Progressive Overload.

Progressive Overload.
If you were with us last week, you know the theme of the newsletter was consistency. To sum up the idea, we learned consistency of one action compounds daily, building up endurance, strength, and resilience. But there’s another piece to the puzzle. What would happen if we combined consistency with progressive overload?

Join me as we explore the second half of the equation in this week’s newsletter; the idea of progressive overload as a fundamental mechanism to grow muscles and strength in the gym is also a foundational tool for excellence in life. We’ll touch more on this at the end.

For now, you can expect 2 key workouts we’ll be doing this week, the philosophy of the workouts, Monarx behind the scenes, and why everyone does not win in life.

Workout of the Week
Track Day - 5k Workout
2 mile warm up
2 x 1200m (4min standing rest)
2 × 800m (3min standing rest)
2 × 400m (2min standing rest)
2 × 200m (1min standing rest)
1 mile cool down

Tempo
2 mile warm up
3 × 2 miles tempo (2min standing rest)
1 mile cool down

Workout Philosophy
I hope you’ve noticed by now there’s a pattern going on here. Track workouts are 5k race specific. Tempo sessions are Half Marathon specific.

5k Workout
Pacing wise, you should be at a 90% MHR (max heart rate) or 9 RPE (rate of perceived exertion). Since there is plenty of rest time, feel free to see what your goal 5k race pace feels like. Personally, I am shooting for sub 18 minutes (5:45 pace), so here is an example of what my average paces looked like:
1200 - 5:52, 800 - 5:30, 400 - 5:24, 200 - 4:14.

Tempo Session
Essentially, this is a 3 × 10-15min of tempo work. 45 minutes is a lot of work being earlier in the block. I recommend keeping this at 2 sets, but this is just the workout I did. The 2min standing rest does make the workout a lot more manageable… we’ll start more continuous tempo work later in the season.

Business Updates
Photo sent to us from our manufacturer. Currently in the sampling phase for the windbreaker.

Recommendation of the Week
One of my favorite podcasts of 2024. Matthew McConaughey is an award-winning actor, producer, and author. Chris Williamson sits down with McConaughey to discuss his career and how he took the risk of turning down a $14.5M movie deal to pursue something great.

A lot of people would do it if it was easy.
If it was easy, everyone would do it. If it was easy, everyone would win. There’s a ton of consistently hard-working people in this country. But even then, how come not everyone wins? If all it took was hard work to be successful, then great, I think I can manage that to blaze my own trail to success. But that’s not the reality of life; there’s a second part to the equation we’re missing. We must be skilled, hard workers. We need to put our hard-working time into an in-demand skill to achieve success.

The way I look at it, consistency = hard work. It is hard to stay consistent in the gym when there is sometimes no motivation. progressive overload = skill. If you’ve ever lifted with me, you know I’ll preach STRENGTH is a SKILL. If two guys of the same build went head-to-head on max bench press, but one only benches on a smith machine vs. the other on a bench press, you’ll bet the guy who trains on the bench will have a stronger bench press. And how would he train to get his bench numbers up? Progressive overload. It takes one, the repetition of the movement and two, overloading the bar to become stronger.

Pull ups. Since I’m weak in the gym, this is the only example I can give you. 6 months ago, I completed a 100 a day pull up challenge for a month and continued on for a few more weeks. I probably put in 4,000 pull ups total before I tried and FAILED 2,000 pull ups in one day. How could I have failed if I was consistent? There was no overload… Fast forward to last month, I completed 2,100 pull ups in 2 hours faster than it took me to achieve 1,900. And what did it take? Consistency + spending 2, 3, 3.5 hours in the gym every Saturday to overload my pull up endurance.

Such is life. To master a career, you need years of experience showing up daily, but also tangible skills to progress in. One of my goals for Monarx is to become more creative. I can work as hard as I want every day on product / design, but if I’m not progressing creatively, the hard work isn’t really going anywhere. Monarx just stays stagnant, and we lose. We’ll be caught on the treadmill at max speed working very hard but making no progress forward. Now, if I am reading, writing, drawing, meeting other creatives, etc. this is where I’ll be able to hone in on my skills. So, let’s all be consistent in the way we work, but diligent in the tasks we choose.

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