"Train Smarter" - Makes my Brain Hurt

There’s a phrase that seems to be making the rounds again and I hate it. I just hate it. I’m not hater, really. I’m a lover. But I hate this term: “Train smarter, not harder.”

People love to attach their thinking to simple phrases and mantras. Whether it’s “The early bird gets the worm” or “there’s no ‘I’ in team”, encapsulating a strategy into a few words is a handy way to capture a concept and help communicate it. The problem is that when picking just a few words, they have to be the right words or they can throw the entire concept off. As Michael Jordan once said, “There may be no ‘I’ in team, but there is an ‘I’ in ‘win’.

What Michael Jordan saw in that the phrase was that “There’s no ‘I’ in team” is an overly simplistic way to look at things. It basically says that you have to focus on teamwork above individuality, but it overlooks the fact that individual talent could trump teamwork in some situations. To put it another way, no matter how good the Bad News Bears are in working as a team, they aren’t going to beat the New York Yankees, because the individuals on the opposing team are just so much better than they are.

So why does “Train smarter, not harder” make me so mad? Well, first let’s think about what it is trying to communicate. The phrase intends to focus athletes on avoiding doing too much of the wrong things. The idea that it is attempting to get across is that athletes shouldn’t just run for the sake of running, their workouts should have a purpose and training “hard” is not necessarily the same thing as training “smartly”.

But herein lies the problem with this phrase. It often turns out that “smart” training is “hard” training. “Dumb” training, as it turns out may be endlessly training at easy paces.

The term “hard” is the issue here. “Hard” can mean two different things. First, it can mean “training a lot” and be speaking to the quantity of training. Or second it can mean “training intensely” which speaks to the intensity of the training itself. Training a lot is not necessarily a good thing, but training intensely is a very good thing. So if you were to interpret “Train smarter, not harder” to be about not pushing yourself too hard in your training, then you’ve totally missed the boat.

So, consider this: “Quality over quantity”. This phrase may not be as pithy and colorful, but it is so much more accurate. Quality over quantity says that you should pick higher quality workouts and do less of them, rather than focusing solely on getting in mileage for the sake of mileage.

The underlying concept of “Train smarter, not harder” is actually a sound one. The idea being that we need to pick out workouts carefully and make sure they are the correct workouts to take us forward toward our performance goals. It means picking and choosing, rather than just beating ourselves senseless working out “hard” without a plan. But training smart often means hard training. It means hard workout and workouts that hurt. If you’re training correctly, in fact, the workouts will be much more intense, more difficult and much, much “harder”. Getting rid of the junk and replacing it with intense workouts that advance your performance is a good thing to do.

The truth is that if you are doing your workouts correctly, they will often be so hard that they you will need to do less of them, because you’ll need time to recover from them. And that’s OK. Working out with a plan that emphasizes quality over quantity is a sure way to improve. And it turns out that really is “smart.”

run smart

Johnny Boy