Hello everyone and welcome to this week’s edition of James complains! I thought today I would have a go at something I have had to combat for years of being a personal trainer and that hot topic, as you may have guessed from the title, is training variety. I’m forever being asked why my training isn’t varied and why I don’t do completely different things with each client. Let’s answer that…
Over the years I have developed a plan which applies to probably 95% of my clients. I’m almost constantly assessing them and deciding when they can progress to the next stage. The unfortunate thing is that my standards for progression are very high. This can result in people having to stay on the same plan or similar plans for a long time before they can progress onto the next stage.
Over the years i have come to a few conclusions with regards to training approaches and what is best to achieve particular goals. One example, you’re trying to lose fat or improve sporting performance or even training to improve your health status, do not bother doing isolation exercises! What’s the more beneficial exercise, Tricep kickbacks or Tricep dips? It will always be dips! The compound exercise utilising multiple muscles will burn more calories, create greater adaptations and is a more functional movement when applied to a sport. Name a sport that includes any isolation exercises. To paraphrase Starting Strength, the only time you will ever isolate your quads is on a leg extension machine. Next up, reps. So, I should always aim to focus on compound movements, but how many reps? Well why do we lift weights? to get fitter? No, we do it to increase muscular contraction strength. This in turn leads to adaptations that improve speed, agility, balance, co-ordination, metabolic rate, power output, maximal force, and all of this has an impact on things like organ health, blood pressure, body composition, skeletal density. The reality is that if you want all or even just some of these adaptions, you lift heavy for fewer reps (5, 3, 1 ideally).
Just to add a little scientific point for all of those that train purely for aesthetics and want to get bigger, strength directly correlates to the cross-sectional area of a muscle. In other words, the stronger you are the bigger your muscles are. For those that think that they need to work like a maniac to burn fat and avoid regaining fat, stronger individuals are less likely/slower to regain body fat when they cease maintaining a calorie deficit. So take your 3 sets of 12 with isolation super sets and go read some journals.
Looking at that list, you can see that if you are wanting fat loss, health profile improvements or sporting performance improvements you should first look to improve strength and the best way to maximise the improvements is to use compound exercises. I wouldn’t ban isolation exercises altogether, but they are usually done as an accessory to a compound lift. If your plan includes 2 big compound lifts, then you may then follow those lifts with smaller exercises that may be isolation exercises. This is simply because if maximal effort has been exerted in the initial compound exercises then you will not have the output to maintain maximal output in another compound movement. Anyone who has ever done hill sprints before knows how quickly your output drops. I would still suggest doing something a little more practical however, for instance after bench press or military press there is no reason you couldn’t do some body weight dips.
My next conclusion/assumption is as follows… You are not strong nor are you fit! We think we are, we think we are ‘trained’ because we can run 10km or squat our body weight. In all honesty very few of us achieve anything close to maximum potential of our bodies. I therefor created basic percentage of bodyweight targets to achieve in compound moves…
Deadlift – 250%
Squat – 200%
Bench Press – 150%
Military press – 100%
When these targets are hit, congratulations, I now class you as strong and you can progress to something a little more complicated (Olympic lifting).
The last part of the puzzle then becomes how to get those compound lifts up to these percentages. You already know you need to perform those moves and you need to do them with correct form at high weights with low reps. But how do you progress?
I have seen some incredibly elaborate plans. The sort of plans where you would need a copy of your plan with you each time you train as it would be impossible to memorise. One day you’re doing a 3 rep max squat, the next session you’re doing box jumps and reverse lunges using sliders. Split squats, leg extensions, leg curl, Nordic curls, glute bridges and hip thrusters all get thrown into the mix and then finally you return to that 3 rep max squat. You may have improved and you may have not. if you were relatively untrained before then chances are you will see an improvement and you will be hooked into thinking you’ve found an efficient path to follow to build your body into an ultimate machine, in reality, you’ve just ran around in circles and lucked into some improvements.
The big secret to improving the contractile performance of muscular fibres (and reaping the rewards that brings) is as follows. Progressive overload. Now you can interpret that in so many ways it’s unreal. The reality is its non-debatable. All it means is that you slowly and patiently increase the weight that is on the bar. You can do some variations with reps, weight and tempo so as to ensure you get full recovery and that you don’t spend every session pushing yourself to maximum output but you should have a pretty repetitive plan which allows you to gradually increase your maximum lift and regularly test your progress.
With this information in mind, lets imagine a few scenarios. I have 3 clients come to me. One wants to lose fat, the second wants to build muscle mass and the third wants to improve their health status. My two initial assessments are; can they lift the percentages listed earlier and what body fat percentage are they. If they are overfat (I will write more about this separately) and cant lift to the targets I’ve set, then my first goal for them is to improve their strength output and reduce body fat. This means all three clients can achieve their goals by focusing on the four listed exercises and controlling calorific intake. There is no need to be fancy. They follow a similar, if not the same plan and repeat the sessions applying increases in the weight when successful in lifting a weight. This coupled with calorie control will result in all three clients becoming stronger, reducing body fat percentage, increasing muscle mass percentage and improving their health status.
It seems one layout can help three people with completely different goals get to exactly where they want to be. The only last two considerations are how long can they stay on that plan and when would it need to be adapted? When it comes to how long they can stay on the plan, the answer varies. A well-developed strength plan is likely to continue offering results for years. The limiting factor is actually the client’s ability to stick with the routine for such a long period of time. I find it a useful practice to have a second strength plan that I can swap to when I feel a client is losing interest in their current set up. realistically however, until they stop getting stronger, they don’t need to change anything. Finally, there are points that would lead to the plan needing to be adapted and it’s all dependant on ability. You may find someone can’t squat full depth or can’t hip hinge. They are going to have to learn to move before they learn to lift. You may also find the opposite whereby someone is close to hitting the strength parameters already. They would benefit from progressing into more advanced work and can start to learn what is in my opinion the ultimate way to train, Olympic lifting.
So, for all of you who get new plans every month or in some cases even more often, and for those that signed up to a gym or Personal Training package that offers regular new plans, you’ve been duped. The plan needs changing because it’s not very good. there are very few instances I can think of where anyone would need regular plan overhauls.
The answer is as follows. Training should not be very varied; repetition allows for practice and that leads to improvement. It also allows you to fairly measure your progression. I have seen trainers compare a 3 rep max squat completed at the end of a leg day to a 3 rep max squat completed at the start of a session. Guess which one the better lift was done on! A good plan allows for continued results for months and offers progressive overload. As for all the fancy exercises, unless you spend your life sea fishing on a small raft, you probably don’t need to be doing your squats on a Bosu ball. Just do them properly and put more weight on the bar on solid ground. You know that thing you spend your life walking on.
Just as an afterthought, I want to really push the importance of making sure that you can actually do an exercise properly before weight progresses. I am sure every trainer around is driven mad watching people post squats on social media where they claim they have a new personal best and all they have really done is reduced the depth of their squat. If your hip doesn’t go lower than your knee then reduce the weight!
Well there you have it guys, weekly moan is over. Hopefully it’s helpful in some way otherwise I’ve wasted your time. Feel free to leave comments and share this to anyone you know who does crazy workouts or just generally isn’t getting anywhere anymore.
Stay healthy!