BASIC PROGRAMMING

We are living in an age of information overload, constantly bombarded with marketing campaigns from clued up businesses advertising the ‘best’ way to build muscle, the ‘fastest’ way to lose body fat with the ‘latest scientifically proven’ training programs all to get us to to purchase their products or services.

We are not like that. We are here to provide you with the core aspects of basic training which is what EVERYONE should know and UNDERSTAND before commencing training. The SCIENCE behind these aspects does not change and they  apply to EVERYONE and should be the FOUNDATION upon which you build. Without these basic concepts, not only are you increasing the likelihood of injury, you are setting yourself up for disappointment.  

But fear not! These basic programming fundamentals are easy to learn, understand and implement and they will give you the best chance of success, allowing you to achieve your physique goals AND provide you with the knowledge needed to ensure constant progression.

The two most important aspects to understand to create a balanced training program are Exercise Variety and Progressive Overload.

WHAT DO YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT EXERCISE VARIETY?

1. Exercise Variety can play an important role in your training program, but you probably don’t need as much as what you think you do especially if you are trying to build strength or  a foundation of lean mass.

2. Learn to ‘master’ the basic exercises. These are the heavy, basic, compound movements like Squat, Deadlift, Rows and Presses. By mastering an exercise we mean sticking with it and applying progressive overload, session after session, week after week and month after month.

3. By mastering the basic exercises and applying progressive overload consistently, you will increase your strength and ensure consistent gains. This is something that you cannot achieve with constantly changing exercises in order to achieve exercise variety.

Many people have a tendency to ‘Program Hop’, starting out with one program and changing to another after a week or two for any number of reasons. This is the quickest way to guarantee minimal results and loss of motivation. 

Exercise selection is important to help shape your physique and your results and it will also provide you with a method to gauge your progression in other physical attributes like strength or muscular endurance. However, if you over-emphasise the variety of exercises in your programming, not only will it will slow down your physique transformation and make it near impossible to gauge your progress, it will truncate your ability to truly progress in a movement or apply progressive overload.

WHY PROGRESSIVE OVERLOAD IS KING.

Progressive overload is simply ensuring that each training session you do more work than the last time and is measured by your training volume. Your training volume= weight lifted x reps x sets for each exercise performed.

To increase your training volume you can lift the same weight for more repetitions or increase the weight butlift the same number of times as previous session.This is the catalyst to force physical adaptation.

SO WHICH EXERCISES ARE BEST?

If only it were that simple! Everyone is different.Some exercises will suit some individuals and not others. You may need to select exercises to train around injuries or your own biomechanics. There are however a few agreed upon basic principles to apply to exercise selection and programming.

1. TRAIN LARGER MUSCLE GROUPS FIRST

To achieve physical adaptation we must subject muscles to ever greater stress’ than they are accustomed to. If you train smaller muscle groups before the prime movers, they will fatigue before the larger muscle group which will then not receive adequate stress to force adaptation to occur. So choose exercises that target the prime movers first.

2. TRAIN COMPOUND MOVEMENTS BEFORE ISOLATION MOVEMENTS

Compound exercises are multi jointed exercises that bring multiple muscle groups into play during movement and  being largely centered around the prime movers they will allow you to train using heavier loads than isolation exercises.

3. ENSURE YOU PROGRAM FOR MUSCLE BALANCE

Programming for muscle balance is not that hard if you apply principles 1 and 2 to your training program and ensure that you develop upper and lower body muscle groups with the same frequency and intensity as each other. Nothing looks funnier than a developed upper physique and an underdeveloped lower physique! Laughter aside, this also increases the risk of injury.

4. BASE YOUR EXERCISE SELECTION AROUND FREE-WEIGHTS

Using free weights ensures that you stimulate and develop stabilising muscles, allows you to move in your own biomechanical path during the movement, and also tends to activate deep core muscles to a greater degree than machine based exercises. Machines also have their place, but just because you can doesn’t always mean you should 

SO REMEMBER The  key is to master the basic movements and apply progressive overload, and learn which exercises tend to ‘hit’ you the best in the area you are targeting.

Do this, remain consistent, don’t ‘program hop’, and results will follow.