Can fitness improve in a week?
Yes, you can improve your fitness in a week. The lower your level of fitness the more likely it will become to make significant improvements in the first week. You will be more likely to have breakthroughs on cardio than on strength within this timeframe.
Why do you want to improve?
- What happens when you improve your fitness?
- What happens when you do not improve your fitness?
Once you have written the answers reflect on them by asking yourself "why" five times to get to the root of what motivates you. A little example
What happens when you improve your fitness?
I will make the team
Why do you an to make the team?
So that I get a scholarship and go to college
Why do you want to go to college?
Because I come from a deprived area and want my family to do better.
Why do you want your family to do better?
Because I see my parents struggle to provide for me
Why do your parents struggle?
Because they never went to college themselves and could not unlock better job opportunities
Why did they not go to college?
Because they immigrated from another country
Writing down why you want to improve your fitness and understanding your motivation better will driving achievement.
The written record can be shared with your coach and reflected upon.
What do you want to improve?
After this reflection,
your goals will fall into one of these three broad fields
It is important to know that you will have a hard time improving in all of these three areas at the same time.
Looks usually come at the expense of performance and health when taken to the extreme. Same goes vice versa. If you optimize for health you might not get the best looks or performance possible.
Therefore the next step is to prioritize these three training philosophies in order of importance to you. This will help you at a later stage to pick the approach which will improve your fitness in a week.
How do you want to improve?
The next choices to make are the fields of interest you have in fitness and how much time you want to invest in your fitness.
The major fields of fitness improve one of these three things
- Strength
- Endurance
- Mobility
Just as you made a choice before for looks, performance and health you also rank these three in importance to you which will help to pick your program.
Again you will not be able to improve everything at the same time. You have to decide how to allocate your time between these goals.
What is your current fitness level
This will be the most determining factor of whether your fitness can improve in a week. The lower your fitness level to start with the more likely you are to improve it in a week.
The worse your habits the easier they are to improve by scaling them back or quit altogether.
The less
exercise you do the more impact it will have to start doing something.
Fitness levels can be determined via exrx for strength and via the Cooper test for endurance.
It is usually a good idea to find a standard which is relevant to you and I compare you to see whether you are improving or not.
Relative vs absolute fitness
The easiest way to explain the
beginner effect is by numbers. You can use numbers to visualize the difference between relative and absolute improvements.
When you want to improve in a week and actually notice it, you want a high relative improvement. The more advanced you are in your fitness journey the more it will be about absolute improvements.
If your fitness level is 1 on a scale of one to ten and you move it to two you have improved your fitness by 100%. That is usually noticeable.
This is the difference between being able to get out of the chair or not.
This is the difference between being able to do a back squat or not.
This is the difference between jogging or walking 3km.
On the other end of the scale if you move from a nine to a ten on the same scale the absolute improvement has stayed the same, +1. The relative improvement has dropped to 11%.
In the real world, this improvement is almost not noticeable to the layman or outsider. Whether you run 10k in 45 minutes or in 40 minutes is not as noticeable a difference as to whether you walk or run it.
For the professional or athlete, the absolute gain on their
personal best or winning against others by being a heartbeat ahead is what it is all about.
These are models to help you understand how likely it is that you will improve in a week.
Bones vs muscle
It is usually easier to drive growth in your muscles than in your bones and ligaments. For that matter cardiovascular improvements are usually achieved quicker than strength gains.
Strength gains need all muscles of the body to adapt depending on the exercise you pick. Gains for endurance highly depend on the amount of blood your heart is able to pump and
how much oxygen the blood carries.
In essence, at least at the beginning, losing weight and training your heart will make you progress quicker on running goals, especially
when you are overweight.
Once the nervous system reaches its limit you have to move on to growing your muscles or working on your leaks. Leaks are places of your body which are weaker than the rest. For most people, this is abs, lower back, and
their grip.
The least promising approach
If you want to make sure you do not improve your fitness the best approach is to pick something that you are already really good at. Then only do minimal work on a million different things within that week and wonder why you did not improve.
The most promising approach
Start with something you really suck at. A good example would be burpees. Then do a ton of them during the week. You will see that you are able to do more burpees within the same time by the end of the week. You have Improved your fitness.
Conclusion
You can improve your fitness when you know what fitness means to you. A clearly defined goal will mark the path to the top of the mountain. If you want to Improve your fitness significantly within a week you have the best chances if you are a wreck to start with.
Further reading
Resources