“Everything works, for about 6 weeks.”
~ Dan John

Training age doesn’t have anything to do with your biological age. It’s a reference to how much of your genetic potential has been actualized. What percent of your capability have you actually produced? This is maturity as an athlete.

Percentile definitions are somewhat arbitrary, but you can generally find approximate benchmarks at 2, 5, and 10 years.

What this looks like in practice is that within the first two years of focused, specific, and consistent training you will see tremendous gains. The stimulus you’re adapting to — whether it’s running, wrestling, or lifting weights — is still novel and there’s a lot of “adaptation potential” to capitalize on.

In jiu jitsu terms, we might call this a “blue belt” level of skill; a denotation that one is clearly not a novice any more, and has put in sufficient time to build a solid foundation.

By the fifth year the magnitude of monthly gains has probably tapered off and you’re thinking of things in terms of “macro-cycles” or seasons. At this “purple belt” stage, if someone worth noting hasn’t told you you’re world caliber, you’re probably not going to make it.

That certainly doesn’t mean that you can’t pursue a lifetime of enjoyment and improvement. It just means that most of your “adaptation potential” has already been converted to achieved skill.

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Then there’s the nebulous 10 years or 10,000 “black belt” reference point. Probably the most significant denotation here isn’t indicated by outward achievement, but the implication that those years and hours have come at the expense and exclusion of something else. This warrants much respect.

Obviously, we have to survive a given endeavor long enough to get to that point. After all, respect is earned. There is no “proof of stake” in the real world — as social media would have you believe. “Proof of work” is the only valid “consensus mechanism” that demands respect.

Actions over ideals. Facts over feelings.

For the first two years of training, just about anything will make you better, so long as you’re focusing on the thing you want to get better at.

These overarching concepts apply to short-term vs. long-term training intervals as well — regarding both physical fitness and skill acquisition like grappling.

In my own (fitness) training, I’ve seen this take root in about 4-week intervals. When I start a novel training program, it takes me about 4 weeks to “calibrate” to the new program and realize what kind of volume I can tolerate.

In a sense, this is learning my “work capacity” or the amount of training I can productively recover from without “overtraining.”

It also means that I can push myself really hard for about 4 weeks and by that point I need to figure out if I’m going to risk “breaking” in the two weeks after, or temper things to continue building for a total 12-week program.

Specific to grappling, it’s inefficient to have absolutely no class curriculum and have every week be an ad hoc class that has no context week-to-week.

On the flip side, attention span, interest, and efficacy all have time limits.

Just like risking physical injury by pushing to hard, for too long, in the same direction, we risk plateaus and eventually injury.

When it comes to grappling curriculums an arbitrary rotation (e.g. “this month we’re working on…”) doesn’t address individual learning styles and skill levels. Think of the difference in how a first-month vs. second-year vs. fifth-year students absorb and implement new skills.

Conversely, belaboring a point (technique / series) beyond one’s short term capacity to learn and digest the information is just as overwhelmingly useless to them.

I say all of this to remind folks that “noob gains” — the pre-two-year mark — are a good thing. Being a “novice” in terms of training age is a good thing. It means that you still have a lot of potential that can be developed.

However, at some point, if we want a greater return on our investment we have to dig deeper and risk more than trivial 30-day or 6-week challenge.

In all kinds of fields people tend to overestimate what they can accomplish in the short term and underestimate what they can accomplish in the long term. Why? It feels good and exciting to think about the end now.

It’s much easier to “see” the 10 lbs you lost on your 30-day challenge. It’s entirely different to envision and embrace the struggle to continue that progress for 12 weeks and maintain that accomplishment for the next 10 years.

The only way to “get good” at something is to be bad at it first. In this sense we need the trial (and frequent) error of our novice training age. We also need those short-term wins to build confidence and renew our commitment to the long-term process.

Alas, noteworthy careers, accolades, and meaningful experiences aren’t just the sum of a lifetime of 6-week sprints. Do the hard thing. Don’t quit.

Savage Zen Athletics

Noob Gains and Training Age