Exercise programming for idiots

OK, you’re not an idiot not as much as me anyway. But, I want to explain a really simple template for programming your workouts. It’s super easy to over complicate these things, so this blog is going to be a basic step by step guide on how to put together your own training plans, why you should program it that way and also how a trainer can involve their clients in the process.

SMART Goals

First off, you need to understand your goals. I mean, if you want to enter a bodybuilding competition and you’re running 20k per day you’re going to look shit on stage aren’t you? So, when it comes to deciding on exercise goals use the SMART template. This video explains more:

Enjoy that? Good. So, essentially you have to know what it is you want to achieve, why that’s important to you and then you reverse engineer the process. The process goals are the actions you have to take in order to reach the desired outcome. Easy right?

Strength or Hypertrophy?

Do you want to get stronger or bigger? Sure, if you get stronger you WILL get bigger but the more specific your training is to the goal the better the results. That sounds obvious, but you’d be surprised how many people don’t seem to get that.

There are a few factors you need to take into account but before I break that down, be honest with yourself (or have your client be honest). Are you saying you want to be stronger but really you want to be bigger? It’s important to define that goal and important to set your expectation realistically. The newer you are the more impressive your results will be. The longer you’ve been training the smaller the results and the longer you will have to keep going in order to get the outcome you want.

Hypertophy training

I’m putting this one first because most people want bigger muscles. To do this you need to take the total training volume into account. Volume is intensity (weight) x reps x sets. But this doesn’t mean that you lift as much as you can as often as you can because you still need to allow your muscles to recover and adapt.

When it comes to this kind of stuff there’s two researchers I rely on (there’s more but for simplicities sake I’ll mention these two) Eric Helms, who Pyramid book helped me to understand these principles and Brad Schoenfeld, who’s authored a number of studies on the topic. Because these two experts have done their due diligence they are in agreement with each other. It’s funny that isn’t it? Those who do the research agree, as opposed to those who choose to ignore it. I’ll side with the clever scientists, not the biased lunatics thank you very much. But I digress.

Schoenfeld identified intensity levels of around 75% of the one rep max and rep ranges of 8-12 being optimal for creating the adaptations needed to cause hypertrophy – there’s that word again! It means muscle growth, by the way. Ideally 4 set of 8-12 but if you aim for a minimum of 40 reps per set and at least 80 reps per week on a given muscle group you should good to go (1,2) those are beginners ranges you can go up to about 210 reps per week for elite lifters. No, you don’t have to go heavy to build muscle, you can get similar effects from low load versus high load training methods (3). But you do need to go heavy to build maximal strength, more on that in a bit.

Strength training

First off, to be developing maximal strength you need to be lifting heavy weight, like above 85% of your 1 rep max for the most part. Therefore, it necessary to perform lower rep ranges. Typical sets and rep ranges for novice strength athletes are 3×5 to 5×5 or 3×3 to 5×3. This is because lifting heavier weights is far more taxing on your central nervous system than moderate weights at higher reps. Basically, it requires a lot more effort and creates a lot more fatigue using near maximal efforts. The key variable to focus on with max strength work is progressive overload. This is a continual and gradual increase in the amount of weight being lifted.

Although actual volume is less important for strength development than overload a good volume range to focus on for the novice strength athlete is 15-25 total reps per lift.

Rest intervals

As I mentioned earlier, recovery is very important. Your muscles require fuel sources called Adenosine Triphosphate and Creatine Phosphate. These occur naturally but they take time to replenish. Therefore, you need to rest between sets to allow this fuel tank to top up. It takes about a minute for the muscles to refill but the harder the effort the longer it takes to recover. 60-90 seconds is generally enough (1). But, the more you weight you lift the longer you can rest, ideally between 2 and 5 minutes. Less intense lower load efforts, like some of your accessory lifts may only require 30 seconds to recover.

But, as important as it is to rest your muscles between sets, it’s as important to rest between workouts. Ideally, muscle groups need 24-48 hours to recover (1,2) and this is often not done by newbies who think that more is better. But, what will happen if you keep pounding the same muscles groups day after day is that fatigue will set it, exhaustion will set in, injury likelihood increases and your CNS crashes. Have you ever done back to back gym sessions for a week and then got to the end of the week and all you want to do is stay in bed eating ice cream and feeling sorry for yourself? That’s exercise induced burn-out. Don’t do that.

The way to avoid this is to not train the same muscle groups on consecutive days. Make sure that you are eating correctly – this means calculating your Calories based on your body mass and activity, eating a meaningful amount of protein and carbohydrates and being well hydrated. Lastly, you need to be sleeping well if you want to recover and perform at your best. To go into the health factors of sleep deprivation would be a whole blog in itself. instead, read this article from examine.com. In short, not only do your muscles repair and adapt while you sleep but wakefulness is directly associated with increased fat mass and decreased lean mass. In other words, being a stressed-out insomniac will make you fat and weak.

A simple template for exercise selection

OK, that’s all the technical stuff out the way. I don’t want this to be too overblown and wordy without lending you the practical advice you deserve. For the purpose of this model and keeping things simple we are going to discard isolation exercises. Not because they are bad but because you need to know the specifics of what and why you are isolating a particular muscle. Bodybuilders use it to develop symmetry, but they have taken years (and lots of steroids) to get their physique to that level of specificity. I use isolation exercises with clients to address asymmetries and weakness as part of an injury rehab or posture correction phase. But this is the 5%, the icing on the cake and we are keeping this simple, more bang for your buck, etc.

Exercise specificity is important but, let’s face it, following a very strict periodized training plan for anyone who isn’t an elite athlete can be very dull and repetitive. I’m not into the whole muscle confusion malarkey but I do feel that for most recreationally active people that, so long as your training mode is specific to your goal and that you train at consistent times there is scope for exercise variation to keep things interesting one week to the next. For example, in my own training right now my goal is to maintain strength and mobility. That’s not a very specific goal so I don’t need a very specific periodized training plan. I decide on the day which exercises I am going to use based on the movement patterns I am training that day.

Movement patterns

I covered this in an earlier blog HERE there are 7 primary movement patterns:

1. Locomotion
2. Squat
3. Hinge
4. Push
5. Pull
6. Rotation
7. Anti-Rotation

Personally, I tend to incorporate all of these during an entire workout from warm-up to cool down. But, I like to keep things simple and break it down further to the Dan John model:

1. Squat
2. Hinge
3. Push
4. Pull
5. Loaded Carries

This just makes programming easier. Bear in mind this is with an eye more on functional strength and athleticism than aesthetics, but if you follow this template in your workouts and choose the correct intensity/volume for your goals you will still get a great physique. Furthermore, because I’m sure you’re asking already, this doesn’t mean that you can only use 5 exercises per workout, just use the desired amount of exercises depending on what your goals are. For example, you could include 2 or 3 squat pattern exercises if leg strength and power is necessary for your goals.

Here’s some exercise examples to make this clearer for you:

• Squat: back squats, goblet squats, leg press, lunges
• Hinge: deadlift, Romanian deadlift, kettlebell swings, good mornings
• Push: press-ups, chest press, bench press, overhead press
• Pull: chin ups, Lat pulldowns, seated row, bent over row
• Loaded carries: farmer walks, suitcase carries, waiter carries, front loaded carries.

Sometimes I use this template with a client to choose their own workout.

I wouldn’t do this with a new client or someone who doesn’t have a year or two training experience under their belt and I will ensure that the client has a good understanding of form and technique and knows which movements will exacerbate any existing injuries or other issues.

We’ll do a specific 10-15 minutes warm-up that works on specific mobility and any asymmetries and muscle engagement issues they have. Then we’ll decide the main body of exercise between us, include an additional finisher and then 5 minutes of mobility to close the session out. This way, the client feels more involved in their own progress, they get to learn more about exercise programming and they can’t blame me the next day when DOMS sets in.

To be clear, if you try this with a client, ask them to name a squat pattern that they want to do and they say “Press-Ups” then you know this style of training is too advanced for that client.

Lastly, I often simplify this whole system down even further to just push and pull. That’s not to say that I don’t include squat or hinge patterns, I just categorise squats as a push and hinges as a pull. This just simplifies the whole process and declutters my head. That’s a good thing because then I can program a workout and still have some space left over for equally important stuff like Movie trivia. For example; did you know that Clint Eastwood was originally considered for the role of Macready in John Carpenter’s The Thing?

So, there you have it. A simple template for creating your own workouts. If you need something more specific or require some external accountability drop me a line and ask about online coaching.

Coach Troy

 

References

1. Schoenfeld, BJ. The mechanisms of muscle hypertrophy and their application to resistance training. J Strength Cond Res 24(10): 2857–2872, 2010
2. Helms, E. (2015). The Muscle and Strength Pyramid. 1st ed. self.
3. Schoenfeld, B., Grgic, J., Ogborn, D. and Krieger, J. (2017). Strength and Hypertrophy Adaptations Between Low- vs. High-Load Resistance Training. Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, 31(12), pp.3508-3523.