Quality over Quantity
This is something you will hear me refer to a lot. With both my athletes in sport and athletes in life, I constantly remind them to focus on the QUALITY of their training, as opposed to the quantity of it. Obviously there is a time and place to focus on quantity (volume is an important piece of progressive overload after all), but the quality of the work will not come at the expense of the volume.
I would rather someone complete 5 perfect repetitions of an exercise, than 20 half-assed repetitions. Quality reps means you are getting exactly what you are intended to out of the exercise. Let's look at the squat as an example. By squatting through a full range of motion, you are able to engage the appropriate muscles, have the joints move through your full range of motion, and truly reap the benefits of the whole movement. If you start cutting the ROM short (unless partial reps are specifically intended), you lose out on certain components of the movement.
Ego can definitely make its way into the weight room. It’s easy to assume you are moving with perfect form, but when the intensity (weight) starts to climb it can result in breakdown if the progression happens too quickly. Your ego will try to convince you that as long as you’re getting through the rep, it counts, but I want you to ensure that those reps stay clean and safe so you can actually get out what you’re looking to build. Focusing on the quality of your reps means you can get the most out of the exercise, build all that awesome lean muscle mass, and keep your body resilient and healthy. In order to get all those wonderful benefits of strength training, you have to go through the movement fully as its intended and not sacrifice the technical side of things in order to lift more weight.
The same thing goes for when you’re programming. Personally, I would rather focus on fewer exercises and drills; doing them properly with adequate rest and recovery, rather than trying to pack in 20 exercises in the same amount of time. Less is more.
One thing I’d like to point out is performing repetitions of an exercise under a time constraint. There is absolutely a time and place for timed sets, but that does NOT mean your technique can breakdown completely in order to get a couple more reps in. I often explain to my athletes that I'd rather see them get less reps maintaining their technique, than blow through a ton of messy ones. This allows the athletes/ individuals to benefit from the exercise and save themselves from potential injury.
Quality over quantity also plays a role in your overall training schedule. I will be the first to admit, that as a young athlete I definitely thought MORE was better - 2-a-days, extra reps, no rest days, etc. I (and I’m sure a lot of others) learned the hard way through some pretty serious burn out and plateaus. Once I learned more about the importance recovery plays with the human body and training, I was shocked at how my body adapted - increased strength, longer endurance, more energy, etc. I do find this one to be a hard one for some to wrap their heads around (again, I was once there too), but I promise you that if you focus on several QUALITY training sessions, they will go much further than 7 hard workouts a week - the body loves rest!
When it comes to your training or the training you facilitate to others, it’s ultimately your choice in how you choose to operate. What I’m sharing is simply my approach to training and coaching as I’ve learned a lot from experiences in the past that doing the simple things, doing them well, and doing them often tend to reap more benefits than just trying to do more, more, more of everything.
Now, let's look at things in a different context - would you rather eat a bowl of real, authentic homemade Italian pasta (with fresh made sauce), or eat three cans of year-old Spaghetti-O's?
... QUALITY over QUANTITY always wins.
