step by step

Why the slow way is the fastest way.

“Step by step” could be the subtitle of our method. While training and progressing step by step might sound like an obvious thing, it is also one of the easiest to forget.

Now more than ever, we want everything fast. We are all guilty of it and for a good reason: almost everything is actually made more convenient and faster day by day. Whether it is buying, learning, watching or getting food delivered, businesses around us keep surprising us by making it easier and faster than ever.

One problem: we tend to expect this in every aspect of our life, which is often unrealistic. As much as society and technology keep progressing, our bodies just can’t evolve in the same way. It takes time for our body to progress, adapt, and change so that we can reach our fitness goals. It is hard but it’s also what makes it so rewarding when we get there.

However, while there is no shortcut, there is surely a way to reach your goals which is the fastest of all. That way is the slow way. There are 2 main reasons why you should trust the slow way, but let’s first explain what we mean by slow.

Training the slow way, or step by step, doesn’t mean training lightly, or only a few times per week and expecting to see the same results as people who train hard. It doesn’t mean becoming overly patient and delaying your goals either. You need to stay eager to reach your goals, you need to remember why you train, you can be impatient and you should train to reach those goals as fast as possible… Just not too fast.

The first reason why you should never skip steps is safety. It is obvious and nobody wants to get hurt, yet many of us rush things, skip warm-ups or mobility workouts, and increase the intensity of their workouts way too fast. The most common type of injury in fitness happens more unexpectedly than you might know. It is often the result of not enough rest between training sessions, increasing the intensity of your workouts before you connective tissue (tendons and ligaments) have time to adapt, a level of mobility that doesn’t match your strength gains etc… It is actually the combination of several or all of these factors at once. This underlying injury grows for weeks and months before striking sneakily and putting you to a forced rest period. Think of it as a snake and always be wary of it. You can’t cheat your body so stick to your program and don’t rush.

The second reason why you should progress step by step is because this is actually the only way to truly make gains on the long term. Our programs put you through proper warm-ups, mobility exercises, strength exercises to ensure you get your basics right, and progress steadily while giving enough time for your muscles, nervous system and connective tissue to adapt. If you do not train all these aspects of your body and master the basics, you will always hit plateaus (progress stops) and you will always have to go back to the basics and work your way up again. There is nothing more frustrating than going back to a lower level of training because we have skipped the basics.

As a brief reminder, the proper way to train as fast as recommended and without skipping steps is to start from a program that is manageable, and repeat each week of training until they become easy. A very simple way to know when you are ready to move onto the next phase is when you can complete the current phase of your training with perfect form, and without any discomfort in your joints.

Not skipping steps will ensure you never have to regress and learn the basics again, and will guard you from sneaky injuries. Although you may feel like you are making quick progress in the beginning, both of these incidents will force you to start again and waste more time than you thought you saved.

This is why the fastest way is the slow way.