Reaching peak fitness is something that many people want to achieve. Getting your body to the point where it’s using oxygen as efficiently as possible is critical for competing in sports or becoming a world-leading athlete. It’s also vital if you want to go on a challenging expedition to climb the world’s highest peaks.
But how do you get there? What does it take, and when will you know you’ve reached peak fitness?
Those are challenging questions and not ones we purport to be able to answer in full in this guide. However, we’re going to have a good stab at it and see where we get, so you’ll know more about when your body is ready to take on the biggest challenges of its life.
So, what do you need to do to reach peak fitness? How can you get there (or give yourself the best shot possible of doing so)?
Dialled-In Nutrition
The first thing to do is to make sure your nutrition is in the right place. Many people think that training alone is what builds fitness, but diet plays a huge role and makes the process so much easier.
Figuring out whether you’ve reached peak fitness is the challenging part. You can’t always tell, and it is often dependent on the type of training you do.
Beating Personal Bests
One sign you’re on the right track is when you’re consistently beating personal bests. These achievements indicate that you’re moving beyond what you did in training before and are now attaining new heights.
When personal bests get broken, it can be a strange experience. You’re not always aware of how much better you’re doing, but it just happens.
The trick here is to figure out what went differently this time compared to, say, last season. Sometimes, it can be as simple as adding a new food to your diet or getting extra sleep. It could also mean you have a better personal trainer who’s able to get to the root of the issue you’re facing.
Better Medical Readings
Another sign you’re reaching peak fitness is when your medical readings, like your VO2 max, is higher than it was before during previous cycles. Again, this suggests you’ve reached a new peak and can do things this time around that you couldn’t last time.
Again, it’s not a fool-proof method: the calculations can be wrong. But if you’re doing the same exercise on the same piece of equipment, it’s usually a sign that you’re doing well.
Healthier Body Composition
Your body composition is another sign you may be teetering on peak fitness. It’s more of a proxy measure for most sports, but it can be extremely important for boxing and weight lifting. What you weigh and your percentage of muscle are critical for indicating your performance and readiness to compete.
When assessing your body fat composition, check your fat levels around your organs. This so-called visceral fat affects fitness more than fat stored under the skin’s surface, so getting it down further is critical for overall health and well-being.
Higher Energy Levels
Ideally, you should also feel higher energy levels when you reach peak fitness. Your body should be spritely and athletic, not slow and lethargic.
Many athletes can almost sense it when they peak because they get the feeling they could take on the world. Challenges seem lower to them, allowing them to dominate their sports or events.
However, excessive training and effort can lead to the opposite sensation. That’s why it is so critical to train with care. Athletes who don’t get this step right can fall into the overtraining trap, reducing their performance when it matters.
So, if you find you have higher energy levels, commit to sustained rest. Make sure you’re treating your body well and giving yourself time off to ensure you reduce the risk of injury.
Better Overall Well-Being
Finally, you can often tell you’ve reached peak fitness when your overall well-being peaks. If you’re feeling great, it’s often a surefire sign that you’re ready to compete or take on difficult physical challenges.
It’s hard to describe this energy, but again, you should be able to feel it when it comes. Usually, it happens when you’ve been training hard but are also resting well and maintaining your weight.
Wrapping Up
Figuring out whether you’ve reached peak fitness often requires exploring a variety of measures. Putting them together will usually tell you if you’re doing better than in previous years, especially if they are pointing in the right direction when combined.
Of course, you won’t always know automatically if you’re succeeding. However, you can rely on how you feel and metrics in training, like personal bests. These tell you if you are progressing and at how high a rate.
Just remember that if you do attempt to reach peak fitness, take precautions. When you push your body to the limit, injury becomes increasingly likely. When running, for instance, switch to cycling or rowing occasionally to give your shins and feet a rest. Similarly, if you are weight training, look for ways to boost the intensity without necessarily increasing the weight.
You’ll want to start by helping your cardiovascular system recover if you’ve been eating a Western-style diet. Consuming lots of refined carbohydrates and processed meats can make it harder for the heart and arteries to function.
After that, you’ll need to make sure that you’re giving your body the energy it needs for the type of training you want to do. Using food effectively can be a great way to give yourself a boost and ensure your body adapts quickly. For example, you might consume extra legumes so you have more protein and carbohydrates your body can use for building muscle and powering long training sessions.
Progressive Overload
Next, you’ll want to consider progressive overload, something that is emphasized during personal training. This technique involves exposing your body to increasingly challenging stimuli to force it to adapt.
For example, progressive overload could involve going harder and longer on the bicycle. Training for more hours per week is a way of pushing the muscles and telling them that they need to go harder.
Another approach is to increase the weights on the bench press or squat rack. These should go up by around 5% per week early in training, and then perhaps 2% per week when you become more advanced.
For resistance training, you can also increase the reps if the weight isn’t practical. For example, you might squat 200 lbs 12 times instead of 10 times. Again, this will increase the “work done” by your muscles and allow you to get the adaptive response you want.
Consistency
Reaching peak fitness also requires a healthy dose of consistency. It isn’t the sort of thing that will happen if you take long breaks or allow your diet to get out of control. Being consistent means doing the same thing for several years until your body tells you that you can’t really go much further.
The consistency you apply depends on the type of training you do, but generally speaking, it means doing it over and over again. For strength training, that means training each muscle group consistently. For cardio, it means getting on the stepper or using the static bicycle, and for flexibility, it means stretching and elongating the muscles.
Consistency is perhaps the most challenging aspect of achieving peak fitness. Doing the same thing every day isn’t easy, even for the most conscientious people, and it is even more challenging if you’re the type of person who likes novelty and doing things differently all the time.
Being more consistent isn’t always something you want to do either, but it is worth reminding yourself of why you’re committing so much energy to the task. If there’s an end goal, that can be motivating in itself and help you push through some of the psychological challenges.
Mental Discipline
This discussion relates to the value of mental discipline. Becoming extremely fit isn’t just about what your body does in the physical world, but also how you approach the task psychologically. Many people find that they can push their bodies further when they have the right attitude.
You see this approach in competition all the time. The most “psyched” or “pumped” people tend to do the best.
Peaking in fitness doesn’t require you to be like this all the time. But you want times throughout the week or month where you know you’re going to your maximum or beyond.
When you do this, you can train your mind and your body. Your brain gets used to the idea that you need it to provide extreme exertion sometimes, while your body adapts however it can to the new stimulus. This approach in training is useful for competitions because it lets you go that extra step that could be the difference between winning and losing.
How Do You Know You’ve Reached Peak Fitness?
Figuring out whether you’ve reached peak fitness is the challenging part. You can’t always tell, and it is often dependent on the type of training you do.
Beating Personal Bests
One sign you’re on the right track is when you’re consistently beating personal bests. These achievements indicate that you’re moving beyond what you did in training before and are now attaining new heights.
When personal bests get broken, it can be a strange experience. You’re not always aware of how much better you’re doing, but it just happens.
The trick here is to figure out what went differently this time compared to, say, last season. Sometimes, it can be as simple as adding a new food to your diet or getting extra sleep. It could also mean you have a better personal trainer who’s able to get to the root of the issue you’re facing.
Better Medical Readings
Another sign you’re reaching peak fitness is when your medical readings, like your VO2 max, is higher than it was before during previous cycles. Again, this suggests you’ve reached a new peak and can do things this time around that you couldn’t last time.
Again, it’s not a fool-proof method: the calculations can be wrong. But if you’re doing the same exercise on the same piece of equipment, it’s usually a sign that you’re doing well.
Healthier Body Composition
Your body composition is another sign you may be teetering on peak fitness. It’s more of a proxy measure for most sports, but it can be extremely important for boxing and weight lifting. What you weigh and your percentage of muscle are critical for indicating your performance and readiness to compete.
When assessing your body fat composition, check your fat levels around your organs. This so-called visceral fat affects fitness more than fat stored under the skin’s surface, so getting it down further is critical for overall health and well-being.
Higher Energy Levels
Ideally, you should also feel higher energy levels when you reach peak fitness. Your body should be spritely and athletic, not slow and lethargic.
Many athletes can almost sense it when they peak because they get the feeling they could take on the world. Challenges seem lower to them, allowing them to dominate their sports or events.
However, excessive training and effort can lead to the opposite sensation. That’s why it is so critical to train with care. Athletes who don’t get this step right can fall into the overtraining trap, reducing their performance when it matters.
So, if you find you have higher energy levels, commit to sustained rest. Make sure you’re treating your body well and giving yourself time off to ensure you reduce the risk of injury.
Better Overall Well-Being
Finally, you can often tell you’ve reached peak fitness when your overall well-being peaks. If you’re feeling great, it’s often a surefire sign that you’re ready to compete or take on difficult physical challenges.
It’s hard to describe this energy, but again, you should be able to feel it when it comes. Usually, it happens when you’ve been training hard but are also resting well and maintaining your weight.
Wrapping Up
Figuring out whether you’ve reached peak fitness often requires exploring a variety of measures. Putting them together will usually tell you if you’re doing better than in previous years, especially if they are pointing in the right direction when combined.
Of course, you won’t always know automatically if you’re succeeding. However, you can rely on how you feel and metrics in training, like personal bests. These tell you if you are progressing and at how high a rate.
Just remember that if you do attempt to reach peak fitness, take precautions. When you push your body to the limit, injury becomes increasingly likely. When running, for instance, switch to cycling or rowing occasionally to give your shins and feet a rest. Similarly, if you are weight training, look for ways to boost the intensity without necessarily increasing the weight.