Tailoring Your Workout Program - Part Two

Tips and Advice for Tailoring Your Training Routine

Part 2: Selecting a Program

     In post-modern philosophy, there is a term that is important to understand.  I’m not a post-modernist myself—I am, if anything, an integralist, one who integrates different philosophies, East and West, into a singular whole—but I feel this concept is important.  It’s called “the myth of the given.”  The “myth” is when we take our given perception of things to be how they actually are.  We do this more often than we think.  It’s easy to understand this concept when it comes to simple objects, but less so when it comes to ideas.  We may not like how something tastes—raw oysters,for example—so we think oysters are simply bad.  Others, however, may love raw oysters—I could eat them by the bucket.  In this instance, it’s easy to see the myth of the given at work.  Even though you may find oysters personally unsettling, and it befuddles you that others enjoy them, you are still capable of understanding that, for some reason, others really do find them tasty.  But when it comes to subjects such as “good” training programs, we find this harder to see.  If a training program works well for us, we assume it will work well for others.  If we don’t gain any muscle on a high-frequency, “easy strength” program, we assume it’s a bad routine for inducing hypertrophy.  But others might have a completely different outcome from you.  Once you understand this concept, you realize how vastly different individuals are, especially when it comes to finding a training program that produces results.

     In this, our 2nd part in what will probably be a rather long series, we will look at how to select the correct program that will work well for you.

     When selecting a program, you need to look at both the objective and the subjective.  The objective component is finding a program that works for your body type, the kind of training that your body is “made” for.  The subjective factor lies in finding a program that you will enjoy and will help you to achieve your personal goals.  You might be “made” for powerlifting, but if you love bodybuilding training, you’re going to stick with a routine built for “aesthetics” over one built for strength and power, so, in that case, the subjective component is more important.  Of course, if you want to really excel at strength training, you would do better on the program that your body is made for.  Take myself as an example.  When I first started lifting in the mid to late ‘80s, I loved bodybuilding.  I wanted to have the muscle of all the guys on the covers of bodybuilding magazines.  So, I trained in order to get those results, even though I had a hard time gaining muscle mass.  I didn’t have a hard time gaining strength, however.  When, in the mid to late ‘90s, I switched over to powerlifting instead of bodybuilding, I made fantastic gains (in strength).  I fell in love with powerlifting and serious strength training, but, looking back on it with some degree of hindsight and wisdom, I wonder if I enjoyed it because I was good at it.  When you see results, you want to keep training, you stay motivated, and, even if you don’t love training at first, you eventually do fall in love with it.  When you see results, you want to go to the gym.

     I want you to keep all of the above in mind as you go about tailoring your own program.  It may help you better decide how to apply what follows.

     If you’re new to training, or have yet to see any kind of appreciable results no matter how long you’ve been working out, you should start with a 3-days-per-week, full-body training program.  I think there are several reasons that lifters don’t utilize full-body workouts.  For one, they often think of them as being too boring or basic.  But that needn’t be the case.  There are a lot of different training programs that can be used, all of which fall under the rubric of full-body workouts.  For another, they think that they are only for beginners.  Yes, if you’re starting out, you should use a full-body regimen, but they are not just for beginners.  Many great bodybuilders of the so-called Silver Era (the ‘40s to the ‘60s) never did split training, even when they were the most advanced bodybuilders walking the planet.  Two that spring to mind off the top of my head would be Clancy Ross and Steve Reeves.  Along with John Grimek, they were considered, in the late ‘40s, to be the greatest bodybuilders on Earth.  And neither of them ever used a split training routine.  They got fantastic results with full-body training done 3 days per week and didn’t see the need to do anything different.

     Full-body programs are also best for athletes.  To quote Bill Starr: “the best strength program is one in which you work all the major muscle groups at each session.  This is critical to strength athletes, for they must utilize all their muscles in their chosen activity, so it logically follows that they must also strengthen them all in the same session.  Older trainees and those no longer involved in sports can often use some form of the split routine.  My philosophy, however (even for older lifters), is based on doing a core movement for the shoulder girdle, back, and legs at each workout.  That said, it’s time to elaborate a bit about the selection process.”  For the remainder of this piece, we will do exactly that—elaborate about the program selection (and the movements you’ll need to use) based on your wants, needs, and goals.  I will use primarily my own thoughts based on decades of training myself and others, and the wisdom of old-school bodybuilders and lifters that walked the path before us.

     I understand why some lifters think of full-body programs as boring.  When I first started training, the bodybuilding magazines of the ‘80s were packed full of all sorts of different split routines, with different sets, rep ranges, and multitudinous exercises.  But when you read a full-body program, it was usually just 5 to 10 exercises for 3 sets of 10 reps per exercise, and really not much else.   If you have read my blog, or my many articles in different magazines over the years, you’ll know that there is a lot more to full body workouts than that.  For the sake of simplicity, however, we can break full-body training (at least, when it is done 3 days a week) into, essentially, just two categories.  The 1st, in the mode of Starr, uses undulating workloads, such as the heavy-light-medium system.  The 2nd uses an “everything moderate” approach, not too heavy and not too light, from workout to workout.  As the workouts pile up over the weeks, you grow bigger and stronger.  Both approaches work well.  Once you become more advanced, you can then start using programs that are higher in volume, total workload, and use a variety of movements.  But you can’t do that until you’ve built up the work capacity to handle it.

     How do you decide whether to use a H-L-M program (or something very similar) or an “everything moderate” system?  Keep in mind that the most important aspect of any program is consistency.  If you consistently train on a program that you enjoy, even if it’s not the most ideal program for your body type, you will get results.  On the flip side, you may select a program that you respond really well to, but if you don’t consistently head to the gym and, you know, actually do the program, you’re not going to see results.  Which means that your first decision should be based on the subjective aspect.  What kind of program are you more likely to enjoy?  What program do you get the most pleasure out of?

     Some lifters love to do hard workouts.  They want to push themselves in the gym and really be challenged.  If that describes you, then go with the H-L-M system, or another system that uses undulating workloads.  That way, you can “kill it” once per week, on your heavy day, and then back off on the other workouts.  Using Monday, Wednesday, and Friday as examples, let’s say that you do a really hard session on Monday—the kind that would make Ken Leistner smile down upon you from lifting Valhalla with the glee of a little school boy—then, on Wednesday, do half of what you did at the Monday workout.  On Friday, use a workload that’s in between the two.  Even though you only have 1 day of really hard training, you can “put up” with doing lighter sessions the other 2 days of the week, knowing that when next Monday rolls back around, you can punish your muscles once more.

     If, before taking up full-body workouts, you were doing a low-frequency program or a “bro split” where you train a different muscle group at each session and take as long as a week off between each bodypart, then you are going to be very sore after your heavy sessions.  You will, at first, have to learn to train through the soreness.  Do NOT overdo it at your first light Wednesday workout.  For your first light session (or two), you might need to do as little as 25% of the workload from the Monday session.  After a couple weeks, however, you should adapt.  At that point, once adaptation has taken place, you can use a workload somewhere between 50% to 80% of Monday’s workload.  Yes, that is a large discrepancy.  Once again, however, it is individualistic, as we discussed in Part One, so you will have to do some experimenting to find out how much volume you should do on your light day.  When in doubt, start lighter, and then slowly work up to 80% over a few weeks.  Your medium day should have a workload that’s between 75% and 90%.  Just make sure that it “slots” between the workload of the heavy day and the light day, and you will do just fine.

     The “everything moderate” approach was the kind of training recommended by Bradley Steiner in his many articles and columns for Ironman magazine from the ‘70s to the early years of this century.  He suggested sane and sensible—his words—barbell training.  In an article for Ironman in the mid ‘90s, he said that the following were good “indicators” that your full-body training is on the right track:

• You feel comfortably and pleasantly tired when your workout session is done.  You feel as if your mind and body have been renewed.

• You feel energetic—not as if you have the strength to train again, but as if you'd do it again if you could.

• You feel positive about your training.  You're deeply satisfied with the session you've just finished.

• You're buoyant, almost high, about an hour later.

• You're relaxed when it's time to go to bed.  You sleep deeply and well, and you feel good when you wake the next morning.

• You feel absolutely super on the day following a good workout.

• When you train right, you enjoy it.

• When you train correctly, you find that you make steady progress.

• And, finally, you feel exhilarated, not exhausted—and that's a good way to feel.

     For a more “exact” way to go about setting up an everything moderate workout, you can use the “90% rule.”  Whatever repetitions that you plan on using for a movement—we will cover “sets and reps” in detail in part 3—use a weight that is around 90% of what you could do for a “max” at that rep range.  Let’s say you are going to do barbell squats for 3 sets of 6-8 reps and your max for 8 reps in the squat is 250 pounds.  Use 225 for your sets, 90% of 250.  Do that for a handful of exercises—squats, bench presses, overhead presses, power cleans, and barbell curls would be a great workout.  Stick with that weight at each session until your workouts start to feel “too” easy.  At that point, add 5 to 10 pounds to your lifts and repeat the process.  It’s a no-frills approach, definitely sane and sensible, but it also leads to big-time gains.

     At some point, if nothing more than you need the variety to stay sane, you may want to move to a split training routine, or at least something different from a 3 days a week, full-body plan.  Once a lifter has spent a year or so on a full-body program, I usually recommend either a 2-way split or an “easy strength” program.  (We won’t discuss easy strength methods here for time constraints but click on the preceding link for more information on that mode of training.)

     I think split training is best for those lifters who have reached a point that it’s hard to continue to do a full-body workout.  Even though Steve Reeves and Clancy Ross stuck with full-body workouts at the height of their career, their workouts would have been rather long—hours at that point.  Many bodybuilders of that same era, once their full body workouts were lasting 3 hours or longer, moved to a 2-way split just so that they wouldn’t be in the gym for so long.  In that case, just take the full-body workout you are doing and split it in half.  Do half of it one day and the other half the next, but don’t add any extra work.  At least, not at first.  Eventually, you want to do just that.  That’s another benefit of split training.  You can get more work in for your muscles and/or your lifts.

     Most old-school bodybuilders who utilized a 2-way split trained 6 days per week.  This might seem like a lot to modern lifters, but it makes sense.  If you were training each lift/muscle 3 days a week, using a full-body program, and getting great results, and the only reason that you went to a split system was because of how long your workouts were lasting, you wouldn’t want to then do less volume.  But that is exactly what a lot of bodybuilders do, and it is the start, I believe, of what ends up derailing their hypertrophy gains.  For example, it’s not uncommon for lifters to go from a full-body, 3-days-a-week routine to a 2-way split, 4-days-a-week program.  Before they were training their entire body on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.  Now, they are training upper body on Monday and Thursday, and lower body on Tuesday and Friday.  It could be that the new program will work—especially if the full-body workouts contained a high workload, and the lifter needs less training per muscle for a small period of time.  But the issue is that the bodybuilder is now doing ⅓ less work on each muscle per week.  That will, eventually, catch up with him.  The answer is to go the old-school way and simply train 6 days per week, keeping the weekly training frequency per muscle group to 3.

     Another option once you find that your full-body programs are getting too long—one that I’m fond of for building loads of strength and power—is to continue training 3 days a week, but utilize a “full-body split” routine.  Day one, you might train squats, bench presses, chins, and curls.  On the 2nd training day, you might train deadlifts, power cleans, overhead presses, and dips.  Obviously, each day is still “full body,” but your lifts themselves get a break from such frequent training.  You can also really push up the volume if you train in this manner.  This is a perfect program for doing something such as 8 sets of 5 reps or 10 sets of 3 per muscle.  If you take this approach, on the first workout, you would do workout 1 on Monday and Friday and workout 2 on Wednesday.  The following week, you would reverse the order, meaning that, even though your entire body is getting a good workout 3 days weekly, your individual lifts only get worked 3 times in 2 weeks.

     Once you settle on the how of your full-body training, you need to proceed to the what, the actual exercises that you are going to use.  If your goal is to simply “get big and strong,” then your choices are easy.  You need to do some sort of squat, some sort of press (both a horizontal and vertical press is ideal), a heavy pull, and probably a curling movement—sorry, but barbell curls are actually an underrated lift.  You can’t go wrong with the 5 exercises that I listed earlier—squats, bench presses, military presses, power cleans, and barbell curls.  If you’re a bit more advanced, however, you need to be more discriminate in your selections.

     If you’re a bodybuilder who already has some degree of muscle, you need to look at your physique with a detached eye and select exercises that can bring up your weak areas.  The front squat might be better for you than the back squat.  The incline bench press might be better for you than the flat bench press.  Dumbbell versions of different movements might be better than their barbell counterparts.  A lot of bodybuilders I’ve worked with get much more pec growth out of dumbbell bench presses (flat or incline) than they do from the barbell versions.  You also may need some isolation movements.  Bodybuilders, once they need multiple exercises for a muscle group, often make the mistake of thinking that they need to do a split program at that point, but that’s not necessarily the case.  Steve Reeves, just to give an example, never deviated from full-body workouts and still did 3 movements per muscle group for 3 sets each, including plenty of isolation movements such as chest flyes, lateral raises, and concentration curls.  Use a split program if you want (and for the reasons mentioned earlier) but don’t think that you have to go the split-training-route just because you’re a bodybuilder who needs to use a multi-angular approach.

     Athletes, on the other hand, should use movements that are conducive to their chosen sport.  That said, generally athletes should select standing movements.  If you’re an athlete and you do your entire workout standing, then you’re headed in the right direction, no matter your sport.  Off the top of my head, I would say that back squats, military presses, and power cleans are the perfect “big 3” for almost any athlete.  If you’re a high-school athlete (or if you train high school athletes) you could do those 3 movements plus add in barbell bench presses and barbell curls, if nothing for the simple fact that young guys like to do those movements.  Younger athletes need basic, standing movements and little else.  There’s no need to specialize until it becomes a must, which would be at the collegiate level and beyond.  Besides, many younger athletes often compete in multiple sports, so a more general approach is better anyway.

     If you are an older athlete, or one who is trying to excel at one sport and one sport only, then you need to take into consideration which muscles are most used in your sport.  An athlete who uses more upper body than lower body muscles—a boxer comes to mind immediately—needs to do more upper body movements, though even the boxer needs leg and hip strength for generating power in their punches.  On the opposite side of that, you have athletes that use the legs almost entirely, such as most track and field athletes.  This week, I’ve been glued to the TV, watching the Winter Olympics.  Most of the athletes there need decidedly more lower body training than upper body.

     In the 3rd part of this series, I will discuss sets and reps.  We’ll discuss the best set/rep ranges for muscle growth, for strength, and for building a combination of the two.  We will also discuss how you can determine which rep range is right for you.  Even when it comes to just hypertrophy, some lifters need reps that are usually considered “strength” ranges, such as 3 to 5 reps.  However, there are also bodybuilders who build muscle with reps in the 15-20 range, reps that are typically considered more conducive to endurance than hypertrophy.  But the majority of bodybuilders will fall between those two extremes.

     Until then, as always, if there are any comments or questions, leave them in the “comments” section below or shoot me an email for a more personal response.

     If you enjoy reading Integral Strength, and would like to support my work, please consider purchasing one (or all!) of my books.  You can head to the My Books page for more information.  At the moment, I’m putting together my next book, with the tentative title of “Old-School Muscle Building.”  It will contain many of my articles on classic bodybuilders of the so-called “Golden” and “Silver” eras, along with a LOT of different training programs and old-school workouts.  I hope to have it to the publisher in the next couple of weeks.