How do you work harder in Foundation?

So Coach Sommer often tells us that we need to "work harder", and I believe Joshua Slocum's article on "When to stop a set" is great in explaining how to work hard during a workout.

But how do I work harder in my strength training schedule? It seems we should ideally focus only on the basics (F1/H1, perhaps excluding other exercises). So is that it? I do just those 3 F1 workouts every week? What else could I do to "work harder" that doesn't impede my recovery? Does "work harder" mean doing a few extra reps on our off days or extra exercises at the end of the workout? Is the only way we can "work harder" by pushing ourselves harder through the Foundation workouts? 

Would love to hear your thoughts.

If I've got energy to burn I'll often add sets (even if they're singles) until form break. A couple sessions of doing 10*3 HBP/PE12, for example, helped me make the jump to wk 9 volume. And if for some reason I only have one great rep before it gets visibly sloppy, provided its one that wouldn't best be fixed by working on a previous element, I'll do multiple sets to get the practise in.

If it's mobility work, do it all the damn time! Once you've attained it it's FAR easier to maintain, so it's fastest to invest extra time at first.

Work harder to me means you've to receive everything that that training session has to you, that is everything. You've to train with awareness of yourself and your body around the space, you've to feel things, connect body parts, apply the enough pressure knowing and feeling it, record yourself day after day to see later the video and think: "what would Coach say about this?". See a video of yourself doing the movement, you're not training physically in that moment, but you're connecting the points that is even equally important. You're applying consciousness.

This is completely the opposite of training automatic, just doing the training and that's it, done, like nothing.

Means also work more on the things that hold your back to progress throught the elements, mobility for example. Just do more mobility workouts, stretch intelligently, etc etc.

Means a lot of things to me not all related to ACTUAL physical training. Is almost an attitude, a commitment with yourself.

Hope it helps

I thought it meant that you should push through the last reps to get the sets and reps you had to do that workout even if you feel like dieing. Even if your mind is ready to stop, there probably still is enough gas in the tank to fight through some reps. If you progress and never feel like you can't do the reps and sets prescribed that week then you probably work hard enough already.

This is what helped me progress when I was stuck on PE1's for months.

When I try to work harder I end up working to failure which I'm told is a bad thing.

As I understand it, you can only fail with good form. If you fail a rep with bad form, that's a no-no. So keep going until you absolutely can no longer hold the good form I.e go past the point where you think you should probably stop and HOLD THAT FORM!!

Thanks for the responses!

A large part of my motivation in asking comes from my background as an athlete. I used to be on a team where we would train every day and were encouraged to do additional workouts and/or lifts on our own. I'm still at a school where all of the athletes are still doing that.

I often feel that I am not putting in enough work to become strong if I am only training 3 days a week (though the 4 & 5-day template did not seem to suit my recovery ability). At the same time, I am afraid of hampering myself by over training. I give my best to my F1/H1 workouts, but I feel like the small time commitment/volume can't possibly be enough.

Has anyone else been struggling with such a transition?

Yes, very much so. But the slowly increasing amounts of evidence to the contrary is beginning to break down that mindset. It's all you can do really, do your best every workout and the patience will pay off.

One way I find to work harder in a sense is to make sure I am in the best possible situation for the workout. Doing a workout after a long day of work, hungry and tired leads to mental fatigue and I won't be able to push myself as hard as I could under better conditions. So plan for your workout so you have both physical and mental energy to get the best possible workout.

LateStarter@46 said:

As I understand it, you can only fail with good form. If you fail a rep with bad form, that's a no-no. So keep going until you absolutely can no longer hold the good form I.e go past the point where you think you should probably stop and HOLD THAT FORM!!

Right, as I understand it, it is alright to go to "Technical Failure" (the point at which you cannot continue the set with correct form, no matter how hard you try), but you would not want to go there on every set of every exercise every workout.

It is not alright to go to "Concentric Failure" (the point where you cannot continue to push/pull yourself through space regardless of form or effort), or "Absolute Failure" (the point at which you are completely incapable of resisting gravity from pulling you down to the ground).

All of these types of "failure" will tax the recovery systems, but technical failure will do so least severely.

I think, after listening to Coach on Robb Wolf's podcast, that this is also why it is generally advised to continue to repeat the cycles (which automatically results in varying the volume of the workouts/intensity of the workouts) rather than to just keep pushing the upper limits (and thus pushing to failure) every workout. But, as Coach has said (can't remember if it was in BTGB) some people do better going to failure more often while others should only go there sparingly. We just have to be responsible for ourselves and find out what works best for us as individuals.

Keegan said:

I think, after listening to Coach on Robb Wolf's podcast, that this is also why it is generally advised to continue to repeat the cycles (which automatically results in varying the volume of the workouts/intensity of the workouts) rather than to just keep pushing the upper limits (and thus pushing to failure) every workout. But, as Coach has said (can't remember if it was in BTGB) some people do better going to failure more often while others should only go there sparingly. We just have to be responsible for ourselves and find out what works best for us as individuals.

This is an important and often overlooked aspect of strength training. When you're in the gym, you're also in the lab, doing experiments on yourself. You should be trying to learn how your body responds to different stimuli - the optimal programming for one person is generally quite different from another person's optimal programming, so to get the best possible progress, you need to figure out what your body responds to best. This is why keeping a workout journal is very important: it's very powerful to be able to read about what you were doing in the past and how it affected your progress/recovery.