EXERCISE for longevity vs TRAINING for performance 

We’ve had hundreds of people in the Club over the years and from all walks of life. Each person is beautifully unique and their lives each enable them to dedicate varying amounts of energy to movement. 

A very frequent conversation with our club members is centred around the notion of exercise and training. Getting to grips with the why behind your movement is a process of asking a lot of whys and discovering how good you are at juggling all the balls that life throws at you. 

Why even ask why?

Goals, targets, structure, and pressure to progress are all super useful tools in the world of sport and exercise! But are they really necessary? 

You’re already swamped with work, the kids, a social life and a house that always needs cleaning and maintaining. Do you really need to add another layer of stress? Is the extra investment worth the potential reward?

What follows here is a comparison of exercise and Training. But think of it less as one or the other and more of a sliding scale that you can move up and down depending on the day, the week or the stage you are in life. 

Defining the Terms

Before we dive in, let’s clarify our terminology. In this article, “training for performance” refers to a focused, deliberate effort to master a particular skill or set of skills with the aim of excelling in a specific task, usually a sport.

Exercising: This is about engaging in physical activity without any rigid time, load, or outcome constraints. It’s your Saturday morning jog, your casual swim, or your impromptu dance session in the living room. It’s free, light-hearted, and fun.

Training: This is a whole different beast. Training involves physical activity with specific time, load, and outcome goals. It’s your well though out training structure, accompanied by intentional nutrition habits, and your carefully tracked performance metrics. We’re approaching training with a similar intent to work.

The Purpose: Performance requires progress – Exercise requires enjoyment

When training, the purpose of doing a movement is to elicit a specific change and adaptation in the body. To achieve this we need to behave in a particular way so that the body has the best chance of absorbing what we’re trying to teach it – to get stronger and run for longer.

Training is far more intentional and goal-oriented than exercise. 

Exercise aims for a general sense of well-being. It’s reminding the body that it is a capable machine that’s fit for life. The purpose of exercise is simply to encourage the body to stay healthy. We know that to be healthy the body needs to be stimulated so that it’s encouraged to regenerate and repair. 

Exercise doesn’t require goals or structure to be effective.

Training on the other hand needs to be laser-focused on specific adaptations and outcomes. If you’re looking to excel in your sport, the movement needs to be done in a particular way so that we can effectively challenge the body to perform better. Structure and intent in your movement is non-negotiable. This probably involves following a professionally designed program. 

Structure of Training

Structure is super important for athletes trying to see progress. You need pile on the pressure for your body to grow and develop, but if you don’t back it off in a timely fashion to allow it to do just that, it will break 

Periodization is not just a fancy term; it’s a science-backed strategy for achieving peak performance. It involves the strategic implementation of specific training phases, each with its own set of objectives. Here’s how it breaks down:

Macrocycle: This is your year-long, overarching plan. It’s the big picture that aims to have you at the peak of your performance come competition day. Within this macrocycle, you’ll find different phases like preparation, competition, transition, and off-season, each with its unique focus.

Mesocycle: This is a shorter period, usually lasting between 2 and 6 weeks, within the macrocycle. Each mesocycle has a specific adaptation goal, like building strength or improving endurance, that contributes to the overarching macrocycle.

Microcycle: This is the nitty-gritty, the week-long or 4-16 session plan designed to meet the objectives of the mesocycle. It’s the daily grind, the sweat and small wins that add up to big victories.

A well structured program will include these cycles with the intention of getting you in tip top shape just in time for a race or competition. 

Structure of Exercise

When the goal is longevity and health, the structure of training should replicate the context in which we’re trying to be healthy for a long time AKA everyday life. If life is random and the stressors of life are always ebbing and flowing, we need to prepare for that and teach the body to be deal with stress when it comes and recover when it’s gone. 

Exercise therefore doens’t need structure. The rigidity of a workout plan would only add stress to something that could already be quite stressful to do in the first place. Move when you can and try to move consistently as opposed to having bouts of intense exercise followed by bouts on inactivity. 

Volume and Intensity Unpacked

Volume and intensity are the yin and yang of training. Volume refers to the amount of work you do—think reps, sets, distance, or time. 

Intensity, on the other hand, describes the level of effort or how hard you’re pushing yourself. 

These two factors have an inverse relationship: when one goes up, the other usually goes down. Striking the right balance between these variables is crucial when training. A well structured plan will balance this for you. 

The idea of training twice a day has been romanticised, especially in the age of social media where elite athletes showcase their grueling routines. However, for most people, especially those juggling work, family, and other responsibilities, training twice a day is not only unnecessary but can also be counterproductive. 

When exercising, we again look to general every day life to figure out how much and how intense training needs to be. As with the structure of life, both these things wildly vary on the daily and are very random. Sometimes things are intense, sometimes the kids want to leg it around the garden for hours and other times you’ll need to pick up something heavy. 

Getting out of breath regularly, moving for a long period of time (over 30 minutes) and weaving in some resistance training will prepare you for whatever life has to throw at you. 

There’s an old saying “If you don’t use it you’ll lose it” and in this context it rings true. The body wants to be lazy, to focus on just surviving for as long as possible. But in reality we demand a lot from it. So constantly and consistently reminding it that we need it to be strong, we need to to be capable of moving something heavy or moving for a long time will keep it on it’s toes and prepared.

Train for nothing, prepare for everything.

Wrapping It Up: Your Roadmap to Peak Performance

If you’re serious about performance, you need a holistic approach that goes beyond just lifting weights or clocking miles. You need a well-structured exercise program, adequate sleep and intentional nutrition. Find yourself a coach or join the Hyrbid Athlete Club and let them ensure you’re doing things optimally!

If you’re moving to stay healthy, stress less about all those things and take exercise in your stride. Move and move often. Understand that things don’t need to be optimal and sometimes you will need to give more energy and time to life, but there will also be times you can invest more in training.  

Not sure what you want or how to navigate all of this? Reach out to us and we’ll happily set up a call with one of the team to figure out what’s the best approach for you.