My wife and I often let friends and budding gym goers lift with us. I don’t mind. I enjoy having a good community of lifters and I love teaching others about lifting. One friend got into lifting about a year ago and loves it. He is still a relative novice but you can’t beat his enthusiasm.
He tends to come over on leg days. He’s obsessed with the squat.
“I hit 295 on the squat a two days ago. I’m going to try and hit that again today,” he said.
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.
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
The shoulder is a complicated region of the body. It contains the most mobile joint in the body (the glenohumeral joint, or the ball and socket we all associate with the shoulder) that must also be strong and stable or else risk injury during heavy movements and exercise.
The fitness and sports industry has come up with many ways to strengthen, rehab, and prehab the shoulder, and for good reason. There are many muscles to address and if injured, shoulder rehab can potentially become a lengthy and complex process.
The weight room is my happy place. I like to think that it will welcome anyone who has any inkling of interest in lifting.
But… I often forget that for the uninitiated, it can be a bit scary and intimidating. You can feel very vulnerable… You’re doing big movements on display in front of everyone!
This can feel even worse if you feel like you’re unsure of what you’re doing.
So let’s go over some basics to get you through your first day in the weight room.
There is literally just one question you need to ask yourself when deciding how to design a fitness or strength program:
What is the ultimate goal of the program?
I know, I know. This is probably the most cliche and overused advice in the book but cliches exist for a reason. Let me illustrate this point with a story…
