Are You “Cocktailing” Your Workouts?

Are you cocktailing your workouts? Are you doing so with a specific purpose in mind, or just blindly picking and choosing? The truth is many gyms and trainers promote a “cocktailed” Workout of the Day (WOD) without any thought into why any one particular exercise or drill was chosen.

With my background, I look at this issue from the perspective of martial arts. If you want results and if you want to achieve a level of mastery, you need to start with a base system and learn the ABCs. Get to black belt, as it were, so that you understand the alphabet of a system, then work your way up several black belt ranks to master so that you learn fluency in applying the basics. Too many people get to black belt and think that it’s time to start cross training.

Far too many people obsessively debate which system is best. And wouldn’t you know that the only people who debate X vs. Y are those who haven’t attained base-level mastery in any one system! I don’t think it matters which system you master first because systems are artificial. Only experience is real. Systems are only delivery platforms for experience. Ultimately all systems lead to the same point. Sure, there are slight idiosyncratic and perhaps cultural differences, but look at the masters of any movement discipline and they all tend to do similar things, move in similar ways, and say similar things.

The most important advice that I could give to someone just starting out is to choose a system that you enjoy in your heart. A system that resonates with you will allow you to confront and overcome the challenges of consistency faced by practitioners of ANY system.

I think that the main problem people face in the pursuit of personal mastery is getting involved in a system that does not permit them to look outside itself. A system is only designed to help you realize certain universal laws. Once you’ve mastered that system you’ve penetrated that mystery and you MUST then explore wherever your intuition leads you. If you fail to do so because you’ve been indoctrinated to believe that you cannot study outside your base system of mastery, you will begin to first get diminishing results and you will then start the process of over-specialization degeneration.

What is over-specialization degeneration? In my case, my mobility, coordination and body control have recently peaked out. I’ve had to downshift my training to focus on some high strength skill development, as well as to increase my power generation. If I simply continued with the training that I had been doing I would stop progressing and begin regressing.

Specifically in our TACFIT Community, I discourage people from “cocktailing” their workouts until they’ve mastered TACFIT (or any system for that matter) because it is counter-productive from a vehicular standpoint. The point of any system is to gain a base level of bodily wisdom. Once you have that you can draw from any source in order to use your intuition (the ONLY accurate compass) to keep you on an even keel, progressing for the rest of your life.

People look at a WOD like one’s I have composed and shared in the past and assume that it’s merely a general-purpose conditioning program. On the contrary, each WOD was created to address a particular issue that I’m resolving in my lifetime of fitness exploration. There is a “black box” that governs my exercise selection and sequencing, intensity levels, etc. That “black box” is the intuition that I’ve reclaimed and developed through mastering one system first so that I have the ability to listen to, understand and accurately respond to my true needs as a lifetime athlete. First we master the basics, then we allow our intuition to guide us!

Respectfully,

Scott B. Sonnon