This question will inevitably cross a beginner’s mind at some point. If a program says to do 5 sets of 5 on the incline bench press, do the warm up sets count towards those 5 sets?
Simple. No. You only start counting the 5 sets once you get up to your working weight. You can take as many warmup sets as you need, although I will recommend that you don’t get excessive about it.
A sample progression will look like this. Let’s say someone is performing their sets at 225 lbs on the incline bench press.
Progressive overload is the foundational basis of strength training. It means that you need to gradually increase the intensity of your training over time. Essentially, make sure that you’re doing more now than you did in the past.
The most common strategy to achieve progressive overload is to increase the weight that you are lifting by a few pounds. The problem is that most advice ends there. If it was that simple, the world will be filled with 1000 pound squatters and 500 pound bench pressers.
Simply adding weight to the bar is a finite strategy. Since we tend to grow muscle and increase strength at a relatively slow rate, just adding weight to the bar will cause us to progress too quickly and hit a plateau.
We must expand our strategies to achieve progressive overload. Here are 3 ways to progressively overload your training that does not involve adding weight.
1. Increase training volume
Training volume is essentially the total amount of work you are doing. While there are multiple ways to determine training volume, it is often calculated by looking at the total number of sets and reps you are performing.
For example, if you are doing 5 sets of 5 reps of a particular exercise (5×5), your total volume will be 25 reps.
If you wanted to calculate the total work of a particular exercise, you will determine how many times you are lifting a particular weight. This is often unnecessary but provides insight about the intensities that are being achieved with certain exercises.
For example, if you lift 200 pounds on the squat for 5×5, you will calculate 5x5x200. This is 5000 pounds of total work.
Increasing your total training volume or work performed is one of the best ways to achieve progressive overload. Simply adding a rep to each set will drastically increase training volume.
In our first example, if you did one extra rep per set, your training volume will be 5×6=30 total reps.
In the second example, your total work will be 200x5x6=6000 pounds of total work.
To implement this strategy, aim to increase your reps per set by one rep for a few weeks. Depending on the set/rep scheme, you may need to climb up to 8 or 10 reps per set. Once you can do the prescribed number of reps for all sets, then you will add some weight to the bar and begin the progression all over again.
Remember that adding weight isn’t the only way to become stronger. Doing more total work is more important. The added benefit is this will force you to slow down your progress to prevent hitting plateaus.
2. Increase training density
Training density is how much time it takes to perform a certain amount of work.
Imagine your typical leg workout session. How long does it take to perform? 45 minutes? 60 minutes? Now imagine if you deliberately took 3 hours to perform the same exact workout. No extra sets or exercises. How easy would that be? This is very LOW training density. Same workout, just performed over a very long period of time.
Now take the same exact workout and imagine trying to do it 10 minutes faster than before. You will be hustling and probably straining hard to get through all of the work. This is an example of HIGH training density.
If you are able to perform the same amount of work in less time, something about your fitness has to have improved.
Of course, this is another finite strategy to implement before it becomes impractical and possibly dangerous, but the point is to perform your training at a challenging pace.
3. Increase tension and improve technique
One of the critical principles of strength training is something called time under tension. It is essentially the total amount of time that a muscle is activated and creating tension. Muscle growth and strength is a direct consequence of time under tension. In general, longer bouts of time under tension tend to yield greater gains in muscle and strength (although this is a great generalization).
One overlooked part of time under tension is the amount of tension being produced. Lifting a heavier weight will naturally cause a muscle to create more tension. However, we can deliberately create more tension during an exercise by consciously tightening the working and stabilizing muscles.
Imagine performing a biceps curl with 20 pound dumbbells. Imagine casually curling them up and trying to expend as little energy on the movement as possible.
Now imagine curling the same 20 pound dumbbell but now brace your abs, squeeze your glutes, and stand tall. Pull your shoulders back. Grip the weights as hard as you can. Slow down the movement and try and actively flex the muscles harder as you lift the weights. In essence, try and make 20 pounds feel as difficult as possible.
This is a technique often employed by bodybuilders to maximize the amount of tension they are creating during any given exercise. Usually when we do this, we need to use impeccable technique to properly control the weights.
When we are intensionally increasing the amount of tension and improving technique, we naturally work harder during the exercise. This is another variation of progressive overload.
Expanding your toolkit
Never rely on just a single parameter to force progressive overload. The three strategies discussed here are simple to implement during every workout.
The pursuit of strength is a long journey. Slow but consistent progress is always favorable to rapid and unsustainable progress. Just focus on doing a little more each time you go into the gym.
I love minimalism. Less is more. Have less stuff. Embrace simplicity. So how do minimalists approach fitness?
Some people don’t want to think too hard about things. They want to get as much out of as little as possible, and I admire that. Work smarter, not harder. In fitness, there are some things that will yield greater results than others.
Let’s apply some lessons from minimalism to fitness. Here are 3 strategies to approach fitness as a minimalist.
Audit every exercise in your workout
Your body has a limited amount of resources to perform and recover from a workout. This is the basis of training economy. It bodes well to spend your time and energy intelligently.
The first thing you need to do is to establish some goals of your training. What are you trying to achieve with your program? Once you establish your goal, make sure that everything you do while you’re in the gym serves that goal and get rid of everything that doesn’t.
For example, if you are trying to increase your max squat, everything you do during a squat, lower body, or leg workout should somehow support your goal. Ask yourself if each of the exercises you do serves the goal of increasing your squat.
Will jumping and doing power exercises improve your squat? Yes. This stays.
Will squatting improve your squat? Yes, of course. This stays.
Will having a stronger posterior chain (low back, glutes, hamstrings) improve your squat? Yes. RDLs, back raises, good mornings, hip thrusts, glute ham raises, etc all stay.
Will having stronger quads improve the squat? Yes. Bulgarian split squats, lunges, step ups, etc all stay.
Will doing 20 sets of calf raises improve your squat? Probably not. Get rid of it. Plus, isolation work for the calf only improves aesthetics and not performance (unless it’s for rehab purposes).
Will doing those awkward glute kick backs in a leotard with 2 pound ankle weights while climbing up a stair master improve your squat? Nope. Get rid of it. But make sure you do it for the ‘Gram.
When you start auditing your training methods in this way, it’s easy to cut out a ton of useless fluff. Only the important things will remain.
Use the minimum effective dose
Louie Simmons always said it best. You don’t train minimally. You don’t train maximally. You train optimally.
May he lift in peace.
You should not be using absolute maximal intensities every training session. This will lead to burnout, overtraining, injuries, and just isn’t strategic and optimal.
The minimum effective dose is the least amount of exercise that is required to elicit a training effect. Any amount of stimulus under this will not elicit an adaptation or training effect. Any amount of stimulus past this may or may not elicit a greater training effect. There will be a point of diminishing returns for increasing your given intensity past the minimum effective dose.
All of this to say: don’t progress too quickly. If you’re squatting 225 for sets today, do 230 or 235 next time. Don’t make unnecessarily large jumps. Get as much out of 225, 230, and 235 as you can. You’ll be regretting that you didn’t when you inevitably hit a wall in a few weeks.
Many coaches will advocate for a slow but steady progression over the long term. This will not only help to minimize plateaus but ensure that you are getting the most out of any given combination of weight, sets, and reps.
Eliminate supplements and focus on eating real food
I’ve said this many times and I’ll say it again: Supplements don’t do jack s*** if you don’t have your basic nutrition dialed in.
Trying to make up for a bad diet with supplements is like using duct tape to save a sinking ship (Unless it’s that flex tape stuff. That stuff is magic).
Supplements should be accounting for less than 5% of your total progress coming from your diet. The other 95% comes from an educated approach to nutrition. Real food will always be superior to supplements, so put forth your effort into the items that are going to yield the majority of results and stop worrying about the rest. The supplement industry is honestly way too big for what it actually offers.
Let me repeat a sentence to make sure I made my point. Real food will ALWAYS be superior to supplements!
If you are adamant about having some supplements to either supplement your nutrition or to have a pre-training ritual, look into creatine, vitamin D, EPA/DHA, and good quality protein. The only supplement companies I really buy from these days are Thorne and Boba Tea Protein. Both companies are incredible.
Go forth and approach your fitness like a minimalist
Minimalism is all about cutting out the unnecessary fluff from your life. When you apply the three of these strategies, you are eliminating unnecessary exercises, volume, and supplements from your fitness journey. When you have less to distract you, you will be able to put forth your energy and effort into the things that truly yield the greatest results.
So here’s my permission for you to do less to get more.
The best way to treat a hamstring injury is to prevent it from happening. Once they happen, they become a real b**ch to rehabilitate. The best way to prevent injury is to make the muscle as strong as possible but adequately loading the hamstrings can be cumbersome and challenging if you don’t have regular access to a gym. This is where Nordic Hamstring Curls save the day. By their nature, they’re tremendously difficult and require no equipment.
Study after study has shown the value of Nordic hamstring curls in decreasing injury to the hamstrings.
This is exercise is so good that it’s consistently been shown to decrease the incidence of hamstring and knee injuries in populations particularly vulnerable to these by half. That is a hugely significant amount!
The Nordic Hamstring Exercise/Curl
The exercise is predominantly an eccentric muscle contraction, which is where most muscle damage and overload takes place.
You will need a partner or a solid place to wedge your foot.
Set up the exercise by kneeling on both knees. Your hips and torso will be upright. Your partner is going to hold down your feet with their hands on the back of your ankles/heels. Your partner should have their shoulders over your feet to make sure enough weight is applied.
Initiate the exercise by slowly lowering yourself to the floor by using your hamstrings. Try to approach the floor as slowly as possible. You will use your hands like a push up to absorb the impact at the floor. You can return to the starting position by either resetting the exercise or doing an explosive push up to hamstring curl your way back up.
Perform 3-5 sets of 5-10 repetitions.
Conclusions
Taking clues from weightlifting and sports medicine, they best way to make a muscle resilient and resistant to injury is to make it as strong as you can and train it with the greatest amount of tension as possible. Then you replicate game time scenarios with various drills.
The studies that showed the value of Nordic hamstring curls used the exercise in isolation with no other exercise program, but of course including the Nordic hamstring curl in a fully comprehensive program is the most optimal approach. However, if you for some reason had to choose just one exercise to do, this is it.
Further Reading
Vianna KB, Rodrigues LG, Oliveira NT, Ribeiro-Alvares JB, Baroni BM. A Preseason Training Program With the Nordic Hamstring Exercise Increases Eccentric Knee Flexor Strength and Fascicle Length in Professional Female Soccer Players. Int J Sports Phys Ther. 2021;16(2):459-467. Published 2021 Apr 1. doi:10.26603/001c.19452
van Dyk N, Behan FP, Whiteley R. Including the Nordic hamstring exercise in injury prevention programmes halves the rate of hamstring injuries: a systematic review and meta-analysis of 8459 athletes. Br J Sports Med. 2019;53(21):1362-1370. doi:10.1136/bjsports-2018-100045
Cuthbert M, Ripley N, McMahon JJ, Evans M, Haff GG, Comfort P. The Effect of Nordic Hamstring Exercise Intervention Volume on Eccentric Strength and Muscle Architecture Adaptations: A Systematic Review and Meta-analyses [published correction appears in Sports Med. 2019 Nov 7;:]. Sports Med. 2020;50(1):83-99. doi:10.1007/s40279-019-01178-7
Workout splits are essentially how you divide and organize a strength training program. What are you going to do each time you go to the gym? How often are you training each muscle group? What’s the best workout split?
There is a lot to consider.
There are an endless number of workout splits from bodybuilding-style splits that emphasize a specific muscle group per day to those that emphasize movements such as push, pull, squat, and hinge. Trainers and coaches will swear by one while slandering others.
Each split has its merits and advantages but there is anything you take from this post, it’s to just stick with one for long enough to make progress instead of hopping from one program to the next every week.
Everyone wants to get jacked but no one knows where to put forth their time and energy.
The 80/20 rule remains true for fitness. A vast majority (about 80%) of your gains will come from about 20% of what you do. This means that there are endless gimmicks in the other 80% that will distract you and waste your time. Focus on these 5 high impact pillars of fitness to get the most out of your efforts.
The 5 Pillars of Being Jacked and Fit
I can simplify getting jacked and fit down to 5 things: lift heavy 3-4 times per week, do high intensity conditioning, eat well, sleep well, and manage your stress. If you neglect any one of these things, your results will take a large hit. There are an endless number of extra gimmicks like massage guns, red light therapy, overpriced supplements, cryotherapy, and rolling around on foam tubes to distract you. If you don’t take care of the 5 pillars first, then none of the extra gimmicks will make any difference.
Supplements can be helpful, but not if your nutrition isn’t dialed in.
Massage guns, foam rollers, and cryo can all be helpful, but not if your sleep isn’t taken care of.
And all of the “corrective” exercise in the world won’t help you if you’re not on an intelligently designed training program.
I repeat: a vast majority of your gains and results come from the core behaviors and principles of training, nutrition, and recovery. We need to differentiate that from the fluff.
So let’s dive in.
1. Lift Heavy 3-4 Times Per Week
In order to get strong and jacked, we need to be lifting heavily and focus on the large compound exercises. These include squats, deadlifts, lunge variations, presses, pull ups, and rows.
Compound exercises are more effective than isolation exercises. The big movements are the core of your training program. Curls and triceps extensions are the icing on the cake. You don’t get dessert before your protein.
We should also be lifting heavily. A vast majority of people will make incredible gains lifting within the 5-10 rep range. I will sometimes push that to 10-20 reps for certain phases and exercises, but most of my sets are done between 5-10 reps.
There is no way around progressive overload. If we want our muscles to grow in size or strength, we must be doing more in the future compared to now. This means doing more reps per set, more sets per exercise, or lifting more weight.
Lifting about 2 times per week is the absolute minimum dosage for strength gains, but 3-4 days seems to be the optimal range. I advocate for an upper/lower split. This is how most athletes train.
If you train 3 times per week, your training schedule may look like this:
Monday: Upper Body 1 Bench Press Emphasis
Wednesday: Lower Body 1 Squat Emphasis
Friday: Upper Body 2 Overhead Press Emphasis
Monday: Lower Body 2 Deadlift Emphasis
Wednesday: Upper Body 1 (The cycle begins again)
A 4 day training week may be distributed to Sunday, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Or, Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday.
High Intensity Conditioning
Don’t do cardio. Perform conditioning.
Low intensity cardio will only yield disappointment when it comes to performance gains and body recomposition. High intensity interval training and sprint interval training are both vastly superior in terms of performance and fat burning.
We don’t need to look much further than Olympic sprinters to have a visual understanding of this.
High intensity conditioning is more effective and time efficient than low intensity cardio. You can get a good HIIT or SIT session done in 20-30 minutes, whereas it can take up to that amount of time of jogging to even sufficiently reach a fat burning state for some folks.
Here is a good sprint interval training protocol to try:
Complete the following 2 times a week:
Week one: 4x10s, 4 minutes rest between each
Week two: 6x10s, 3 minutes rest between each
Week three: 8x10s, 2 minutes rest between each
Week four: 4x20s, 4 minutes rest between each
Week five: 6x20s, 3 minutes rest between each
Week six: 8x20s, 2 minutes rest between each
Week seven: 4x30s, 4 minutes rest between each
Week eight: 4x30s, 3 minutes rest between each
Week nine: 4x30s, 2 minutes rest between each
Complete the following 3 times a week:
Week ten: 4x30s, 4 minutes rest between each
Dial In Your Nutrition
You must tailor your nutrition towards your goals. If you trying to gain weight, then you need to be in a calorie surplus. If you are trying to lose weight, then you need to be in a calorie deficit. And, if you trying to maintain your weight, you need to be at calorie maintenance. There is no way around this law of thermodynamics.
Gaining or losing 1-2 pounds per week is a healthy start. A pound of fat is about 3500 calories. In order to lose about 1 pound per week, you need to be in a 500 calorie deficit everyday.
Gaining a pound of muscle requires about a 2800 calorie surplus. This means you should be in a 400 calories surplus per day if you are trying to gain weight.
The calorie surplus and deficit are the most reliable metrics of altering body composition. The next most important is macronutrient distribution. This is the ratio of protein, carbs, and fats if your daily diet.
The most important macronutrient to focus on is protein intake as this will help with building muscle during weight gain phases and maintaining muscle during weight loss phases. Once you have protein dialed in, you should focus on taking in more complex carbs than fats, as carbs will provide more readily available energy than fat.
This does not mean to completely eliminate fats! Fats are important for a wide array of functions throughout our body.
If you have your calorie surplus/deficit and macronutrient distribution dialed in, then you will have covered a vast majority of your nutritional needs.
Sleep Like You Mean It
Sleep is the foundation of all health. If you neglect your sleep, then you are essentially throwing away all of your hard work.
I cannot emphasize the importance of sleep. Sleep is usually the first thing that gets neglected when life gets busy and hectic. However, skimping out on sleep will negatively affect literally every aspect of your life. You will notice that you have less energy, are more irritable, make poor food decisions, perform poorly at complex tasks and at the gym, and have reduced vitality overall.
There is a reason why professional athletes obsess over their sleep. It is the foundation of their performance. Sleep is the time that our body repairs itself, the brain literally cleans itself, and balances our hormones.
I have written about the importance of sleep and how to optimize our sleep in previous articles here and here (don’t worry, they open in new tabs).
Here is the gist. You should sleep between 7-9 hours every night (children and teenagers will need more). Get to bed around the same time every night. Make your bedroom as dark, cool, and quiet as possible. Cut out screens and stimulating activities about 3 hours before bed time. Stop caffeine at about 1pm.
Don’t neglect sleep.
Manage Your Stress
This is a big one for the modern world. Our attention and focus are being stolen from us everyday from every direction and our jobs only get more stressful. Responsibilities quickly pile up.
If we don’t do something to manage our sanity, we are heading towards a world of anxiety, panic attacks, and depression.
All of these factors significantly impact our health and well-being. Chronic and high levels of stress will negatively impact our mental health, motivation, hormonal health, sleep, nutrition, and gym performance.
We are all wired to handle stress differently. Some people can manage loads of stress without any negative consequence, and others will fall apart at the slightest derailment of plans.
You must understand your needs and manage your stress or else suffer the negative consequences. Some strategies to help manage stress include meditation, journaling, exercise, sleeping enough, and making time for your passions.
Your life cannot just be your job and responsibilities. You need to make time for your tribe and community. You need to pursue your passions and hobbies. Go outside.
Spend Your Efforts Wisely
We only have so much time during the day. Ensure you are spending your efforts on the right things that will yield the most results.
Lift heavy weights.
Do conditioning.
Dial in your nutrition.
Sleep enough.
Manage your stress.
If you have these 5 pillars in check, then you are off to a good start.
Let’s face it. Big traps are intimidating and cool. They round off a powerful physique. You can’t have a jacked upper body and have deflated upper traps. Massive deltoids look silly when they’re next to tiny traps.
When people think of building their traps, they always think of shrugs. When I ask for any other exercise for their traps they… shrug… Shrugs are great but that’s way too limiting. Here are the best exercises to build massive traps.
If you’ve lifted weights for any amount of time, then you know that progressive overload is the thing you need to be pursuing. This is one of the fundamental tenets of strength. If you don’t lift heavier weights or do more work over time, you will not get stronger.
The Problem
Sounds easy enough. However, when I ask most people what they lifted on any given exercise in the last few days or weeks, they always have a hard time telling me. Not that they need to have their numbers memorized, but they don’t even have something they can reference in order to check their progress.
If you’re squatting 200 pounds for 3 sets of 5 today, you need to be using heavier weights or do more reps/sets next week or month. But if you can’t remember if you were squatting 185 or 225 last, how are you going to make intelligent decisions in the gym?
In part 1, we explored common technical faults and injuries of running that can be remedied with strength training.
As mentioned in the previous post, running is a strenuous activity. Proper technique requires a certain level of strength.
In this post, we will go over the various performance gains runners can expect from strength training.
Improved energy efficiency/running economy
Running economy is essentially how much energy a runner expends at a certain pace. Multiple studies have shown that running economy improves with strength training. While the exact mechanism isn’t fully understood, we can make a few intuitive leaps.
First, an improvement in strength will decrease the perceived difficulty of all tasks. A stronger individual will find a given task easier than an individual who is weaker.
Second, an improvement in muscular strength and conditioning will improve energy use and efficiency. With decreased strain will come decreased energy usage. If the overall task of running becomes easier to perform, the overall energy expenditure is lowered.
Third, an improvement in strength will improve technical efficiency. Deviations in running technique caused by weakness will worsen running economy. Good technique exists for a reason: It is the intersection of optimal performance, energy efficiency, and injury prevention. As we deviate further from good technique, energy efficiency will plummet and injury risk rise.
To be sure, a systematic review and meta analysis (one of the highest levels of evidence) in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research confirms that strength training will greatly benefit running economy.
Improved Propulsion and Take Off
Running can be crudely described as your legs continuously pulling and launching you forward. The moment that your foot leaves the ground is the take off phase of running. The ability to propel your body forward takes tremendous strength and power.
Now, no one actually runs like this but this image illustrates the importance of strong glutes and hammies for running. Do you think he would be able to do that with a pancake butt?
If we improve the force output and power of the legs, we can vastly improve the take off phase of the running cycle. The glutes and hamstrings are the primary muscles responsible for forward propulsion. A program with a good variety of squats, deadlifts, Romanian deadlifts, hip thrusts, good mornings, hamstring curls, split squats, and box squats will be very beneficial here. In addition, a good mix of plyometrics will help with improving power.
Improved Management of Ground Reaction Forces
For every action, there is an opposite and equal reaction. When your foot strikes the ground, the ground needs to push back up into the foot. Think about running on solid ground versus running on a soft mattress. The mattress will push back with less force than the solid ground. This is called the ground reaction force.
Running produces tremendous amounts of ground reaction forces, 250% of bodyweight by certain measurements. Needless to say, if you don’t have the eccentric strength and tendon strength to manage this, then you are working much harder than you should and will likely get injured at some point.
The heel strike produces large amounts of ground reaction forces.
The usual suspects for a good lower body strength program (squats, deadlifts, lunges, etc) will work well but if bounding, reaction, and eccentric strength are a problem, you should also do include a variety of plyometric exercises like skipping, broad jumps, jump roping, box jumps, and (for more advanced trainees) depth jumps.
One simple way to figure out if you need some help with managing and absorbing the ground reaction forces, perform the single leg hop test.
Hop forward as far as you can with one leg and land on the same foot. Do the same on the other side. If you can stick the landing without wobbling too much or losing your footing, you have good control and strength to manage the eccentric forces. If you are very wobbly, lose your footing, or there is a large discrepancy between your two legs, then you should probably spend some time lifting weights and jumping.
Lifting weights will improve all aspects of sports
As you can tell, lifting weights is not just for the meatheads and body builders. The myth that lifting weights will make you inflexible and slow needs to go the way of the dinosaurs. There is ample evidence to suggest that lifting weights will improve almost every aspect of athletics.
Remember this: A stronger human is harder to kill, harder to injure, and will outlast others who are weaker.
Further reading
Balsalobre-Fernández C, Santos-Concejero J, Grivas GV. Effects of Strength Training on Running Economy in Highly Trained Runners: A Systematic Review With Meta-Analysis of Controlled Trials. J Strength Cond Res. 2016;30(8):2361-2368. doi:10.1519/JSC.0000000000001316
