Have you heard about 'grease the groove'?
It is a training principle created by Pavel Tsatsouline, an expert in Kettlebell training.
It consists in spreading your practice across the day.
Instead of doing your training in one chunk during the day, you learn to spread it in little bits. For example:
- 21km of running per week= 3 km every day
- 75 minutes of yoga and mobility per week= 10 minutes of morning mobility routine every day
- 700 kicks per week= 100 kicks every day
- 25 pull-ups per day= 5 pull-ups every hour during your day
Strength and mobility are skills, therefore they require deliberate practice and repetition to learn and implement them.
Grease the groove helps with time restrictions. For young parents or people which have difficulties to fit one hour in a row for one thing.
It allows you to take a long break in between your sets and you can accumulate more volume of practice at the end of your day.
It is particularly efficient with bodyweight training which doesn't require much time to warm up.
>> Check out my 10 minutes: hip mobility routine
How to practice grease the groove as an athlete?
You can execute half of the maximum repetitions you are capable of.
You can practice doing low repetitions(5 reps or lower) of the exercise, several times per day by taking long rest in between.
For example, let say your maximum repetition for pull-up is 10.
You can practice doing sets of 5 repetitions each time that you pass your pull-up bar at home. If you walk by 5 times a day you can accumulate 25 pull-ups per day.
If you multiply 25-pull-ups x 7 days = 175 pull-ups
At the end of the week, you would have executed 175 pull-ups!
If the exercise is too easy, you can jump to the next progression or add more repetitions
Photo by Charlotte Karlsen on Unsplash
Don't go up to failure, otherwise, it will be more difficult to train the next day.
It works the same for your flexibility/mobility training.
Can you do 5 sun salutations every morning as you wake up instead of doing a 90 minutes yoga class once a week?
Tips:
- Start small with your habit or practice.
- Design your environment to make the practice easy, visible, attractive and satisfying.
- Stick to it for at least 30 days to see some changes in your behaviour and in your body.
If you are interested in habits building I would highly encourage you to check out Atomic Habits by James Clear: https://jamesclear.com/
What are the benefits of grease the groove as yogi, athlete or martial artist?
Once you apply grease the groove you will emphasise on volume over intensity
It is better to train every day for 10 minutes than doing a high-intensity practice of 2 hours once a week.
It will help you build habits and train more often. Training will become part of your identity, it will be a defining trait of your character.
It will allow you to train every day and improve quicker.
PS: Grease the groove is applicable for any skills that you are trying to learn (language, instrument, sports...)
>> Check out my 10 minutes: hip mobility routine
Have a strong and supple week.
Marc
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