’s important to know. And more importantly, how that impacts you. I don’t know what’s going on with my screen here, apparently I’m blurring in and out, but whatever, you guys can still hear me.

If you enjoy this content, give us a like, give us a subscribe. We appreciate your feedback. If you have any thoughts about what you’d like other future topics to be. Please leave comments. We want to hear from you. This is all for you guys. Anyway, now on to training versus working out things we’re going to be covering.

Unfortunately, we have to go through some definitions. We have to go through some physiology. The theory, where we talk about homeostasis, adaptations, supercompensation. And then we’ll get into the fun stuff – practical considerations for how any of this impacts you and what the whole big takeaway is.

We’re going to talk about a time for just working out. Sometimes it makes sense to just work out rather than train. And then CrossFit itself provides kind of a unique case just because of what the goal of the program is. And when we talk about competitive CrossFitters and what they need to be able to accomplish, it gets really interesting. Or at least I find it interesting. Hopefully, you do too.

So, some definitions. What is the definition of exercise? That is body, excuse me, bodily, mental exertion.

Training. Subtle difference from exercise. It is structured exercise to elicit a specific adaptation in the body. We will get to that in a bit.

You may also hear some words thrown around like minimum effective dose. I am not the only one that uses that, but it is the minimum amount of training needed to elicit an adaptation, so the minimum training stimulus. We will get into that.

Maximum recoverable volume is the maximum volume of training that you can handle and still adapt.

If you do too much, you are going to be in a degraded state. You are not going to be able to recover from it. You are not going to get the adaptations which are the whole point of training in the first place. Oh, there is a nice typo.

Workout: the period of physical exercise. So, what does that mean? In general, the main difference between training and working out is a structure that is superimposed on training. It is specific. It is specific workouts, specific exercises that are done in which you are trying to force the body to change in a specific way. A workout would be exercise simply for the sake of doing exercise. You’ll learn about how the body adapts to training, it’s important.

So again, we have some more annoying biology definitions, but they’re important to understand when we get to the practical considerations.

Homeostasis: basically, your body exists in an equilibrium state. The body is resistant to change, it doesn’t want to change, it has sort of bands in which it exists and that’s your current state of existence. Everything that you can do right now, your physical abilities are within that state, and you have certain tolerances for what you can handle and maintain that state. That is that. The body doesn’t want to change.

On the flip side, the body is very adaptive to change. That’s where adaptation comes in. And if you repeatedly apply a stimulus, you will force the body to adapt to that. So, again, the definition here, all definitions provided by dictionary.com, in this case, an organism is better fitted to survive and multiply in its environment.

Humans are the same way. If you repeatedly apply the same stimulus, you are going to adapt so that that stimulus is now not enough to force any more adaptation. It’s going to be your new baseline level of existence. You are now able to do these new things and that’s part of your homeostasis.

Another important definition of adaptation that also comes up when we’re talking about training is the decrease in the response of sensory receptor organisms to changed, constantly applied environmental conditions. That’s what we’re saying is if you repeatedly apply the same stimulus, your body adapts and it’s no longer a stimulus at all. You can handle that and it’s within your tolerances in homeostasis. Why do we care about this? Well, this is how the body adapts in general.

We have your stress resistance right here. The stressor occurs and this goes for anything, not just training. Or in an alarm phase, your body compensates to resist that stressor and then eventually it’ll either go back to your initial resistance or if the stressor goes beyond what you’re able to handle, you enter an exhaustion phase and you’re depleted. This is also a little bit illustrative of the body’s  inflammation response. In our last episode we talked about fitness buzzwords that need to die and inflammation is one that gets thrown around a lot that needs context. Acute inflammation is a good thing, chronic inflammation is not. This graph also kind of illustrates the inflammatory response which is we have inflammation in response to the stressor. The next step is repair – the body is trying to get back to that baseline. And then remodeling occurs to make the body even stronger and more resistant to change. So that’s how we adapt.

More importantly here is what we call super compensation where if this is my initial baseline right here, what I’m trying to get is to move that baseline up so what we have here is a graph of different kinds of training stimuli – so again training is a deliberate stress to the body to elicit a specific adaptation. In this case the solid line is If I don’t apply enough of a stimulus right here, I don’t get as much of a response. If I apply too much I never super compensate, I just return to baseline, so this is where the idea of minimum effective dose comes into play. The minimum effective dose is going to be what puts me onto this optimal path the solid line and allows me to compensate. If I do any more than that I risk approaching the bottom dotted line here which will not allow me to recover.

If I exceed my total recoverable volume, my maximum recoverable volume, which is cumulative throughout the week, it’s not just one training session, If I do too much in a week, I’m not going to recover. And then I don’t get that super compensation.

So why we care about this is when we’re looking at it over time, if my baseline is right here and I apply training, and then I apply another training session after I’ve super compensated, I can improve my physical abilities time and time again and my baseline is going to increase over time. This is why we say that consistency is more important than intensity. If I have one very intense session, I run the risk of not recovering. Whereas if I repeatedly have consistent workouts and I’m doing enough to elicit a response, I’m going to improve time and time again.

So training is specifically designed exercise to elicit an adaptation. It doesn’t matter if that’s, you know, I’m trying to grow muscle or I’m trying to build strength or I’m trying to lose weight, or I am trying to improve my cardiorespiratory function. Any of those follow this model. And that’s how we get better over time. So, what ends up happening before we get into other practical considerations, is my minimum effective dose, is going to increase over time. I need to manipulate either training frequency, which will hopefully increase my total training volume, or I need to increase my training intensity, which in the basis of lifting weights means I’m lifting more weight. It might mean if I’m a runner trying to get better at running, that I need to run faster for a longer period of time.

You see a lot of people that don’t apply increasingly difficult stimuli over time. And so, they stop improving. And where we see this is people that are trying to lose weight and they plateau when they are, let’s say, using a treadmill for an example. We’re doing three miles on a treadmill every day. Eventually, your body adapts. Again, second definition of adaptation that we went over. Your body is going to adapt to the point where that is no longer enough of a training stimulus to elicit any response.

It is well within your banded equilibrium state. That is your new level of homeostasis. Three miles on a treadmill at a nominal pace isn’t going to do anything to force further adaptation.

So, it’s not stressing you. It’s not going to help you lose any additional weight. It’s not going to help you improve because we’re not knocking the body out of homeostasis. So, when we talk about muscle confusion and programs that are basically just workouts thrown together with no progression over time, the body responds in very specific ways. There’s a principle called the SAID principle, Specific Adaptation to Imposed Demands. There’s not progressively harder and bigger stimulus, I’m just doing random stuff.

I’m not really getting better at anything. I’m not timing my next training session optimally to make continued progress.

So, we always say random program or random workouts gives you random results. Pretty much. Again, that’s where we would call this working out as opposed to training is I’m just doing exercise for the sake of exercise. I’m not eliciting any long term adaptations to my body, which again, we’ll get into the reasons why you might want to do that from time to time, but most people It’s been a long time for going to the gym with specific goals in mind whether it’s to build muscle gain strength lose weight improve body composition and that’s where it’s mostly important to train as opposed to just work out. People talk about the minimum effective dose – you know why would I do any more than the bare minimum necessary if I’m going to get the same response either way you?

You can say the same thing on a test if I did extra credit when I already got 100 points. I guess some teachers will give you more than 100 points, I had I had some teachers that did that if you got extra credit, but ultimately it doesn’t change your grade, it’s just ego with that.

So how do we measure the minimum effective dose? That’s going to depend on what your specific goal is. What are you training for? If I am a runner and I have specific events that I’m prepping for those events that serve as benchmarks along the way. And so, a lot of this is going to be by feel. Have I recovered enough from my training session to perform well at my next training session? And am I making progress towards those goals? If I run an eight minute mile and my goal is to get to a six minute mile, I don’t want to test all the time, but am I able to complete my training sessions and when I do next test my mile time, is it improving?

If so, I’m probably meeting my minimum effective dose. If I’m not improving and I feel beat up all the time, then we know we’ve exceeded your maximum recoverable volume. You’re just not recovering. You’re not adapting.

If I am never sore and I feel fresh for every workout, but I’m not improving, then I’m not meeting my minimum effective dose and I need a stronger stimulus in order to force my body to adapt.

Then we get into something called junk volume, which is a term that gets thrown around a lot in the training community. Basically, what is it and why do we care? Anything that I do above the minimum effective dose that’s not going to improve my results long term is considered junk volume. If I’ve already hit the minimum, why bother continue training? All that’s going to do is push me farther towards my maximum recoverable volume. So, sort of the difference between what I’m doing, and the minimum is considered junk volume. But again, how do we know that we’re doing junk volume? You don’t really because the only thing we can measure is whether or not I’m actually meeting my minimum effective dose. Not really what it is. So, it’s great in theory. But when it comes to improving a specific performance metric, you can’t really tell.

What is more obvious would be if I’m doing any additional training that doesn’t help me progress towards my goal. So, if I’m a bodybuilder and I’m trying to put on as much muscle mass as possible and I decide, you know what? I don’t want to lift weights today. I’m going to go run a 10k. That is a stimulus that is honestly in most cases detrimental to muscle growth depending on when you do it. It serves no purpose towards your goals. That would be another definition or another example rather of junk volume. So why do we care?

Most of us are not professional athletes. We don’t do this for a living. We do it because we have specific goals. We want to be healthy, and we only have an hour or so a day to spend in the gym. Fill that with work that is going to help us improve towards our goals rather than just having us needlessly spin our wheels, get sore, and not see any progress.

So, if all I’m doing is random exercises with no superimposed structure, I’m really just spinning my wheels and I’m going to get frustrated long term because I’m not going to make progress towards my goals. So why do we care? Essentially, if you have a limited amount of time, you don’t want to waste any of it. So, that’s why we care about these things.

Now, arguments can be made for just doing exercise for the sake of doing exercise. Maintenance. A very packed life schedule. You might be super busy with work. Family life might be out of control. You might have 50 other things going on. You really don’t have time for structured training. It is a lot easier to simply maintain where you’re at than it is to continue building and making progress. It doesn’t take much to maintain. So, you may end up just doing a 10 minute quick CrossFit style workout because that’s all you have time for. Great. That’s better than doing nothing.

You may be burned out or mentally fatigued from factors that are external to the gym. The body doesn’t really differentiate between stressors. It doesn’t matter if it’s deliberately applied stress like training, or if it’s work stress, emotional stress from stuff going on in your life, it doesn’t matter. You can only handle so much. So, if you are completely burned out, either from that or because you’re tired of training for the same goal and it’s gotten monotonous, just doing something, again, it goes back to the maintenance idea, but just doing something to avoid that burnout or to cope with it is better than nothing.

Sometimes working out is just plain fun. You might have exercises that you like. Generally, most of us need to improve weaknesses in order to get better at what we’re doing. If I’m trying to get better at a specific lift, I need to build weak muscle groups. And if I’m bad at an exercise, it really sucks, you know, it’s not a whole lot of fun. So, sometimes hopping into just a workout is fun, or maybe there’s a social benefit, you’re going to do it with friends.

I went to visit my college roommate down in Washington, D.C. a few years back. I went out to dinner, and they were doing a charity 10k the next day that they didn’t tell me about, so just to be social I jumped in. Meanwhile, my goals are mostly strength based, so it really didn’t align with my particular goals, but I wanted to be social.

Another aspect would be a challenging aspect, and we see this in the CrossFit world a lot with hero workouts. A lot of them are just long, grueling workouts that really don’t serve any purpose other than to be a gut check, and sometimes people want that challenge. So that would be a good time to hop in and do that. We’ve got one happening again this year, November 11th at Thomas Hooker Brewery in Bloomfield. If you get a chance, definitely check it out. But it is a long, grueling workout that is, again, completely out of line with, my goals. But I’m going to hop in for that very reason. It’s a challenge, it’s for a good cause, and that’s another good time to just work out for the sake of working out. Otherwise, you would never catch me doing 100 burpees.

The philosophy at Viking Athletics is kind of along those lines. You guys are paying us. We’re not cheap. You’re paying us to help you achieve your fitness goals. So, we don’t want to waste your time by filling classes with movement for the sake of movement. We pride ourselves in structuring our training long-term to improve various capacities of physical fitness. We change throughout the year what in particular we’re working on, but generally speaking, strength is always a focus. Power is always a focus. Well, our CrossFit class does follow the CrossFit prescription with 10 general physical skills and we’re constantly working on them. We’ll get into that in the next slide. But in general, our philosophy is we’re here to help you train. We’re not here to just help you work out for an hour. If you’re paying us what you’re paying us, you want to see results. So, we’re going to honor that and do right by you. Helping you achieve those results and that is best achieved through training rather than working out, which is another reason that we harp so much on the programming side of things. If you’re not programming intelligently, then you are just working. And you may see results in the beginning, but long term, it’s a waste of your time and money and we don’t want to do that to you.

So, what makes CrossFit unique is there are many, many movements to master as opposed to say powerlifting where you’re measured against three movements, squat, bench, and deadlift. And, you know, in the powerlifting world, you’re going to perform a ton of variations of these movements to improve, but ultimately you got three benchmarks. And we do have a powerlifting program at Viking Athletics as well. Many of these people are not interested in competing in the sport of powerlifting.

They just want to build strength and muscle mass. And so, we use those three lifts as metrics to measure their progress.

In CrossFit, we have numerous benchmark workouts. We have every lift under the sun. There are, so we’ve got various gymnastics movements to perform that maybe we can test max volume or max load on. How many pull ups can I do? How many? What’s the heaviest weighted pull up that I can do? There’s numerous ways and methods to gauge progress. And in a lot of cases, you know, some of the workouts require a little bit more aerobic capacity. Some of them require a high level of strength. So, we see a lot of overlap and even conflicting goals. You know, if I want to be the best runner possible, maybe I need to be on the lighter side in order to run a super-fast 5k. But is that going to allow me to lift the most weight as well? Probably not. There’s kind of a happy medium for both.

And in the case of CrossFit Games athletes, they’re well beyond medium and high level in both. But you’re not going to get CrossFit athletes that are the strongest in the world. There are stronger people. It’s not to say they’re not strong. Many, many CrossFit athletes can at least in the sport of Olympic lifting, their numbers would, make them nationally, if not internationally competitive. Tia Claire Toomey is, I think she’s won five, I don’t remember what her total is up to, six, maybe seven time CrossFit Games champion. She made it into the Olympics as a weightlifter as well. I think she finished like 16. So not top of the world, but she made the damn Olympics while being a CrossFit Games champion.

So how do you manage all that when you’ve got conflicting and overlapping goals? And then we talked about minimum volume, but in a lot of CrossFit workouts, the goal is to do as much work as possible.

Volume is literally the goal of the workout. And if you look at the CrossFit’s definition of fitness, it is increased capacity across broad time and modal domains.

Again, it is, like, literally the goal is to improve the amount of work that you can do. So, do maximum recoverable volume and minimum effective dose even matter anyway? Yes. How do we balance it all? You can’t train everything all at once. You can maintain capacity in certain elements of fitness and try to build in others and then flip-flop. So, my maximum recoverable volume is cumulative. What I want to do is try to hit the minimum effective dose for different modalities. If I can improve my back squat by doing three sets of five, I’m not going to do five sets of five. I want to limit the amount of work I’m doing there because maybe I need to go run 5x800m sprints after this in order to improve my running. And I don’t want my legs to be dead from squatting. So arguably, minimum effective dose matters more for a CrossFit athlete because you have so many different modalities that you’re trying to train. And maximum recoverable volume again, is total work. It doesn’t matter what the modality is, whether it’s a cardio-based modality or lifting, there’s only a certain amount that I can handle.

And that’s why when you see specialists like Powerlifters, they’re not going to go run a 5k because they’re already allotting all of their training volume to improving strength. So, they don’t want to do that junk volume. CrossFit kind of throws the idea of junk volume out the window for the most part.

Because volume is kind of the goal. I guess I shouldn’t say that. Your total volume matters, but you need to be specific about what you’re allotting it as. The modalities you’re allotting the volume to. So, again, minimum effective doses are even more important for competitive CrossFit athletes. You want to do the minimum you can in each modality, and even then you’re going to be focusing on certain modalities at certain times.

You can’t do everything all at once. Wish we could, but you’re going to see the improvements in one area and then maintenance in another, maybe a slight degradation in that other. And then when you go focus on that other area, you maintain the first one and you improve the second one. So that’s kind of how it all works. Most athletes are able to do that throughout the year. That’s why we rarely see one athlete that wins every single event.

You can see some that dominate in many events, but we’ve never seen one CrossFit athlete win first place across the year. In any case, for the layperson, the main concern here is that we want you to spend your time wisely. You only have so much of it. So, think about what your goal is. Is your workout in line with those goals, or are you just spinning your wheels? And if you’re just spinning your wheels, is that by design because you’re trying to maintain? You’re having fun? Or do you really not know what you’re doing? And what do you need to be doing to achieve your goals? If that’s the case, hit us up. That’s where our coaches come in. That is what we’re here for. That is why we offer the service that we do here at Viking Athletics.

In any case, we hope you enjoyed this one. If you did. Like, subscribe. If you have ideas for the next topic, let us know. Shoot us questions in the comments. We’re happy to answer you. And thanks for tuning in.