What Is Holistic Training?

By Howe Russ


Every ten years or so, an old style of exercise comes back into the foreground. From kettlebells to high intensity interval training, the fitness world loves a comeback. One of the items doing this right now is the art of holistic training.

While the industry is seemingly hell bent of discovering new training methods designed to get you in and out of your local gym in less time than ever before, it's important to remember that there are a few quite basic routines which still work better than anything which has been developed in the last decade.

If you have been exercising for a while now you will have noticed that all the new workout styles out there are not actually new at all, they're simply old techniques making a comeback. Whether it's kettlebell training or hiit workouts designed for fat loss, it's all been done before. Ten years ago if you asked for advice on how to lose weight you wouldn't have been told to do either of those, because they had faded out of popularity.

The height of popularity for holistic approaches to exercise was probably the middle of the eighties, where everybody from action movie stars to athletes were adopting this technique in a bid to keep their workouts at the cutting edge of science.

If you'd like to train holistically you simply need to inject constant variety into your program. Every week you should train with a different focus in mind.

So, what are the benefits to this often overlooked method?

The two largest advantages are listed for you below.

* Weight loss and muscle growth will be increased via a constant focus on new training sessions, never allowing your body to adapt.

* Gym sessions become intense, interesting affairs rather than drawn out, predictable nonsense.

The most common problems with people who hit plateau usually involve boredom and lack of progression. As you can see above, those are the two main areas this workout method attacks, making it a great choice for those who usually succumb to the pressures of either issue.

That's because it involves switching between different styles on a weekly basis. You'd be going from training with high resistance and low repetitions in one week, to suddenly doing high intensity sessions involving lots of work the next, followed by extremely low rep strongman style workouts. The constant variation is enough to keep most people away from the slightest plateau. This is great for both muscle building and fat loss.

However, nothing is perfect. There is one potential negative to this idea which could prove to be a deal breaker. It is very, very hard to monitor your progress when you use this concept. Think about it, by switching from high rep workouts to low rep workouts on a weekly basis it can become impossible to determine whether your major lifts have improved or not.

Depending how important that factor is to you, you may actually really enjoy this way of exercising. Holistic training is one of the simplest forms of breaking a plateau and, therefore, it's usually one of the tried and tested methods which pops up whenever any gym user asks for tips on how to lose weight.




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