Instinctive Training

Can a Lifter Really Train Using Instinct Alone?

My Slightly Rambling Thoughts on the Subject

     Ever since I first picked up a bodybuilding magazine sometime in the mid to late ‘80s, I’ve read about so-called instinctive training.  Even then (as there are now) there were debates over whether or not one could train “instinctively.”  A lot of bodybuilders, once they became advanced enough, seemed to naturally incline toward instinctive training.  Vic Richards—perhaps bodybuilding’s first true “mass monster”—trained in what seemed to be an entirely haphazard manner, but he simply called it instinctive training.  He would show up at the gym, have absolutely nothing planned, then did whatever he thought felt “right” when he hit the weights.  On the opposite side of that, you had Mike Mentzer, and others who took a more “scientific” approach to training (or at least thought they did—there might be more science to what we call instinctive training than was understood back then), who swore that instinctive training was a myth, and was essentially a fool’s errand for any bodybuilders who took it up.

     Tom Platz was another bodybuilder from that era who trained instinctively.  When I met him in ‘94, the year I first started writing for IronMan and MuscleMag International magazines, he said that he kept meticulous dietary journals, but he never kept a training log, and he didn’t plan any of his workouts.  Soon after that, Platz was a spokesperson for the “Big Beyond Belief” training manual—a.k.a. “Serious Growth 3”—which I found odd since the “Serious Growth” manuals were rather meticulously crafted training programs (maybe not crafted well, but that’s another point) that one was supposed to follow to a tee.  But when I received my BBB training manual in the mail, there was a difference with it.  In it, once you reached an advanced stage, you basically did whatever-the-hell you wanted in the gym.  That, I suppose, was Platz’s stamp on the book.  (On a side note, I must say that one of the best regular columns in IronMan in the mid ‘90s was Platz’s and Leo Costa Jr.’s ”Serious Growth” column, despite some of my problems with Costa’s training manuals.)

     When Crossfit first became popular—or, at least, when I was first made aware of it, so I suppose that’s when more and more folks were conscious of it—the “Fittest Man on Earth,” Rich Froning—who won the competition each year from 2011-2014—followed no training program, didn’t have a coach, but, instead, simply worked out multiple times per day and did whatever he felt like doing at each training session.  When I heard/read about his training, I remember thinking to myself, “I hope other Crossfit athletes don’t try that.”  But for Froning, it worked.  I’m sure he understood his body well enough to know what to do—and what not to do—at each training session.  (On another side note, Froning also ate whatever-the-heck he felt like, as well.  If I recall correctly, he consumed a lot of peanut butter and whole milk, along with carbs that were generally thought of as “bad” by his fellow Crossfit cohorts, who, for some reason, tended to eat “paleo.”  But this isn’t uncommon, Tom Platz aside, among many “instinctual” trainees—they eat following their instincts, very similar to how they train.)

     You see instinctive training done more by bodybuilders—and others interested in simply working out for aesthetic reasons—than you do among strength athletes.  Many strength athletes—powerlifters, olympic lifters, et al—follow exact training programs with little to no deviation within them.  But not all of them.

     In recent years, you hear instinctive training often referred to as “auto-regulation,” though I suppose that some writers/trainers make a distinction between the two.  Auto-regulation involves changing the parameters of your training—maybe doing more, maybe doing less, maybe doing a different exercise than what was initially planned—based on how you may feel, either mentally or physically, when you do a scheduled workout.  That’s pretty much exactly how instinctive training was described when I first read about it all those years ago.

     So, what do I think about instinctive training?  I think, in theory, at least, most lifters will naturally gravitate toward it as they advance, and it can be a good thing.  In practice, however, it probably causes a lot of lifters to not get good enough results because they end up doing too many random workout sessions, and, often, they will end up avoiding the very things they need to train.  I have a good feeling that a great majority of American (male) gym-goers would have their “instincts” telling them to do a lot more chest and arm workouts than heavy-and-hard back and leg sessions.

     Before you can learn how to train instinctively, you first need to just learn how to train.  By that, I mean that you need to follow programs for years in order to understand your body and how you respond to different training methods.  And, at that point, you may indeed start training more “instinctively.”  As I’ve written elsewhere, are you on a training program or are you just working out?  If your “instincts” are telling you to do random “whatever” workouts, then you are on a path to mediocrity.

     Maybe part of the problem is that “instinctive” is a bit of a misnomer.  If instinctive training was a product being peddled, it would confuse most buyers.  It’s more of a learned instinct, but an instinct that’s learned isn’t really an instinct, so it’s not just a misnomer but an oxymoronic one at that.  That’s probably part of the reason that some writer/strength coach/personal trainer (whatever) decided upon the term auto-regulation.  But it’s not obvious as to what “auto-regulation training” is, either, when you first hear/read it.  Maybe “instinctive” isn’t the correct word, but most lifters know what is meant by it, even when they first hear it.  So it’s probably going to stick.  I’m not sure what else I would call it.

      In many ways it is similar to—and this might be a good way for lifters to look at it—the idea of mushin in budo training.  Mushin translates into english as “empty mind” or “no mind.”  But you don’t attain mushin by trying to attain it.  It’s just something that naturally happens once you’ve been training for a long time, as in many years.  When I was a young man in the ‘80s and early ‘90s, I trained at a very traditional Japanese karate dojo.  My sensei (Japanese for “teacher”) would often extol us in class to “fight without fighting” and to “think without thinking.”  But he didn’t tell that to beginner students, or even students who had a year or two (or three) of training.  He only said that once you had been training so long that “thinking” was getting in the way of making progress.

     Mushin is more, perhaps, “in the moment” than how we think of instinctive training, but that might be the way that instinctive training should be applied anyway.  Once you reach a state of mushin, it’s not about doing random training.  It’s about just training.  You show up, you do the work, and you don’t think about it.  And you don’t have to think about it because the techniques have already been ingrained into your psyche and into your body.  So this doesn’t mean to not follow a program.  It means to show up, do the training, and don’t constantly think or “brood” over every aspect of your training (in the gym or outside of it).

     One thing that you have to be careful with if you decide you are going to start training “instinctively” is going by how you feel.  As I’ve also written before: how you feel is a lie!  So don’t take off because you don’t “feel good” or because you think you need to take the day off.  Follow the program you’re on, and, once you get to the gym (and are actually training) then you can make changes as you see fit.  But you shouldn’t even do this if you don’t have (at least) a year or so of training under your weight belt.

     With all of that being said in this slightly meandering essay, here are the takeaways.  First, there really isn’t such a thing as instinctive training, not in the literal definition of the word “instinct.”  (I really believe, for instance, that the main reason that Mike Mentzer—who only seemed to use “logic” in his decision-making—disagreed with it may have been simple nomenclature.)  Poor wording choice aside, it will, over time, however, be what most bodybuilders—and, yes, even strength athletes, too—lean towards.  But remember: this doesn’t mean that you should do random whatever when you go to the gym.  You need to be on a program.  But I also think the best programs are ones that have flexibility built within them.  So if you are, as an example, following a basic, 3-days-per-week full-body mass-building regimen, you will naturally have days when you do more and days where you will do less.  If the program calls for 5 progressively heavier sets of 5 reps, there may be days where you only do 3 or 4 progressively heavier sets.  There may be days, conversely, where you do as many as 7 or 8 progressively heavier 5s.  Also, some days you may do some “back-off” sets on all your exercises, and other days you only do two or three movements, then call it quits.  As you progress, and learn more and more about how your body responds, you will know more-and-more about whether or not to make these decisions.  Now that I think of it, maybe that means “learned instinctive self-regulating training” would be the best title for it.  But since that’s not gonna happen, I guess instinctive training it is.