On Planning, Programming, and Assessing

 

     “No battle plan survives contact with the enemy.” ~Helmuth Von Moltke the Elder

     When it comes to building prodigious amounts of strength and/or muscle mass, you must learn to plan your training, program based on your plan, and then make assessments throughout the application of your program.  If you can’t do these three things, then, to be honest, you have little chance of success.  Planning, programming, and assessing may not be “sexy” but they are vital and necessary to achieving your goals.

     It all starts with a good plan, and you must have a plan, but, as with the best laid plans of mice and men, it will often go awry, which is where assessment is as important as both the plan and the programming.

     First, what do you want out of your training?  You can’t plan unless you’re specific about your goals.   I have written this elsewhere but it bears repeating here: you will not achieve your goals—in training, in life, in anything, really—unless you’re honest about what it is that you want.  You are training for yourself not for anyone else.  (And if you are training for another person, you will never achieve your goals nor will you last long in training.)  So be honest with yourself.  Are you training with a group of powerlifters, but what you really want is to train like a bodybuilder?  Are you training for football or some other sport, and now you realize that you don’t like training for football because what you really want to do is just enter bench press competitions?  Are you training for a Crossfit competition, but what you really want is to just look good naked?  There is nothing wrong with training for any of those things because you are the one doing the training.  No one else.  So, yes, be honest with yourself about what you want out of lifting.  But once you DO know what it is you want, you need a plan in order to reach those goals.

     No matter what it is that you’re trying to achieve out of training, there are a few things that all programs need, so let’s begin with these.

     Your program must focus on basic, compound movements that work as many muscle groups as possible.  Nothing else will cut it.  Never has cut it.  Never will.  So don’t go and try to reinvent the wheel.  The folks that do end up with square wheels.  Or they just end up with the wheel again.  It might look a little different.  It might have a different color, or be bigger or smaller.  But it’s still gonna be a wheel, so don’t waste time trying to reinvent the thing.

     The basics means, of course, that you need to squat, deadlift, power clean, overhead press, bench press, chin, barbell curl, and do some loaded carries.  You don’t need much, if anything, else.  When you have a program set up on the basics, and you do have to assess it, you may, indeed, find that you need some new exercises.  When this happens, always think same but different.  Instead of back squats, you might do bottom-position squats or front squats.  Instead of conventional or sumo deadlifts, you might opt for deficit deadlifts or snatch-grip deadlifts.  Instead of barbell overhead presses, you may select one-arm dumbbell overhead presses or behind-the-neck presses.  Do you get the point?  Same.  But different.

     Sometimes you may need to even think same but harder.   Having trouble getting stuck in the middle of your deadlift?  Try doing some sumo deficit deadlifts.  It’s the same lift but harder.  The range of motion is greater, so the lift takes decidedly longer than a regular deadlift (sumo or conventional).  Most powerlifters who take up sumo deficit deadlifts quickly find that sticking points are a thing of the past.  Are you a fighter or lifter who needs more grip strength?  Then try doing all of your lifts with thick bars.  One of the best investments I ever made for training was to purchase a pair of “Fat Gripz.”  They’re relatively inexpensive, can be carried in your gym bag, and can probably be purchased at your local Walmart.  They can turn every lift into a thick-bar movement.  Try a session where you do your deadlifts, chins, barbell curls, and bench presses all with a pair of Fat Gripz attached.  After a hard workout, you may have trouble even making a fist the next day without being in pain.  It’s the same workout you were doing.  Just harder.

     If your workout has you training each muscle group on a different day, and if each day has multiple sets and reps of multiple exercises, you probably need to rethink your plan from the beginning.  When you’re deciding on a program, you should almost always think full-body workouts.  If you are doing a split workout, you should be able to come up with a good reason for utilizing split workouts instead of full-body sessions.  If the reason is because that’s what everyone does, then you don’t have a good reason.

     At some point, once you’ve gained quite a bit of size and strength, you do want to change over from full-body workouts to a split program.  This could be because your workouts are simply getting too long so you need to make the switch in order to cut down on workout time, or it could be because you just need to stave off the mental and physical boredom.  Some lifters enjoy doing full-body workouts their entire training life.  Some don’t.  And when you do change over to a split program, change over to nothing more than a two-way split.  I think the first split that most lifters should transition to after full-body workouts is an upper-body/lower-body split.  But this might not be you.  You might do better on a “push/pull” split, training chest, shoulders, triceps, and legs on one day, and back and biceps the next day.  I also like training chest, shoulders, and arms on one day, and back and legs on the next.  I like this split, as well, because back and leg training is similar, and chest, shoulders, and arm workouts are similar.  Also, you can simply do bench presses, barbell overheads, and barbell curls on one day, and squats, deadlifts, and power cleans on the next day.  That’s a pretty damn good workout, by the way.  Throw in some sort of loaded carry on one, or both, of the days and you have a program that’s as good as about anything out there, and way better than anything most guys do at the gym.  After a few weeks, you might want to make some changes to it, and, thinking same but different, you could do bottom-position bench presses, one-arm dumbbell overhead presses, and dumbbell curls on one day, and front squats, deficit deadlifts, and power snatches on the other.

     It’s important to be able to assess when you need to make changes to your program.  Some lifters change too much.  Some don’t change enough.  Most lifters need to make changes after about 6 weeks.  Sure, there are some lifters who seem to be on the same program almost indefinitely, but even they make minor changes, even if it’s just to their sets and reps but not their exercises.

     When I was a teenager in the ‘80s, I had a tendency to make a change about every 4 weeks… whenever the latest round of bodybuilding magazines hit the newsstands.  Which was a problem, because one month it was a program from Stuart McRobert or Randall Strossen, and the next month it was the latest from Gene Mozee or Greg Zulak.  And the problem with this approach is that all of these writers wrote very different programs from one another, so I was often just changing things willy-nilly (is that even a word kids use these days?) with no rhyme or reason.  That wasn’t assessing.  That was just randomly doing whatever.

     Everything works.  But, as said, everything works only for about 6 weeks.  If you’re a beginner, then you can probably stick with the exact same schedule the entirety of a 6-week block of training.  If you’re an intermediate-to-advanced lifter, you will need to make changes within a 6-week training block.  In fact, the best programs are one where the template never changes, but there is plenty of variety built inherently into the template.  Think Westside.  Or Starr’s heavy, light, medium programs.  The templates of those programs never change, but there is a ton of variety built into them.  If you follow Westside, you will always do a speed day for your bench and for your lower body, and a max-effort day for your bench and one for your lower body.  That doesn’t change, but, depending on the “level” of the lifter, you may rotate exercises once every two-to-three weeks or once every week.  To know how often to make those changes is the role of assessing the program.

     Let’s say that you’ve been doing a full-body program that focuses on the basics.  You’ve gotten some good results after a few 6-week training blocks, but now you feel as if you need more variety.  Then try changing things up every 3 weeks, at least at first.  You don’t even have to change exercises.  Just change set/rep schemes.  Weeks 1-3, perform a traditional 5x5.  For weeks 4-6, switch over to sets of 5s, followed by some triples and maybe some doubles.  For weeks 7-9, change it up by doing all of your sets with the “boring” 3 sets of 10 reps (it might be boring, but it can still be effective).  And, finally, for weeks 10-12, perform multiple sets of singles.  As you get more advanced, if you want to stick with a full-body workout, simply change reps and exercises more often.  If you were an advanced lifter (and here’s proof that advanced lifters don’t have to utilize split workouts), for instance, following Bill Starr’s H/L/M methodology, 9 weeks of training might look something such as this:

Weeks 1-3: 5 sets of 5 reps

Heavy Day: squats, bench presses, conventional deadlifts

Light Day: reverse lunges, barbell overhead presses, power cleans

Medium Day: front squats, incline bench presses, high pulls

Weeks 4-6: 5 sets of 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 rep(s)

Heavy Day: squats, bench presses, sumo deadlifts

Light Day: walking lunges, incline dumbbell bench presses, power snatches

Medium Day: barbell hack squats, two-board bench presses, Romanian deadlifts

Weeks 7-9: 4 sets of 8 reps

Heavy Day: squats, bench presses, deficit deadlifts

Light Day: overhead squats, one-arm dumbbell overhead presses, hang cleans

Medium Day: bottom-position squats, weighted dips, thick-bar deadlifts

     But that’s just one example, albeit one that would probably work for you, or anyone else, reading this if you’re advanced enough to handle it.

     If you are a highly advanced lifter—or if you just happen to be a highly intuitive lifter; I’ve known a few—then you may reach the point where you do little other than simply assess your training each week, but you may rarely plan or program anything.  Especially if you love training.  I’ve met a few massive, and massively strong, lifters who did just this.  If you watched them at the gym, it might even look as if they didn’t know what they were doing.  It looked too random.  They may squat two, or even three, days in a row.  They might take off from deadlifting for an entire month, then come in the gym and hit a personal best.  They may train for 10 days-in-a-row, then only train 2-days-per-week for the next 3 weeks.  But they do all of that because they know that’s what works for them in the moment.  We used to call that “instinctive training.”  I think these days it’s called “auto-regulation.”  But it’s all assessment.

     As the 19th century Prussian military commander reminded us at the beginning of this essay, our battle plan may not survive contact with the enemy, but you still have to put together a plan.  Then you have to implement it, and then you have to know what to do when you encounter adversity.  And that’s all part of proper programming, planning, and assessing.