Christine working on her pull-ups.
Conditioning:
Run, Row, or Ruck 5k (pick one you didn’t do Tuesday)
Coach’s Corner: Progress Part 3
A couple of weeks ago I proposed a series of phases that a person might progress through as they become more fit. Today I want to talk about where people get stuck and then next week about what to do about being stuck. The fact is that most people never make it out of the beginner phase.
The tendency for people to get stuck in the beginner phase is not unique to fitness training. Whatever skill you are trying to learn or domain you are trying to master you are likely to get stuck as a beginner and you probably won’t even know it!
The main reason people remain beginners is because they don’t know what they don’t know. This is sometimes known as second order incompetence and it is often coupled with being overconfident in what we think we do know. In other words the advanced beginner seldom recognizes that he is an advanced beginner. I think this situation is amplified with fitness training because since most of us have all been exercising for a while we assume we know what we are doing.
Its important to remember that repeating the same thing daily for a year is not necessarily the same as a year’s worth of experience. Its a day’s worth of experience repeated 365 times. To gain experience we have to ask question, learn, and either find objective standards to compare ourselves against or get the opinion of a professional. Not knowing what we don’t know about fitness leaves us prone to pop fitness movements and other nonsense.
Some common statements that I hear from advanced beginners are things like:
- I just want to “tone up” or “lean out”.
- I want to get stronger but not bigger (or more commonly “huge”).
- I just need to add _________. (Usually the blank is another training day, more cardio, etc.)
- Almost any statement with the words “core” or “cardio” in it.
Advanced beginners often will also do one or more of the following:
- Justify doing or not-doing something because its not part of Program X.
- Believe that continuing to do Program X will lead to continued progress or results even though they have not seen any improvements in months.
- Tend to add “more” to their training rather that questioning what they actually need. In other words thinking more-is-better rather than better-is-better.
- Hop from one program to another every few weeks.
- Fail or be unwilling to consider other lifestyle factors (sleep, diet, stress) as their limiting factor or to question whether their training goals make sense in the context of their broader life.
- Judge the validity or value of a program solely by the results other people are getting.
- Regurgitate statements about their current program without really knowing the reason behind the statement.
- Tend to assign moral value to programs or program attributes as in “my program is right and yours is wrong” or blanket statements like “using machines or isolation exercises is stupid.”
In many cases someone exhibiting one or more of the above behaviors is an advanced beginner and might not know it. They might think they know more than they do.
When we are overconfident about what we think we know we often do not respond well to criticism, we take it as a personal attack. Some readers probably felt a little annoyed by the last sentence of the previous paragraph, for example.
Often the criticism feels like an attack because it is. People who have made it to the next phase in their training often don’t realize that they are on a progression. Thus, they tend to look down upon those people who are struggling with the same things they were unknowingly struggling with themselves not too long ago.
There is nothing wrong with being an advanced beginner but we can take some steps to avoid getting stuck in this phase or to be more happy in the phase if we choose to stay there. Next week I will provide some suggestions for not getting stuck and write a bit about things we want to add to EmerFit to help our clients through the progression.
Notes and References
Lest someone think I’m making all this advanced beginner stuff up the seminal work in the field of skill progression was done by Dreyfus brothers back in the 80′s and resulted in the Dreyfus Model of Skill Acquisition. The Dreyfus Model was then applied in the field of nursing and documented in the book From Novice To Expert. More recently, and where I first learned this stuff, the Dreyfus model has been applied in the field of software engineering as explained in Pragmatic Thinking and Learning. Finally, not knowing what we don’t know is now known as the Dunning-Kruger effect and Kruger has a nice free journal article explaining their research: “Unskilled and Unaware of It” (pdf).
