For many people, workouts can be scary, intimidating, or seem downright impossible. Oftentimes we come across movements that we can’t do, weights that are too heavy to lift, and things we’ve never done. A great skill to have is to learn the proper way to scale a movement or workout.
A great coach should be able to walk you through your options but that isn’t always the case. Or maybe you don’t have a coach and are just working out on your own. When it comes to scaling there are two major things to think about:
- intent
- intensity
Let’s break these down.
Intent:
What is the intent of the workout or the movement?
The first thing we need to understand is what the intention of the thing is that you want to scale. For instance, if a workout calls for a 100m sprint the intent of that movement is to fire your fast twitch muscle, give an all-out cardio burst, and go 0-100 as best you can.
If you saw that and decided to scale it to a 100m walk you would then be missing the intent of the movement. In this case, a better option would be a bike sprint, rower sprint, or sprinting a shorter distance such as 50m or 25m.
Sometimes we also need to look at the intent of the workout. Some workouts are designed for muscle fatigue, muscle endurance race, strength, or a mix. If you decide to scale the entire workout or do something different your goal should be to match the intent.
Intensity:
This is very similar to intent in the fact that you have to identify the intent first, choose your scaling option, and then you need to do your best to perform the movement or workout with the original intended intensity.
Something that often gets missed and why people don’t see the result they want from their workouts (once their nutrition is on point) is the intensity intended for the exercise or workout.
If you’re trying to grow muscle but only lift at 20% of your max on all your sets you are missing the intended intensity and won’t see the results you want. If you scale a movement or workout you still have to keep the intensity.
I hope these two things help you next time you have to scale something. There is nothing wrong with scaling. In fact, I wish more people were humble and scaled their workouts appropriately so that they could start seeing the results they want!
