Introduction

We all know by now that everyone should lift and there have been hundreds if not thousands of posts about it by now. The only problem is that these are either purely motivational in nature or tell you outdated shit like "just do SSLP" or "hurr durr 5x5". This might have been great advice in 2010, but the quality of common and academic training knowledge has come a long way since then. In this post, I will try to give a more theoretical approach to building a program or just reviewing the program your about to do.

I will assume that the reader knows about RPE or RIR. Since it is simply a superior way to measure effort than random percentages. If you don't others have written at length about it.

Content

  • Specificity
  • Overload
  • Volume and intensity
  • "Pyramid of performance"
  • Variation
  • Rest days
  • Periodization
  • Templates for strength or bodybuilding

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Specificity

When trying to learn anything in life specificity is the most important thing there is. Humans are not general learners and while some skills or adaptions might carry over from one task to another, in general, they do not. This means that if you want a big squat you NEED to squat, if you want big arms you must train arms and if you want to get stronger you must lift heavier weights. This is usually called Specific Adaptation to Imposed Demand (SAID).

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Overload

As humans adapt to stimuli we run into what is known as the repeated bout effect. Every time a stimulus of any kind is imposed on the body, it adapts and in turn, becomes a little more resistant to that stimulus. The way to solve this problem is by steadily increasing the stimulus over time. This is known as Overload. A few common techniques for this is to increase weight, decrease rest, add sets, increase effort (RPE), slow the tempo down, pauses mid-movement, supersets, etc. basically the exercises need to become harder over weeks, months and years.

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Volume and intensity

Okay! now we know what to do. We need to choose what we want to become better at and then make it harder over time. In the case of hypertrophy, it turns out that there is no significant difference in training outcomes as long as one performs between 5-30 reps per set at an appropriate intensity. This means choosing how many reps to perform becomes only a matter of practicality, stimulus to fatigue ratio, and personal taste if one's goal is to increase muscle mass. But how hard and how much? In general, most people see the most results between 10-20 sets per muscle group per week. With the caveat that novices might get results with as little as one set and some highly trained individuals might be able to benefit from even more. The intensity these sets should be performed at is in general between RPE 7-10. where most training should probably be close or at RPE 8. Heavier exercises like squats, Bench press, and deadlifts should, in general, be performed at lower average RPE than lighter exercises.

In general the higher the average RPE the fewer sets per week. A general strategy is to start a training cycle in the lower end of the 10 sets and then increase the volume with one or two sets per week as long as one does not have DoMs.

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"Pyramid of performance" (PoP)

All types of performance training are ordered in a pyramid type structure. The more complex the type of performance the more parts are going to make up the pyramid. The parts are going to be the sub-skills that allow you to perform and how large the part depends on its importance. In bodybuilding, the base would be work capacity (how much training can you do and recover from) and then the hypertrophic training itself would be the top. For a powerlifter, this pyramid would also include a layer of "general strength" training and then a layer of maximal strength or specific strength at the top.

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Variation

Variation is a tool used to prolong the time before diminishing returns sets in. In bodybuilding, this can be done by just changing exercises. Since the goal is to train muscles. While if strength is the goal it is usually done by modifying the exercise. Examples are adding pauses, tempos, RoM or changing technique (ex. High bar or low bar, sumo or conv deadlift etc.)

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Rest days

The amount of rest a person needs between training highly depends on the advancement of the individual and how hard each session is. In general, it is probably recommended to have at least one day every week with full rest.

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Periodization

The goal of periodization is both to stave off diminishing returns from the repeated bout effect and to train all the different training parameters we need for our performance goal (PoP) in a focused way. There are many different types of periodization. All with different strengths and weaknesses. I will not detail these here. But what the reader needs to understand is that they all, in general, take the trainee through some type of training block of either constant or increasing training volume. A general block will consist of two or three of the following types of weeks.

Light weeks: All blocks, in general, starts off with one of these. Light weeks are what are normally referred to as deloads. Their goal is to drop systemic and local fatigue and to resensitize the athlete for more training. They in general consist of about half or less the volume of a medium week.

Medium weeks: These are your bread and butter of training and where you will see the most of your results. They consist of a good amount of training but are not overwhelming. They should have volume in such an amount that a person can take 4-6 of these weeks before needing a light week.

Heavy week: The gaols of these weeks might either be to squeeze out the last gains in a training block or allow a person to adapt to doing more training. They are in general placed at the end of training blocks and consist of more volume than a medium week.

In general, each training block needs to be significantly different in some way then the block coming before it. This means varying either rep ranges, exercises used or maybe even the focus of the block.

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Templates for strength or bodybuilding

We have now reached a time where we need to choose a structure for our training week.

Bodybuilding: The only thing we really have to take into consideration here is that at least two times a week frequency seems to give the best results. One can structure this in many ways. Some popular ones are PPL two times a week with one rest day (push-pull-legs) (grouping exercise by movement pattern), upper-lower two times a week (grouping days by which part of the body is used), or any variation of training muscle groups together where one hit all groups two times a week.

Exercise selection does not really matter here. But one should remember that the goal is to train a specific muscle and not just to move weight.

Strenght training: The most popular and maybe most effective template for performance-based training is a heavy-light-medium structure of training. This type of structure allows the athlete to have hard overloading training days and then recover between while still having some productive training.

Let us produce an example of a 3 days a week powerlifting type template. it would contain

Heavy squad (competition style with belt) - light squat (focus on technique or training the muscles used, use higher reps and harder variations to lighten the load) - medium squat (usually same or close to the rep ranges as the heavy day, but with a variation)

Heavy deadlift (same as with squat) - medium deadlift (same as with squats)

now you probably don't need to deadlift 3 times a week unless you are very good at deadlifting. So we use the light deadlift as a press instead.

Bench follow this same pattern and we could now structure our weeks as:

Day 1: HS - MB - MDDay 2: HB - MS - LBDay 3: HD - LB - LS

We now have a full training week, where the dedicated might add cardio (two times of at least 20 min per week is recommended for general health.) and some extra training for arms and back and w/e on the other days.