We had a fantastic day on Saturday. Chris and I met up with a good friend in the Peak District for a multi-activity day of outdoors entertainment.
The sun was shining gloriously, the wind was warm, and it smelt of summer. We had a full day planned and having amazing weather was like adding a heap of caramelised onions to an already perfectly-cooked steak. A touch of perfection!
The Peak District
The plan for the day
We were all travelling for a couple of hours to get there, so it didn’t make sense to do a half day of activity, go for lunch at a café or pub and then head home. Instead we wanted a full day of activity.
Chris and I are easily bored if we don’t get enough variety. If we are doing a multi-day walk or bike ride then the variety comes from the changing landscape, but a circular walk that takes a few hours can often end up feeling a bit monotonous. We wouldn’t have had a problem doing an all-day walk, stopping in the middle of it for a lunch, but we didn’t feel that had quite enough Fun.
Then we hit on the solution.
We knew that our friend did some cycling and we knew we would need to get our touring bikes out for a test run before our cycle touring holiday, which is only a few weeks away. Since our touring bikes are used as trail bikes when they aren’t loaded up with panniers we realised that the obvious thing to do was to go for a ride on some trails in the morning, stow the bikes in the cars, have some lunch and then head out onto the hills for a walk in the afternoon.
So we spent Saturday cycling for 3.5 hours in the morning, inhaling a pub lunch and then trekking vertically up a hill to drink in the views of the Peak and meander gently round a circular walk for 2.5 hours.
The joy of getting some variety in your life
At the end of the day we collapsed at home with a great sense of fulfilment and satisfaction. Similar to the joy that we felt after we first started incorporating strongman workouts in our weekly weights routine.
Strongman workouts made us incredibly happy to be doing something different. It gave us a renewed enthusiasm for our training and this filtered into our other workouts, giving small improvements elsewhere too.
Changing activities to improve and avoid injury
By mixing up the cycling with the walking on Saturday we found another benefit – we avoided the usual aches and pains that accompany a long day of doing the same activity. Our feet didn’t have the throbbing sensation that accompanies a very long walk. Our quads weren’t thrumming in the way they do after a long day on the bike. The welts I get where the seam of my cycle shorts pad crosses the saddle edge hadn’t quite broken the skin.
In the same way, it is beneficial to mix things up with training programs. For both weights and cardio.
If you always do the same workout your body adjusts to it. There are no surprises and both you and your body stop concentrating. You may often find that you stop getting the same training effect. Perhaps you may even create an injury. If you just did a specific exercise for a few weeks before rotating to something different you may not see a problem, but doing the same exercise week after week with no variation may create an overuse injury.
It doesn’t have to be as extreme a variation as re-writing your whole training program or, as in the case of my day out on Saturday, putting in a new activity. It could be as slight as swapping to sumo deadlift from conventional deadlift for a couple of weeks, or changing from a high-reps-low-sets scheme to a low-reps-high-sets scheme.
Do you mix things up? Does it give you the same successes that we see? If you don’t mix things up then I recommend you give it a try. You may just find that you enjoy yourself that little bit more!
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