Today I want to continue by looking at what the specific goals of beginner training are, that is what specific adaptations and things are trying to be accomplished when setting up a beginning routine in the weight room.  As I’ll come back to when I finish up next Tuesday in Part 3, those goals desired, along with some science I’m going to bore you with go a long way towards helping to design a good basic beginning weight training program.

Now, as I mentioned in Beginning Weight Training Part 1, people have varying and myriad goals for why they get into the weight room.  And while the specifics of training certainly need to reflect that at some point, at the beginner stage, I believe that their training programs will look more alike than not.  Whether the ultimate goals are the physique sports (bodybuilding, fitness, figure), powerlifting or some other strength related sport, lifting for sports performance or general health, beginner routines will all look basically the same.  The big exception, as I also mentioned before, would be Olympic lifting training but setting that up is between you and your coach.

But hopefully the point is made and that point is this: in a conceptual sense, the goal of all beginner weight room training is to develop a base upon which to perform more specialized training.  But now you’re wondering what exactly I mean by ‘developing a base’ upon which to perform more specialized training which is, of course, the topic of today’s article.  I’ve summarized the primary adaptations that are important to beginners below:

1. Develop a general balanced whole-body base of strength and/or muscle mass to allow for specialization later on
2. Improving neural mechanisms of strength production/Learning to lift weights
3. Determine optimal exercise selection for targeting individual muscle groups
   
4. Condition connective tissues to handle heavy training
5. Improve work capacity/recovery
6. Behavioral stuff: pain tolerance, determination, consistency, etc.

I suppose I should also mention diet here since that is, as much as anything, a key aspect of many weight room goals (whether physique or athletically oriented).  Starting to develop good basic nutrition skills can and should be done during the beginner stage, it’s all part of developing fundamental habits for later down the road.  I won’t say much about this in this series; instead I’d point readers to The Baseline Diet 2009 Part 1 and The Baseline Diet 2009 Part 2 for a look at setting up a basic athletic type of diet.

And with that out of the way, I want to look at each of the 6 topics above in some detail.

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Goal 1: Develop a General Balanced Whole-Body Base of Strength/Muscle Mass

While developing monster muscles isn’t the goal of everyone entering the weight room, I’d certainly say that increasing muscle mass to some degree (whether it’s for health, vanity or performance purposes) is generally at least one goal of going into the weight room.  Sure, some folks fall into the ‘I don’t want to get bulky’ mentality but, truth be told, given the slow rate of muscle mass gains, waking up huge is not a rational fear that anyone should have.

Mind you, if there’s anybody who wants to get huge fast it’s generally (young) males; females are more commonly in the ‘I don’t want to bulk up’ camp (and often engage in endlessly pointless training in an attempt to avoid something that isn’t going to happen anyhow).  The simple fact is that, with few exceptions (usually underweight teenage males put on a program of squats and milk), rapid gains in true muscle mass don’t happen in the first place and certainly not for beginners (and certainly certainly not for women).

In a  similar vein, increasing strength to some degree is also a common goal of going into the weight room whether it’s for performance/sport reasons or just a desire to lift minimum macho poundages and impress one’s buddies (again, this is usually common among younger males).  I’d note, and I’ll come back to this in more detail in Part 3 of this series on Tuesday that the desire to lift as much weight as quickly as possible gets a lot of beginners into a lot of problems.

But again, the point is sort of made: at least a primary goal of beginner training (whether by desire or simply end result) is to have some increase in both muscle mass and strength levels.  Both are clearly key for anyone interested in performance or physique competition and even for general health carrying a bit more muscle (or at least limiting the common age-related loss of muscle) and having more strength tend to improve overall health and wellness (e.g. you can pick up the bag of groceries/take out the big garbage can that was once too heavy).

I would note that developing any muscularity/strength in a reasonably balanced fashion across the body might be considered a sub-goal here.  Put differently: just training the pecs and guns (guys know what I’m talking about) or whatever isn’t what I’m talking about.  Rather, developing some muscle mass and strength throughout the body in some sort of roughly ‘balanced’ fashion should be one goal of beginning training.

In a related vein and this is something that will be far outside the scope of this article is the fact that, as often as not, beginning strength training needs to address the massive imbalances that are often caused by our modern life.  Folks who sit all day at a computer/in a cubicle or do various and sundry jobs often enter the weight room with strength and/or flexibility imbalances that need to be corrected.  Pelvic tilt issues, shoulder rounding issues, neck issues and others are common as a function of what most of us do all day long and early training is a good place to address these.

However, addressing all of them in any detail in this article would be impossible; in Part 3 I’m going to make the (probably incorrect assumption) that no corrective work need be done.  But that is a consideration and something that usually needs to be addressed to at least some degree in the beginning stages of training.  Unfortunately, it’s a consideration that is hard for people to deal with without some form of competent coaching or training.  I would suggest folks read Eric Cressey and Mike Robertson’s excellent Neanderthal No More series for a rather thorough look at the topic.

But ignoring that last bit, that’s the first primary goal of beginning weight training; regardless of your ultimate goal down the road, developing a good base of all-around whole-body strength/muscle mass to provide a ‘base’ upon which to lay more specific training down the road (whether it be jakkedness, hottiness, strengthiness, general healthiness or what have you).

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Goal 2: Improve Neural Mechanisms of Strength Production/Learn to Lift Weights

To address Goal 2, I have to bore you with a bit of physiology about how the body adapts in the very initial stages of a weight training program.  For context, simply realize that how much weight you can lift in a given exercise is determined both by muscular size and a variety of neural factors.  Of course, levers and such affect this but you can’t change those for the most part so I’m going to focus on the neural and muscular factors here.

Simplistically, we could write:

Strength Output = Muscle Mass * Neural Factors

Where muscle mass is the size of the muscle (technically the cross sectional area) and neural factors refers to a host of adaptations that I’m not going to detail (if you’re really interested, I discuss them in my first book The Ketogenic Diet; I’d note that a lot of additional research on this topic has been done since that book was written so some of the information is probably a touch out of date).

Now, early studies repeatedly found the following phenomenon: when people started lifting weights, they would increase their strength without significant/any increases in muscle mass.  This was taken to mean that the body first made improvements in neural mechanisms with gains in muscle mass coming later; this was eventually almost extended to the idea that the only initial adaptations to training were neural and that actual gains in muscle mass happened later.  However, there’s a problem with this interpretation which is that studies also show that, even in total beginners, training clearly turns on protein synthesis (one of the key aspects of gaining muscle).  What’s going on?

Various explanations for this phenomenon have been thrown around ranging from the idea that beginners also ramp up protein breakdown in the initial stages to the simple fact that most methods of measurement are not accurate enough to pick up changes in muscle mass in the early stages.  I tend to go with the latter interpretation, I think muscle mass gains are begin stimulated in the beginning stages of training, they are simply too slow and small to show up with the methods we have to measure them. In that vein, in my experience with beginners was that gains were simply too slow for anything to show up on body composition measurements until about week 4, and by week 8 there were always measurable changes in something (usually an increase in muscle mass with some fat loss).

Regardless, the point is made that many of the early adaptations to weight training are neural in nature.  Simply, when you start lifting weights, you get stronger initially without necessarily getting bigger.  Which is great if your goal is to get stronger without increasing muscle mass but not so great if your goal is to get jakked as quickly as possible.  But ultimately you sort of don’t have a choice in the matter, you have to go through the neural adaptations one way or another before the real gains muscle mass start to occur/show up (and there are relatively better and worse ways of getting them to occur as quickly as possible which I’ll talk about in Part 3).

I’d mention that weight training tends to cause increased carbohydrate storage in muscles and this also causes water to be stored; and this probably explains why some people do feel as if they are ‘bulking up rapidly’ when they start training.  Women especially tend to feel like they are ‘getting huge’ when they start lifting (and freak out because of it) from this mechanism but it always goes away by about week 3 as the body gets back into water balance.

At least part of these ‘neural adaptations’ is that you’re basically learning proper technique for the different exercises.  That is, without going into all of the details, a lot of initial training is ‘learning to do the movement properly’ and a majority of this is neurologically based.  And, as I noted in Beginning Weight Training Part 1, while much of what’s done in the weight room isn’t as technical as many sports, the point is that proper technique is still generally superior to improper technique when you’re looking at making long-term progress.

I would mention here that lifting technique is actually one place that pure bodybuilding/physique training and pure strength training can potentially differ (and often athletes training for improved performance may be doing something a bit different from either of those two groups).  To make a massive generality, bodybuilders have often attempted to perform exercises in a way that maximally stresses the muscle, based on the idea that it is that stress that causes growth.  Exercise form is often subtly different in bodybuilding and attempting to beat the hell out of the muscle is a big part of how bodybuilders train.  In essence, they try to make the exercise as inefficient as possible, to put the maximal stress on the muscle they want to grow.

In contrast, pure strength athletes tend be more about lessening muscular stress in the sense that the less work the muscle does, the more weight you can move for the same amount of effort.  In essence they are looking for ways to maximize efficiency as this allows them to lift the most weight with the least effort.  So specific techniques or what have you are often made in the strength/power sports to lessen muscular work.  Somewhere in the middle, athletes who are lifting for performance reasons often use lifting techniques somewhere between the two extremes used by bodybuilders or pure strength athletes.

As an example of the differences, I would point you to my article on Bench Pressing Variations where I contrast a ‘bodybuilder’ bench press to a generic power bench (what most performance type athletes would do) to a pure shirted (sort-of) powerlifting bench press.  You can see that you’re moving from one extreme to another with the generic power bench being right in the middle.

Now, as I have mentioned several times already, I feel that this type of specialization or difference is fairly academic in the beginner stages: whether someone is an aspiring physique athlete, aspiring strength athlete, general athlete or simply in the general public, I tend to stick with the middle of the road exercises with a focus on learning how to actually train the target muscles.

That is, whether or not a powerlifter will eventually use a shirt, I think they should learn the technique of Benching with the Pecs. And even if a bodybuilder type eventually moves to an elbows flared ‘pec-tacular’ bench press, I still would start them with a generic power bench in the beginner stages.  Athletes, with few exceptions will be doing the middle of the road variations as a matter of course (there are always some exceptions).  Of course, anyone lifting for general health/fitness or what have you is going to get the middle of the road variations.

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Goal 3: Determine Optimal Exercise Selection for Targeting Individual Muscle Groups

In addition to the basic goal of ‘learning to lift weights’, there are other important goals of this phase of training. Related to the idea of learning to lift weights in general, I’d suggest that folks interested in physique based activities start figuring out what exercises are best for their individual mechanics and such.  This can also be relevant for those who eventually want to pursue strength or performance related activities, figuring out exercises (usually assistance stuff) that best targets a given muscle group or muscle groups (or improves the primary lifts) is important.

Now, I’m not going to get into a big discussion of exercise selection for hypertrophy here as that will be the topic of a future article, sufficed to say that any exercise that generates sufficient tension overload can make you get bigger and/or make the muscle you’re training stronger.  And Internet flame wars to the contrary, exercise selection for hypertrophy or strength is not as simple as “Compound is better” or “Isolation is better”.  As discussed in the highly contentious Squats vs. Leg Press for Big Legs – Q&A article, differences in mechanics and weak points make it more complicated than that and what usually happens is that people project what’s best for them onto the entirety of the training universe.

And, similar to what I wrote above regarding what exercises to first learn, exercise selection tends to be where pure physique sports and pure strength sports often diverge the most.  With athletes it gets even more complicated depending on your overall philosophy (e.g specific vs. general) in the weight room but I’m not going to cover that here.

It should be fairly obvious that anyone who wants to powerlift has to learn to squat, bench and deadlift (or just bench/deadlift if they go into that type of federation).  Obviously Olympic lifters have to do the competition movements (and most would argue some form of squatting) although philosophies can differ drastically beyond that.  Due to the demands of something like strongman competition, squats, deadlifts, overhead pressing of some sort and possibly the Olympic lifts will generally be an important part of training.  While they may not be strictly required, good luck getting very far without them.

But what about folks with physique aspirations (whether competition or just looking better naked)?  As much as many will disagree with me here, there is no exercise that someone with physique aspirations is required to do in their training since it’s simply not part of their performance package.    How much you squat, bench or deadlift doesn’t matter on stage for a bodybuilder or fitness competitor (or for someone just trying to ‘tone up’ or whatever), it’s simply not what you’re judged on.  Rather, muscularity, symmetry, balance, leanness (mainly a function of diet) are what matter.  And as noted above, any exercise that provides sufficient tension and overload can contribute to those things.

Put more directly: the best exercise for hypertrophy of a given muscle group is the one that targets that muscle for a given individual and provides sufficient tension overload to trigger a growth response.  There are other requirements (mainly revolving around safety and the ability to progressively load them) but beyond providing tension overload, no one exercise is mandatory or inherently superior for all people.  Certainly, for some people heavy compounds fit the bill well in this respect; however, for others they are drastically inferior.  Differences in levers and mechanics along with neurology all contribute to this.  Again, this is something I’ll address in more detail in a future article.

But again, no single exercise is mandatory when gains in muscularity are the goal.  Certainly no single exercise will possibly be the best under all situations for all trainees.  At best, a given exercise might be best for an individual trainee under a given situation.  But even that can change depending on the specifics of the routine and the goals.  For example, what if you want to train chest without training triceps for some reason (maybe your triceps are overdeveloped relative to your pecs and you want to bring pecs up without further triceps growth)?  A pec isolation movement would be superior to compound chest in that specific context.

As a more specific example, one of my trainees gets absolutely nothing out of rows for mid-back.  She’s very lat dominant and ends up substituting out when she does cable rowing: her mid-back isn’t targeted optimally regardless of it being ‘the best compound movement for back’.  Rather, a more isolated reverse pec deck with scapular retraction is a far superior movement for her.  It takes her lats out of the movement and it takes her arms out of the equation as well.  And it trains her mid-back better (which is all that matters).  Of course for someone else, the exact opposite might hold true: the reverse pec deck w/scapular retraction is the inferior movement to a compound cable row.

In any case, one thing that can start to be done during the beginner stage is to determine what exercise might or might not be best for you as an individual trainee.  Of course, this brings up the question of how to tell what’s better or worse.  Often you simply go by feel; many have used soreness as an indicator and even acute fatigue or a pump during training would be at least a rough indicator of the muscle being worked (note: this isn’t perfect).  If you have a training partner (or a competent coach) partner, they can check for muscular activation during the exercise.   Various types of touch training can be used to not only help the trainee focus their attention on the target muscle but also to check for activation and such.

In any case, on top of the overall goal of ‘learning to lift weights’ in terms of overall technique, starting to determine what exercises are going to be important is something that can start to be done during the beginner stage.  Note that this is a process that will be continuing for much longer than the beginner stage as well.

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Goal 4: Condition Connective Tissues

While it’s cliche these days to throw out that “[Insert buzzword of the week] is the forgotten part of weight training” I’d suggest that one factor that goes almost completely ignored in the weight room is the status of connective tissues.  Tendons, ligaments and such can all adapt to heavy training; quite in fact they need to do so to be able to handle heavier loading down the road.  But, unlike muscles which often show rapid gains in strength (especially initially), connective tissues adapt very slowly.  Trainees who jump into training that is too heavy or too frequent often come up with joint injuries.

And once injured, connective tissues tend to re-injure fairly easy.  Develop elbow problems early on and they may annoy you for most of your career.  In fact, you can see people in any commercial gym with knees and elbows wrapped simply to get through training with minimal pain.  That’s a sign that their connective tissues are beaten up, either because they didn’t give things time to adapt early on or are training too heavily too often for too long in their current routine.

But this is something that is critical to long-term success (many old time strength athletes talked about the need to ’strengthen the ligaments’ for maximal strength performance) and avoiding injury.  Just realize that it’s a slow process that takes time (months).  Go too hard too fast and you’re likely to pay a hard price.

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Goal 5: Develop Overall Work Capacity

In Beginning Weight Training Part 1 I mentioned that one criterion for having moved past the rank beginner stage would be the ability to handle a full 60-90 minute workout without the trainee being absolutely crushed by fatigue and that brings us to Goal 5: improving overall work capacity and training tolerance.  In essence, when starting out in almost any activity, trainees have to get into shape to be able to train. Yes, this seems like a contradiction but bear with me.

Intense training is a stress to the body.  And requires that certain base fitness quality be developed.  This is usually referred to as work capacity, others simply call it the ‘training base’.  You can think of it as having worked up to the point that a given workout, while stressful, doesn’t overwhelm you completely.  As well, recovery capacities can be improved over time and this means not only better recovery during a workout (between sets for example) but between workouts.

Beginner trainees, unless they are coming from some other sport into the weight room, have to gradually develop their ability to handle training volume.  This, like connective tissue, tends to be slower than other adaptations.  And it’s not sexy to develop basic fitness which is why nobody wants to take the time to do it.  But it’s crucial for long-term progress.  Quite in fact, in many more performance oriented sports, phases to improve work capacity are often performed between phases of performance improvement.

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Goal 6: Behavioral Issues: Pain Tolerance, Consistency, Focus, etc.

A final goal and one I’m not going to spend a ton of time on today or next Tuesday I’m going to simply group under behavioral stuff.  This includes pain tolerance, training consistency, focus, determination, etc.   These are all things that trainees often lack when starting out but which can be developed with practice.  Because nobody reaches much of a goal when they skip every second workout.  And nobody but nobody reaches their goals when they are unwilling to put forth at least some effort in their training.

While I’m not saying that trainees need to kill themselves in training, anyone not willing to work outside of their comfort zone and push themselves a bit isn’t likely to get very far.  And this can be trained over time (by gradually pushing yourself a bit harder over time and resetting what you thought of as a previous limit).  Discussing all of this would require more space than I have but it is important and can be improved by training progressively in the weight room.  It’s also where a good coach or trainer can be valuable as they will know how to push just enough to get the person to the next level without destroying themselves.

For example, beginning (and even some intermediate trainees) often think that they are far more fatigued than they are; a good coach can spot this and have the athlete successfully complete something that the athlete/trainee thought that they were too tired to do.  Which has the end result of teaching that athlete that their limits are higher than they thought.  And at some point in the future, when they reach what they perceive as another limit the coach will have them do it again, further raising the bar.

Similarly, many beginning trainees tend to give up quickly when things get even the slightest bit uncomfortable.  In many ways, this makes sense, pain is a sensation that usually means ’stop doing that’.  But learning how to tolerate the discomfort endemic to productive training is a huge part of long-term progress; without it folks will hit an early wall since they won’t be able to push hard enough to generate further gains.

Again, a good coach can play a role here; when an athlete starts to give up, the coach can get them to go a little bit further.  The athlete learns that they didn’t die, that the pain wasn’t really that bad.  Ultimately, this teaches them to push a bit harder.  And, again, later on the coach can do it again, raising the athlete’s ability to tolerate discomfort a bit higher still.

I think you get the idea.  And while the above is certainly easier with a competent coach available, some of it can be trained during the beginner stages by following the guidelines I’m going to give you.

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Summing Up

And that’s a look at the primary goals of beginner training.  From developing a basic base of muscular strength and size (and possibly dealing with imbalances due to lifestyle) to learning how to lift weights to determining optimal exercise to others, these are all factors that are important to pretty much all trainees regardless of their ultimate goal.  Which is why beginning training, by and large, won’t be terribly specific.  Since they all have to accomplish the same things during their earliest stages in the weight room, the training will be essentially identical.  Specialization will come further down (even as early as the intermediate stage of training).

And that wraps it up for today, on Tuesday I’ll bore you with some more science and then look at some different approaches to drawing up beginner training programs with some specific examples.

Read Beginning Weight Training Part 3.

Answer: This is another common situation that comes up, people who work full time jobs and who have families that they don’t want to completely neglect often can’t spend a lot of time in the gym on a day to day basis.  Traditional types of workouts which take 1-1.5 hours per workout simply aren’t realistic (especially during the week), between travel, changing clothes, etc. their entire evening after work is completely taken up.

In that situation there are actually a few different solutions.  One that I have used is to use multiple shorter workouts during the week (using a more traditional split routine) and then longer workouts on the weekends when time is usually a bit more abundant.  I discussed this option in the chart in Training Frequency for Mass Gains.

However, even that can be problematic as folks with families have other obligations that keep them out of the gym or they simply can’t spend extended periods in the weight room even on the weekends.  So I’ll continue answering your question from the standpoint of needing to do 5-6 short workouts and how best to sequence it.

Let me note ahead of time that training with this high frequency can cause problems and there are a number of pitfalls that need to be avoided.  Of course general overtraining is one of them but, more specifically is the issue of connective tissue and general overuse injuries.  Something that is so often forgotten is that connective tissues are the slowest tissue to adapt in the body: if you’re hammering things too often during the week, often trauma accumulates and causes problems.  Even if your muscles are recovering, if your joints or tendons/ligaments aren’t, eventually you’re going to get injured.

In this context what I absolutely would not do with a high training frequency would be to train full body at each workout.  Certainly, some Olympic lifters do this although their definition of ‘full-body’ is a bit different than what individuals seeking muscle mass gains would be doing.

As well, they take years to work up to that level of training and there is typically a lot of intensity cycling going on (with heavier and lighter days).  In the systems where guys are going to max all the time, well…there’s a reason that those countries can’t pass drug tests anymore.  As well, the nature of the Olympic lifts is different in terms of how they hit the body relative to more traditional bodybuilding movements.

So that leaves us with some type of split routine.  As I noted in Training Frequency for Mass Gains I’m certainly no fan of traditional bodybuilding splits where you hit every muscle group once/week.  In my experience, this simply doesn’t generate ideal growth for most natural bodybuilders.  So those types of classic splits aren’t what I’d do either.

One potential option would be to use some type of three way split routine (where the body is split into three ‘parts’) and rotate through it across the 6 days/week. This provides a nice frequency of twice/week for each body part and keeps the workouts short.

However,  this takes very careful scheduling due to overlap and the potential for the shoulder girdle to get worked too hard.  Let me explain with the table below (Sunday is assumed to be a day off) by looking at two different three-way splits.

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Split 1 would be a pretty common way of approaching things since chest and back can be alternate supersetted to save time.  Basically this is just the old Charles Poliquin split crammed into 6 days/week.  But there is a problem which is this: fatigue from delts/arms on Wednesday is likely to really screw up chest/back on Thursday.  If you go hard at all on that Wednesday workout, you simply won’t be able to use much weight on the following day.   As well, shoulder girdle is getting hit pretty hard four days/week which can cause problems in the long-term.  So that is kind of out.

Split 2 is a basic push/legs/pull split and avoids the problems from Split 1 of workouts interfering with one another.  However, the shoulder girdle is still being worked 4 times per week on both the chest/delt/tri and back/bis day.  While this can work for some, there is the potential for overuse issues and/or shoulder problems.  Of the two, this would be my first choice but just watch out for problems with overuse in the shoulder girdle.

If you don’t go with one of the above, that basically leaves with what would be my generally preferred choice which is a stock-standard upper/lower split routine training the full upper body one one day and the full lower body (with abs) on the second day.  This moves direct training for the shoulder girdle from four times per week to three (compared to Split 2 above) and movements can still be alternate supersetted to save time.

As well, since compound chest and back movements work the shoudlers and arms, this allows volume there to be reduced further to save time.  Additionally, due to overlap, warmup for movements later in the workout is usually minimal. If you’ve done heavy flat or incline bench you shouldn’t need much warmup for delts or triceps later on.   This saves further training time.

Of course, volume for each workout will also be low, basically you’re distributing the total weekly volume across the workouts so volume at each workout would be far lower.   After warm-ups, a handful at most of work sets would be done.  You might do 3-4 total work sets for large muscle groups and 1-3 for smaller.  You could either do all of the work sets for a single exercise or distribute them further across two movements (which is what I did in the example workouts below).

A fairly ‘generic’ upper and lower body workout are shown in the table below.  You can make appropriate exercise substitutions as desired or needed.  While I’m not generally a massive fan of exercise variation within a given training cycle (change them every 6-8 weeks, not every few workouts), different workouts of the week could be used to do different movements with this type of frequency.

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Exercises could be alternate supersetted if the gym will allow it (e.g. do one set flat bench, rest 1 minute, do one set cable row, rest 1 minute) but folks who train in the evenings when the gym is busy may not have this option.  With warm-ups, that might take 40-45 minutes in and out the door.  I’d note that the above looks quite a bit like Bryan Haycock’s Hypertrophy Specific Training (he uses more repetition variation across the cycle than I do).  I’d also note that if scheduling allowed it, volume could be increased slightly on the Friday/Saturday workouts due to the extra day of recovery on Sunday.

Finally, I’d note that intensity will need to be controlled with this type of scheme.  As I discussed in Training Frequency for Mass Gains one potential ‘negative’ of higher frequency training is that often intensity has to be reduced somewhat to compensate for the increased frequency.

In general, during the Mon-Thursday workouts, I’d suggest stopping work sets 1-2 reps short of failure.  As with the volume comment above, on the Friday/Saturday workouts, you could push a bit harder (either raising weights or pushing closer to failure) due to the extra day of recovery on Sunday.

Another option would be to use a more formal type of weekly intensity cycling like a Heavy/Light/Medium system of some sort (I’d probably go Medium on Monday/Tuesday, Light on Wednesday/Thursday and Heavy on Friday/Saturday); that’s really beyond the scope of this article and, my experience is that bodybuilder types don’t usually like that kind of training because they hate light days.

As well, you would still want to cycle intensity over the length of the cycle.  So the first 2 weeks would be relatively low intensity and then spend 4-6 weeks pushing a bit harder trying to hit some poundage PR’s at some point in the cycle.  You might simply attempt to add some weight to the bar every Monday/Tuesday workout (or every Friday/Saturday) and then maintain it for the next couple of workouts before bumping it again.

Every 4-6 weeks, depending on how the individual was recovering, I’d probably drop the Friday/Saturday workouts completely to give a sort of ‘unloading’ phase with 4 full days off.  This will help avoid problems both with overuse type injuries as well as cumulative fatigue.

And, for reasons you’ll see below, there is certainly an element of truth to that.  Individuals with great calves often don’t train them at all while others toil away (sort of) at training their calves with little to show for it.

What’s going on?

Well, a number of things.  In this article, I want to look first at some of the underlying physiology of the calves as well as examining why the calves seem to be so resistant to growth.  Then I want to look at common training errors that simply contribute to the problem.

Calf Anatomy and Fiber Typing

The muscle group referred to as the calves actually include several muscles although most only focus on two: the gastrocnemius and the soleus.  The primary function of these muscles is to act as plantarflexors (pointing the toe) although the gastroc also has very weak knee flexion activity (which is why some people will catch calf cramps on leg curl type movements).

This is also why doing calf work with the knee bent (e.g. seated calf raise) tends to work the soleus preferentially, since the gastroc crosses the knee, if the knee is bent, the gastroc can’t contribute as significantly to force output.  Put differently, if you do a straight legged calf movement, both the gastroc and soleus get trained, if you do bent-knee work, only the soleus really works.

Anatomically, the soleus essentially lies ‘underneath’ the gastroc but both give the calf its distinctive diamond like shape (when developed).   As I sort of alluded to above, the soleus doesn’t cross the knee, the gastroc does (why it can function as a weak knee flexor).

Many people seem to still think that the calf is a primarily slow twitch muscle but this is incorrect.  The gastroc is actually a fast twitch muscle and is involved in explosive type movements.  This is actually part of what is colloquially referred to as Black Man’s Calf Syndrome.

Black bodybuilders have commonly been completely unable to develop calves and the function of the calves is part of why.  High/short calves are excellent for jumping and sprinting but have little potential for growth, they are simply too short.  Black bodybuilders (or white bodybuilders for that matter) who have a short/high gastroc with a long tendon will make fantastic jumpers and sprinters; but great calves they will never have.

In any case, the soleus is predominantly a slow twitch muscle as it is more involved in overall stability (what rehab types often call a tonic muscle) of the ankle complex.  The difference in fiber type between the gastroc and soleus has implications for training that I’ll get to at the end.

I really should note another issue with the calves and that has to do with the very tiny lever arm of the achilles tendon relative to the ankle (the axis of rotation).  Because of the specific anatomy of the calves, a rather small muscle can actually generate a massive force (technically: torque) around the ankle.  This is one reason that many people can use such absolute massive amounts of weight on calf work (in addition to something I’m going to talk about below).

So Why are the Calves So Stubborn?

I haven’t honestly ever seen anything to suggest that the calves are genetically resistant or prone to muscle growth but there is one lesser well known biological fact about calves that contributes to the difficulty in making small calves into big cows (see what I did there?).

I’m assuming that everybody reading this knows or has heard of androgen receptors (AR).  The AR is what testosterone and related molecules bind to and one of the effects is to stimulate protein synthesis.  In men, there is a distinctive pattern of AR whereby there is a higher AR density in the upper body (especially the traps and shoulder girdle which is why steroid users tend to have their shoulders BLOW up when they take anabolics) decreasing as you move down the body.   If you think about it, this makes sense, since the typical wide shouldered v-shape is sort of the ideal ‘male’ physique, and we evolved like this for a reason.

By the time you get to the calves, the AR density is very low.  So even if you train the absolute hell out of them they simply don’t get the same training effect because testosterone can’t exert as much of an effect.  Even the legs of most men don’t have the same androgen receptor density as the upper body; yes, I’ve just given you guys an excuse for chicken leg syndrome.

On this note, my friend and altogether too smart guy Bryan Haycock once hypothesized to me that he thought that modern bodybuilders had better legs and calves than guys of old due to their essentially year round anabolic use.  By constantly bombarding even the low AR number of the legs and calves with constant dosing (not to mention that studies show that steroids actually upregulate the AR number), he felt that this contributes to better leg size (compare for example, the size of Lee Haney’s legs to that of Arnold in his prime, despite all that squatting with logs, Arnold had proportionally smaller legs compared to his upper body).

In any case, this is a big part of the reason that the calves are so hard to develop.  I’d note, and this is purely an empirical observation on my part, that some people seem to have somewhat reversed patterns whereby AR density seems to be higher in the lower body and lesser in the upper body.  These folks develop legs easily but the upper body never seems to catch up.  Women, especially those carrying more weight seem to have this happen but I’ve seen it in men too.  Again, no research on this, just an observation over the years.

What We can Learn from Kangaroos

There’s another aspect of calf function that most ignore but that I think contributes massively to most people’s complete inability to develop their calves.  Everyone reading this at some point been in the weight room and seen the absolute skinniest of folks bouncing enormous amounts of weight on calf exercises without appearing to be working very hard.  They couldn’t do this on any other exercise, did you ever wonder what was going on?

To understand what I’m going to explain, I need to talk about elastic tissue and how it stores and recoils energy.  Tissues like tendons are termed elastic tissue (meaning that they can stretch/deform and come back to normal afterwards), if you load them quickly (e.g. through a fast eccentric), they actually store energy which you can then get returned to you if you move quickly enough.  This is part of why it’s always easier to bench out of a bounce than with a pause (there are other reasons that aren’t relevant here).  So just remember that: elastic tissues can store energy and return it if you move quickly enough.

And that brings us to kangaroos.  Ever seen a kangaroo hop, ever notice how bouncy they are?  As it turns out, when kangaroos hop for distance, they do it in a very certain frequency.  And research has shown that this frequency allows them to load the tendon on the back of their leg to get a massive amount of elastic recoil; this allows them to keep going and going without using much muscular energy.  It’s massively efficient because tendons don’t really get tired.

Do you see where I’m going with this yet?  The human achilles tendon, the elastic tissue connective the calves to the bottom of the foot works similarly (not to nearly the magnitude of the kangaroo mind you).  This is an adaptation for human locomotion, when you walk and the shin moves forwards, it loads the achilles which gives you a bit of energy return, it saves energy for walking and running

Quite in fact, running shoes have tried to build mechanical versions of this, spring type cushions in the heel of shoes that return energy when you run so that less muscular energy is required.

What do you think is happening when people do bouncy bouncy calf work?  That’s right, they are basically using the elastic energy return potential of their calves to move enormous amounts of weight without performing much muscular work; and since the combination of tension and work is what stimulates growth…biology isn’t the only reason most people’s calves don’t grow.  Most people just train them terribly.

I honestly think this is where the idea of doing massively high reps on calves came from: when you bounce, you use such a tiny amount of muscular effort with each rep, that you have to do hundreds of reps to get the muscle to feel anything at all.

Of course, there’s a much easier solution; you’ve probably guessed what it is but this brings me to the next section: how to train the calves.

How to Train the Calves

First, let’s sum up what I’ve covered:

• The gastroc is primarily a fast-twitch muscle
• The soleus is primarily a slow-twitch muscle
• If you do calf work with straight legs, you work both the gastroc and soleus
• If you do calf work with bent legs, you work only the soleus
• When you bounce, the achilles tendon does much, if not most of the work and the calf does little

I didn’t mention the androgen receptor density thing because, short of taking steroids year round, there’s nothing you can do to control that.  But with proper training, we can take all of the above into account.

First, here’s my standard go-to calf routine.

A straight legged calf exercise: 5 sets of 5 done in the following fashion.

From a dead 2 second pause, explode up, squeeze for 1 second at the top, 3 second eccentric (for tempo freaks, this would be written X/1/3/2: explosive concentric, 1 second squeeze at the top, 3 second negative, 2 second pause at the bottom).  Take 3 minutes between sets and GO HEAVY.   When you get all 5 sets of 5, add weight at the next workout.  The gastroc is fast twitch, it responds to heavy loads.  The explosive concentric out of the pause will maximize tension, the squeeze makes sure that you’re controlling the weight, the slow eccentric is critical for growth.  Note: be careful on the pause, don’t overstretch the calves or you can give yourself plantar fascitis.  But don’t cut range of motion either.  You want some stretch on the calves, don’t try to drop your heels as far as possible.

Follow that up with:

A bent-knee calf raise: 3-4 sets of 8-10 done in the following fashion.

From a 2 second pause, take 2 seconds to squeeze the weight up, brief pause at the top, 2 second eccentric (so 2/1/2/2).  60-90 seconds rest and use as much weight as you can in good form, you may have to drop weight after each set due to fatigue.  Being slow-twitch, the soleus will respond to longer sets and more of a fatigue stimulus. This should hurt like hell.

Putting it a little more clearly:

• Straight leg calf raise: 5X5/3′ rest on a X/1/3/2 tempo
• Bent knee calf raise: 3-4X8-10/60-90″ rest on a 2/1/2/2 tempo.

That’s it, do the above twice per week (once every 5 days if you have poorer recovery) either as specialization or after legs.  Oh yeah, and you need to be gaining weight to grow calves (or any body part).  You’re not going to build muscle out of thin air and wishful thinking and if you’re not gaining weight while doing the above, you won’t grow anything.

Do the above for an 8 week cycle, take the first 2 weeks sub-maximally (you won’t be able to walk the first week if this is your first time dead pausing calf work) and then push the weights as much as you can (especially on the heavy sets).  After 8 weeks, drop the weight for 2 weeks and either hit it again or move on to something else.

I can’t guarantee that the above will turn your piddle calves into cows but compared to how 99% of people train calves, the above coupled with a slight caloric surplus can only help.

In this article, I want to look at the three most common training frequencies (in terms of how often a given muscle group is hit each week, I’m not talking about overall training frequency) and some of their pros and cons.  First I’m going to look at the two opposite extremes of training each muscle group before giving my own preferred training frequency.

I want to make it clear that I’m looking only at training frequency as it applies to explicit mass gains and hypertrophy type goals.  I’m not talking about athletes or strength per se (although the recommendations end up being fairly similar) but focusing only on muscle growth as an explicit end goal of training.

Three Times Per Week for Each Muscle Group

It’s often claimed that historically, bodybuilders trained every bodypart three times per week and there is certainly some indication that that is the case (especially in the pre-steroid era).  Training systems that look a lot like the heavy/light/medium systems first advocated by Bill Starr and re-popularized in recent years by coaches such as Mark Rippetoe and Glenn Pendlay (as discussed in my article The 5X5 Program) seem to crop up fairly commonly when you look at the workouts of old time lifters.

It’s worth noting that many lifters of that era trained primarily for strength with size gains being more of a ’side-effect’ of the training, rather than being such an explicit goal.  Still, there is a point to be made that training for strength gains (plus sufficient food) tends to result in size gains.  Whether or not they are a ’side-effect’ or however you want to look at it doesn’t change the overall success of that approach: grow stronger and eat and you will grow.

More modern training systems such as Bryan Haycock’s Hypertrophy Specific Training are also based around that type of higher training frequency. I’m sure there are others.

Typical arguments for a higher frequency of training revolve around gene expression and keeping the genes involved in hypertrophy running more constantly by training at a higher frequency and, again, there is certainly some truth to that idea; arguments about the type course of increased protein synthesis often crop up as well.  Typically full body workouts ranging from as few as three exercises per workout to as many as perhaps 8-10 depending on the specific implementation are performed with this type of training.

An additional potential benefit to a higher frequency of training, and this is especially true for beginning training, is that performing movements more frequently tends to improve motor learning.  And since a majority of the adaptations that occur initially to training are neural in nature, the faster you can get through them adaptation, the sooner you can get into real growth.

However, outside of that one situation, I find that there are some major drawbacks to the idea of training full body three times per week for optimal growth.  One of these is that once trainees start handling heavy loads, full body workouts can become incredibly difficult to complete: the loading used in exercises done early in the workout tend to severely limit what can be done later in the workout and something invariably suffers.

This is especially true if heavy leg training is done at the front of the workout: this often leaves about zero energy for the rest of the workout.   And performing leg training last often means that it suffers.  Back squatting heavily with a tired shoudler girdle after upper body training is problematic at best and dangerous at worst.

Additionally, there is at least some indication that there is an optimal training volume per muscle group (a topic I’ll cover in a later article) and achieving that volume in the context of a full body workout tends to become nearly impossible without the workout being several hours long.

So under most circumstances, I don’t find that hitting each muscle group three times per week is optimal for most trainees.  It can be accomplished with proper cycling of intensity for the different bodyparts but since, in my experience, bodybuilders like to train hard pretty much all of the time, suggestions to do that often fall on deaf ears.

Blast Every Muscle Group Once Per Week

At the other extreme of training is the idea, that seems to have primarily developed as steroids started to enter the picture, that a muscle group should be blasted into oblivion once per week and then allowed to rest before training again.  Many critics of higher frequency training will point to successful elite (read: drug using) bodybuilders who train that way.  Or who at least claim to train that way.

Typically in this approach, one or perhaps two muscle groups would be chosen for a single workout with a fairly large volume of training (often 15-20 sets of 3-4 different exercises) performed for each.  Hitting all of the angles, blitzing and bombing were all ideas that came out of this type of approach and generally the body is split across 4 or more workouts which each muscle group getting blasted once every 7 days.

Now, there is no denying that this approach seems to work at the elite level of bodybuilding.  However, there are often a lot of other factors involved that people tend to ignore.  The main one, of course, is drugs especially steroids (it’s no coincidence that this approach to training developed primarily as steroid use was starting to increase among bodybuilders).

People don’t like to hear it but anabolic steroids will generate muscle growth without training at all and, to a great degree, many elite bodybuilders seem to succeed in spite of their training rather than because of it.  In that context, I know of several coaches who work with drug using bodybuilders and invariably growth is better with a higher frequency of training, even in the context of steroid use.

Another factor is that even if top level bodybuilders only hit every bodypart once per week after they have been training for 10 or more years, that’s usually not how they built the majority of their muscle mass (if their reports of what they did earlier in their career are accurate).

Basically, looking at the elite level of any sport and how they train after 15 years of training is usually a losing proposition, what they might be doing at the peak of their career and what they did to get there are often very different things indeed.

But of perhaps more relevance, outside of a small percentage of folks, I simply haven’t seen the majority of natural trainees grow optimally training in this fashion.  Basically, it just doesn’t work for the majority in my experience (and in the experience of a lot of coaches I know).  Sure, we can always look at the ‘big guys’ in the gym who are doing fine hitting everything once per week but the fact is that the majority of folks training that way aren’t usually growing well at all.

As well, for naturals, the lower frequency of training tends to lead people to do far too much volume at any given workout.  As I mentioned above, there appears to be an optimal volume of training for each bodypart with both too little and too much volume being a problem.  Naturals who do endless sets in a given workout (which is not only allowed but usually mandated by low frequency training) not only aren’t stimulating better growth, they end up cutting into their recovery with excessive volume.

Few bodyparts in my experience need more than two exercises (back is possibly an exception) in the first place and being able to do a zillion overlapping and redundant exercises is usually pointless for most trainees anyhow.

For the most part, I can’t think of any situation where I’d recommend only hitting a bodypart once per week for growth unless the goal was to simply maintain a given muscle group.  And that’s usually in the context of a specialization cycle (a topic for another day) when other bodyparts are being trained more frequently.

One that I might mention (in a sarcastic way) would be for people who are addicted to being sore or exhausted from training.  At least one of the reasons that I think people stick with low frequency training in the absence of good results is that they always get to walk out of the gym feeling like they have completely exhausted a given muscle group.  As well, low frequency training tends to get people sore more consistently than a higher training frequency.

People who are more concerned with acute exhaustion or crippling soreness rather than actual progress may want to just keep on doing what they are doing….like I said, just a bit sarcastic.

Hit Each Muscle Group Between Every 5th Day and Twice Per Week

Which brings us to my preferred training frequency.  Which, given my tendency to middle of the road types of recommendations for most things probably won’t surprise anybody at all.  For most applications, for the average trainee, I think hitting each muscle group somewhere between twice per week or a minimum of every 5th day yields about optimal results.  Which is best for a given individual depends on individual recovery and how often they can be in the gym.

Again, here I’m talking about an optimal training frequency for the majority of natural trainees.  Again, as I noted above, I know of several coaches who work with steroid using bodybuilders who report better results with this type of training frequency.

Generally speaking, you might see this frequency of training implemented as some type of upper/lower split routine  (which is the basis of my generic bulking routine) although there are many other workable options to achieve this training frequency per bodypart.

And it’s worth noting that a lot of successful training systems (whether strength or hypertrophy oriented) use this type of training frequency.  Most powerlifting programs use a generic template with two upper body and two lower body workouts per week; although the exercises may differ on each day, there is generally sufficient overlap that each muscle group is being hit about twice per week.

Doggcrapp training, for example, uses a split of chest/shoulders/triceps/back for one workout and legs/arms for the other.  The workouts are alternated on a three days per week program which means that each muscle group is being hit every 5 days.

To give you an idea of how this might be implemented weekly, I’ve shown how the two different training frequencies could be achieved in several different ways depending on the circumstances.  Although, I’ve used an upper/lower body template in the example below, any type of approach that divided up the body into two different workouts would work just as well.   I’ve also shown a higher weekly training frequency for people with that kind of flexibility and/or who want to be in the gym more often.

I’m also assuming that most people will train on the same days each week which I find is the most common pattern for people with a job, families, etc.  Of course, people who can train different days each week can use other variations of the below approaches since they can vary the days of the week that they are in the gym.

Oh yeah, blank days would either be taken off or could be used for metabolic work (e.g. the type of thing I described in the article Cardio and Mass Gains).

* On the higher training frequency option, it’s important to keep the volumes of the split workouts (on Tue/Wed/Thu) down.  Trainees who are prone to overdo it (you know who you are) probably shouldn’t use that option.

As you can see, all three of the first options hit each muscle group twice per week in varying combinations depending on the specifics. The first one gives better recovery during the week (since there’s a day off between several of the workouts) but not everybody can train weekends.  That’s option two which is for folks who can recover from four weekly training sessions per week but can’t get to the gym on weekends.

Option three might be for someone who works late during the week and wants to keep the weekly workouts a bit shorter by splitting things up, but who has time to train for longer on the weekends.   The last option shows how a once every 5th day frequency would be achieved, while also avoiding weekends.  This tends to be good for folks with poorer recovery and/or who simply need or want more recovery between workouts.

Again, the workouts don’t have to be upper/lower, that just tends to be my default choice for a variety of reasons I’m not going to go into here.  Any reasonable split can be used effectively in the above types of templates.

As you might imagine, I find that this type of training frequency tends to strike a balance between the other two extremes of frequency which is why I prefer it.

Since the body is split up a bit more compare to three full body workouts per week, individual workouts tend not to be quite so daunting with exercises early in the session not impacting as badly on later exercises.

And, as noted above, compared to the typical ‘hit everything once and then let it rest a week’, while soreness and acute exhaustion is lower, growth is almost invariably better.  At the same time, the frequency is low enough that trainees can go pretty hard in the gym while still being able to recover by the time the next workout rolls around so that they can do it again, allowing them to make progressive strength gains.  Which isn’t to say that I suggest going all out all the time but intensity cycling is another topic for another day.

Summing Up

So that’s a quick look at optimal training frequencies for muscle growth.  For the most part, I find that the cons of full body training three times per week tends to offset any potential benefits in terms of gene expression or what have you.

And while it’s still common to emulate the training pattern of elite (read: drug using) bodybuilders and bomb and blast everything once per week, my experience (and that of many others) is simply that the majority of natural trainees (and even many drug users) simply don’t get optimal growth that way.  This is one of those cases where the athletes seem to be succeeding in spite of the training rather than due to it.

Which brings us to my preferred training frequency for the majority of folks seeking optimal size gains: somewhere between once every 5th day and twice per week.  I find that this yields about optimal results for most people (and recent research supports that recommendation anyhow), offsetting the cons of both the higher and lower training frequencies.

At one extreme is the idea that trainees should perform an hour of low intensity cardio daily during their mass gaining phase.  This is usually suggested as a way of staying lean during the period of overfeeding needed to maximize muscle gain.  At the other extreme is the idea that any activity outside of lifting weights, and especially cardio, will do nothing but harm gains in muscle mass (and strength).

As usual, I think that the truth lies somewhere in the middle and I’d like to look at some of the various pros and cons of keeping some form of cardio in the overall program when the explicit goal is muscle mass gains.  As usual, whether cardio is good, bad or neutral depends on the situation along with how it’s performed.

For context, the main type of cardio activity I’ll be focusing on in this article is low to moderate intensity steady state cardio which is usually where the big arguments erupt.  For the most part, unless dealing with an athlete who must be performing interval training for their sport, I don’t recommend interval training when the goals are maximal muscle mass gains.

Yes, you can always find someone who makes it work (and there have been various theories thrown around how sprinting might enhance muscle gain which never seem to have really panned out) but for the most part I don’t think high intensity cardio training of any sort (interval or otherwise) is optimal when the goal is maximal muscle gain.  So I’ll be focusing on low- to moderate-intensity steady state type cardio here.

Benefits of Cardio During Mass Gaining Phases

Among the pros of maintaining some amount of cardio during a mass gaining phase, I’d probably include the following:

1. Improved recovery
2. Appetite
3. Maintaining some conditioning and work capacity
4. Improved Calorie Partitioning
5. Keeps the fat burning pathways active

Let’s look at each.

Improved Recovery

Done at low to moderate intensities (I’ll come back to specifics at the end of the article) cardio can act as a form of active recovery.  By pumping blood through worked muscles, recovery is often hastened (and for many, active recovery actually helps more than simple passive recovery: doing nothing).

I’d note that most forms of cardio tend to be lower body dominant so most of this effect will be for the lower body.  Trainees who want to achieve a similar effect for the upper body would need to perform rowing or use the EFX or a machine that also involves the upper body to some degree.

Finally, it’s worth noting that, by sipping on a dilute carb/protein drink (perhaps 30 grams carbs and half as much protein per hour), the increased blood flow to the working muscles will enhance nutrient delivery; this should also help with overall muscular recovery.

Appetite

The impact of exercise on appetite can be exceedingly variable.  For some people, activity, and this is especially true of high-intensity activity, can blunt appetite; for others it can stimulate it.  In the context of mass gaining, trainees who have trouble consuming sufficient calories often find that including moderate amounts of cardio can be beneficial in terms of improving appetite.

Maintaining Conditioning/Work Capacity

Depending on the specifics of the training, it’s not uncommon for lifters and trainees to lose a lot of their metabolic conditioning when they move into pure mass gain phases (where all they are doing is weight training).  Lower repetition/long rest interval types of training tends to have the greatest impact and individuals lose vast amounts of conditioning and work capacity during this type of training.

For athletes this is clearly detrimental since it means they have to start building things back up from scratch.  Even for non-athlete lifters (e.g. bodybuilders), losing work capacity can hurt overall recovery both during a workout and in-between workouts.

The good thing is that it takes far less training to maintain some conditioning than it does to develop it and keeping at least some amount of cardio in the total training program goes a long way towards this goal.

Improved Calorie Partitioning

As an additional potential benefit, aerobic activity could potentially improve results during a mass gaining phase in another way and that has to do with overall calorie partitioning.  As I discuss in Calorie Partitioning Part 1 and Calorie Partitioning Part 2, partitioning has to do with where calories ‘go’ or ‘come from’ when you over- or under-eat respectively.

Probably the most potent partitioning tool we have is training.  Regular activity increases nutrient uptake into skeletal muscle; practically that means less excess calories to get stored elsewhere (e.g. fat cells).   While it’s debatable how much of an effect low- to moderate intensity cardio will have in this impact, it certainly won’t hurt done in reasonable amounts.  And it may help in the long-term.

Staying Lean/Keeping Fat Burning Pathways Active

Finally, there is the issue of keeping fat burning pathways active and/or staying lean while mass gaining.  Frankly, I’m not hugely convinced that doing cardio does a ton to keep folks lean; especially given that it’s relatively easy to eat more calories and overpower any slight caloric burn from the type of cardio that is usually advocated.   Frankly, I suspect that it would be easier to just keep the caloric surplus under greater control (or time that surplus around training better).

However, there is another related reason to keep it in and that has to do with the fact that eventually folks who are gaining muscle mass will want to lean out.  As I discussed in General Philosophies of Muscle Mass Gains, most will get the fastest rate of muscle growth while allowing some fat gain to occur; this necessitates eventually dieting off the extra fat.

Now, tangentially (and this is a topic I can’t discuss fully here), I think that one of the reasons that cardio has gotten a bad rap in terms of muscle loss on a diet is that people jump from doing basically zero cardio to fairly large amounts often overnight; this is often accompanied by a massive drop in calories and I suspect that it is this combination that tends to cause muscle loss.

This is a problem as during the overfeeding that is needed to generate maximum gains in muscle mass, the body often loses some of its ability to use fat as a fuel and this can take a couple of weeks to get fully ramped back up when calories are restricted (I suspect this explains some of the odd delay that seems to occur in true fat loss when people start dieting again).

And this seems to be even more pronounced if folks have been doing zero cardio while they are gaining muscle mass.  By keeping in some amount of cardio during the mass gaining phase, at least some ability to use fat effectively for fuel is maintained.  When the dieting phase eventually starts, the body will be a in better place to use fat for fuel.

Drawbacks of Cardio During Mass Gaining Phases

Having looked at the pros of keeping at least some cardio in during mass gaining phases, I now want to look at the two major cons, or at least the two that are usually brought up:

1. Burns up calories that could go towards muscle growth
2. Might cut into recovery/Over-training

Burning up Calories that could go to Muscle Growth

This tends to be one of the major concerns of the ‘no cardio while gaining mass’ group, that valuable calories that might go towards muscle growth will be burned off by cardio.  And certainly, taken to the extreme where excessive cardio is being done, there is much truth to this.

As I mentioned above, the calorie burn of reasonable amounts of low to moderate intensity aerobic activity isn’t generally very high unless someone is exceedingly well trained (and can burn tremendous numbers of calories even at low intensities).  The few hundred calories burned during activity is pretty easy to replace on a day to day basis and I’m not sure this is a huge concern in terms of preventing calories and protein from getting to the muscle to support growth.

One exception to this are the perpetually skinny (e.g. the classic ‘hardgainer’ or ectomorphic type).  These are the folks who have a hard enough time putting on weight in the first place, for a wide variety of reasons (that I’ve discussed elsewhere on the site).   Since they rarely have to worry about getting lean in the first place, they probably should avoid much if any cardio so that all of their energies and food intake go towards training and gaining muscle mass.

Of course, the exception to this exception relates to the appetite issue I mentioned above.  The classic ectomorphic/hardgainer type often has trouble eating sufficient calories (one of the reasons they tend to stay so lean/skinny is that their appetite tends to shut off pretty readily when they overfeed).  In that situation, if performing some cardio on off days helps them to eat more, then it might still be worth including.

Cutting into Recovery/Over-training

The final two issues I want to look at are extremely related so I’ll look at them together. The basic concern is that trying to combine both heavy weight training and cardio/endurance type training will impair results in the weight room.  And there is certainly some truth to that idea.

A great amount of early research (and practical experience) suggested that the combination of cardiovascular and strength training tended to cause an interference in terms of results.   Interestingly (and this is beyond the scope of this article), while cardiovascular training tended to impair strength performance, the opposite often wasn’t seen; heavy strength training didn’t seem to impair the adaptations to endurance training.

Now one factor to keep in mind is that most of the studies looking at this topic were using some fairly high intensity types of cardio; they were often examining the types of training that might be seen with American football or sports of that nature.  Meaning that they don’t automatically have a ton of relevance to what’s being discussed in this article.  The intensity is a key factor, for reasons that are beyond the scope of this article.  When intensity is kept down and the volume and frequency is more moderate, the potential negative impact of cardiovascular training on adaptations in the weight room is massively reduced.

In that vein, I would still note that excessive amounts of cardio can still cut into recovery, both systemically (whole-body) and locally (specific muscle groups).  The legs are what typically what can take a beating since most cardio modes are lower body dominant.  Excessive amounts of even low intensity cardio can cut into the overall recovery of the legs and rotating machines to alter the stress on the musculature may be a worthwhile consideration.

So Cardio while Focusing on Mass Gains…Yes or No?

In my opinion, with the potential exception of the extremely skinny/hardgainer type (who may still benefit from appetite stimulation), there is more benefit to be had from reasonable amounts of cardio than there are negatives.

I simply feel that most of the problems with cardio training start to come into play when either the intensity or volume get excessive.   As long as the amounts are kept moderate and the intensity is kept under control I think most of the concerns are mostly a non-issue.

So what defines moderate, reasonable, etc.?

At a bare minimum, 20-30 minutes of cardio performed three times per week will maintain some basic cardiovascular fitness, burn off a few calories, act as active recovery, and help to keep the fat burning pathways active so that the shift to dieting is a little bit easier; all of the good things that I mentioned.  And it should do that without having any really major impact on progress in the weight room.

A higher frequency can be used but I wouldn’t see much point to more than five per week unless the intensity is kept very low (e.g. you can do brisk walking daily if desired).  Going longer than the bare minimum of 20-30 minutes will burn a few more calories but there are limits to time availability (and people start to get bored) and I might set a reasonable limit of 40 minutes of moderate intensity cardio at the maximum; if the intensity is kept way down (again, think brisk walking), an hour is acceptable.

In terms of intensity, I think keeping things in the low to moderate range is going to be best.   More specifically, a maximum intensity of 70% of maximum heart rate (140 beats per minute for someone with a maximum of 200 beats) or even lower should achieve some benefits without cutting into recovery or growth.

As I referred to in the first part of this article, it’s damn near a bodybuilding tradition to walk on the treadmill for an hour every morning and, while I think that amount is overkill for most, the intensity is definitely going to be low with that type of activity.  That bodybuilders have done this successfully for so many years would seem to be an important lesson, especially for those folks who think that the only type of metabolic work worth a damn is high intensity stuff.

A final issue to examine is that of timing and when to perform the cardio.  In an ideal universe, any cardio would probably be done completely separately from weight training.  Cardio in the morning (fasted or not) and weights evening would probably be ideal but can’t always be realistically scheduled when people work full-time.

A very common approach is to perform some type of cardio on off-days from the weight room and this is certainly workable if scheduling will allow it.  Of course, not everyone can make it to the gym daily and the weather or what have you may preclude doing it outdoors or at home.  As well, for a short 20-30 minute session, making the trip to the gym (driving time may take longer than that) may not be realistic.

In practical terms, that means performing cardio in conjunction with the weight workout; this raises the question of whether or not it should be done before or after the workout.

As long as the intensity is kept low, doing a short cardio workout before weights shouldn’t hurt intensity in the gym (just think of it as a prolonged general warm up).  Doing it afterwards has less potential to impact on the weight room session itself but, for those compulsive about post-workout nutrition, does delay eating.  A reasonable compromise would be to drink your post-workout drink while doing your cardio after the workout.

I would note that, after heavy leg training, most probably won’t want to do much in the way of cardio.  Keeping the session to the bare minimums (e.g. 20 minutes of pretty low intensity work) is probably best.  Cardio done after upper body workouts can be a bit longer and/or more intensive if desired (within the guidelines I gave above).

Summing Up

So summing up, under most circumstances, I think keeping a reasonable amount of moderate intensity cardio in the training program, even when the goal is explicitly mass gaining can be beneficial for most trainees (the major exception being the extreme hardgainer types).

Potential pros include improved recovery, improved work capacity, better calorie partitioning, improved appetite (sometimes), perhaps staying leaner and an easier time shifting back into dieting when the mass gaining phase is over.  The cons, including hampered recovery and systematic overtraining only really become an issue when too much volume or too high of an intensity is performed.

A minimum of three sessions per week (up to perhaps a maximum of 5) of reasonable duration (20-30 minutes minimum up to perhaps 40 minutes maximum) at a low to moderate intensity (70% of maximum heart rate or less) should achieve the benefits I talked about above without causing any of the problems that I also discussed.

If you had to pick a single repetition range to train in for growth, what would it be?

That is, imagine some very strange situation where you could only train within a certain range (and let’s make that range something a little less vague then ‘Between 1-20 reps’ by limiting it to a 3 rep range) for the rest of your lifting career, what would it be?

I used to ask this of friends of mine in the field and, almost with exception, the answer was pretty much the same.  This was true regardless of whether or not they had arrived at that value from experimentation and experience or just looking at the research.

I’m going to take a quick look at the research (including a bunch of seemingly disparate topics) to tell you what I’d pick.

What Makes Muscle Grow?

I asked a job supervisor that question once once; he was a smart-ass like me and told me “It needs lots of sunlight and water.”  Close but not quite.

The mechanism of muscle growth has been under heavy scrutiny for years and a lot of theories and ideas have come and gone in terms of both the mechanism of growth as well as what stimulates it.  Semi-amusingly, about 98% of the actual answer was known back in the 70’s.

In an exceptional paper (which I recommend the reading of to any nerds in the field) titled “Mechanism of work induced hypertrophy of skeletal muscle” a researcher named Goldspink pretty much laid it out concluding that:

It is suggested that increased tension development (either passive or active) is the critical event in initiating compensatory growth.

Basically, the development of high levels of tension within the muscle is the key factor in initiating the growth process.  I’d note that there are also some elements of fatigue that may be contributing to what ‘turns on’ the growth response.  Finally, I’d note that in order to keep stimulating growth beyond an acute training bout, there has to be an increase in tension.  Basically, over time you have to add weight to the bar.

Which as another great scientist in the field (Ronnie Coleman) summed up thusly:

Everybody wants to be a bodybuilder, but nobody wants to lift no heavy-ass weights.

The simple fact is that, outside of heavy drug users (steroids having the capacity to stimulate growth without even training), the biggest bodybuilders are the strongest.  They grow because they provide, over time, a progressive tension overload (of course there are more variables that go into this, total workload per workout, frequency of training and diet all interact here).

But as I have been pointing out for years and years and years, if you’re not adding weight to the bar over time, you’re simply not growing. You can focus on the feel and the pump and the squeeze all you want; if you’re using the same weights 6 months from now that you’re using today, you won’t be any bigger.

Which doesn’t mean that you have to add weight at every workout (the fallacy of HIT), simply that over time you have to be lifting more weight.  But progression over time is a whole separate article.

Anyhow, the summary of this section is that a combination of tension overload (with a possible contributor of fatigue) within skeletal muscle fibers is what turns on the growth response. Just remember that, what stimulates growth is tension and fatigue (with tension playing a relatively larger role in terms of actual contractile growth).

Which brings us to the next question: what’s the best way to develop that combination of tension and fatigue within skeletal muscle (or a given fiber)?

A Quick Tangent into Some Neurophysiology

When you look at strength production, the body has essentially two methods to increase force output which are

1. Muscle fiber recruitment
2. Rate coding

Muscle fiber recruitment is exactly what it sounds like, how many of the fibers within a muscle are actually being recruited.  Contrary to the exceptional silliness which is endlessly repeated in books and on the internet, most people can actually get pretty close to 100% fiber recruitment (it’s a little bit lower in the lower body but, in the triceps for example, people can get near 100% recruitment).

Rate coding referes to how quickly the body is sending electrical signals to that muscle.  As rate coding goes up, the muscle fires harder.

Now, in the muscles we’re interested in from a sports or bodybuilding standpoint, the body will generally use recruitment to increase force production up to about 80-85% of maximum force output (in the lab, this is measured with Maximal Voluntary Isometric Contraction or MVIC, which is effectively 1 rep maximum weight).  Beyond 80-85% of maximum, it uses rate coding.

I’d note for completenes that this isn’t true for some muscles in the body, notably stuff like the eye muscles and finger muscles.  In those muscles, recruitment is used up to about 50% of MVIC and rate coding handles the rest.    Which is a lot of why studies looking at the thumb muscles aren’t really relevant to most training applications. But I digress.

Anyhow, now we have the next part of the picture, the body will recruit more fibers up to about 80-85% of maximum; above that point, there is no further recruitment and force output is improved via rate coding.

I should note that even at lower intensities, as the individual goes to fatigue, eventually all muscle fibers will end up being recruited.  But they won’t have been recruited until fairly late in the set (e.g. the last few repetitions).

Putting it Together

And this leads us to our answer to my original question.  For most people, 80-85% of maximum is roughly 5-8 repetitions there is variance in this between individuals and perhaps muscle groups (for example, some people find that they can get 12-15 repetitions at 85% of maximum in some leg movements).

Now let’s put that together with my comments about tension and fatigue from the earlier in the article.

Imagine that you put 95% on the bar, which will let most people get about 2 reps.  You wouldn’t increase fiber recruitment (remember, it maxes at 80-85%) but you would drastically decrease any fatigue because you would be getting a lot less reps per set (and most people couldn’t do many sets of 2 at 90% so their total volume per workout would be much lower).

Or say you wanted to do 15 repetitions which, for most is about 70% of maximum.  If you take it to failure, you will in fact end up recruiting all muscle fibers; however many of them (and this especially holds for the highest threshold fibers, the ones with the potential for the most growth) won’t have been recruited until near the very end.  So those highest threshold fibers won’t be exposed to high tension and fatigue for very long.

In contrast, imagine that you work in the 5-8 rep range with 80-85% of maximum.  First and foremost you will get full muscle fiber recruitment from the first repetition.  Secondly, you will maximize fatigue/metabolic work/volume within that range.   Basically, that range of reps and intensities is the one that will give an optimal balance of tension/recruitment and fatigue/metabolic work.

And that’s the answer that repeatedly comes up among people in the field who aren’t clueless: 5-8 repetitions.  If you had to pick a single rep range to work at to optimize the growth response, it would 5-8 reps per set.

Which isn’t to say that there aren’t valid and valuable reasons to work in other repetition ranges, mind you.  But that wasn’t the original context of my weird hypothetical.

Activation Exercises

So what are activation exercises?  Basically, in modern training, due to the often dysfunctional demands of the modern world (e.g. sitting at a computer for 8 hours per day), coaches are finding trainees for whom specific muscles don’t fire well; this can also be caused by injuries (which often cause compensatory changes in muscle firing patterns which, if anything, tend to worsen things).

A few common ones are the glutes (which often become inhibited by tight hip flexors), the vastus medialis  (the teardrop muscle), or the rotator cuff complex.  Others such as serratus can often become inactivated from injury (this is common in a lot of shoulder problems and serratus malfunction leads to the scapula not moving right which causes bigger problems up in the shoulder girdle).

This has led to a whole host of activation movements which have as their goal getting these muscles firing better prior to lifting.  Not only is this important for injury prevention, over time this will help reintegrate those muscles into more complex movements.

Some examples of activation movements would be lying glute bridges or X-walks for the glutes, scap push-ups/push-up plus for serratus, or the YWTL complex for the rotator cuff and lower trap complex.   For the vastus medialis, various quad setting and lunge movements (e.g. Petersen lunge) can be used.

I’d note that the use or not of these depends heavily on the trainee and their needs.  A common trend is to have athletes or trainees do them whether they need them or not.  In my opinion, this isn’t an effective use of training time in the weight room (which is often limited enough for many athletes and general trainees).  If you only have an hour to train, spending 30 minutes of it with endless warm ups including activation movements is simply not time-effective.

At the same time, individuals who truly need them may be spending quite a bit of time doing those movements and essentially rehab exercises in lieu of ‘real’ training in the weight room; at least initially.  Over time, assuming the activation movements are doing what they should, they should become less important to the overall training and be replaced by more ‘real’ training.

Realistically, activation exercises could probably be considered part of the general warm up or part of the specific warm up.  In any case, they’d be done following any type of stretching and foam rolling but prior to actual weight stuff.

I want to really point out that doing the stretching/foam rolling prior to activation movements is very important here.  If a tight muscle is causing inhibition of its antagonist (e.g. tight hip flexors are keeping the glutes from firing properly), then activation movements won’t do much if the hip flexors aren’t stretched first.  The same would go for the presence of trigger points or tightness in connective tissue, if that isn’t dealt with via foam rolling, the activation movement won’t be as effective.

The Specific Warm Up: General Comments

As I discussed in Warming up for the Weight Room Part 1, the warm up serves a number of purposes. Reiterating them below they are:

1. Warming the tissues themselves
2. Establishing appropriate ranges of motion for safe and effective training
3. Technical training, allowing the trainee to groove the exercise
4. Preparing the nervous system for optimum performance

Strictly speaking, goals 1 and 2 are targeted by the general warm up although, as I mentioned, some trainees will simply use the first sets of their first exercise to accomplish the same thing.  As I noted, for some trainees, this is perfectly appropriate while others will require an explicit general warm up and the other components I discussed in Part 1.

As I mentioned briefly in Part 1, I’d note that most people I’ve witnessed in the weight room fall into one of two camps: they either warm up insufficiently or far too much. So either they go into their lifting unprepared to give their best effort or they tire themselves out so much with their warm up that they can’t give their working sets their best effort.

Invariably folks in the former category will do one or two half-assed warm up sets before trying to jump to far too heavy of a weight and the latter will make their warm up sets an exhaustive workout in and of itself.

The key, of course, is finding sort of an optimal warm up, one that prepares you to give the workout your best but without exhausting you before you get to the actual work; this can take some trial and error although there are general rules.

I’d note that a general lack of overall fitness can make even an apparently optimal warm up exceedingly fatiguing. In this situation, it’s more an issue of improving the trainee’s fitness level and work capacity than tweaking the warm up per se.

With that said, I want to make a few general ‘rules’ about how much warming up is necessary for the weight room.

1. The more technical the lift, the more warm up you need. The Olympic lifts, and the snatch even more so than the clean and jerk, are notorious for needing a large number of warm up sets for a lifter to get a proper groove. Since most aren’t using these lifts that often in commercial gyms (and if you do, you probably have a coach), I won’t spend much time on them.  Lifts such as deadlifts, squats or bench press require somewhat less warm up but are still pretty technical while stuff like machine work or, say, isolation arm work, requires relatively little warm up at all (from a technical standpoint anyhow).
2. The higher the intensity (defined here in terms of percentage of maximum) of your workout, the more warm ups you need.  Someone doing heavy triples (~85-90% of maximum) will need more warm ups than someone doing sets of 12 (70-75% of maximum).  The triples might require 4-7 warm up sets depending on the weight being used and the specific movement; the sets of 12 might require 1-2 warm up sets.
3. The more advanced the trainee, the more warm up they typically need. This is probably simply a function of the loads being used, someone squatting 500 pounds needs more warm up sets to adequately prepare for that than someone squatting 100 pounds.
4. Note that these rules are in addition to the topics I discussed in Warming up for the Weight Room Part 1: folks who are older, who live in colder areas, or who have joint injuries typically need more warm ups and may benefit from higher repetitions in their initial warm up sets than younger, non-injured folks where it’s warmer.

High Reps vs. Low Reps for Warming Up

An old school method of training was to use what was generally called an ascending pyramid to train. Lifters would start with a light weight and do a high rep set, perhaps 12-15 repetitions to failure or near it. Then they’d add weight and do 10-12 more reps. Add weight and do 8-10, add more weight and do 6-8.  Multiple sets might be done in the 6-8 repetition range or the trainee might then move to another exercise.  An example of this type of pyramid would be:

135X15, 185X12, 225X10, 275X8

Essentially, the first sets acted as warm up sets (since they were light) and the lifter worked up to the heavier sets as they went. The problem with this style of training is that the earlier sets tend to do little more than tire the athlete out without generating much in the way of strength or mass gains. Even taken to failure, the weights are too light to stimulate gains but they do generate fatigue. The consequence is that the lifter arrives at the heavy sets too tired to give it their best.

A far more modern trend is to use low repetition warm up sets to work up to the day’s working weight. The goal being to get the lifter warmed up for the day’s weights without generating undue fatigue. A lifter following that approach might do something like

135X5, 185X3, 225X1, 255X1, 275X10X3 OR 295X8X3

Since the lighter warm up sets are only that, multiple sets would generally be done at (or around) the day’s working weight. If the 295X8 felt easy, a heavier weight might be done; if the lifter wanted to get more volume, they might drop the weight back slightly to keep their reps at 8. There are endless combinations that are beyond the scope of this article but that I’ll discuss at some later date.

In any case, by using less repetitions on the warm up sets, the lifter would arrive at the day’s working weight with less fatigue but still prepared for the heavy lifting. This should allow either more reps to be done at that same 275 working weight, or a heavier weight (in this case 295) to be done for the same 8 repetitions.

The second pattern would be expected to give a better growth or strength response. I’d also note and I’ll come back to this below that some lifters actually benefit from a single repetition at or even heavier than the day’s work weight.

There is much to be said for the second pattern (some on the net have become quite militant that this is the ONLY way anyone should ever warm up) and, generally speaking, I prefer low-repetition warm ups for most people. There are at least two major exceptions to this, however.

1. Individuals with joint injuries: folks with wonky shoulders or knees often benefit from one or more high repetition (10-15 rep) sets at the beginning of their workout to pump some blood through the affected area. Which isn’t to say that heavy weights need be used.  But one or two sets of high rep bench presses (for example) with just the bar prior to moving into the lower repetition warm up sets is often beneficial in this situation. The same would hold for squats and knees, a set or two of higher rep squats (with the bar or a light weight) may help warm up painful joints.  Since a very light weight is being used, this shouldn’t generate much fatigue to hamper the lifter’s main sets.  More importantly, it may be required for the lifter to lift pain free; any small decrease in performance is more than offset by that.
2. Beginners often benefit from doing somewhat higher repetitions during their warm up sets although this has to be carefully balanced against generating too much fatigue.  Many coaches advocate multiple sets of low repetitions for technique practice for this reason but this has to be carefully monitored to work effectively and keep the trainee from going too heavy too soon.  This goes back to my comments in Part 1 about using warm ups as an additional form of technique practice. warm up sets are an excellent time to practice proper technique and a good place for relative beginners to accumulate technically correct repetitions that will help with motor learning in the long run.  Again I’d mention that this only works is the lifter is paying attention to what they are doing during the warm up sets (and the coach, if there is one, is giving feedback).  Just ‘going through the motions’ for 12 reps without using proper form won’t do anything for long-term motor learning.

Before moving on, I want to mention one slightly more individualized approach to warming up, something I was taught by my mentor. He noted that, during warm up sets, most trainees will find a place in the set where suddenly the reps become much easier. It might be repetition 5 or 6 or 10 depending on the person.  So the reps will feel hard, hard, hard, easy.

That repetition would be the point when the warm up set should be terminated and the weight increased for the next warm up set. For many trainees, this may work better than following some specific repetition guidelines; if it takes you 4 reps on a given warm up set for the weight to feel easier, do 4 reps. Even if someone says you should only need 3 or 1 or whatever.

Basically, use the above as guidelines, not as holy writ.

Some Practical Examples

Ok, with all of that out of the way, I want to look at some specific warm up schemes.

A generic warm up approach might look something like this.

50-60% of the day’s work weight X 5-8 repetitions
65-75% of the day’s work weight X 3-5 repetitions
75-85% of the day’s work weight X 1-3 repetitions
85-95% of the day’s work weight X 1 repetition
100% of the day’s work weight by 1 repetition (optional).  I’ll come back to this at the end of the article.

The lifter might take 30-60 seconds between the warm up sets and then rest 1-3′ after the last warm up set prior to the first work set.

I’d encourage readers not to get super hung up on the percentages, it’s sufficient to get close enough and just pick reasonably spaced weight jumps to get in the ballpark.  Depending on the weight being used, it may just be easiest to jump with 5-10 pound plates (if the weight is light), 25 pound plates (if it’s medium) and 45’s (if it’s heavy).

Lifters using very heavy weights may start far lower than 60% and take multiple single repetitions up to the day’s work weight after the initial sets of lower repetitions; typically larger jumps would be used initially and smaller jumps as the work weight was approached.

So a lifter who is using 500 lbs. in the back squat might go
135X8
225X5
315X3
365X1
405X1
455X1
475X1
500X1 (if needed)

In contrast, a relative beginner working with 135 pounds in the back squat might do something like
95X5-8 (the higher reps would give more technical practice but may generate more fatigue)
115X3-5
135X1 (again an optional single at the work weight may be valuable).

Someone using 225 might do something along the lines of
135X5
185X3
205X2
225X1 (if needed) before moving to their work sets.

Hopefully you get the idea.

Warming Up for Multiple Exercises

A question that comes up is what, if any, warm up should be done if a lifter is doing a second exercise for the same muscle group (or simply doing an exercise involving the muscles that were used in the first exercise).

For example, say a lifter is performing heavy bench press followed by lighter incline DB presses. Strictly speaking, the muscles being used in the second exercise should already be warmed up; it’s all pecs, right? The same would go for a lifter following heavy bench with a triceps exercise, the bench should have warmed up the triceps.

So from the standpoint of tissue warmth, etc. a warm up set is probably not strictly needed and the lifter could probably jump straight into the second exercise without a warm up set.

However, remember that warm ups are also useful from a technical standpoint and to get the groove of the exercise. Performing one (or two) light warm up sets prior to the second exercise shouldn’t hurt and can be beneficial to find the groove of the next exercise before jumping into the work weight. Since the tissues are already warm, etc. it’s usually sufficient do do one or two very low rep sets (like a set of 3-5 and a set of 1-2) for warm up in this situation.

Advanced Warm Up Ideas

Ok, I’m hesitant to even add this section to the article because trainees always over-estimate how advanced they are and I find that they start trying to incorporate all of the neat advanced concepts before they get the basics worked out.

My point being that until you have a decent idea of how you should be warming up (by playing around with some of the guidelines in the above section), you have no business fooling around with these advanced concepts.

However, for folks with a reasonable training background and/or who are using fairly heavy weights, here are some things that I’ve found can be helpful for optimizing the warm up.

The Optional Single

As I mentioned in the examples above, sometimes a single at 100% of the day’s work weight can be beneficial for trainees and I want to talk about that now.  Many lifters find that doing that single repetition makes the first work set of the day (at that same weight) much easier and ‘lighter’ (in terms of feel).

This is both a neural and mental issue and lifters who find that their second set at a given weight is usually easier than the first should experiment with the single repetition at 100% to see if it helps. When higher repetitions are being used, it can also be useful to do a single slightly heavier than the day’s work weight; this tends to make the work weight feel much lighter.  When low repetitions (threes and below) are being done, a single at the day’s work weight is often too heavy and can cause more fatigue than it does benefits.

A Supramaximal Hold or Partial Repetition

Taking the optional single idea a step further, there can often a be a neural potentiation effect from using a weight that is in excess of the day’s top work weight.  However, this would typically not be done for a full repetition (unless high reps were being used in training).  Rather, it would typically be done for an isometric hold or a partial.

So someone squatting heavily might benefit from taking a weight in excess of the day’s work weight and simply setting up with it.  So get under the bar, take it out of the racks, set up, stay there for 6-10 seconds and then re-rack the weight.  A heavy bench press workout might be preceded by a bench hold done the same way.  I’d note that you don’t have to go insanely heavy on this type of thing.  10% over the day’s work weight should be sufficient.

A related idea would be to do a partial repetition with a weight above the day’s top weight.  So someone full squatting might work up to a moderately heavy triple in a partial squat prior to full squatting.  After feeling the heavy weight on the back with the partial, invariably the full squats feel ‘lighter’.

Benchers might do board pressing prior to full range bench to achieve the same thing. Again, the key is to find a load that is heavy enough to provide a benefit without exhausting the lifter and generating too much fatigue.

Using Heavy Weights to Warm Up for Explosive Movements and Vice Versa

Similar to the above ideas, lifters performing explosive movements (e.g. cleans) often benefit from working up to a heavier weight in a slower lift (e.g. RDL or deadlift).  When the lifter moves back to the explosive lift, the weights usually feel much lighter and often move faster.

Similarly, athletes often find that doing a small amount of explosive work can really get the nervous system clicking for heavy work.  Clean pulls warming up to deadlifts or Westside style speed work prior to benching or squatting can all be potentially beneficial.

Bands, Chains and Unstable Movements

Finally, some lifters may find that doing a few sets with bands, chains or the new trend of hanging plates off the bar attached to bands can be beneficial prior to heavy work.  I’ve heard of lifters doing banded GM’s or light band deadlifts prior to heavy work and this is simply being done as a neural potentiation technique.

One lifter of mine found that doing 2-3 sets of front squats or bench press with chains made the non-chain lifts feel much easier.  I suspect that both activation of some stabilizer muscles along with her nervous system was the key aspect.

With another, we played around with a single set done with plates hung from bands prior to heavy work.  For the same reason, when moving from the incredibly unstable situation with the plates hung from bands to the straight weight, everything was so dialed up that heavier weights felt that much easier.

Again, the above are all advanced techniques and shoudn’t even be considered until a lifter has the other aspects of their training and warm up figured out first.

As mentioned in the article above, I don’t think that DC training is right for everyone, and not everyone does well on it. For those that do, they grow and grow well. Now, I’ve wished for a while that Dante would write a book on DC training as I think the ideas need to get wider exposure. Apparently he’s just not interested.

Thankfully, two of Dante’s ’students’ (for lack of a better word), Jason Wojo and Franco Ditillo, put together a DVD to both explain and demonstrate the ideas that make up the DC approach.

Overall appearance: The DVD is professional in terms of packaging and appearance (e.g. the outside of the DVD). The audio is good (this isn’t the case for many products) and the video is nicely shot; it’s not professionally done, nor is it a guy with a handycam. Most of it is simply the guys talking at the camera but the training footage is well shot and it’s easy to see what’s going on.

The DVD itself: The DVD is divided into 4 segments which are Introduction, Workout 1, Workout 2, and Special features. I want to look at each in sequence.

Introduction: The first segment of the DVD is about 20 minutes long and consists of Jason Wojo explaining the guts of the DC system. Starting with who DC training is for (advanced guys who are able to push), it also covers who it isn’t for (beginners and wimps). There’s a refreshing element of honesty to this attitude, recognizing that the system that you personally think highly of just isn’t for everyone.

In a nutshell, DC is similar to high intensity training (HIT) in that it attempts to get maximal growth stimulation in the least volume required. In most cases this represents a single set but with a twist: after reaching failure once, two rest-pause sets are typically done with 10-15 breaths between ‘mini-sets’ so that a total of 11-15 reps per set is done.

For many exercises this is followed by an isometric hold and most movement are then followed by something DC calls loaded or extreme stretching. DC training rests on the concept of making progress at every workout (if possible). There is always an attempt to beat your previous best and make strength gains in a medium repetiton range. Coupled with sufficient food, that equals growth.

As well, for any given training cycle, multiple exercises are chosen and rotated each workout with the idea being that you will make better overall strength gains returning to the same exercise a bit less frequently.

In contrast to some HIT systems, DC calls for training each muscle group every 5th day so that growth is stimulated more often than with lower frequency training approaches. The basic approach is three days/week alternating between two different splits. Within that, as noted, exercises are rotated in and out within each workout.

As well, DC training follows an approach of ‘blasts’ and ‘cruises’ (essentially varying intensity) lasting roughly 4-6 weeks and 2 weeks respectively. So you cruise (training relatively less intensely) for 2 weeks and then blast (going for major gains) for 4-6 weeks. This is basically identical to how I recommend folks cycle my generic approach to hypertrophy training, 2 weeks of relatively easier work followed by 4-6 weeks pushing things hard before backing off and then building back up again.

Overall, I found the part of the DVD to be an excellent introduction to the concepts of the DC system. Frankly, it’s not a complex system but training doesn’t have to be complicated to be hellishly effective.

I would say that I think the introduction went a little bit wrong when Jason tried to get into some of the deep scientific reasons that loaded stretching might work (personally I think they are just a heavy loaded eccentric). Going from talking about progressive overload and beating your logbook to a discussion of hyperplasia and PGF2a seemed a bit out of place to me. Then again, in one of the bonus sections he mentions having a degree in immunology. So he’s just another labcoat; a big labcoat mind you, but a labcoat nonetheless.

As well, the camera guy thought it would be cute to move from a straight ahead shot to this sort of 45 degree angle shot (thank you MTV) so part of the time Jason is sort of looking off to the side of the screen and not talking directly to you. This is a pretty minor quibble on my part.

Workout 1: The first workout demonstrated consisted of chest, delts, triceps, back width and back thickness. Frankly, I usually find watching training videos boring as dirt and this wasn’t much different, it took me several viewings to get through it. Basically, we got to watch the guys explain and then warmup prior to doing a rest pause set for incline bench, DB shoulder presses, reverse grip bench presses and a sort of modified rack chinning movement (DB held in the lap), static holds were done after several movements although neither lifter got even close to 30 seconds on any of them.

For reasons that went unexplained, rack pulls for back thickness were done for 2 straight sets (note: the reason is that rest pausing deads is a good way to kill yourself when your form breaks down). Both Jason and Franco are big strong boys and they moved some serious weight (IMO, Jason had the better form on everything).

Possibly the most interesting bit of watching the workout was seeing the loaded/extreme stretches themselves. Those never lent themselves to verbal descriptions and seeing what is actually being done for them will be informative for anybody interested in the system. Since the lifters did slightly different stretches (sometimes), it also gives viewers some options for their own training should they pursue the methodology.

Each set is accompanied by loud heavy metal and the guys joke with one another between sets. The segment ends with each lifter explaining how they personally log their workouts. I found it kind of useless but, then again, when 99% of gym goers don’t record a thing, seeing that a couple of big boys record their workouts to keep track of their progress is a good thing.

Workout 2: Workout 2 consisted of biceps, forearms, calves, hamstrings and finally, quads. Biceps were hit with incline DB curls, forearms (really brachialis) with a cross body curl that they called pinwheel curls. This was followed by a loaded/extreme stretch. Calves were a single LONG set consisting of calf raises with an incorporated extreme stretch, it hurt to watch. Hamstrings were leg curls, for some reason the hamstring stretch was not shown but only described via text. Finally quads were hit by leg press, two straight sets (no reason was given for not using rest-pause). Frankly, I was a bit disappointed here, DC’s guys tend to talk about 20 rep ‘widomaker’ squats as if they are the key to the system, I was hoping to see a good set of 20 reppers done on the DVD.

As with Workout 1, some good poundages were moved and the guys goofed off between sets. It was funny seeing the look on a couple of the other gym-goer’s face as Jason and Franco loaded up the leg press with just about every plate in the gym.

Special features: The DVD had a number of special features which I’ll describe briefly.

DC nutrition: A basic look at DC nutrition concepts including protein, carbs, fat, intake, how much to eat, etc.

Alternative exercises: Shows a bunch of alternative training movements (with an overemphasis on arm training in my opinion) some of which you’ve probably seen and some of which you haven’t. I’m still disappointed that the DVD showed no squatting.

Wojo’s Wisdom: One of the dudes on the DVD shares some of his experiences with training over the years, he makes some good points regarding getting injured, not being ego driven and taking rest if your body is telling you to and other things most gym rats simply don’t do (but should).

Interview: A very informal interview with Franco and Jason, I had trouble staying focused and paying attention to this.

Big Larry: I zoned out completely on this, it was something with 4 DC guys eating at Texas Roadhouse talking about something or another but I had completely lost interest by that point in the DVD. If I missed THE SECRET to DC training by skipping this, please let me know exactly what time point on the DVD it occurs and I’ll go back and watch it.

And that’s that. Overall, I think this is a good DVD and anybody interested in an excellent introduction to the DC system (and seeing how actual workouts play out) would be advised to purchase it. I usually find training videos to be painfully generic (watching a big dude blast his guns is boring as hell) but this one is actually pretty informative for folks who have heard about DC training and want to learn more.

Learn more about the DC Training DVD

I’d also note that Trueprotein is one of the few places that I trust to provide quality supplements and I personally get all of my protein powder from them. If you choose to order, you can get a 5% discount by using the coupon code “Lyle”.

In this article, I want to look at three of the more popular hypertrophy programs that are out there on the internet. The first is Doggcrapp (or DC) training which is the brainchild of Dante Trudeau (he also runs Trueprotein.com). The second is Bryan Haycock’s Hypertrophy Specific Training or HST. Finally, of course, I have my own approach to muscle mass gains which I’ll talk about a bit too.

As you’ll see, while each program shares certain commonalities (as all programs that ‘work’ will), they also have a lot of differences. This simply reflects the realities of training, every program out there has to make some concession depending on the overall philosophy and approach of the designer. The variables of interest here are intensity, frequency and volume and, as you’ll see, each program has to concede one aspect in order to emphasize another.

If this reads a little bit roughly, it’s because I originally made it as a post to a forum, basically pointing out that they simply approach the main issues of training (frequency, intensity, volume) from slightly different places. Here’s what I wrote:

IMO, a lot of it depend on where you fall philosophically in terms of training, physiologically you can argue for various approaches a lot of different ways. Looking at three approaches to hypertrophy training, for example: a lot of it comes down to the interactions between frequency, intensity and volume.

1. Bryan’s Hypertrophy Specific training: looking mainly at gene expression, Bryan trades intensity and volume for a higher frequency. You train 3X/week but only max out about once every 2 weeks or so. This would be similar to Pavel’s Grease the Groove approach approach.

2. Doggcrapp trades intensity for volume and frequency and focuses primarily on progressive overload (the goal is to beat your previous workout poundages at every workout) in addition to trying to stimulate that maximum amount of growth with the minimum volume (DC uses rest pause training to accomplish this). Volume is lower, frequency is cut to about once/fifth day but the intensity is very very high with the rest pause and loaded stretches. Many people burn out badly on DC but the guys who thrive on it grow very well.

3. My generic bulking program is stock in the middle because I’m a middle of the road kind of guy. I generically like to see a bodypart hit about 2X/week with slightly lowered intensity (relative to DC) although higher than Bryan’s HST. I recommend about a rep short of failure so that the volume (which is higher per workout than either DC or HST) can be accomplished. I’m trying to strike a volume between the issues of frequency (for gene expression and protein synthesis), recovery (failure training can burn people out) and progression (I want to see the poundages going up consistently over the cycle).

Is one ‘better’ than the other? In the long run, I doubt it. If, at the end of 2 years of training, each trainee has hit roughly the same place in terms of absolute strength (weight on the bar), I bet size will be the same.

So a lot of the choice then becomes which approach to hypertrophy training:

a. Fits the trainee’s psychologically. Fore example, someone who ONLY feels good about training if they blow themselves out will hate HST and absolutely LOVE DC. Someone who hates training a given lift as infrequency as DC might prefer HST (you train a lift 3X/week) or my approach. etc. Someone who wants to be in the gym more often than 3x/week might prefer mine (or one of Bryan’s HST modifications that lets you train very distributed volume 6X/week, very much like Pavel’s GTG stuff)

b. Fits their individual recovery pattern . I’ve seen a lot of people say that DC just blew them out. And I’m NOT saying this is a drug thing. A lot of DC’s guys are juiced and a lot are not. But no everyone seems able to train that intensely and recover. In which case, HST or my approach might be a better ‘fit’ physiologically.

And I’m sure there are other considerations. If you’re a cellar dwellar (someone who trains in the basement), you might not be able to rotate exercises like DC recommends (he usually says pick 3 movements per bodypart and rotate them, switching out whole exercises wen they stall). If you train at home and have limited equipment, that’s not workable and a program centered around the same lift for any given cycle might work better.

I’m sure I’ve left out many many other considerations (injuries, individual biomechanics) but that’s just a quick look at some of the things that might go into deciding which approach to hypertrophy is best.