How to Attack Your Weak Links
Your goat is something that challenges you. Usually, it’s a thing that you don’t want to practice, and when you do, it’s a frustrating time.
The tried and true way to improve your gym goats is through a progressive strengthening plan. Slowly adding weight to a lift or working through an exercise progression is the best way to attack your strength deficits.
Although many exercises can be improved tremendously by teaching the brain to coordinate the movement pattern better.
For more complex movements, like Olympic lifts or gymnastics exercises like muscle-ups, you can make huge strides by focusing on the skill of the movement.
Essentially “practicing” rather than “strengthening.”
Use this plan of attack to practice your movement goats—it can make big changes in a short amount of time and tends to be less frustrating.
Deliberate Practice
Poor practice habits usually have poor results.
Trying to improve a movement as part of a physically demanding workout, crammed alongside heavy weights or an abundance of repetitions, isn’t the best approach to building better skills.
Instead, dial things back for a full focus on hitting a perfect rep every time.
The struggle is this type of training is boring and hard to endure, making it hard to repeat on the regular. That’s where the goat day training plan comes into play.
Goat Day Training
Rather than beating yourself into submission with skill-based work, the goat day training template will help set mini-goals to work towards. This improves consistency and keeps you moving toward your goal.
Goat Days use an EMOM (Every Minute on The Minute) format, in which you work using a repeating one-minute time clock. Choose a movement to repeat for the extent of the workout or for twice the fun, and alternate between two of your goats.
Set a time clock for 20 minutes, starting a new set every minute.
Example:
20 Minute EMOM
- Odd Minutes- 20 Double Unders
- Even Minutes- 10 Wall Balls
The beauty of this strategy is that you set small attainable goals for yourself. Rather than beating yourself with relentless movement, practice.
Although to make this work, the workloads must be set up to match your purpose.
Dialing in The Workloads
Use the following guidelines to set the course for your goat day training:
Rest Intervals
The EMOM should have built-in rest. If you’re going non-stop for the entire minute, it will become taxing, and you miss the point of skill work.
Generally, you should be able to complete the work in under 30 seconds, leaving another 30 seconds of rest, keeping you relatively fresh between sets.
Weights
You don’t want strength to be a limiter in this training. Although the workloads shouldn’t be easy either. Movement patterns change at super light weights, and neurological adaptations happen at higher intensities.
The best advice here is to stay under the threshold of physical failure, so you can focus on hitting a perfect rep every time. But if you can string together reps for longer than 30 seconds, increase the weight to challenge the nervous system a bit more.
Reps
The number of reps per round goes along with the weights you choose. Again, this is skill-based work, so fatigue shouldn’t be a limiter.
Select a rep set that you don’t have to rest in the middle of the set.
Getting it Done
If you have a struggle that you would like to improve, commit to working on a goat day at least once per week.
Ultimately if everything is done correctly, the workout should NOT crush you. This makes it a great active recovery workout or something that can get thrown onto the front end of a larger training session, almost as a dynamic warm-up.
With a commitment to achieving these mini-goal training sets, hard movements eventually become easy by improving your skill in executing an exercise.
