The Insanity Principle: A Portrait of Agony
During this evening’s circuit training, I managed to fall over mid squat-thrust. As I peeled myself off the mats to resume the hell, I noticed that my face had left an interesting sweat-mark on the ground. There were visible cheeks, a chin – even areas where eyes should go! It was a distinctly realistic-looking face…and it was in a lot of pain…
You see, these latest circuits are based on the Insanity principle. A contrast to traditional high intensity internal training (HIIT) (where one works very hard for short periods of time, then rests for a longer time), Insanity involves working very hard for longer periods of time, then resting for shorter periods of time.
So we work maximally for 2 minutes, then rest for 30 seconds…and repeat than for an hour and a half. By the end, I can barely stand, barely breathe and barely believe I haven’t just crawled out of a swimming pool, to judge by the dripping state of every item of clothing.
Exercises involved include punching or kicking a heavy bag as fast or hard as possible, standing sprints, handstand press-ups and chin-ups, not to mention the squat thrusts, kick-ups and variety of other nauseating bases. It’s horrible, truly. But it’s also brilliant.
You see, training to keep fit and healthy is all well and good but, to be honest, I find it hard to motivate myself to work hard for the simple sake of my health. I mean, it’s not like I actually have a healthy lifestyle outside of the realm of exercise. Instead, I like to train to achieve a goal or get better at something else, whether it’s something simple like lifting a certain weight, or something more on-going and complex, like being a better fighter.
In terms of training for professional wrestling, insanity training is just about ideal. Explosive and extended periods of maximal exertion, followed by the briefest intervals for catching your breath and recovering. That’s pretty much how a wrestling match works!
If I can put myself through that for ninety minutes a couple of times a week, before long a fifteen minute match shouldn’t be quite as hard. So, in theory, insanity training is perfect for wrestling fitness. Oh and wrestlers are also a little crazy, in case you were afraid I’d missed the more obvious of jokes there.
The only stumbling block is the CONSTANT AGONY and need to vomit. But hey, what’s life without a little bit of that?
Jul 5, 2012 at 9:04 PM /
I’m about to study at UCSB in California as an exchange student, and I’ve seen people talking about this online only today! It seems really popular. I was curious to learn what it was all about, and I happened to stumble on this, how fortunate! Sounds very good. I recently changed my gym programme to have a similar principle- I do what my trainer terms the “Blast workout”. It involves a lot of constant weight increasing, and short rest periods. For example we do exercises with reps that descend and ascend: 20, 12, 10, 8, 6, 8, 10, 12, 20, increasing the weight until 6 reps, then lowering it back down again. It’s tough!!