Tailoring Your Workout Program - Part One

Tips and Advice for Tailoring Your Training Routine

Part 1: Workload Basics

     “In order to create a successful strength program, you must design it to fit your individual needs.  You must consider your weaker bodyparts, and build it around such factors as time limitations, old injuries, and your ability to recover from the workload.  A program that brings results for your training mates of the same age and bodyweight may not be right for you.  Some people thrive on lots and lots of work in the gym, whereas others become chronically fatigued and eventually injured if they attempt to carry a heavy workload for any period of time.” ~Bill Starr

     I open with that quote from Bill Starr since those are the very things that I want to cover in this series of essays.  Lately, I have received the most questions from readers on this very subject.  With all of the programs that I write for the blog, I give workout “examples” rather than set-in-stone routines.  Even when I write a program that can be used exactly as-written, I always give some advice for how you might want to tailor it to suit your particular needs.  In the same article where I got the quote above from Starr, he also wrote that the one reason it takes a lifter several years to see results is because it takes a great deal of experimenting before you finally find a routine that fits.  In the beginning, when you first start lifting weights, you experience “newbie gains.”  If you’ve never trained before, any program will work, though some undoubtedly work better than others.  But once the hypertrophy honeymoon period wears off, you have to find the program that will bring you results.

     Of course, there are always lifters who are hyper-responders, easy gainers whose muscles respond to almost any stimulus.  Unfortunately for us mere mortals, those guys are also usually the biggest, strongest guys in the gym.  Typically, trainees like to get advice from the biggest guy in the gym.  That may work, but it may not.  Now, if you see a group of lifters who are all big and strong, those are the guys you should talk to, especially if they’re not too young.  A group of bodybuilders or powerlifters who have trained for years will know that they all don’t respond to the exact same sets, reps, intensity, or workload, among other factors.  They can usually give you some pretty sound advice to fit your particular goals.

     When I write, and Starr before me, that you need to experiment to find what works for you, I don’t mean that you need to experiment every time you go to the gym, or that you should constantly be rotating to new workout routines, based on every single thing that you read about, listen to, or the latest video you watch on the internet.  I write a lot of different training programs on the blog or in my books.  If, every time that I wrote a new workout routine, you tried the new one out, you would be changing to a new program way too frequently and would end up just spinning your wheels but going nowhere.

     In the mid ‘90s, when I first started my freelance writing career, I also worked as a personal trainer.  I have to admit that I always enjoyed training women more than men, and, no, it had nothing to do with being around good-looking girls in tight fitness attire.  The women stuck with the routines I gave them, always worked hard, and didn’t want to switch to a new program every couple weeks.  The men on the other hand, were another matter.  Most of them wanted to try a new program at the beginning of each month because that was when the latest issues of all the bodybuilding magazines hit the newsstands.  There was always something new and “shiny” that they wanted to try.  And that was before the internet.  I imagine it’s worse for young bodybuilders and fitness enthusiasts these days, with new information just a click away and way too much of it.

     So, the first principle to keep in mind is that what works for other lifters may not work for you.  You are unique.  When I was personal training 3 decades ago, my male clients often wanted to try the latest bodypart routine from some steroid-laden pro bodybuilder.  What worked, and worked really well, for those pro bodybuilders, wouldn’t have worked for them.  But that’s not what the magazines were selling them; a magazine has to make money after all.  I know because I worked for those same magazines.  Thankfully, there were a couple of magazines, Ironman in particular, that had plenty of info for the average, natural lifter.

     It’s easy to tell that most people who workout these days don’t understand our 1st principle.  How do I know that?  Because of the sheer number of folks who go to group exercise classes or take part in a group workout where everyone does the exact same thing, no matter the number of years they have been training, their age, their gender, or, well, any-damn-thing else.  I’ve been critical of this approach in the past, and have received pushback from gym-goers who tell me they got in shape by going to an aerobics class or joining a Crossfit “box.”  My reply: of course you did.  If that is the only form of exercise you enjoy doing, and if before doing group whatever, you were sedentary and eating a bunch of junk food, then keep doing it.  That’s fine.  But it is NOT ideal because it is NOT tailored for your individual needs, goals, training history, age, and so forth.  If you want to excel at your chosen endeavor—bodybuilding, powerlifting, weightlifting, or, heck, Crossfit—you must tailor a program specifically for you.  There is not a single champion bodybuilder, powerlifter, or weightlifter, at any level, who got there by training in some class.  They all found what worked for their individual body type and stuck with it.

     Even though I was doing personal training in the ‘90s, and even taught a weight-training class at a local college for a couple years—which probably deserves an essay all its own since I did have to train a large number of students at one time in a group setting—I didn’t really understand how extremely individualistic lifters could be until I started training powerlifters in the early ‘00s.  At the time, I was determined to be the strongest 181-pound powerlifter walking the planet.  That is not hyperbole.  That was my goal.  Or, at least, the strongest drug-free powerlifter, though I didn’t—and still don’t—believe it’s impossible to be a champion drug-free strength athlete.  Bodybuilding? No way. But powerlifting?  Sure.  It’s at least feasible.  Anyway, that was my goal.  I can’t remember what the record total was at the time for my weight class, but I did have around a 1,500 pound total between the 3 powerlifts (at, roughly, 175 pounds).  And I knew I could get stronger, and I could also gain some weight and still stay in my weight class.  With my goal in mind, and inspired by Westside Barbell and other powerlifting clubs of the day, I set out to assemble a group of powerlifters who would train with me in my garage gym.  I had everything in my garage that a proper gym needs—Forza bench, lifting platform, power rack, 1,500 pounds of plates and ‘bells, chains, bands, boxes, sled, sandbags, stones; the whole lot.  Later on, I would go on to train a larger number of powerlifters when, because of injury, I had to retire from the sport, but then I limited the number of powerlifters who would train with me to 4; 5 of us when you count yours truly.  They were all strong, all dedicated, and all close to my strength, which would make training together simpler.  They were also all much bigger than I was.  The lightest of the 4 was a dude we called Stumpy—he was only 220 pounds, but he was also 5’4” and, therefore, built like the proverbial brick outhouse.  The other 3 were at least 275 pounds.  One of them, Ox, who would go on to be my primary training partner, was a SHW; he generally weighed between 330 to 350.

     With some caveats, we followed Starr’s heavy-light-medium system.  I had used it for several years, already, and knew that it would be a perfect template, but also because it required only 3 days of training a week.  We might have all been young and strong, but we also worked full-time, manual labor jobs, and had families.  More than 3 days a week, I thought, might be too much to ensure consistency.  Occasionally, when we had been training with a high workload, I reduced the training down to 2 days per week.  Always keep in mind time limitations when designing, or selecting, a program.  Maybe you do get great results from 5 days per week of lifting, but can you consistently make it to the gym that much?  Select a program you know you can stick with.

     Even though we only trained 3 days per week, we did workout rather long, especially on Sundays, our “heavy” day.  That workout routinely lasted 2 and ½ to, occasionally, 3 hours.  To give you an understanding of the kind of workout I did at the time, the below example week of training, or something very similar, was frequently used by me, though it was too much for my training partners:

Heavy Day:

Squats – 8 sets of 5 reps, 4 sets of 8 reps

Walking lunges – 4 sets of 10 reps

Bench presses – 8 sets of 5 reps, 4 sets of 8 reps

Weighted Dips – 4 sets of 8 reps

Deadlifts – 8 sets of 5 reps, 4 sets of 8 reps

Weighted Chins – 7 sets of 5 reps, 2 sets of max reps

Barbell Curls – 5 sets of 8 reps

Skullcrushers – 5 sets of 8 reps

Ab work

Light Day:

Squats – 5 sets of 5 reps, 2 sets of 8 reps

Bulgarian “split” squats – 6 sets of 12 reps (each leg)

Overhead Presses – 8 sets of 5 reps, 2 sets of 8 reps

Seated behind-the-neck presses – 4 sets of 8 reps

Power Snatches – 8 sets of 3 reps

Good Mornings – 5 sets of 5 reps

Ab Work

Medium Day:

Squats – 8 sets of 5 reps, 4 sets of 8 reps

Front Squats – 4 sets of 10 reps

Incline Bench Presses – 8 sets of 5 reps, 4 sets of 8 reps

Flat Dumbbell Bench Presses – 4 sets of 8 reps

Deficit deadlifts – 8 sets of 5 reps, 4 sets of 8 reps

Power Cleans – 8 sets of 5 reps

Dumbbell Curls – 7 sets of 12 reps

Ab work

     No, that is not a workout session you should attempt to do.  It had taken me a couple years to work up to that workload.  Eventually, I even switched to a higher workload, by utilizing a 4-days-a-week Starr-inspired template, and then even more work when I started using a Russian-style “Sheiko” regimen.  Also, that represents the kind of workload that I did during a “heavy” week.  Other weeks, I did decidedly less, but the above was not uncommon.

     Ox, even though he could bench press close to 500 pounds, did about ⅓, sometimes only a quarter, of the work that I did.  He was the largest of us, but also thrived off way less work than the rest.  I thrived off the most; the others somewhere in between.  Often, Ox would just do 5 sets of 5 reps, working up to a heavy weight on squats and bench presses, and nothing else.  Other days, when he felt good, he would do 1 or 2 sets of assistance movements at the end of his core sets.  Dips really helped his bench press, he believed, so he would do 2 sets of those on our heavy sessions.  (When he eventually benched 500, he did it with a reverse grip, so it makes sense that dips were helpful.)

     Training with Ox reminded me of something Starr wrote about training with Tommy Suggs.  Suggs and Starr were both top-notch weightlifters in their day.  Here’s how Starr told it:

     “Tommy Suggs and I have known each other since we were collegiate Olympic lifters in Texas.  When he brought me to the York Barbell Company in 1965 to be his assistant at Strength & Health magazine, we started training together.  It didn’t take Tommy long to figure out I was an overachiever in the gym.  He quickly determined that he didn’t need to do as much work as I did in order to be successful.  He made it a rule to do half of what I did.

     “Which program produced the best results?  On paper, it appears that I would make the higher lifts, since more work translates to more progress.  At the end of our lifting careers, however, we posted the exact same totals for the three Olympic lifts—1,035—and our bests on the press, the clean and jerk, and the snatch were nearly identical as well.

     “Tommy’s condensed program worked well for him, and he was smart enough not to be lured into a more extensive routine.  On the other hand, if I had done the same program that worked so well for him, my strength would have suffered.  We simply had different training requirements.  This basic variation in individual needs is one of the most difficult aspects of strength training for many people, especially beginners, to understand.”

     It’s no different today, almost 3 decades later, from when Starr penned those words in ‘97.

     With all of this information I’ve presented so far, what should you do?  That is the question.  First, get on a program!  Don’t just go to the gym and do random workouts?  As Vince Gironda said, “Are you on a training program or are you just working out?”  A program is the answer.

     I won’t re-hash it here, but for advice on what all programs should have, read my last essay “Bulk Building Advice.”  Ideally, I would start with some kind of full-body program.  Once you select the program, start by doing less work, not more.  If you choose a Starr-inspired 5x5 program, then start off by only doing 5 sets of 5 on 3 core lifts for each day.  Stick with it for a few weeks and keep a training journal to chart your progress.  If you’re progressing well after a few weeks—your strength is consistently going up—then stick with that same level of workload.  Sure, you need to make some changes.  You need to rotate to some new same but different movements on occasion and you need to change your set/rep sequence at times, but keep your workload around the same level.

     If you don’t feel as if you’re making adequate gains, ask yourself if you’re doing too much or too little.  If you feel “beat up” each week and stay routinely sore, then you might need to cut back in volume.  Make your light day a really light day, or switch over to a 2 days per week regimen.  A lot of lifters who respond better to less work do well by training 3 days one week and 2 days the next, rotating back and forth week to week from 3 days to 2.  If, on the other hand, you feel really good at the end of your workouts but you’re still not gaining much strength and/or muscle, then add work to your routine.  Add a couple of back-off sets to your core lifts on the heavy and medium days and/or add in some auxiliary movements.  Utilize 2 big lifts for your major muscle groups—your legs, back, and chest/shoulder areas—instead of just one.  You can also simply increase the amount of sets you’re doing on your big 3.  Instead of 5 sets of 5 reps, go to 7 or 8 sets of 5.

     In future installments, we’ll cover more on total workload, the best number of sets, the ideal rep range for your body type and goals, along with the best number of movements that you should use in your sessions.  We will cover how to manipulate the 3 training variables of volume, frequency, and intensity, and how to figure out if you’re a volume lifter, a frequency lifter, or an intensity guy.  We’ll also cover whatever else comes up based on questions readers have, and I’m sure I’ll think of a few other topics that need to be addressed.

     I have several other articles that I will be working on, so this will probably be an intermittent series, and perhaps a rather lengthy one.  I will just write the other parts in between different articles, essays, and training routines.  As always, if you have any questions or just want to comment on what works well for you, leave them in the comments section below.  You can also send me an email if you want a more personalized response.  If anyone has sent me an email and has still yet to hear a response from me, if it has been several days, then please re-send it.  With all of the emails I receive, sometimes one or two slip through the cracks or go to my spam folder.

     Until next time, stay at it and stay strong!

     If you enjoyed this essay, then consider purchasing my book “Ultimate Mass and Power Essays.”  It’s packed with similar essays on a variety of training subjects.  You can find out more about it, and my other books, in the My Books page.  Also, if you enjoy reading about Bill Starr, then be on the lookout for my new book The Strongest Shall Always Survive.  I am reading over the final proof from the publisher at the moment, and hope to have it out in a week or two.

Sources

The quotes from Bill Starr in this essay are from the article “Only the Strong Survive: Tailoring Your Strength Program” from the March, 1997 issue of Ironman magazine.