Top 5 Regrets in Training the last 20+ Years (I want my kids to avoid)

Hey, Athletes! Top 5 Regrets in Training the last 20+ Years (I want my kids to avoid) - Episode of The Garage Gym Athlete Podcast is up! 

• Top 5 Regrets in Training the last 20+ Years (I want my kids to avoid)

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IN THIS 28-MINUTE EPISODE WE DISCUSS:

• Jerred is doing a solo podcast again
• He gives a rundown on his macro goals with fitness and how it fits in his life
• He then dives into 5 regrets he has within fitness and specifically want his children to avoid. 
• And A LOT MORE!!

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Top 5 Regrets in Training the last 20+ Years (I want my kids to avoid)

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To becoming better!

- Jerred

Podcast Transcript

This is the Garage Gym Athlete Podcast, and we're here to build autonomous athletes and put phenomenal programming into every garage, basement, and spare bedroom out there. I'm Jerred Moon, and I'm with Joe Courtney. We are strength and conditioning coaches who have turned over 20, 000 people into Garage Gym Athletes over the last decade.

And we're here to reduce the information overload that exists in the health and fitness industry today. We're going to do that by covering relevant science and give actionable takeaways, not only from the data, but from our years of experience. So let's dive in.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Garage Gym Athlete podcast. Jared Moon here. And today I'm gonna be talking about some of my biggest regrets or things I wish I knew when I was younger. And part of the reason I want to do this podcast episode is I've been training my kids quite a bit.

I've talked about this in other episodes where I do talk about training my kids, but I'm really My main goal in training my kids right now is to give them a love for fitness. And I feel like I'm, I just have this like delicate glass ball that's like just covered in Vaseline that I'm just like trying to like not, trip and fall or break it because there's a fine line on everything.

It's like I don't wanna, I don't wanna push them hard too fast to where they hate it. But I need them to learn how to push themselves. I'm actually feeling like I'm really finding some strategies. But I want them to love fitness for the longterm. And I also, I'm not trying to get into super specific sports training because one, that's not necessarily my skillset, how to throw a ball faster.

Those things are not my skillset, but at the same time, I don't want them with overuse injuries or growth plate injuries, or any of these things that are becoming more prominent and oddly prominent. Because parents are pushing their kids too hard. And so I'm, like I said, this is delicate balance and everything I'm doing with them because I want them to love fitness.

And I want it to just be a part of what they do. It's just a part of who they are. That's how fitness has ended up for me is it's not so much something I'm trying to do, if that makes sense. It's not it's not a habit I'm trying to develop. It's just, there's no question that I'm going to train this week.

My schedule can get in the way. Sometimes something might change how a training session happens, what happens, how many times I train in a week, but ultimately my goal is to always do something each and every single day. And I actually love it. I'm not doing it so I can eat what I want or because I ate too much and I feel like I need to exercise.

I've just developed such a healthy habit around fitness and it hasn't always been that way. Took me a long time, but I have such a healthy mindset and healthy habits around it that it's just something that I do. It's something that I really enjoy. It has nothing to do really with, at this point, I don't really care how I look.

I don't really care what it has to do with burning calories or anything like that. It's just about optimal performance, longevity, and all the things that you get like mentally with and, stress relief, all these things that come from doing fitness. That's what I utilize it for. And I want all these things for my kids.

And in doing that, I've just been like reflecting a lot of what do I want them to know? What are the mistakes that I've made? Because I've been training for a long time. There are definitely mistakes I've made. And so I want to talk about some of those mistakes and some of the things I want to avoid.

But with the preface that I'm pretty happy with where I'm at, I feel like I've done a decent job. Really, my schedule's never allowed me to train probably as much as I really would have, especially when I was younger, to train two or three times a day and go hard each and every single time and just lift a ton of weight I feel like my body would be more broken had I had a different schedule.

If I like, pursued being a professional fitness athlete or something like that, I think my body would be more broken down, but I actually feel great. My body feels great. I'm still able to move. I still have some limitations very minor limitations and more fears around some of the heavy loaded exercises based off of some of my previous injuries.

But still I'm able to move decent loads. I'm able to move well, I'm able to push myself. So nothing significant. But there are some things I wish I understood earlier or had done a little bit differently. And some of them are just like missed concepts. And I want to talk about those today.

So let's get into it. The first one is going to be, I wish I knew more about base training or zone two training. I didn't come from an aerobic background. I came from very much a strength training, hypertrophy, bodybuilding, then powerlifting background in my younger years, as a lot of teen boys do. They just want to get bigger and stronger.

And I didn't realize the benefit of zone two training till much later probably late twenties, early thirties. And it's not Oh, I missed the boat there. It's just, I wish I would have known about it sooner. I wish I would have known more about concurrent training. Cause I was almost anti running in my early years in my teens.

And then once I got to ROTC in college, I was forced to run because I was going into the air force and then I picked up concurrent training from there. And everything, but I feel like I wish I would have picked it up sooner. I think it would have helped me more as an athlete with recovery, with being able to actually have a better top end and all these things that come with base training.

I really wish I would have done more zone two training. So if you're unfamiliar, zone two training is 60 to 70 percent of your max heart rate. And it's just the sustained long duration efforts. And it really is not going to affect your muscle mass too much or your strength gains. And those are all the ideas I had around cardio.

So it's not just, I wish I had known about zone two. It's I wish I had known about zone two and base training and didn't have the mindset that cardiovascular or aerobic based training was going to crush my strength gains or my muscle gains. So I do wish I would have done more of that, more zone two training.

And I think that can go for a lot of people adding in a little bit more low intensity stuff. It can go a long way. So that's number one. And then. The next one is, I wish I would have had a better understanding of strength versus hypertrophy training. If you don't know the difference strength is just that.

Strength training is you are training to get stronger. You want to get stronger, so you're doing strength training. That is, I want to squat 400 pounds, 500 pounds, 600 pounds, whatever it is. That's strength. Hypertrophy is muscle growth. And so just think about power lifter versus bodybuilder. I was in the hypertrophy based zone when I first started, all I want to do was grow muscle mass.

Now, when you grow muscle mass, especially as a young teenager, who is lifting, you're going to want to lift something heavy so they can go hand in hand to a certain degree. But there is a way to grow muscle without having to be a power lifter. Obviously. Yeah. And and you can also have really big muscles without being power lifter level strong, like most bodybuilders are strong, but they're not, there's a reason why the biggest dude at Mr.

Olympia isn't competing against the strongest powerlifter. They're just completely different training methodologies. And I don't think I fully understood that completely, but the problems I had with hypertrophy training is at that young age, I picked it up and I only wanted to grow muscle. I feel like I, it formed a little bit of body dysmorphia for me.

And so I always thought, like I even got up to 200 plus pounds, and I still thought I was small, like I thought I needed to get bigger. Luckily I was able to break free from some of that, but I wish I would have understood, like hey, here's how you can blend these things. Because I ended up moving away from hypertrophy or just bodybuilding, mainly because of the, I feel like the mindset issues it was giving me.

With body dysmorphia. And so I went more towards strength training, but then I went all in on powerlifting and getting stronger. And that also had its cost. Like it's, I don't know if strength training, and this is the wiser version of me I don't know if going heavy all the time is the best thing for the human body.

I've talked about this more, and I'll talk about it more with my next lesson learned as well, but I wish I would have known how to balance these, is the main point, is there's a way to get stronger. Without having to go heavy every single day of the week, always pushing the limits, always trying as hard as you can for strength gains.

And then there's a difference between always trying to get bigger. There's some, there's overlapping, like overlap. People call it. Power building, right? Like the, this ability to build your body while also doing powerlifting. I wish I would have had a better understanding of these different modalities and known how to cycle through them.

It's almost like I wish I was more of an advanced programmer in my late teens and early 20s than I, I, that's my wish, is I wish I understood the difference. But I think if I could have blended these better, it would have saved me one, some body dysmorphia mental battles that I had.

with bodybuilding style training. And two, it could have saved me from a lot of injuries that I've accumulated throughout the years doing powerlifting training. And, those setbacks cost you time. They cost you time mentally, they cost you time in actual training. So I wish I would have known how to blend those a lot better than I did.

And that's something I want to teach my boys for sure. I want them to know again, aerobic training is not going to hurt your gains. Here's how you can implement it and where you should implement it. And then here's how to balance getting stronger while also getting bigger. And you can go through all these different, um, modalities.

You can cycle through them because life is long when you just want to get stronger. That's all you want to do, right? Like that, or if you want to get bigger, that's all you want to do. You don't realize Hey, you might want to be more optimal at a certain point. So that's another thing is I'm trying to instill.

Ill in my boys is like, Hey, you can do both of these things. And being able to explain that to them. Now this next one's gonna sound weird, and this has been more recent and I talked about this on a podcast, but partial reps are okay. Partial reps are okay. I got in, I don't know where I picked it up, but I just, everything had to be full range of motion.

And I don't know where I picked that up. I don't know if it was in different courses I took or seminars I went to or whatever. And I'm talking about, I'm talking about really on everything, but we talked about it more on a recent podcast with partial squats, but like full depth squat, always going all the way down, deadlift full range of motion, bicep curl, full range of motion, everything full range of motion.

And you don't actually have to do that. And that's just, to me, that was such an epiphany that you can still see a lot of results. And there are actually different benefits from not going full range of motion. I just wish that would have clicked with me a lot sooner than it did even on the squats.

That didn't click until the last few years when I hurt my back. And then I realized, hey, there is a lot of benefit to doing partial squats. High backs, high box squats, all these different things. You don't always have to be going low every single time. And it's I knew these things because I watched a lot of the strength stuff that I learned was from Louis Simmons from Westside barbell who is now passed away.

But. He did all these things, he would do high box squats with his athletes. He would train he would change up all the time, like almost on a weekly basis what activity they were actually doing. If he was doing just a full deadlift today on Monday, next Monday, he wouldn't do that.

He would do some sort of partial deadlift a rack pull or, Or a deficit deadlift going further than the normal range of motion. And he mixed these things up on a weekly basis, but somehow I missed that part of one of my biggest I would say influences in my strength training journey was Louie Simmons and how he programmed, but I missed that whole part of the conjugate method.

Like I didn't want to listen to that part. I was like, no, we're just going to do full squats all the time. Full deadlifts all the time, full range of motion, everything. And you just don't have to. And that might be like a no brainer for some of you out there, or maybe you're hearing something like this from me for the first time right now.

And you're like me and you're like, Oh, that kind of changes my mindset. But. Even in hypertrophy, there are, hypertrophy, again, muscle building, there are benefits to keeping the muscle engaged and never letting it fully relax, and you can do that through partial repetitions, even like on a bicep curl, or a push up, not pushing all the way up.

It might have been my military background too, like everything had to be full range of motion for the rep to count. You can actually do push ups, like partial range of motion push ups, and you're gonna get way more benefit from fatiguing the muscle in hypertrophy if you do partial reps.

And it's just, it blows my mind, even me saying it now still, is like, partial reps are okay in just about every way and in everything. It's not, only ever do partial reps. That's not what I'm saying. It's make it a part of a well rounded training program. It's okay to do high box squats, or super low squats, or parallel squats, or quarter squats, 1 8 squats, they all serve a purpose, and this goes across all different exercises.

Again, pulled from Louie Simmons, that's basically what he was doing. He didn't talk about that as much, he talked more about the movement based. And the real reason he was changing exercises week to week, and he's always doing that, is he wants the, he wants you to be able to PR almost every time you go in the gym, so he finds a way for you to PR.

It's yeah, I PR'd my normal full squat. It's okay, then if you PR'd that this week, we're not doing that next week. Next week we're gonna do a, Box squat high box squat. And if you like PR that it's okay, next week we're going to do a high box, an even higher box squat.

We're going to add chains. And he adds all these like caveats to where it's technically a PR because it's not a squat, it's not a high box squat, it's a high box squat with chains, and so it's like a different type of movement every time. And I, like I said, I can completely miss that this partial reps are okay.

And actually probably really beneficial. And I think that would have saved me in a lot of wear and tear on my body of always doing high rep deadlifts. And it's always the deadlift. There's no I didn't, I've always done conventional deadlift. I didn't play around with sumo. I didn't play around a lot with rack pulls or deficit deadlifts to some degree I have, but not in any major way in my like full on strength training days.

So partial reps are okay. Partial reps are okay. All right. The next one is high intensity is not, is a tool. It's not the way to do things. And I learned this one. Like I, I got that beat out of me probably by my mid twenties. But I probably beat it out of myself just because everything I wanted to do, everything I did was just high intensity all the time.

Didn't matter what kind of session I was tackling, whether it was. A strength training session, a mixed modal, like high intensity interval training, running especially running. When I was trying to first get good at running in the air force everything was as hard as I could do it all the time until I would burn out.

Like it didn't matter if it was a one mile run, one and a half mile run for the PT test, or if I was running five or six miles, it was always, what's the fastest I can go for this five or six miles. And then I would just be absolutely gassed by the end of it. There was no, no bit of like low intensity training.

I, going back to the first one where I talk about zone two, this is the opposite of like, I don't wish I only did zone two. I wish I realized where high intensity fit in. Because if all you ever do zone two, if that's all you ever did you're not actually going to have a very good VOT max.

You're not actually gonna be very well trained athlete. That's another like lesson. I haven't necessarily made, but like less than four people out there is like zone two is not like this secret key that unlocks everything. It's just a part of a well rounded training program. But going back to high intensity is I just did everything with the utmost intensity all the time.

And that's even improper and programming high intensity exercise. Like your body and your central nervous system. Can realistically only handle that one to two times per week. And I'm was more than happy to do it five, six, seven days a week, high intensity, all the time, anything. And that doesn't mean I was always doing like a CrossFit workout or high intensity interval training workout every single day.

It just means whatever I was doing was going to be at the highest level of intensity. And that was more of my personality type, being type A, ambitious, all these things. I just wasn't like, that's how I wanted to hit every single thing. And so again, not only do I wish I had the zone two stuff in there, I wish I was just programming it correctly.

I probably would have seen more progress if I utilize high intensity, how it should be used where it's like, Hey, we're going to go really hard one time this week. We're going to recover here. The other types of training sessions throughout the week. Maybe twice per week, something like that. Utilizing it as a tool and realizing it's not the only way to get things done.

I can already see that in one of my boys right now. He basically thinks hard is the only way as hard as it can be as fast as it could be all the time. And that's something I'm going to have to teach and help him see Hey, There are other benefits to these other styles and methods of training.

Now the last one I'll leave you with is don't normalize problems. And I got a story or two for you on this one, but don't normalize your problems. And this is very easy for us to do. In very different ways. This could be, oh yeah, my, my lower back hurts when I squat and that's just normal or one step further.

So I'm just not going to do that thing anymore. We, the more you train, the more you can start to normalize these things. And I see people do it all the time. I see runners do it. They normalize. A certain knee pain or a certain Oh yeah, but it loosens up after three miles. Like I've heard all this crap.

Just don't normalize your problem and go get help, from a professional, just whatever the problem is. And that does not mean orthosurgeon. That's typically going to be like a physical therapist or a performance based chiropractor, those kinds of things like that's going to help you out a lot more in your journey.

Go get the help. You need I avoided that for a very long time, and I think part of the reason I do, going back to the beginning of the podcast, the reason I do feel good now is because I have been okay with all of those things, and I really try to get ahead of things now, almost preemptively seeking out help when I just see something coming up because I want to get ahead of it.

And that's very much in the strength and, running like the training side of things. But I, one story I haven't fully shared on the podcast is my more recent experience with mold exposure. And this would be the last story as I wrap things up, but. A couple years ago in Texas, there was this really bad freeze really bad for Texas because no one was really prepared for it.

And I know people in the north always laugh about what happens to people in Texas because they're like, Oh yeah, you should try being in Michigan or whatever. But the problem in Texas is we don't have the infrastructure for it. Like they, they build the houses differently. In my opinion, that's stupid, but they build the houses differently.

That's stupid. They don't have snow plows. They don't salt roads. Anyway, we had this really bad freeze and it froze our pipes in our house. And we had two bathrooms significantly leak, significant water damage. And we ended up having to get these bathrooms remodeled or like redone, and there was a ton of mold that they discovered and it could have been just from that specific water damage, but it was also an older home.

It could have been preexisting. And so we had to. Get rid of the mold. So we had, we went through insurance, we had all the proper people and all these things in place, but what we, the mistake we made is we were still around in the house too much during the mold remediation process, and I think we had massive levels of mold exposure.

And it really affected us all. And I didn't really realize it for a while. And I started to normalize again, normalize my problems. And not really realizing it was a problem. I just shook it all off, but here's like what was happening. I previous to the mold exposure, I just have great energy levels.

Like I, I sleep anywhere from seven to eight hours a night. I'm normally not that tired at the end of the day, but I go to sleep anyway. I wake up ready to go like immediately out of the bed. That's been me basically my whole life. And that's me right now. But what happened was. I didn't, I, again, I was normalizing this.

One of the big red flags for me is I was just tired. Like all the time I was tired. Like I would wake up, I would have a couple of cups of coffee. It would get me through two to three hours of the day. I'd be tired again. And then by the end of the day, I was on, I was actually going to bed around 8 p.

m. sometimes which is barely acceptable, when I had my kids and their ages at that time, um, it was like, they go to bed, I go to bed, and then I would immediately go to bed, and then I would sleep. I used to wake up at 4. 30 or 5 a. m. I'd do morning routines.

Sometimes I'd work out, or whatever. I'd sleep till the absolute last minute I had to wake up until my kids I had to get them up to get ready to school. Sleeping from 8 p. m. till 6. 30 a. m., and I probably would have slept longer. And, I just normalized that for a while. I was like maybe things are stressful.

Going through the remodel process or you got a lot going on at work or, all, and I kept up all my good habits during this process, but ultimately I just, I normalized everything. I just shrugged it off. I was like, nah, it's fine. But sleeping 10, 11 hours is so drastically different than how I was before.

My energy levels are in the tank. I'm not doing anything how I should. And again, I haven't talked about this on the podcast too much, but I thought I'd bring it up as one of my biggest lessons learned because it finally clicked and once the mold was gone and fully remediated and like I was removed from that environment, like things started to get better, things started to get a lot better and it, but it took a lot of time.

It's taken a lot of time. And I feel like I'm just now like fully back to myself, but it took a very long time to get there. But I didn't realize that part of the reason I wasn't talking about on the podcast at the time is because I just didn't really know what was going on like I was like, Oh, maybe you're getting older.

Like I said, maybe it's stress, like whatever. And it could have been a much bigger issue. But since things have been resolved and like we had all the mold testing done, we know it was mold like this isn't some half brain theory that I have Okay. It was definitely mold. And I worked with some doctors and did some different protocols and all these things and I'm doing, like I said, I'm good now.

I feel back to normal. But, my whole point in telling that story or talking about normalizing your knee problem or your ankle problem or whatever, is we all have a tendency to do that as we get older. Is we're like, hey, This is fine, or yeah, I'm just getting older, or whatever, blah, blah, blah, we have all these things we start to normalize it, but what happens is you start to stack these normalizations, and that becomes an even bigger problem, is it's yeah, my ankle does this, my knee does this, and yeah, I'm starting to sleep 11 hours a day these things can be serious health problems over time, these things can be bad seek out a professional.

And don't normalize your problems. Seek out whether that's a medical doctor, a physical therapist, it doesn't matter, go get the help that you need. And don't just try and Google and YouTube your way to all your answers, like work with the professionals who are out there who can actually help you.

And I, I'm not trying to go down this, you need all these medical interventions route, but if you have a problem, don't normalize it. Don't just think that this is how things are, right? It's not Oh, I have a bad back. I hate that. Like I have a bad back, it's just Oh, just that's permanent, huh?

You have a bad back. I hate it when people say things like that because you could probably go get help. and fix the issue. And so I think that's my biggest takeaway for all health and fitness and training related things is if problems start to creep up, don't normalize them. Don't justify them in your mind somehow.

Go get the help you need and fix them as fast as possible. So that's what I've been reflecting on lately. More zone two aerobic base training strength versus hypertrophy, how to blend those two without getting into any of the negative negative side effects, partial reps are okay. And high intensity is a tool, not only the way and don't normalize or justify your problems get help with them.

And I'm sure I'll reflect on more and have more things that I want to talk about over time, but that's it for this one for all the garage gym athletes out there. We really appreciate you sticking around and for anyone who wants to be a part of garage gym athlete training, you can go to garagegymathlete.

com and sign up for a free trial and we'd love to have you, but that's it for this one. Remember if you don't kill comfort will kill you.