Why You Shouldn't Train Like a Pro

It makes logical sense that if you want to be the best you can be at a sport, you should train like the best. And there's big business to support that notion as well. Everything from professional training plans to your favorite sports star's nutritional supplements to their morning routines is sold, traded, shared, and reshared on social media.

But what if I told you that you're actually shooting yourself in the foot by training like Felix, Rapinoe, Curry, or Bolt? 

Let’s start with a recent study that plotted the progression of thousands of people following an ultra-minimalist training plan. As sports science writer Alex Hutchinson put it in his Outside magazine article:

There’s good news and bad news in a remarkable new multi-year study of nearly 15,000 people who followed an ultra-minimalist strength training plan involving just one short workout a week. The good news is that the training really works, despite taking less than 20 minutes a week all in street clothes. The bad news is that it eventually stops working, or at least gets less effective…

The last part of that quote may have you scratching your head. But the study researchers argue that this leveling-off phenomenon may actually be much more universal rather than specific to this particular training plan. And that point is precisely why this study has some important implications for how we mere mortals should train and set goals. 

The Fit20 Study

The Dutch training plan that the researchers looked at is called Fit20. It involves one solitary workout per week for—you guessed it—about 20 minutes. The workout typically includes six exercises on a Nautilus One exercise machine. 

The workout may be short, but it's intense and challenging.

The exercises are chest press, pulldown, leg press, abdominal flexion, back extension, and either hip adduction or abduction. 

If that isn’t minimal enough for you, the workout calls for only one set of each exercise. And it requires you to use a weight that will have you reach failure—the point when you feel like you can’t do another rep—after just four to six reps.

The key is that the few reps you do are performed pretty darn slowly. To be precise, 10 seconds in the concentric phase and 10 seconds in the eccentric phase—that's basically 10 seconds up and 10 seconds down. And the rest period between each exercise is kept to about 20 seconds. And, at least for the study, there was no music, no mirrors, and no fun allowed. The workout may be short, but it's intense and challenging...

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