1 – They are cool
2 – We often talk about how you can scale your efforts
Scaling effort comes from the world of RPE. Rated Perceived Exertion. We use this scale as a bench mark for our programming and while it might all seem a bit subjective it’s actually a really good measure of intensity and it allows you to make progress when you feel good and allows you to recover when you are having an off day.
Traditional strength programmes tend to follow a fairly rigid loading scheme, where you add a specific amount of weight to an exercise, in a given timeframe, and generally you can’t add more even if you felt like you could and they tend to have planned periods of recovery when you might not need them.
The beauty of using the effort based system is that it works around you. When you get to the gym feeling like a superhero you can add load/intensity and make some really good improvements in your strength and fitness and when you compare that to a traditional model it’s not, THAT different. Periods of recovery, coasting and added effort. You just get to decide for yourself when you push and when you back off.
Both models will increase your strength and fitness but when the progression model is build around you rather than forcing you to fit the model, you are more likely to enjoy training and get better results because you will be more consistent.
Consistency is a big part of why the effort based system of training works. If one day you wake up and you fell terrible and the prospect of added 5kg to a deadlift you already find hard isn’t very appealing. So you are more likely to not go. If you knew that you had to put in an 7 or 8 out of 10 it wouldn’t really matter what weight you selected and you would feel better about going to the gym and having a workout.
Try it out if you’d like www.icongym.co.uk/get-started.html