One of the things that makes Formosa Fitness special is our use of Personal Record and Goal boards and the challenge board that we have. The challenge board is a group of challenges that we feel could help you get to the next level if you undertake them. The problem is, few people seem to understand how to use the challenges and the board.
Some fitness styles treat every workout as a challenge and IMO that’s a disaster waiting to happen. You aren’t physically capable of doing that every time, despite what some people would have you believe. And the mentality that that method promotes is detrimental to long term progress. It turns every workout, regardless of how you feel that day, into a competition and leaves no room to slow down and develop skills. Not a good thing.
The challenges exist as a way of training — you pick a challenge or at most two at a time and make beating your time or reps in that challenge part of your training.
The challenges allow you to test your training over time and keep you focused on a goal. Are your reps going up and your time going down? If yes, then you’re doing something right. If not, then you need to go back and look at your exercise form, your recovery methods, your programming, supporting exercises, your diet, etc.
Instead, what I see are people that try a challenge once, get a random, meaningless time or rep number, they say “that was swell” and write a number on the board and never look at it again. That is NOT the point of the challenges!!!
Challenges aren’t a new, shiny thing that are meant to provide distraction from our regular training, but that seems to be how people are using them. The challenges are meant to give purpose and focus to the training. It’s about challenging yourself!
So let’s take a look at how to do an actual challenge and train for it. Above is Martin Rooney’s Training for Warriors Challenge 4. The challenge consists of four 1:00 rounds of max pushups, max pullups, max special situps (watch the video), and max dips. You take :15 rest in between the exercises and count up all your reps at the end. That total is your score and you try to beat it.
So how would you use this challenge to train yourself?
First of all, can you do all the exercises? If not, then that’s the first challenge: learn to do all the exercises. Nothing is worse than someone that wants to “do a challenge” but insists on dumbing down all the exercises. If you are far away from doing them, then pick a lower challenge. Don’t let ego tell you it’s okay to substitute suspension trainer rows for real pullups and that your number then is equal to those that did real pullups. It isn’t and you’re pretending to be something that you aren’t. So don’t dumb down a challenge, rise to it!
Second, if you can do all the exercises but the volume is way beyond what you think you can do now, then work slowly on increasing that volume through sets first. In the challenge above, I might be able to do 10 pushups but this challenge calls for 1:00 of them. Again, honor the challenge by respecting it. If you can only do 10 then you aren’t any where near doing them for a full minute, let alone followed by 3 other exercises for max reps. Work those pushups in sets of ten, or in pyramids, etc. to build up your reps first. Do these for each of the exercises.
Third, when you’re in reasonable shape to take the challenge then do it! Take the challenge for the first time as a test. Now you’ve done it. Write your name and number on the board and never look at it again. WRONG! How did you do? What exercises were harder? Where is your weakness? Did the challenge just make you it’s little bitch? Then we have some work to do, don’t we?
So the challenge exposed our weaknesses and we know what to work on. Go to it! Pullups not what you thought they were? Let’s increase pullups to at least 3x a week. Situps slowed you down? Haven’t been working the core, have we? Maybe saving core work for the end isn’t doing us any good. Time to make it a priority. Can you do all the exercises well individually but gas out when they’re put together? Then your metabolic conditioning needs work. So we’ll just do the test every workout, right? WRONG!
We’ll start by pairing a couple of the exercises into a superset and do them one after another. That will get us used to the metabolic demands. We could pair :30 of pushups with :30 of pullups, take a break and do that 3x. Then :30 of situps followed by :30 of dips, rest, and again x3. There’s a lot of ways to train for this. But here’s the key: we train up for this challenge.
After we train for a while, we’ll take the challenge as a test again, and repeat the process. The challenge trains us as we rise to meet it.
In the meantime, we compare our efforts to others taking the challenge. By doing this, we motivate and support others. Iron sharpens iron. Tinfoil doesn’t sharpen anything.
So treat a challenge with respect! It shows you the flaws in your training and will teach you how to correct errors in your training. But if you use it as just some random throw away “what workout are we going to do today?” kind of thing, then it’s meaningless. Rise to the challenge!