Blog | Training Training Mistakes I’d Never Make Again

Author / John

6 - 8 minutes read

Training hard isn’t the same as training smart.

I played ten years in the NFL. That sentence makes it pretty easy to look backward and assume the training that got me there must have been good. It wasn’t.

When I was young, my brother and I knew two things: we wanted to be big and strong, and lifting weights was going to help us play football. That was about the extent of the master plan.

We trained hard as hell. We also wasted a ridiculous amount of effort because we had no idea how to separate work that moved us toward the goal from work that simply made us tired.

That distinction matters.

John Welbourn in a Philadelphia Eagles uniform crouched at the line of scrimmage during an NFL game.

More Work Isn’t Always Better Work

At one point, training basically consumed the day. I rearranged my school schedule so I could lift during lunch and fifth period. Sixth period was football, where we would sprint, condition and do football-specific work. Then we’d leave school and go train again at 24-Hour Fitness.

Our goal was around 20 sets per body part. Every. Damn. Day. Nobody could accuse us of being lazy. But effort wasn’t the problem. Direction was.

We treated fatigue like proof that the training worked. If ten sets were good, twenty had to be better. If one training session made us stronger, three must make us unstoppable.

That’s not programming. That’s just collecting work.

Every piece of training needs a job. Before adding more volume, another workout or the latest exercise you saw online, ask yourself what problem you’re actually trying to solve. If you don’t have an answer, you probably don’t need it.

Build the Foundation Before You Chase the Details

This is where athletes still screw it up today.

Everybody wants speed work, agility drills, advanced plyometrics and whatever exercise is currently making the rounds on Instagram. Meanwhile, plenty of young athletes can’t perform a legitimate push-up, control a squat or move their own body through space.

You don’t need more complexity. You need more capability.

Strength gives you a bigger platform to express everything else. Speed requires force. Power requires force delivered quickly. Changing direction requires producing and absorbing force. Even sprinting demands enough strength to hold position and repeatedly attack the ground.

That doesn’t mean strength is the only thing that matters. It means there’s not much point decorating a house before you’ve poured the foundation.

You have to earn complexity. Get brutally good at the basics first. Squat. Push. Pull. Hinge. Sprint. Jump. Carry. Learn to control your body. Build strength, then give that strength somewhere useful to go.

Stop Training Like Every Goal Is a Separate Problem

One of the biggest mistakes in performance training is treating strength, speed, power and conditioning like they exist in separate buckets. They don’t.

Want to get faster? Getting stronger can help. Want to become more explosive? You need force to express. Want to hold up better late in a game? Your strength, conditioning, skill and recovery all interact.

The goal isn’t to find a “speed program” on Monday, a bodybuilding workout on Tuesday and an agility coach on Wednesday. It’s to build an athlete.

Man and woman flexing beside a phone displaying Power Athlete training programs, promoting All Access with 10 programs for $59 per month.

We didn’t understand that when I was young. We grabbed ideas from powerlifting, bodybuilding magazines, football training and anywhere else we could find them, then threw everything into the same week.

Some of it worked. Some of it probably worked against everything else.

Stop collecting methods and start building a system. Training should work together toward the demands of your sport and your current weaknesses.

You Can’t Outwork Bad Recovery

We thought recovery meant the amount of time it took to drive from one gym to the next.

Training volume was massive, and our nutrition strategy wasn’t exactly sophisticated either. We ate to get big. Huge bowls of Grape-Nuts, bananas, nonfat milk, sandwiches, rice, burgers, peanut butter and jelly. We were young, active and trying to pile on bodyweight.

Again, there was plenty of effort. Not much precision.

Training is the stimulus. Adaptation is what you’re actually chasing. If you constantly add work without giving your body the resources to adapt to it, you’re eventually just digging a deeper hole.

That means food matters. Sleep matters. Managing volume matters. And sometimes the smartest thing you can do for your performance is not add another workout.

Judge training by what you can recover from and adapt to, not by how destroyed you feel afterward.

Hard Work Still Matters. Aim It Better.

Here’s the part I wouldn’t change.

We learned how to work. We showed up. We trained when nobody was watching. We chased strength before it was cool. We weren’t looking for shortcuts, hacks or the perfect exercise.

That mentality carried me a long way. But surviving bad programming doesn’t make bad programming good.

I made it to the NFL with plenty of mistakes baked into the process. Looking back, the lesson isn’t that you need to suffer more than everyone else. It’s that hard work becomes a hell of a lot more powerful when you point it in the right direction.

Build strength. Master the basics. Train for a reason. Eat to support the work. Recover hard enough to adapt. Then repeat it long enough for something to happen.

You don’t need twenty different answers. You need the right work, done consistently, for a long damn time.

Stop guessing and start training with a plan. The Power Athlete All Access pass gives you access to all 10 of our training programs, plus the coaches who can help you choose the right tool for the job.

John

John Welbourn is CEO of Power Athlete and host of Power Athlete Radio. He is a 9 year starter and veteran of the NFL. John was drafted with the 97th pick in 1999 NFL Draft and went on to be a starter for the Philadelphia Eagles from 1999-2003, appearing in 3 NFC Championship games, and for starter for the Kansas City Chiefs from 2004-2007. In 2008, he played with the New England Patriots until an injury ended his season early with him retiring in 2009. Over the course of his career, John has started over 100 games and has 10 play-off appearances. He was a four year lettermen while playing football at the University of California at Berkeley. He graduated with a bachelor's degree in Rhetoric in 1998. John has worked with the MLB, NFL, NHL, Olympic athletes and Military. He travels the world lecturing on performance and nutrition and records his podcast, Power Athlete Radio, every week with over 800 episodes spanning 13 years. You can catch up with John as his personal blog, Talk To Me Johnnie, on social media @johnwelbourn or at Power Athlete Radio.