Welcome to the Choose Hard podcast, the one and only
fitness and nutrition podcast that goes way beyond just
training and nutrition and helps you choose hard and transform
your body and your mind. I'm your host, Cody Mcbroom, and
today we are going to dive into training principles for body
transformation. So today's going to be the five.
I would call them pillars of program design.
These are five things that are unbelievably important when it
comes to ensuring you have a program that is built and
designed to actually get you results.
There is so many people that follow programs that aren't even
programs they are training. Plans that are just a list of
exercises. They're not.
It's literally like, what do you feel like doing the gym?
Let's just go have fun. Let's go use some machines.
Let's get a sweat. It's training without direction.
And so if you're somebody who wants to train with a purpose,
you want to train with a specific direction, and most of
all, you want to do those things in an intentional way that
actually leads you to the destination.
You're after it. Takes you to the result.
You are chasing the goal that you really want to achieve.
This podcast is for you, and I'm going to try to boil down these
five principles in such a simple and streamlined way that you can
literally take this podcast. You can go create a program
based on what you hear, or you can use this as a filter against
what you're doing in the gym against the plan you're
following and ensure that you are doing the right things in
the right way to get you to the right goal.
So let's dive in the five principles that I'm going to
touch on today. And I'm going to run these
quickly and then I'm going to break each one down
individually. The five principles are simple
movement patterns, is #1 #2 is volume ranges #3 is progression
methods #4 is individualized exercise selection.
And the final one is having fun. It's it's literally, and I would
say, you know, in a funny way, this is how we make America fit
again. And quite literally, because if
we're not having fun in the gym, we're not going to stay in the
gym. And if we don't stay in the gym,
we're not going to be fit. We're not going to be healthy.
We're not going to get bigger, we're not going to get leaner.
That it's just plain and simple. The only way to ensure that we
have consistency over the long haul is if we find a way to
enjoy the gym. Now, if you are feeling good in
your movements, if you are choosing the right exercises for
your body, if you are doing the right amount of volume, if
you're doing all these things I talk about today, you're going
to get results. And at the end of the day,
results are fun. Getting results is fun.
So even if there's parts of the process that suck, welcome to
the club. Everybody who is chasing a goal
in the beginning, it just sucks. Like that's just part of the
game. That's part of the game for
success in anything. So whatever goal you are
chasing, there's going to be parts of it that aren't fun.
There's going to be parts of it that are stressful that are
taxing and fatiguing and and and grueling and, and can.
Feel like a lot of work, but if it leads you to a result that
you really really want. And that part is fun.
So just hang with it, keep going, and you'll have fun.
Now, the other side of it is I think there's a lot of ways to
make things fun within the program.
Like if you're doing an exercise that you just hate and it takes
all the fun out of the workout plan, stop doing that exercise
'cause I promise you there's other exercises.
In fact, I'm going to give you a rubric essentially that allows
you to individualize exercise selection.
And if you just follow that guide or that rubric that I'm
going to give you, you can find a different exercise that's
going to give you just as great of results without you having to
do something you hate doing and not having fun doing it.
OK, so all right, going into the first one, movement patterns.
So in order to maximize movement capacity, we need to maximize
neural and muscular capacity. And, and what I mean by this is
like, you can't just do one part of this.
If you are somebody who is chasing muscle growth, you can't
only train with bodybuilding style training.
You can't only do pump work. You can't only do my muscle
connection work. You have to do some kind of
strength work too. You have to do some kind of
mobility and flexibility. You have to be explosive.
You have to train these different intensities and
systems. Otherwise your body's not going
to work well in synergy. And that part is really, really
important. And so I have this in front of
me and it says movement, and then it says nervous system
control. Muscular system manipulates
skeletal system. And what that means is that your
nervous system controls your muscular system, and your
muscular system manipulates the skeletal system.
And if you understand this, you can understand why everything is
so important. Your nervous system is the it's
in an easy way of describing this.
This is how your brain connects to the muscles, right?
This is how your brain, which is, let's say this is the
computer, this is the nervous system, sends a signal to
control the muscular system. And then by control, I mean
contract. It's going to contract and fire
your muscles in a certain way. And when you contract or fire
your muscles, it manipulates the skeletal system, which is your
joints. So if my brain tells my bicep to
flex, my elbow bends, Really simple.
Same thing with your quads and your knees, your hips and your
quads for your for your hip joint, your glutes and your
quads. For your hips, I should say your
core for your spine. Like if we can develop each of
these systems, we can avoid injury, we can build more
muscle, we can get stronger, we can be more athletic and
explosive. It's so unbelievable.
This is why when I train people for purely just muscle growth, a
lot of times I still do incorporate some kind of
explosive movement or some kind of heavy lifting.
And if it's not in their weekly routine, then I might integrate
it every once in awhile. There's times where I'm going
into a bodybuilding prep with somebody and I might not include
it on a weekly basis because it's very taxing and we're
dieting really hard, doing a lot of cardio.
Like we don't want to just keep. Adding things on their plate.
But if somebody's in their offseason, if somebody's just a
general person trying to build muscle and get lean, you bet
you're going to be doing some explosive movements followed by
some heavier lifting, then followed by the bodybuilding
stuff that they that's going to lead them to our primary goal
'cause you're going to get more out of the bodybuilding work if
you start with the other two. And it's because your body needs
to work in synergy with each other, all these different
systems. OK.
And so knowing that we have. 5 main movement patterns that the
training program needs to include.
So we understand that there's the nervous system, the muscular
system, and the skeletal system. So we need to be able to connect
these three, basically the brain, the muscle and the the
joints. Then we need to look at the
movement patterns that all exercises stem from.
I shouldn't say all exercises the primary exercises stem from.
There's going to be some isolation exercises that don't
fall into these categories. Like a lateral raise is actually
going to be shoulder abduction, and you're going to have
shoulder abduction in a pushing movement, but you're not going
to be pushing anything when you're doing a lateral raise.
What I mean by that is when you're doing a bench press,
you're pressing horizontally. But if you actually look at the
shoulder joint, you are working in shoulder abduction, your
shoulders coming outward. But if you're doing a lateral
raise, you're not pressing anything, You're just doing a
lateral raise. It's just isolated shoulder
abduction, right? Same thing with knee flexion.
Knee flexion is going to be involved in a squat.
But we're gonna just talk about the squat, not knee flexion,
because knee flexion in an isolated sense is like a leg
extension. You don't need it.
OK, So when we think of these movement patterns, I'm gonna
talk about right now. These are the primary movement
patterns that your training program must contain.
So we have the different energy systems or the different systems
of the body, nervous system, muscular system, skeletal joint
system. Then we have the movement
patterns push, pull, hitch, hip hinge, squat, and core.
Core is not a movement, but follow me, push is going to be
anything that is pressing weight.
You can be pressing overhead, you can be pressing
horizontally. I'm going to recommend for the
push and the second one pull, which is the same thing as a row
we're talking about. Horizontal first.
This is where it gets a little bit more complex.
I would say Step 1 is just understanding push, pull, hinge,
squat, core. You do those, you're good.
I don't care if you're doing a horizontal push or vertical
push. Like are you pushing something
great? Are you pulling something great?
Are you squatting great? Are you hip hinging, RDL, hip
dash, deadlift? Great.
You doing something for your core?
Ideally a carry or some kind of plank variation.
Those are going to be the most functional and probably useful
core exercises for for day-to-day function.
Not the best part of per trophy, but again, we're talking
primary. Step one is primary movements
for for life, for function, for athleticism and just the
baseline foundation of fitness. Then we go into level 2.
Now we're talking, I would say push, row, press, pull and we
could look at, you know, and this is just opinion and
semantics. I consider this is always to be
interesting for people. I wish I could talk to the
person listen this, but it'd be interesting for to hear your
thoughts. When you think of push, do you
think of like a horizontal, like a chest press or do you think of
a overhead press? I think of a bench press, a
push. I feel like I'm pushing in front
of me. Maybe it's 'cause you push
somebody over, it's, it's horizontal, it's in front of
you. And when I think of press, I
think of overhead. And so as you, as you, if you
could pay attention to how I said it, I said push row, then
press pull. Because I look at a row as a
horizontal and a pull as a pull down like a vertical pull.
And so it's more important to stay in the horizontal movement
plane than it is the vertical movement plane.
And so I'm going to program somebody a row before I do a
pull down or a push before I do a press because it is going to
require less shoulder mobility and extension.
And most people do not have the the best shoulder mobility.
A lot of people have bad posture, so on and so forth.
It's also more commonly, it's more common to see that people
can easily activate the muscles better in a horizontal movement
plane. So.
Level 2 is kind of taking these, you know, push, pull, hip hinge,
squat and core into a more, I would say diverse and expanded
set of movements. So we have push, pull, hinge,
squat, core for level 1. Level 2 we have push, row,
press, pull, hip, hinge, squat, lunge.
Core. So the core is still going to be
something functional for your core, but I added a second squat
pattern. Technically a lunge could be a
squat pattern, but it can be hip dominant, it can be knee
dominant. The point is you should be doing
something unilateral. So level 2, we're going a step
further with these movement patterns and then level. 3 is
where. We add isolation and movements
for hypertrophy, muscle growth and that's going to be shoulder
abduction, it's going to be hip extension inflection for the
glutes and stuff like that. OK.
And so, you know, to apply what I'm talking about here, the
application of this is number 1, you got to make sure that your
training, the program includes each of the five primary
movement patterns throughout the week.
OK, so throughout the week you should be seeing push, pull, hip
hinge, squat and something for your core every week, no matter
what. I don't care what your goal is,
strength, muscle growth, fat loss, endurance, like anything,
if you are training your body, you should be doing these five
fundamental movement patterns. You need to include at least 50%
more pulling than pressing unless you're in a
specialization phase. And what I mean by that is if I
have, for example, 10 sets of pushing and pressing movements,
whether it's overhead or it's horizontal, I need to do 15 or
more sets per week of pulling and rowing.
So I'm going to do 50% more pulling and rowing movements and
I am pushing and pressing movements.
And the reason for that is really just about shoulder
health. Your shoulders are going to be
much healthier if you develop the muscles in the back.
And also your back has some of the biggest musculature in the
body, especially for men. Women, your biggest musculature
is probably going to be on your lower body.
Men, it's both lower body and your back, but like for the
upper body, your back carries the majority of your muscles.
And so it's really important for shoulder health and for overall
strength that carries over into these other compound lifts and
movement patterns and body parts #3 incorporate unilateral
exercises in each training session, but not at the expense
of bilateral exercises unless you are injury prone.
And So what this means is that you should be doing some kind of
single leg movement in every session, single leg or single
arm. So if I'm doing upper body day,
I need to have at least one movement or exercise that is a
single arm movement, whether it's a one arm pull down, A1 arm
row, A1 arm bench press, A1 arm overhead press, even a curl, you
know, 1/2 feeling landmine press, anything.
We want to have at least one unilateral movement per session.
You can have more than that for sure.
And sometimes it's really smart to do more than that.
But we don't want to remove bilateral because you should be
also able to do regular 2 legged movements, a regular squat, a
regular hinge, a regular press, a regular row, and we want our
left and right sides to work together.
However, sometimes there are cases where I will remove almost
all bilateral movements if we have an injury.
So for example, mostly with a low back injury, somebody has a
back injury, I'm going to be doing a lot of single leg work
because it reduces the weight on the hips and spine dramatically.
OK. And then the last thing is just
regardless of your goal, train each primary focus, the nervous
system, the muscular system and the joint skeletal system.
And the way I look at this is explode, lift and move.
If you be explosive, whether it's a jump or a jam ball throw
or like an explosive press, you're going to be training your
nervous system predominantly explosive work and really low
Rep strength development. So strength to power development
specifically trains your nervous system more than anything lifts,
you know, we want to overload the muscular system that's going
to train your muscular system and then move, just focus on
movement quality and in big ranges of motion and flexibility
and stuff like that. Because that's going to train
your skeletal system as well as your muscular system, of course.
But you're going to get the most out of your joints in the ranges
of motion that you can do when you really focus on move.
So explode, lift, move. And so that's the application of
step one, which is just the movements in general, right,
movement patterns. The second thing in the five
principles is your volume ranges and really just understanding
how much volume you actually need in the gym.
And in my experience, most people need more volume to build
muscle and transform their body than they realize.
Most people think they can get away with not doing so much.
And a lot of times people take poor advice about volume from
honestly, really advanced trainees who call themselves
trainers. They could be a trainer.
However, they've been training themselves for a really long
time, and most likely they already have very mature
musculature, meaning they have a lot of muscle in their body #2
they're probably really strong. So their loads are really high.
And if your load is really high, even if your reps are low, your
total volume is still really high.
Your sets times reps, times load.
It goes up because you're lifting a lot of weight and you
can't. Do a lot of weight and a lot of
reps all the and a lot of sets all the time.
It just doesn't work. So they're talking about their
own experience with that, right? And #3 they've been in the gym
for so long that their joints are banged up.
So if you've been in the gym for 30 years and you're freakishly
strong and you're, you know, advanced in the gym and you can
fire your muscles really well, you don't need as much sets
because you can activate your muscles better.
You're advanced. You've been in the gym for so
long that you've got to be careful of aches and pains.
And on top of all of that, you're strong enough to where
your total tonnage volume is so high regardless of the amount of
volume you do on paper that you can get away with less volume.
I mean, not to mention when you're really advanced, you're
not really growing much anymore anyway.
So somebody will talk about how you don't need much volume, but
it's like you're just maintaining, right?
There's a lot of really, really advanced influencers, like gym
goers that are influencers and they're telling people to not do
a ton of volume, not do a bunch of stuff.
And meanwhile they're not, they haven't changed their physique
in years. They're doing the same stuff
because they're just maintaining what they built years ago,
right? And I think that's terrible.
That's a terrible point of view or person to take advice from
because you're trying to create a transformation.
So first let's define volume. So volume is going to be the
total tonnage or sets performed. So like the the key definition
of volume is going to be tonnage sets, times reps times sets.
We usually track this on a weekly basis or on a per
exercise basis. So your bench press has a total
tonnage this week. You know 4 * 10 * 200 lbs equals
blank. That's your tonnage for today
because you did four sets of 10 with 200 lbs at the end of the
week. You can calculate all your sets
for the chest and you can really look at your total volume, your
set volume throughout the week. That's another way to look at
it. But total tonnage and sets are
typically the two ways we define volume and look at volume.
From a metric to measure intensity is going to be the.
Total load on the bar. It's not to be confused with
effort, which is how hard you are training and how close to
failure you're getting. And then frequency is how often
you train a muscle group or movement pattern.
So if I'm doing a high frequency for powerlifting, I'm going to
look at movements, bench press, and how many times a week I'm
bench pressing. If I'm looking at hypertrophy
and trying to build muscle, I'm looking at the bench press from
a chest perspective. I don't care if it's a barbell,
A Smith machine, a dumbbell, or it's a.
Family push up anything that involves your chest.
How many sets per week am I doing for that volume wise and
the frequency, how often am I training the chest right?
Those are the three main terms we need to understand when we're
looking at volume. I'm not going to dive deep into
intensity and frequency because right now we're really trying to
talk about transforming your physique.
And although intensity is important, it's the load on the
bar is less important than your effort, how close to failure you
get and how much total work you're doing in the gym volume,
because the effort you are creating.
And I guess the load is going to be important too, because you
should have a load that is going to match your, your, the
required effort. You know your RIR reps reserve,
which I'll get to in a SEC because that's going to lead you
to reaching a point that's close to failure and that's going to
stimulate maximal muscular tension when we reach a point of
maximal mechanical tension which.
Is what they call tension on the muscle.
Mechanical tension is what creates hypertrogen.
It's what causes your muscles to grow.
The volume is how much of it we do.
OK, so mechanical tension is a true driver of muscle growth,
right? And this is just a tension
applied to the muscle during an exercise.
Tension applied to a full range of motion is the next level of
this. And this is really, really
important because range of motion being full, a really good
long full range of motion encourages the lengthened
portion of a movement. So for example, a squat, that is
the bottom range. When you get to the very bottom
of a squat and your knee is at maximum flexion, your hips at
maximum function, we're going to stretch the glutes in the quads
as much as possible under load. You have a bar on your back
that's going to lead to the most growth and mainly muscular,
easier on CNS and joints than pure strength.
So for example, your nervous system is going to be involved.
Your skeletal system's obviously going to be involved, but the
main system we're working here is muscular, which is obvious.
If we're focus on hypertrophy, build a muscle, then of course
the main thing we're going to be training is the muscular system.
And then volume is the metric to track tension.
So it can be tracked by sets per muscle group per week or sets
times, reps times load, which is tonnage, like I said before.
But the main point is that, you know, mechanical tension is the
thing that causes hypertrophy. Volume is just the thing that
helps us measure. That's how we measure how much
mechanical tension we're creating in our training.
And then we want to split up our volume in thirds.
So if our main goal is strength and 2/3 of our training should
be strength, if our main goal is hypertrophy, which is mainly
what we're talking about when we're thinking of a
transformation, we're looking at fat loss in muscle growth,
either of which we're going to train for muscle growth.
And that's what this podcast is about 2/3 of our training volume
should be 4 hypertrophy, which means probably in the 8 to 12
Rep range and then some in the 15 to 20.
We don't need to be hitting sets of three and such.
Maybe if we're doing some explosive work in the beginning
like a speed bench before going into chest day or a explosive
chest throw with a ball with a lightweight ball.
So we can be explosive, which is just going to set us up for
success in the movement patterns that we want to overload in.
But nonetheless, the point is that 2/3 of our training should
always be geared towards the main focus that we're after, OK,
with frequency, you know, studies show two to three times
per week is going to be most optimal.
And the point is, is we don't want to just hit a muscle once a
week. It gives us too much time
between sessions before we, you know, create tension on that
muscle again. And so in order to simulate
maximal tension, we actually want to limit how much we do in
a single session on that muscle, which again, I'm going to talk
about here in a SEC. Because if we do too much, we
have dimension returns, but we want enough to stimulate maximal
tension and keep loads and reps in in reaching close to failure
as high as possible. We all know that if you know, if
you do like 4 different exercises of hamstrings, by the
third one, your hamstrings are smoked and you're not really
lifting heavy. You're not able to go through a
good full range of motion because your your form is
breaking down. So we actually want to do less
in that session so that we can do more with less.
Meaning we do more weight, more reps, get closer to failure in
the few sets we do in the few exercises as we do on that
session, and then recover after a couple days and do the
hamstrings again. So rather than training them
once a week and trying to just demolish them, we actually will
get further ahead by doing them twice a week or maybe even three
times a week, depending on the muscle.
It's a smaller muscle because we can recover faster than we would
if we were just doing once a week.
And then of course, you know, strength is a learned skill.
It's mostly neurological. So we want to probably train if,
if strength is goal, like I said, powerlifting, you know,
bench press squad, we probably want to train that, you know,
three times a week because it's like throwing a baseball.
If we're going to be a great baseball pitcher, you don't just
throw the baseball once a week. You throw the baseball numerous
times a week because you want to get that repetitive movement in
and that motion in and connect the brain to your your
mechanics. So you get great at throwing the
baseball that way. So per session volume is
something really important. This is what I was referring to
with diminishing returns in a single session.
And so if we look at this graph, if you're watching on YouTube, I
have a graph on the screen right now.
If you're on Spotify or Apple, go subscribe to the YouTube
channel so you can see these. But essentially we have this
graph and it shows one to two sets.
So the bottom row is sets per session per muscle group.
And then the right is just hypertrophy.
So how high this this line goes on this this graph is basically
how much hypertrophy we're going to get.
And as you can see, we have, you know, one to two sets, one to
three sets per muscle per session.
And we're going to have a lower stimulus.
And as we go from like 1 to 3 all the way up to four to six
sets in a single session for a muscle group.
And so I'm talking again, like let's say chest, for example, if
I do one to three sets, so let's say one set or even three sets
of chest work, that's a low stimulus.
So we're not going to get a ton of growth from that.
If we do anywhere between 4:00 to six sets at a single session,
which could be three sets of bench, three sets of flies,
we're going to have a moderate stimulus.
We're going to get more when we reach close to 7:00 to 9:00.
So this is our seven to 10, so 7-8 or even up to 10 sets and a
single muscle group in a single session.
So that would be like 4 sets of bench and three sets of chest
flies. And then let's say like two to
three sets of push ups as a finisher or some kind of
dumbbell press or a cable press or something as a finisher
reaching, you know, 8-9 or 10 total sets of hitting the
muscle. We're going to maximize that
most likely in that 8:00 to 9:00.
After. 10, it's the tipping point.
So 10 is the tipping point. When we go beyond ten sets in a
single session for muscle, we're going to see a diminishing
return. And the reason we see a
diminishing return is because they see that muscle protein
synthesis starts to drop off. There's also the fact that it's
a diminishing return because when you get beyond tensets, you
can't lift heavy, you can't lift hard, you usually can't lift
with good form. So it's unlikely you're going to
have a good quality training. You're probably going to have
junk volume at that point, but when we get to about 10, we need
to just know that we're going to be at a tipping point.
So you could do like for the, again, chess as the example,
five sets of bench press and five sets of chess flies.
I have a program in the tailored trainer that is called 4 day
physique. I believe it's a men's program.
It's great and it's literally it's a push, pull legs, upper
body program. And you'll see on a push day,
you go five sets of bench, five sets of flies, five sets of
military press, 5 sets of lateral raises.
It is about as simple and black and white as you get 4
exercises, 2 muscle groups, five sets each.
You're maximizing going to the highest amount of sets in a
single session that you can go and still stimulate growth.
And then you're backing off and go to the next muscle, right?
And so, and these are working sets.
So obviously if you got to do a couple warm up sets, don't worry
about those. But the point is, is that that's
going to be the maximum we can get.
And so more is not always better, but minimal is not good.
So when people say you want a low volume training program for
muscle growth, they are literally not only wrong based
on anecdotal experience of anybody I've ever worked with,
but they're also wrong from a point of how the mechanisms of
hypertrophy work from a scientific lens.
Mechanical tension placed on a muscle and doing more of that
leading to more growth. You can only do so much in a low
volume program. But on top of that, we also have
the fact that every single research study done on muscle
growth shows higher amounts of volume, which is more mechanical
tension place on a muscle in a single week is better.
And so we know that the tipping point is 10.
So we want to stay in that say, let's just say for easy math for
everybody from a beginner to an advanced lifter, anywhere
between 5:00 and 10:00 sets for a muscle group on a single
session and then you want to move on, OK.
And then when we look at this from a per week perspective,
it's more of a bell curve. It's a little bit different.
So if you're watching this, you can see it.
But if you're not, I have volume on the left side and I have
experience level on the bottom. And we'll see newbie on the far
left, advance on the far right. So the further you go on this
bottoms, the the bottom of this graph, the more advanced you get
in your experience. And we'll see we have 10 sets
per muscle group per week for volume for the newbie, 20 sets
for the intermediate because that's right in the middle.
It's why it goes up to 20 sets, which is probably the maximum
most people need, and then down to 10 sets for an advanced
lifter. So we actually go back down in
volume. Now, the reason I say this
relates to what I had mentioned earlier about what like some of
these old heads in the industry will say and tell people you
need less volume to build muscle.
No, you need less volume to. Recover enough to actually build
muscle. If you do too much volume you
get fatigue and can't recover. And recovery is where muscle
growth happens. But because this person is old
from a standpoint of years in the gym, experience in the gym,
I don't mean like literal age-old.
I mean, they got to be at least. I would say in their mid to late
30s, just because you have to have at least 20 years of
experience in the gym to really be able to say this.
But at a certain point you're not able to build as much muscle
because of age, obviously #2 you're too strong to do that.
You're gonna get hurt doing that much volume so you can place
more mechanical attention on the muscle by load and you don't
need to go as high in sets. And that's why it's a bell
curve. It goes back down as you get
more experienced and advanced and being able to activate fire
and maximally fatigue a muscle as well as lift really heavy
with good quality form because that comes with experience.
You can actually taper off your volume and do a little bit less
in the gym and still maximize results.
But for most people, we're going to be in that 10 to 20 range.
And that goes very well with the five to 10 range per session
because if you're a newbie, you can do five sets in one session,
five sets in another session for a single muscle group, that's
going to be 10 a week. If you're optimizing frequency,
which is 2 to three times a week, right?
So 2 * a week you're hitting a muscle, you do 5:00 and 5:00.
That's 10 total volume for the week.
That's perfect for somebody more intermediate to advance that
needs more volume. You do 10 sessions like I talked
about in that Pure Physique program in the Tailor trainer.
And then you do it again on the second push day, let's say of
the week or the second chest day, upper body day.
Now you have 20, somewhere in the 15 to 20 range.
And that's going to maximize hypertrophy.
So really, really cut and dry way of looking at volume.
And, and how we apply this is pretty simple.
Assess your current volume in the gym and increase it by 10 to
20%. Because most research has shown
that more volume leads to more growth.
But there was a few outlier research studies that showed
less volume. So doing low volumes actually
led to more growth. And the only way they were able
to rule this out was to actually take people's training program,
assess how much volume they were doing.
And instead of saying, OK, this is a high volume study,
everybody's doing 30 sets of chess this week, which is
they've done studies with 30 up to 40.
Instead, they said everybody's going to increase by ten, 1520%.
And so it's not the total amount of volume, but it's how much you
increase it. Because somebody at a newbie
stage doesn't need to go to 40 sets or 30 sets or 20 sets.
They need to just increase a little bit.
And so it can rule out the fact that at times, yes, there's
outliers, but also if you drop 40 sets per week on somebody who
is brand new, they're just going to be too fatigued, they can't
recover, right? Or they're training like a wimp
because it's too hard and they can't lift heavy and do that
much work and then they don't grow because they're not
recovering. So point being is assess your
current training and based on what research shows, increase
that by anywhere from 10 to 20% of total weekly volume and
you're going to see the best results as far as muscle growth
goes. Be cautious of volume loads by
constantly assessing joint health and overall fatigue.
When loads increase substantially, volume needs to
taper down accordingly. Meaning if you are paying
attention to how much you are lifting, as you get stronger and
you lift heavier and heavier and heavier, just be aware that you
might need to taper down your volume because you're getting to
a point where injury is like going to happen because you
can't have the volume dial and the intensity dial cranked way
up. And then prioritize a low
intensity, moderate frequency and high volume training
program. If your goal is primarily muscle
growth or I should say physique transformation progression
methods. So the third pillar or or
principle of this is progression methods.
And this one's pretty simple because obviously if you're not
progressing in the gym, you're not going to progress your
physique. We need to ensure that we are
getting stronger, that we are doing more training, that we are
doing harder training, that we are challenging our body.
It's this stress recovery stimulus that we are after, or I
should say stress adaptation stimulus.
So we need to stimulate the muscle with a stress which is
going to be overload, A weighted stretch, a heavier weight, more
reps, more volumes, something to stress the system in a way that
it has not yet been stressed before then.
We need to be able to recover from that so that we can adapt.
Right. And so if we're not doing that,
we're not going to grow. But the problem is, is that if
we do that and we recover and then we go back to the gym and
do the same exact thing we did last week, well, maybe it'll
work. But then if we do that again the
next week and the next week, we're not going to continue to
grow because we're not creating a new, harder, stronger, bigger,
more stressful stimulus for the body to adapt to.
It's not going to adapt to what it doesn't need to adapt to.
It's not going to adapt to what it's already adapted to from
before. So the ways we can progress are
pretty simple. Movement capacity.
So how you're loading the movement, movement variations
and stuff like that. Load progression.
So adding weight over time, volume progression, adding sets
per muscle group per week over time, volume, load progression.
This is where we're adding total tonnage.
So if we are doing 4 sets of 10 with 200 lbs, can we do four
sets of 10 with 205, right? Or can we do four sets of 11
with £200? That's going to lead to more
total tonnage because four times 10 * 200 is less than 4 * 11 *
200. It's a greater amount of total
tonnage that we are accomplishing split progression.
So adding days per week, which is just going to lead to more
volume, more mechanical tension density and work capacity.
So how many rounds or volume done within a certain time
duration. This is going to be great for
conditioning, but also it's, it's also going to be good for
your mitochondria, your capillaries, blood flows, things
like that. And then intervals, adding
intervals, duration endurance can be better for conditioning.
But the point is, if we look at all these really like movement
capacity, your ability to load at different move through
different ranges of motion, how you're loading it and adding
load over time, how you're adding sets over time, how
you're adding volume loads of total tonnage over time, split
progression, all these things really they're only going to
work as a form of progression to transform your physique if it is
leading to more mechanical tension placed on the muscle
over time. Which means your total tonnage
needs to go up. Your sets times, reps times
weight, the total amount of pounds that you move week to
week needs to go up in order to accomplish that.
It's why in the tailor trainer there's there's a total tonnage
tracker. So it actually shows you how
much total tonnage you're doing. It'll calculate your sets times
your reps for each exercise. And so it'll increase that and
show you how much total tonnage you are performing so that you
can ensure you're doing more of that 'cause that is the most
granular and detailed way to track your progressions and
track your volume of mechanical tension to ensure that you are
seeing progress from. The work you're doing in the
gym. In fact, we're actually working
on a feature in there, hopefully it'll be out soon, where you can
track this per muscle too. So you can click the lats and
it'll take all the lat based exercises and actually show you
how much total volume, total tons you're doing for the lats
in a given week. And that is going to be one of
the best ways to track because you can see how much total work
you are doing for the lats and ensure you're following what I'm
talking about here today accurately to lead to
progression if your goal was black growth.
So really a bit simple with that.
And the only other thing I would say for load or, or progression
method is just to understand there's, I like to look at this
from a four step process, especially with any beginner,
because you can't just start stacking weight, stacking sets
and so on and so forth. Because some people might be
listening being like, well, maybe I'm I'm recovering from
injury or, or I'm not great lifting in that way.
Like I can't do a bull grain split squat perfectly.
How am I supposed to add load or sets, right?
So step one is skill acquisition.
This is mastering the skill, the movement pattern.
Step 2 is pacing and tempo. So before we add.
Any weight or reps or anything, we're going to slow down the
eccentric. We're going to add a pause at
the bottom. We might even slow down the
concentric, the positive, the upward motion.
But the point is, is that once you accomplish the skill of the
movement, now let's control the movement and really master how
well we can control it. We can add pauses, we can add
segments. So doing like an RDL in a
segmented fashion would be stopping at like 1/4 way down
all the way down, quarter way up all the way up.
So you're adding pauses throughout the range of motion.
It's just ultimately you're owning that exercise, you own
that exercise and you are controlling every single part of
that range of motion. Step 3 is overloading the
pattern. Now that we're actually
mastering the movement and we're able to control it so well, we
can start to add load to that movement.
And then Step 4 is increasing volume.
So we've done the skill of it, we've learned the movement,
we've been able to control it and really own that exercise.
Then we're going to overload it with weights.
And then once we feel good overloading with load, we're
going to add sets or reps and start to accumulate volume
through total tonnage or we're going to accumulate total
tonnage through set volume and Rep volume.
So that how we can build muscle. And it's really simple.
Step 1234. You do it that way on any new
exercise or if you're just new in the gym, you do it in that
four step process for every exercise that's going to lead to
a safer and more productive progression scheme over time in
your training. So you know, to apply this
really just, you know, progress your training no matter what.
First and foremost, just make sure you're getting better in
the gym. You're getting stronger, you're
doing more sets, more reps, you're doing harder exercises.
Like if you're not challenging yourself consistently, like if
you're not doing more in the gym, you're not going to get the
results you want. OK?
Choose a progression method that matches your goals as well as
your training program. So certain exercises and certain
ways of training are going to be more.
It's going to be easier to add sets per week.
It's going to be easier to add a pause here and there, or it's
going to be easier to add load. Just match your progression
method with the type of exercises you're doing for your
program, but also make sure that it lines up with your goals.
If your goal is muscle growth, then you should probably be
looking at adding reps and sets because that's going to lead to
the most total tonnage, right? Like 4 * 8 * 205, even though
you lifted 5 lbs heavier, maybe even 210, like 5 to 10 miles
heavier. That's great, but that's less
total tonnage than 4 * 10 * 200. So you could have added a Rep or
two and done more total tonnage and that might lead to more
muscle growth. However, there is diminishing
returns there because if you just keep going up in reps,
you're never getting strong enough to add more load.
And so there's going to be also be times where we need to
sacrifice total tonnage in order to get stronger so that we can
lift heavier for the same amount of reps.
So we might actually go back on total tonnage for a couple weeks
to then take 10 steps forward on total tonnage.
But regardless, match up your progression method with your
training program. As well as your goals.
Right, don't just add weight to the bar and stay in the low Rep
range and just keep getting stronger and then wonder why
you're not building muscle. OK, and then progress your
volume for the most muscle growth.
This really just like cut and dry simple progressive volume.
If you goal is muscle growth, progress load.
If your main goal is strength and then progress the movement
pattern and quality. If your main goal is flexibility
and mobility, individualizing exercise selection is going to
be next. And and then we just have one
more, I believe, which is fun. Yes.
OK, so for exercise selection, there is AI have a seven step
process and I'm going to go through those pretty quickly.
And we're going to link to another episode I did because I
did a whole podcast on exercise selection.
And I think it's really important.
And if you can watch the YouTube video for this, because it's
just it's so good to see the graphs and everything on screen.
And I can take you through a rubric that shows you how to
grade certain exercises, but I just want to explain why this is
so important and then just give you the titles of the seven.
Because I think if you just understand why it's so important
and you hear the seven titles, it'll encourage you to go listen
that podcast because it really does deserve a full hour, which
is what I give it. Now, people often claim to have
the best exercises for muscle, but it's typically just an
ignorant thought from an inexperienced trainer because
everybody is different. For example, like the the slide
I'm looking at while I'm talking you through this, there's a
picture of myself and my best friend who is also somebody I
lived with on occasion, also owns a fitness business.
His name's Cody Smith. He's been on the podcast a bunch
of times. Well, Cody Smith is 6 foot 5 and
Cody Mcbroom me is 5 foot 9, so he is a lot bigger than me.
So when we train together, the exercise variation has to be
different. We can both be training our
upper body and doing a chest movement, but the chest movement
for somebody his height with his wingspan is dramatically
different than mine. Because the, and This is why I
say that when somebody says they have the best exercise for your
glutes, they're ignorant. They don't know what they're
talking about because there is no best exercise for everybody.
There's the best exercise for you.
And if you understand how to individualize exercise
selection, if you understand or you learn from a coach like
myself or my team who does this process for our clients when
they work with us one-on-one in training, then you will
understand how important this is and how big of a difference it
makes. So there's that limb length,
flexibility, mobility limitations, neurological
efficiency. So your skill and your
experience level in the gym, your preference, your muscle
focus. So like you could be, we could
both be doing a squat, But if you do want to build your
glutes, and I don't want to build my glutes, we have a
different squat pattern. And that is also going to change
if we have different limb lengths, if we're not the same
height and stuff. So all these things are really,
really important. And I think it's, it's so
valuable to understand these each individually.
So please go watch that YouTube video.
I think it would be really, really helpful for anybody.
This now, step one in that video, I break these things
down, the video and the podcast so you can go watch or listen
to. I break these seven steps down.
Step one is your goal. You have to make sure that
you're choosing exercises that line up with your specific goal
#2 is goal specific movement. So once we have the goal
established, we have to also make sure that the movement
itself is going to line up with the goal.
For example, we have to have a goal of hypertrophy.
Then we have to know that we still need to do a hip hinge,
whether our goal is hypertrophy or strength or you know,
mobility, flexibility, movement, stuff like that.
Now we have to choose a specific type of hip hinge.
If my if my goal is strength, I'm going to be doing a heavy
deadlift from the floor, probably a trap bar deadlift
because it's. Easier to keep.
Your hips and spine in a good position, meaning I can overload
more. If I can overload more, I'm
going to lift more weight. That means I'm going to get
stronger. If my goal is hypertrophy, I'm
probably going to do a stiff leg deadlift.
It's going to be lighter weight, straight bar.
I'm going to keep my hips higher than I would with the trap bar
and I'm just going to stretch the hell out of my hamstrings
under load because that's going to lead to the most muscle
growth. So I have my goal and then I
have to choose specific movement patterns to match up with that
goal. And it's not just the movement
of hip hinge, it's the exercise within that movement pattern.
Step 3 is the mind muscle connection.
This is just a sign that you're training the right muscle group.
So if you're doing an exercise and you're trying to choose the
best exercise for your triceps and you choose an exercise and
you don't feel your triceps when you're doing it, that is not a
great exercise for you. Mind muscle connection is not
everything. It doesn't mean it is the key
driver of hypertrophy. And the pump in the muscle isn't
even that important for for hypertrophy, but it's a proxy.
It tells you that you are in the right place training the right
muscle. And now you can emphasize the
load, the volume, all these other things to ensure you grow
it. So you should have a mind muscle
connection #4 is localized muscle soreness.
So following that last point and basically on the same kind of
standpoint or, or lens, if I'm feeling it in the local muscle
while I train it, I should also feel soreness in that local
muscle. If I train my triceps and then
the next day my shoulder hurts or my elbow is really painful or
like my forearms are burnt out, well, that means I trained my
forearms and I banged up my elbow and shoulder joint.
That is not what an exercise I want to do.
The next day. My triceps should be sore if
anything, right? Not my joints, not a different
muscle. So you want to make sure that
you have a localized muscle soreness for the muscle you were
training the next day or the days following #5 is progression
potential. And this is just a simple idea
that this exercise has the potential to progress.
If I'm doing a dip for my chest and triceps, how much can I
really progress that over time? Once I'm doing 20 reps, I should
probably add some load. Well, I can only add so much
load to a dip without hurting my my tendons, ligaments, and
joints, especially around my shoulder and chest.
So I'm probably going to move on from the dip at a certain point
and I'm not going to use that as a main movement week to week to
progress. But a bench press I can add load
over time. I can do low reps, I can do high
reps I can do a dumbbell variation.
I can do a floor press, A Smith machine press, a hammer strength
press. There's a lot of bench or chest
press exercise that I can do. And so the progression potential
of that exercise is really high, making it a good exercise.
SFR, which is created by Mike Izzertel, it stands for stimulus
to fatigue ratio is just the amount of stimulus and the ratio
of that stimulus compared to fatigue.
So a dead lift again, as an example, has a pretty high
stimulus, I guess actually it really doesn't as a neural
stimulus. But if you really think of a
heavy dead lift, you don't wake up sore in one place the next
day. If you do a bunch of heavy dead
lifts, you're just sore head to toe like your whole body's sore,
which is great. But for muscle growth, it's not
really targeting anyone place, which is why the dead lift is
not a great exercise for muscle growth whatsoever.
And you're going to be extremely fatigued.
So the stimulus is low to anyone muscle, but the fatigue's high.
Now a barbell, stiff leg, RDL, the stimulus is extremely high
for your hamstrings. Still a deadlift, but now I'm
getting a lot out of it because the stimulus is so great on my
hamstrings. Maybe the fatigue is somewhat
high too because it is a bigger lift.
You can usually go heavy, but that's OK because the stimulus
is really high and the fatigue is still not nearly as high as a
normal deadlift or a dumbbell lateral raise, for example, or a
cable lateral raise. It's a great stimulus in my
shoulders and the fatigue is really low.
I could do them the next day. I'm very rarely going to get
sore and have a lot of fatigue lingering from doing a lateral
raise. So the stimulus to fatigue ratio
is phenomenal. Most of your training should
have a high stimulus to fatigue ratio, high stimulus, low
fatigue, a really good stimulus to fatigue ratio.
I should say really high stimulus, really low fatigue,
right? You can have one or two
exercises throughout the week in each session, you know that have
a high stimulus and a high fatigue.
But no matter what, most of your training should be a high
stimulus, low fatigue, especially if your goal is
muscle growth. And you don't want to have too
much high stimulus, high fatigue exercises because you can
probably do even more throughout the week if you choose high
stimulus, low fatigue exercises. This is specific to body
transformation and muscle growth.
And then lastly #7 injury risk. Choose exercises that have a low
injury risk because the lower the injury risk, the less likely
it is you're going to get injured, obviously.
And if you get injured, you can't go back to the gym.
If you can't go back to the gym, your total volume per week
sucks. It's really low, and you're not
going to progress week to week, month to month.
OK. So running through those things
is really important. And applying that information,
again, look at every exercise you're doing and just ask
yourself those seven things. And if you want a more in depth
and detailed way of tracking and look at those.
Like I said, go check out the the podcast and the video I did
on exercise selection and it'll break all that down.
So the last point #5 is where I put MAGA Make America Fit again,
a little joke here. And it's really just about
having fun. If you don't have fun in the
gym, you're just not going. To.
Be consistent. People are not going to
consistently be in the gym, so you yourself are not going to
follow a program consistently and adhere well to it over time.
But also, if you're training clients, if you're a coach, your
clients are not going to consistently hit the gym and be
excited about the gym if it's not giving them some excitement,
some challenge, some fun, so on and so forth.
And there's a lot of different ways to do this.
A lot of it's just mindset and coaching them properly.
But also you can really look at like daily and weekly PRS,
right? I want to see people hitting PRS
with Max reps How many rounds they did in a density set?
Did they add load to the bar? Like tell me about your PRS.
The more we reflect on PRS, the more excited we get about
training 'cause we are winning, we are doing better.
But a lot of times people won't notice if they're not tracking
and you're not intentionally telling them to look for.
These PRS emphasize specific body parts.
So help them feel the muscle they're after.
If somebody comes to me and they want to train with glutes, I
want to make sure that they leave their sessions that have
glutes in it and their glutes burn and they are on fire.
That is the point. And I love like I get hit up all
the time for people doing the tailor trainer and they DM me
and they're like, dude, my arms or my chest or my glutes or my
hamstrings are on fire after blank session.
I do that intentionally and in the tailor trainer, which by the
way, I haven't talked about this much, it's free now like there
is a premium version. So if you want the full access
to all my programs, you want to like be able to train week after
week, you want to use the full tracking system, all that stuff,
you got to pay for it. Obviously it's dirt cheap, 29
bucks. But if you want to check out
everything, if you want to try it out, if you want to use some
of my programs, but you don't want the full access, you can
get the freemium version and you can train almost on any program
for up to three weeks completely free.
So it's not even a seven day trial.
It's beyond that now. So go check that out.
But nonetheless, I want to make sure that people do this.
So in the programs, I break it down in the video and I talk
about that like this is what you're going to get out of this
program. And I want to make sure they
understand that. Create challenges within the
plan, whether it's time based sets, Amraps, there's little
competitive natures or competitions with themselves or
with others in the gym that you create for them.
Make it so that they can compete against themselves and create
challenges that push them and get them excited.
Intensification methods are next.
Drop sets, myo reps, Amraps, things like that.
It's just ways to intensify training.
I have a whole podcast on that as well, and it's really, really
cool. I think that podcast might
actually air this week or next week or something if it's
already out. We'll link it in the show notes
though, because we have already recorded that it should be out
soon. And then last but not least, get
results. If you're getting results.
People are having fun no matter what and there's a lot of
different types of intensification methods you can
do. There's a lot of different
challenges you can do. There's a lot of ways to
emphasize the specific body parts they're after.
There's a lot of ways to track and and really highlight and get
them to reflect on their PRS. But no matter what, again, make
training fun. If you can make training fun,
the gym becomes a lifestyle. The gym becomes part of your
life, part of your client's life.
And that is the most important thing 'cause that's what keeps
them in the gym for weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks and
months and months and months and ideally years and years.
Because we should never stop training our body, whether we're
training three days a week or six days a week or maybe six
days a week right now. And eventually it goes down to
two or three days a week and you go on hikes and you're active.
Doesn't matter. We should be active.
We should be moving our body. It's what our bodies are
designed for. Our bodies are meant to move.
Our bodies are meant to resist load, resist tension and develop
muscle and strength. And I want to encourage
everybody to make sure they're doing everything they can in
their programs to make that possible and to make it fun.
So that's a wrap on this one. Going back to the beginning to
say what we did here, really simple foundations of training
program design. Number one, movement patterns #2
volume ranges #3 progression methods #4 individualizing the
exercise selection and #5 make training fun for anybody in the
gym. I hope that you can listen to
this, use this as a filter for your programs.
I hope this can help you write programs better.
As always, I just appreciate you listening as I appreciate you
being here. I love being able to spread this
information. This knowledge on training
nutrition minds is what I love to do.
So thank you for being here. Thank you for being a part of
the Choose Hard tribe and culture.
Please go leave us a five star rating and review.
Check out Tailored Coaching method dot shop if you want to
grab a choose hard hat or journal and I will catch you
next time on the Choose Hard podcast.