Auto-Regulating Your Contest Prep
What you are getting yourself in for
Word Count - 1000 Words
Reading time - 5 Mins
Topic - Auto-Regulating Your Contest Prep.
What is Auto-Regulation??
In strength training terms, auto-regulation is the ability to make changes as a result of how someone feels, behaves or reacts to a certain stimulus. An example would be, if you are warming up for a Squat on a Lower Body day, and you feel something 'twinging' really badly even on lighter weights, you would ‘auto-regulate’ and maybe either do a lighter day, or change the exercise to something that isn’t going to hurt you.
Auto-regulation is sensible in some cases, however in some cases it can simply lead to you being a p*ssy.
Auto-regulation in a Contest Prep Phase
In a contest prep phase, there are a lot of ‘moving parts’. It’s like a complicated machine, to get all the parts flowing together in unison, you sometimes have to make frequent, intricate changes to keep the parts of the machine moving effectively, if you don’t, something could fall out of line and the machine might not operate as well as it should be doing. With our nutrition and training, alongside managing sleep, stress, hydration etc, we have LOTS of moving parts… if one of them slips, we might have to make a change to another, this will keep us moving in the right direction. So how do we do it…
Training -
Auto-regulating your training is something you should be looking to do even in your gaining or ‘off season’ phases, but like I said, as we have more variables, it becomes slightly more integral in a contest prep phase. Some days, you will walk into the gym feeling…
Sluggish
Tired
Run down
De-motivated
Frustrated
Flat
Hungry
Amongst other things ^^ these will sometimes have an adverse effect on your sessions.
However, you CANNOT always be a cop-out.
Auto-regulation, and just being a p*ssy, are two different things, but you must know how to use this tool, so that on the days where you do REALLY need to back off, you do back off, and it will allow you to…
Reduce chances of injury
Lower stress
Stay on track
Potentially make more progress later on.
Well, what would we do to training then??