Two years ago I released my first book, “Base Strength” which included 10 prefabricated programs at the end. I never meant for these programs to be ran as written or to be done in sequence of some kind of bucket list of training programs (though I knew they would). Rather, they were specifically meant to be examples of the concepts that I’d spent the early part of the book fleshing out.

 The fact is there are a lot of viable ways to train that involve different frequencies, exercise selections, set and rep schemes and so on and I wanted to give the reader plenty of opportunity to see how these same principles pop-up in differently structured programs.

 Choosing an appropriate training split requires knowledge of your own recovery abilities and training tolerance. It can be kind of tricky to get that down as starting out in weight lifting usually involves just copying what other, more successful lifters are doing. In the beginning, everybody grows and it’s not until you’ve been around for a while that you recognize that the same old thing doesn’t work or that what will work really well for somebody else may not provide satisfactory results for you.

Download the slides for this video here.

1. The Bro Split (one muscle each day)
2. One Lift per Day (squat/bench/deadlift/overhead)
3. Push Pull Legs (bench/ohp, row, squat/deadlift)
4. Upper Lower Upper Lower (bench/ohp, sq/dl, bench/oh, sq/dl)
5. Whole Body (sq/bp/dl every day)

These are just 5 of the endless options you have for training organization. It can be mind numbing to look at all of the (seemingly arbitrary) ways to put together a workout and the result is paralysis by analysis.

I did a video last year covering charlatans in the lifting/performance/fitness industry. My main focus was Joel Seedman, somebody who’s gained quite a bit of notoriety by  peppering his Instagram with videos of his clients doing ridiculously complex exercises. Seedman is known for gems like “ squatting to 90 degree knee angle is superior to squatting to depth” and likes  to insist on his very carefully branded method of training, which primarily consists of training  conflicting movement patterns within the same exercise and often in a massively destabilized  setting.  Do a curl with one arm and a press with the other, stand in a split squat, control the eccentric and try to resist external band tension pulling you out of position. Seriously, that’s an exercise.

 Now, in his case it’s one thing to argue the efficacy of any one movement. Of course A movement can’t be evaluated until you have a specific goal to apply it against; NFL players, for instance. Seedman often uses Pro players to prop up his methodologies, which is a compelling sales tactic. Understand that these athletes need to be strong but also fast, reactive and coordinated more so than they need to be big. So it stands to reason that standard hypertrophy work is going to be a smaller piece of the puzzle than things that might lend themselves to sports specific performance. You wouldn’t evaluate a program for an NFL player the same way you would a powerlifting or general fitness program for the average Joe.

1. Functionality 

 Performance in anything requires physical ability as well as skill and experience in that particular movement. It would be enough to say that squats develop really strong and conditioned leg and hip muscles but the fact that the pattern of squatting so closely resembles athletic and real-world movement patterns gives it a quality that few other movements have. It’s no accident that squatting is a key feature in all athletic programs, from American football and soccer to  track and field events.  Putting a weight on your back, sitting down and standing back up creates physical adaptations that  transfer over to just about every physical activity you can think of. 

Now, there might be valid arguments for favoring more specialized variations when it comes to peaking in a specific event. Specificity advocates have cited quarter squats as being more specific (and, thus, more useful) to sprinting and jumping and I’m inclined to say that they aren’t exactly wrong. But as a base standard for physical development, getting comfortable sitting down into a parallel squat  will lead to a baseline of strength, size and coordination that will provide a substantial platform for more specialized training in any particular sport.  

Glutes are pretty damn important.

The muscles are responsible for most of the power that extends the hip. If you are standing up, running, jumping or, most importantly, deadlifting, your glutes will be the difference between success and embarrassment.

Serious training builds up fatigue. It’s a fact. If you’re training hard enough to get stronger then you’re training hard enough to dig yourself into a recovery hole. Now, there are a lot of ways to work around that which might include varying the exercises over time, dropping volume as the weights get heavier or moving into different phases of training. But when it comes to making your training sustainable in the short-term, deloads are one of the easiest and most proven methods for making your training sustainable.

 While not defined in most textbooks, deloading is talked widely about in general training culture and has been written about extensively. It generally means a deliberate reduction in training stress that is done to allow for recovery. So as multiple weeks of hard training compound togethe,r a single week of reduced training stress will allow the lifter to bounce back so that they can continue to hammer the iron once again.  This can be done by reducing volume, intensity, effort, aggression, changing the exercise or doing some combination of all..