A professional athlete does not practice and train for their sport by exclusively playing their sport. For example a basketball player does not just play a 4 quarter game on repeat every day. They weight train, run, practice shooting, practice defense, etc.

Generally speaking in the gym we are trying to improve our work capacity, the ability to do more work in less time (this is how we improve our health). To do that we go faster. To go faster, we need to be able to slow down and build our mechanics, just like the basketball player practicing free throws. Then we want to make sure that we have consistency with those mechanics and once we have those both mechanics and consistency we can go faster (bring the intensity). Those mechanics, however will always have room for improvement and we need to keep practicing and training to make them better.

One of the core concepts when working out is the idea of Practice vs. Training vs. Competing.

Practice is something you do EVERY day. When we are doing our general and specific warm-ups for the workout this is practice and those reps are not throw away reps.

Training is done during the workout and the goal is not to get your best time ever, instead it is to hold onto sets of 5 when you usually would do 3, it is to squat clean when you would usually power, it is going 5 pounds lighter to work on pushing under the bar in the jerk, it is breaking up the thrusters into 2 sets to learn how to pace a workout. By training and having a specific focus during the workout we are building skills and capacity that will pay dividends later when it is time to compete.

Competing is something that should be done in a group environment about once a week. All other workouts should be training. You can compete yourself out of shape.

Takeaway
When working out throughout the week slow down to practice and train. Be mindful when you are warming up of your movement and use that time to improve it. Pick a specific goal for the workout to train. Finally once a week compete, put your training together and test how much you have improved.

Cheers,
Berek