Exercise Programming and Design
What Should Your Workouts Look Like?
Recently, I was having a conversation with someone who wanted me to take a look at what their online coach had given them for 4 days of workouts for the week.
Personally, I’ve always stayed away from online training because a good deal of what I do requires me to be there with the person. I can explain and demonstrate proper form and its importance using examples from mechanical physics. (Fun fact: most of the people who enjoy training with me and excel are people who are mathematically oriented) But it requires actually being there to observe what is potentially going wrong, why it’s going wrong, and how to fix it. Another part of it is to ask questions in the moment to determine whether or not it’s appropriate to increase the load they’re working with or whether to alter an exercise to accommodate an “off” day or a situation where a person simply needs more reinforcement of how a certain exercise is done before they can progress on to the thing we were attempting to work on that day.
The main reason I call this “Foundation Personalized Fitness” is because everyone’s body is different. Different arm lengths, leg lengths, torso lengths, etc and then all the varying ratios of limb length to torso length and how that impacts what your personal movement is going to look like. We’re not all the same shapes and sizes and so how we move is naturally going to be different also. And that’s an incredibly important thing to understand if your job is to train someone on how they move themselves and objects in space. And it’s really difficult to do that properly if you aren’t there to observe.
But here’s the thing: that’s not even what we’re going to talk about here! Because after seeing the prescribed workouts that this person was given by their online coach, I think it’s important to discuss what a workout should look like in general.
Program Design
How to design your workouts
The fact of the matter is there are a multitude of ways you can design your workouts. And aside from the statement that any exercise is better than no exercise, there really is a basic system you should follow, even under the broad structure of what I would consider practical.
The goal of most strength training programs when it comes to time management is to try and limit how much rest occurs. If you’re working on building strength it simply isn’t practical or safe to keep pushing yourself through your workout without giving your body time to recover. And the recovery time will vary depending on the volume of weight and the number of reps you’re able to do. Generally, your recovery time is faster if you’re using a weight where the rep range allows you to do 10-12 reps as opposed to a weight where your reps are going to max out at 3-5. The demand on your muscles is greater therefore the recovery time is greater. So, what exercise professionals typically do is utilize supersets.
A superset is when you perform two exercises back to back within the same set, but each exercise involves opposing muscle groups between the two exercises. And this combination can vary greatly depending on your goals, how much time you have, and how frequently you can make it to the gym.
One very common type of superset is called a push/pull routine (even though technically all muscles pull, not push, but we can talk about that another day). An example of this would be doing bench press followed by seated row. In bench press the primary muscles involved are chest, triceps, and the front of your shoulders. In a seated row the primary muscles are going to be back and biceps. So the idea is that if you fatigue your chest, triceps and front delt muscles doing bench press and those muscles need to recover before your next set, rather than sit there doing nothing while they recover, you do an opposing exercise that works muscle groups that haven’t been fatigued and won’t have much impact on the recovery of your chest, triceps, and front delts. And vice versa. While you’re back doing bench press, your back and biceps get a chance to recover so they’re good to go for seated rows once you’ve finished your set of bench press.
These combinations can be almost anything as long as you’re applying the concept of allowing the muscles you just worked to recover by doing an exercise that doesn’t involve them. So you can do upper body push/pull, lower body push/pull, upper body push and lower body pull, or even upper body push combined with lower body push. Really any variation you can think of.
But the point is, to me anyway, it really doesn’t make much sense when someone tells me they’re doing chest and triceps, or back and biceps for their workout. Unless the chest exercise doesn’t involve triceps (like a chest fly) or the back exercise doesn’t involve biceps. But if you’re doing bench press and then tricep extensions, you’re going to burn out your triceps since both exercises involve triceps. So you’ll never be able to achieve maximum gains in either because one of the primary muscles is working double time. Your chest isn’t going to get the best workout if the triceps are too fatigued to provide the support needed for your chest muscles to max out. Some might argue the opposite, that if you fatigue your triceps then it will force your chest to work harder in the exercise. I simply disagree with that. Triceps are a primary mover in a chest press, and their inability to sufficiently perform the exercise doesn’t force the other muscle to work harder because no matter what the triceps still have to be involved. All that’s happening is you’re diminishing whatever power output you might have been capable of. If you want your chest to work harder, focus on an exercise that only uses chest muscles. It’s safer and more practical.
If you want your workouts to be effective, efficient, safe, and move along at a good pace, then don’t overwork the same muscle groups by exercising them back to back. A lot of times that’s how injuries occur. An effective use of time and energy is to use supersets to work opposing muscle groups or muscle groups separated by upper and lower body function. Hopefully next time we can talk about how your movements are affected by all your wonky limbs!
Thanks for reading, and feel free to comment below! And as always, contact me if you’re interested in a consultation and movement assessment.