I’ll be the first to admit it, when I started weight lifting I was a clueless jack-bag. I was the first guy to set up shop at the bench press, then proceed to bicep curls, and eventually hit some cable flyes on my way to getting to the water fountain. Occasionally I would do a lunge, then eventually another one, because I didn’t want to be unbalanced with one large leg and one small leg from all the hard work I was doing. I did stupid stuff like calf raises, wrist curls, leg extensions and machine shrugs till I wanted to puke in the face, and then I would come back and do it all over again the next day, because God forbid I ever switch it up and do something different. Yep, I was riding the short bus.

So I’m not going to sit here and point fingers at others who are making the same mistakes I made, because not everyone knows everything right out of the box. So instead, I thought I would drop a few pointers on how to develop and design an effective program so that you don’t wind up killing yourself or those around you.

Point #1: Assessments are Key to The Whole Thing

What separates a good program from a cookie-cutter program is its’ ability to address specific needs of the individual in question. Let’s say, for example, that I had someone who wanted to increase their squat for powerlifting. Let’s say this is an individual who has competed a few times and can comfortably handle 500 pounds like it’s nothing.Cool, right? So in most situations, they would get a squat-specific program that focused on heavy loads for low reps, lots of recovery time in between, the odd break to snort some ammonia, and up goes the weight.

Oh, I forgot to say, the person has little to no internal rotation in their right hip, is slightly kyphotic, and has the ankle mobility of a clam. In short: stuff to build into their program!!

If this individual were to get on the squat specific program without addressing these concerns, they may run the risk of getting injured, or at the very least not see the results they were looking for because their mechanics may be preventing them from getting the right movement and strengthening the appropriate muscles and soft tissue.

Always address the weakest link first, while keeping in mind the end result. If Joe Squatso here were to just work on getting his ankle moving and get his hip internally rotating, and completely said “Eff You!!” to doing squats until those problems were fixed, his weights would drop faster than the Dow Jones. But on the other hand, just focusing on the squats wouldn’t get the best benefit either, so is one direction better than the other? What about performing some mobilizing work on the ankle, hip and spine, corrective exercises to address the limitations, and then going into the squat workout?? Fa Sho!!

Performing a good and thorough assessment will allow you to learn three main things prior to beginning a workout:

1. What parts of your body are in the most need of strengthening and mobility work.

2. How far away from your goal you currently are sitting.

3. How you move through specific task completion (squat pattern capability, etc)

Once you know these three components, you can start working on a program that will help you reach the main goals you set out to achieve, in the fastest time possible and with the least chance of injury.

Point #2: The Goal is to Keep the Goal the Goal

This is a great axiom from Dan John. Let’s say I have someone looking to increase their skate speed for the upcoming hockey season, and I decide in my infinite wisdom to get them doing lots of walking lunges, bench press and shoulder side raises.

Huh??

Seriously, I’ve seen this happen.

First, the main goal was skating speed, and while walking lunges could arguably produce some increased strength that may eventually translate over into skating speed, the program as a whole would address absolutely none of the core components of speed.

When laying out a program, think about the goal first, and then pick exercises and training intensities that will help to achieve that goal in the shortest and most efficient manner possible. So what would be better at developing skating speed? Skating for speed, of course. But if you don’t have access to a sheet of ice for practice, exercises like lateral jumps, vertical jumps, Airdyne sprints, and other accelerative drills would help a lot more than a slow meandering walking lunge.

This is kind of a common sense component, but it has to lead the field, because there seems to be a lack of common sense in society. Seriously, do we really need to have a by-law to tell you to stop texting while you’re driving 80 down the highway and veering hard into my lane? Shouldn’t vigilante justice suffice?

Let’s say you have someone who can only work out 3 days per week, and someone else who can work out 6 days per week. You can understandably do more with someone in 6 days than you can in 3, so you have more room to work on secondary components that may not be directly related to their main goal but are important nonetheless. That 3-day a week person is going to have to spend the vast majority of their time working only on the specifics pertaining to their goal, because they don’t have a lot of spare time to work on anything else.

A good example of this would be someone looking to lose weight. While high-intensity VO2 max interval training is one of the better ways to burn calories, lose body fat and preserve muscle mass, it would probably suck ass trying to do a program like this for 6 days a week. Conversely, doing it 3 days a week wouldn’t be a bad idea. With the 6-day a week program, you could venture into interval training, strength, mobility work, soft tissue work, explosive power training, yadda yadda yadda, and it would all be cool because you would have the time to do it and not run the risk of completely obliterating yourself.

Point #3: FOCUS

Ever see someone who comes into the gym and on Monday they’re planning to become a professional bodybuilder, Tuesday they want to be a powerlifter, Wednesday they want to run a marathon on the treadmill, and Friday they want to become Mr. Agility Ladder? Are they actually training for something, or simply training to be training?

If you want to achieve something, then work your ass off to get it. Want to deadlift more weight? Guess what you’d better spend more than half your gym time working on??

Cross-training allows someone to stay fit without risking overtraining (somewhat), and allow for specific motor patterns to rest while you still work other ones. This is all well and good, but what it doesn’t do is allow for supercompensation in the desired direction, so running around the gym like a chicken with its’ head cut off trying to be everything to everyone does nothing except increase your laundry bill and piss off those who are there to train for reals.

 Let’s say you can spend 5 days a week training and you’re looking to get stronger. A typical training week could look something like this:

All 5 days are working towards the end goal of lifting more weight, but only one day in the week is devoted to lifting the most weight possible. This allows the body to work on the components that go into lifting heavy, work on the obstacles standing in the way, and get the specific heavy lifts in that are necessary to see improvements in strength. If we were to do only max lifts for a program, it would be very short lived, as the individual would either burn out from the mental and physical stress of handling max weights repeatedly throughout the week, or they would get injured from the lack of recovery offered. This is basic periodization of a training plan.

Tomorrow we’ll look at the next three points in Periodization to get the best out of a program.