A Primer on Skating Part 1: Are You Serious?

As I mentioned in No Regrets Part 2, there is a small tradition of inline skaters successfully making the switch to the ice.  I had assumed that my years skating inline (and recall that I did fairly well in my last season) would make my switch easier.  Oh how wrong I was.  Quite in fact, if anything it did more harm than good.  My years doing things wrong would make reprogramming my nervous system that much more labor intensive.  I’ll come back to this at the end of today’s installment.

As I quickly found out, my technique absolutely sucked.  I mean everything I did was wrong.  I was fit as hell and strong as hell but it didn’t do me any good on the ice.  Without technique, nothing happens; you can’t muscle the ice.

Let me try to put the above in perspective, it’s really not me making excuses.  At one point in the time I was in Salt Lake, I was able to out train Caleb in everything.  In the weight room, despite being 60 pounds lighter than him, I could outlift him.  I don’t mean pound for pound, I mean in absolute terms.  I could destroy him during dryland and if we hadn’t ridden at different times, I suspect I’d have killed him there.  And on the ice?

On the ice, he was 3-5 seconds faster than me per lap.  He had come from downhill skiing and ice hockey and between knowing how to move on ice and knowing how to lean over without pissing himself, he was faster than me despite lesser fitness levels. Because he could skate well and I couldn’t.  All my fitness and strength just didn’t make an iota of difference.  Because if you can’t put it into the ice, it’s just irrelevant.  It was very frustrating.

The same would happen with Eva Rodansky when she joined our group in my final year.  I could keep with her on inlines (and on smaller wheels meaning I was putting out more power), could out dryland her, was stronger muscularly, etc.  She was 2 seconds faster than me per lap because she knew how to put it into the ice better (she was a natural, having made essentially the Junior National Team with only 4 months on the long-track; she had done sporadic short-track prior to that).

There is a thing in skating called ice feel, it has to do with knowing how a blade moves on ice so that you can build pressure and generate force. Some people supposedly have it intuitively, some get it after years of training (many skaters said it took them at least 5 years) and some never get it.

It’s one of those ephemeral things: it can’t be taught, it can only be learned.  Wooooooooooooo………

In many ways, skating is a lot like swimming and this is one of them.  There, you hear about water feel.  Good swimmers know how to catch the water, feel the pressure across the surfaces of their body, streamline, etc.  Some have it intuitively, some get it after years, some never get it. It’s also a sport where, between water feel and technique, you get a situation where being strong and fit doesn’t mean all that much at a certain level (at the highest level you need both).  And where little kids will hand you your ass because they know how to swim better than you.

Ice speedskating is like that.  I got my ass handed to me by younger kids quite a few times, because they had been skating 10 years already and I hadn’t and they could skate better than me.  I’m not ego-driven for the most part but that was tough to deal with at certain points in my career.

Amusingly I saw an interview with Clara Hughes (one of Canada’s most decorated Winter Olympians) two nights ago about her switch from ice hockey to speed skating and she said the same thing: she was 18 and strong as hell and little kids were outskating her because they knew how to speed skate and she didn’t.  And it took her years to change that fact.

But the long and the short of it was that my technique sucked and all my strength and fitness was irrelevant beyond allowing me to train at full tilt on the ice from day 1 (i.e. I had an ungodly work capacity and could handle any training load).

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A Primer on Skating Part 2: Basic Technique

Technically, skating is simply bizarre.  The movement patterns are completely unique and nothing like anything you do in normal life.  Ideally your knee is bent at 90 degrees with your back rounded like a cat.  You push directly to the side while moving the pushing leg into internal rotation. While this is going on, you bring the recovery leg through to enter the glide phase, sitting on that skate for about 1 second before compressing and then pushing to the other side. It’s the only activity where you push sideways to go forwards; sailing is actually similar, you tack against the wind which pushes sideways to move you forwards.  Newton would be appalled.

The picture below shows me in perfect basic position: back rounded, head down, reaching through with my swing-arm, knee at a 90 degree angle with the recovery leg hanging down (you may marvel at my gray shorts at your own leisure).  Imagine pushing hard from this position.  The push is actually down into the ice (it looks like the push is sideways since you’re falling away from the skate) while pushing the leg into internal rotation (carving the skate around) and essentially falling sideways.  Yeah, right.

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This is me.

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And that’s just the straightaway.

Then there are corners/crossovers which are literally all-important to speed skating.  It’s an asymmetrical movement where you push through with one leg as you crossover the other leg (the right), and you do this with your back rounded, shoulders out of the corner, head turned in, while falling into the corner sideways due to gravity (this is where you get a lot of the acceleration). It looks like this on long-track and we always turn left.

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This isn't me.

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The skater above is just finishing his left leg push; at this point, you begin to push with the right leg as you bring the left leg through.  Corners are not only where you get your acceleration; they also give most skaters back problems.  You generate huge strength asymmetries because of the differences in left and right leg pushes and are effectively round backed and twisted both out of (shoulders) and into (head) the corner.   Your spine corkscrews.

Basically, if you have good corners, the rest really doesn’t matter; if you don’t have good corners, you can’t go anywhere since that’s where you get all of your speed and acceleration from.  I would get straightaways figured out fairly soon on the ice but they did me literally no good at all.  The only real point of the straightaway in the sport is to get a little bit of leg recovery and try not to lose too much speed before you re-accelerate in the corner.  Every lap is skated in this weird interval style where you relax on the straights and then build the corners like a bear is chasing you.  An ice-bear.

This is part of why short-trackers like Shani Davis are so good on long-track; amazing corners.  In that vein, the Korean skater who took silver in the Men’s 5k in Vancouver had only been on long-track for something like 3 months; he had skated short-track his whole life and having great corners got him a medal on long-track.

It’s also why indoor inliners (whose sport is all corners) often transition to the ice better than the outdoor guys (whose racing is mostly about straightaways and endurance).   I actually saw one world class indoor inliner skate one of the fastest flying laps ever (24.3 seconds which is about 37 mph) on the big oval.  And he had no straightaway technique at all, his feet were turned out about 45 degrees.  That’s how important corners are.  And how irrelevant the straights.

This would be another source of frustration about the middle of my career: I’d see skaters who I could outskate on the straightaway, my technique was better than theirs.  But it didn’t matter, they had better corners than me and I couldn’t keep up.  On sprint laps, I could even stay with Caleb on the straightaways.  And he’d drop me like a bad habit in the corner.

So that’s the basics of speed skating technique.  It’s like no other human movement, you push sideways to go forwards and corners are just completely bizarre.  One coach I demonstrated them to said “That’s the most ludicrous thing I’ve ever seen in my life.”  Another I had asked “How would you train someone for this?” said “I can’t do anything with that.”  These are guys that have trained athletes in every sport; speedskating just made them go “Huh?”

And that doesn’t even get into the odd physiological demands but I’ll save those for either a later part or another full article if readers are really interested.

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Inline to Ice: Part 2

I mentioned in No Regrets Part 2 that there is a small tradition of inliners switching to ice succesfully and specifically mentioned KC Boutiette, Derek Parra and Chad Hedrick.  It’s worth looking at their backgrounds in terms of making the switch from inline to ice.

KC is claimed to have made an Olympic team after only 2 weeks on the ice but this isn’t entirely accurate.  Not only had he spent some prior time on the ice, he worked with an athlete that my coach had taught to skate.  Meaning that he had been taught classical ice technique already; he also had a huge endurance motor from his years racing pro inline marathons.  As well, and this is not meant to take anything away from his accomplishment (he’s an amazing skater and just a super nice guy who was always friendly to me), but the qualifying standards were lower and, at the time, there was one US skater sort of qualifying for the 10k by default.  So KC jumped in and took the spot based on his fitness and having already developed very good technique.

Derek Parra started skating indoor inline at a young age and also raced outdoors on the track.  This gave him a lot of corner exposure even if inliners do some things differently (due to differences in wheels on pavement vs. a blade on ice); then he raced pro outdoor inline which gave him a motor.  But he had no previous ice experience.  It took him 8 years to break through and win his Gold medal.  Because that’s how long it took him to get ice feel and really perfect his corners.

Finally there’s Chad Hedrick.  Chad’s parents owned a skating rink and Chad probably knew how to skate before he could walk.  He skated indoor inline which means tons of corners.  He played ice hockey his whole life (a little known fact is that he invented the double push, a different skating technique used by inline racers, while playing hockey) so he had ice feel (and starts).  And he dominated outdoor inline so he had a huge motor.  As I said, he had the full skill set to go from zero to World Champion on the ice in 1.5 years.

Basically, all three had previous skill-sets that allowed them do make the switch to ice and succeed.

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And Then There’s Me

I had assumed I’d be in a similar situation to the above guys (going from my final year competition results) but I was utterly wrong.  My 8+ years of inline did nothing to help me on the ice.  If anything, they hurt me.

I think I had ice skated like twice in my 20’s (home from college and wanting to ‘train’ for inline in some fashion).  I’d skated indoors once when I was about 8 and actually touched an indoor racing track for the first time 3 nights ago in Austin, Texas.  Rather, all my race experience was outdoor 10k’s; while there were some corners, it was mostly straightaways.

And my technique on everything was simply awful.

On the straightaway I skated with a flat back, stayed in-between my skates (no outside edges), and pushed back instead of sideways.  It was awful and whatever power I had didn’t push me forwards very effectively.  How I skated as well as I did in my 20’s is beyond me: I guess I got by on youth, strength and stupidity.  Inline is also a bit more forgiving as a sport, you can bypass some technical issues by just being strong.   But that doesn’t pay the bills on the ice.

Most inliners have bad corners (they tend to look in since you never know what’s around the next corner when you’re skating outside) but mine were flat-out awful.  I turned my shoulders in, flattened my back and would step in with my left foot to come into balance, I was never falling into the corner or letting gravity help me pick up speed.

And I thought I could make the jump in 1.5 years. Yeah, right.  It would take me until February of my next to last year to finally get anything approaching decent corners and really lock-in perfect straightaway technique (which again, doesn’t really matter).  Sadly that wasn’t long enough to get good/efficient at them.

As I mentioned above, if anything my inline experience made it worse rather than better, I had burned in a staggering number of bad habits that I’d have to break.  And that takes time.  But Rex was a technical master and I was an attentive and obsessive student; he would give constant feedback and I’d work like hell to get it right.

It was going to be a long 5.5 years.

To be continued in No Regrets Part 5.

As noted in No Regrets Part 1, I’m turning off comments for this series of posts.  The first reason is so I don’t have to delete the invariable trolling.  The second is that I’m also not interested in atta boys or whatever.  I spent the last 5 years pursuing this goal for myself.  Whether folks supported it or thought I was an idiot was never relevant to what I was going to do.  So neither positive nor negative feedback is needed nor wanted.

It Begins

It would actually be about a week before I got a pair of blades for my boots so I couldn’t get on the ice immediately.  My first task was to find a gym, I did this before finding a place to live.  I found a fantastic one down the road about a mile and joined immediately.  Sadly it would get bought out by Gold’s Gym a year or two later and ruined before being closed.  But I could continue my weight room assault and cardio until I got my blades.

They finally arrived and I started going to club ice sessions.  Now, the oval has a ‘coaching’ program in place, it’s run with about the same level of competency and organization as everything else they do there; which is to say, with less skill than the average little league soccer team.  The head ‘coach’ was the guy who had blown me off at camp.  After watching me do drills one night he told me “I don’t believe in drills, just go skate.” That’s when I knew he was an idiot.  I later watched him overtrain every skater in the club into dust and they all got slower that season working with him.

But the long and the short of it is that I was going about this alone.  And oh was I alone.  I had been involved in road cycling in college and, let’s just say that there is an elitist prick gene that is common to that sport.  They shun anyone without the right equipment, the right socks, etc.; then you’re a Fred and they won’t even talk to you.

Well ice speed skating, by and large, has that same elitist prick gene to about the 10th power.  To be fair, two groups of skaters turned out to be friendly on average: the inliners and, how can I put this gently, the brown-skinned people.

Now, by and large, speed skating is one of those sports ruled by the lily white folks from Minnesota.  But there are an increasing number of other ethnic groups starting to skate: Derek Parra was actually the first Hispanic American to win a winter gold medal and Shani is the first African American.  And brown-skinned folks are starting to enter the sport in small amounts.  Those two groups, the inliners and the brown-skinned folks were friendly.

In dire contrast, the majority of the white folks from Wisconsin who made up the sport well….unless you were as fast as them, you weren’t worth even saying hello to or talking to unless they were yelling at you to get out of the way.  They would happily stand in the middle of the track while people were trying to train and felt that they owned both the oval and the ice although neither were true.  If they wanted to ignore ice etiquette, that was fine; if you got in their way, you wouldn’t hear the end of it.  That kind of thing. That was if you were slower than them.

And if you were faster than them (never an issue for me), they hated you for it because it meant they actually had to do some work to keep their spots rather than just getting by on the lack of competition and having friends who were higher up to vote them onto the team.  What a bunch of miserable pricks (please note: this wasn’t ALL of them, just the grand majority).

This made the oval a very unfriendly place to be; everybody was more concerned with being competitive than anything else.  Now, I’m all for competition, it’s kill or be killed during a race.  But afterwards, chill the hell out.  My soon to be teammate Caleb mentioned repeatedly that it wasn’t like that in skiing, everyone competed like hell during races; and then had a beer when it was all over.  You can do both.

That the Utah Olympic Oval is the the official Olympic training center didn’t help mind you.  There is just that ‘We are elite athletes’ mentality where you’re better than the rest of the world.  Except that you don’t work, get supported by your parents and chase this little obscure hobby which entails skating in a circle for hours at a time.  And yet fail to realize that ’skating fast in a circle’ is not really important to the functioning of the world at large.  Or a job description.

Outside of our group, nobody seemed to be having much fun there.  I can’t work that way and was a constant comedian during practice and workouts.    Make no mistake,  when it was time to train, the joking stopped and I was as serious as a heart attack. But there’s a lot of sitting around in-between sets and laps in skating.  Have some fun people.  I had fun.

In any case, this attitude had apparently trickled down to the club level as well: in the first few weeks of attending club sessions, I don’t think a single person said so much as “Hi”.  Now, I can be difficult to approach, I look perpetually pissed off.  But if some random new guys suddenly showed up and started skating (at a session where there are maybe 15 people there) in this little niche sport, you figure that at least someone would ask what he was doing there or something.  Nope.

But I didn’t care, I was here to train, not make buddies.  I’d go up there three times per week, do the drills I thought I should do, try to skate laps, then do conditioning afterwards. I actually talked to Derek Parra (he was preparing for Torino) early on, he saw me doing dryland with my weight vest and came over to talk to me.

Like a good fanboy, I told him that reading his book is what made me pursue this and he was nice enough to take my blades and straighten and sharpen them for me.  I know some people have real issues with him but he was never anything but nice to me (he was an inliner AND had brown-skin so he got double points).  Later on, he’d give me one of my top compliments, telling me he was impressed by how I attacked my corners.  He had struggled endlessly at this sport and saw me working my balls off to get better.  That was nice.

But that was my first month in Salt Lake.  No coach, no friends, no nothing.  Even the strip clubs were just horrible (I had to go to one).  I was in a fairly miserable city where I couldn’t even get a decent plate of fajitas (I missed Tex-Mex).

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Caleb

At some point, one club skater finally introduced himself.  His name was Caleb and he’s The Big Kid I talked about in Training Secrets.  He had moved to SLC from Vail to chase the dream and was equally lonely and unhappy and sat down to say hello to the other weird outcast at club skate.

As it would turn out, we’d end up as teammates for nearly the next 5 years and form the core of my coach’s group.  I can’t say we were exactly friends, he’s not the kind of person I’d probably hang out with outside of training.  But we got along, he had a big heart and he was a hard worker (usually).  Over dinner one night he mentioned off handedly that there was this guy, a coach named Rex that I should talk to.  And that he’d be coaching at club the following session.  So I looked for him.

And found him, an older guy wearing a blue jacket, he was working with an athlete trying to make Olympic trials.  I introduced myself and he gave me a couple of pointers on the ice that immediately helped.  After skating, I was doing dryland and he gave me some more tips that also worked.  I asked him if he had plans for dinner that night.  He did not.

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Rex

Rex and I went to the Panda Express in my ‘hood for dinner where I proceeded, for about 2 hours, to interview/interrogate him.  Due to my own experiences with coaching, I have some rather strongly held opinions about certain things and had to make sure we were on the same wavelength before I took him on as coach. We were.

The long and the short of it is that he’d made the Olympic trials in 1980 but was too overtrained to make the team.  So he became a coach; I have always felt that he was trying to make up for his own previous failings by getting others to surpass how far he got.  As I talked about in How to Be Your Own Coach, a lot of good coaches usually found out what not to do the hard way:  by screwing themselves as athletes.  What they learn is passed down onto their charges who benefit from their mistakes.

For the last 30 or so years he’d coached and obsessively taken apart every aspect of speed skating in the way I take apart every other bit of training and nutrition.  He’d gotten many skaters like myself to Olympic trials and put at least one on the team.  He always seemed to get older skaters who had a limited time to reach their goals and his entire program was based around that singular goal; he had pared it down to the essentials. It was all specificity all the time since his athletes usually didn’t have time to dick around with warm-up soccer or the agility ladder.  I could get behind that completely.

So he had the results to back it up and his and my philosophy of training (technique first, quality over quantity) were right inline (har har).   We clicked instantly both in terms of our attitudes and obsessiveness as well as our sense of humor and personality.  I hired him on the spot.  I told him my goals, he told me what I’d have to do and it was on.

I joked that night that “Just so you know, if I succeed, it’s because I worked so hard.  But if I fail, it’s because you coached me wrong.”  I was joking (genuinely despite something I’ll mention in a later part) but told him that I figured most athletes operate that way, I just wanted to let him know up front.  That was when he knew he’d found a kindred (read: smart-assed) spirit in me.

Make no mistake, over the years Rex and I would have our ups and downs.  We became good friends but there were various blips during the 5.5 years I worked with him; at one point in year 2 or 3 I actually walked away from training for about 3 weeks due to a personality conflict with another of his skaters that was not getting dealt with.

She perpetually tried to start conflict with me as I just tried to ignore her and I warned him that if she started with me again, I’d walk.   She mouthed off one day and I walked.  He fired her (sort-of) and I came back to practice.  I simply trained on my own and I’d note that I didn’t miss a single workout.

We also had some disagreements about training, mostly the conditioning aspect since I didn’t know enough about skating to have an opinion about technique.  But he was the type who would discuss things with me, he knew and respected my background and was as willing to learn from me as he was to teach.  Over the years, many aspects of my training would be adjusted based on my own input (as I figured out the unique demands of skating).  I’d note that my teammates also got to take advantage of the Super Secret Project that I was developing.

If I had to sum up Rex briefly as a coach, I’d put it this way: when it comes to the technique of skating and how to teach it, I’m not sure there’s anyone better in the world.  He’s dissected every millimeter of the sport and can teach it effectively.   His conditioning and nutrition stuff is a bit out of date (this is where he was really willing to learn from me) and he fails completely in handling people or his skaters well.

The latter wasn’t an issue for me personally (I was always there to work at my best) although it did affect me when his flaky other skaters would interrupt my training with their bullshit (being late to practice, missing weeks and then bitching about being out of shape, etc.).  But he knew skating technique and that’s what I was mostly interested in.   I needed to learn to skate and he was truly a technical master.  I’d be lying if I didn’t also point out that, realistically, he was the only one willing to work with a late-starting 34 year-old wannabe. It was just a happy coincidence that he was as good a technical coach as he was.

Now, one month into the journey it was truly on.  I had skates, I had a coach, I had years of background skating inline.

How hard could this possibly be?

To be continued in No Regrets Part 4.

As noted in No Regrets Part 1, I’m turning off comments for this series of posts.  The first reason is so I don’t have to delete the invariable trolling.  The second is that I’m also not interested in atta boys or whatever.  I spent the last 5 years pursuing this goal for myself.  Whether folks supported it or thought I was an idiot was never relevant to what I was going to do.  So neither positive nor negative feedback is needed nor wanted.

2004: Ice Camp

By the summer of 2004, my fitness was improving but I was still without a race circuit to attend.  I wasn’t sure what to do. I was biding my time in Austin, not really doing much with my life, books were selling, I was dating a very crazy girl.  And in poking around the Internet, I came across a used pair of ice speed skating boots (that turned out to be six sizes too big) on Ebay.  What the hell, I thought, let’s pick them up.  You know, just in case.

Part of me must have been thinking about the ice because, somehow, I then managed to stumble across an Introduction to Long-track camp being held at the Salt Lake City Olympic Oval.   I signed up immediately.  If nothing else, I wanted to be able to say that I had at least tried the ice once.

I flew in that Thursday night, got a room at the extended stay hotel and showed up for camp first thing the next morning.  It was awful and I mean that very seriously.  I figured it would be a bunch of older folks like me; instead it was me and a bunch of 8-10 year olds who had all been skating for 5 years and who’s parents apparently saw this as great daycare.

I felt like an idiot and I looked like an idiot.  I was this older guy with gray in his beard playing warm-up tag and soccer with the 8 year olds (all while the national team was training on the big oval watching me be an idiot on the track).  But I was there to try the ice and that’s all I cared about; I’d do the goofy stuff to get to the real stuff.

The camp was meant to be a full introduction to ice speedskating and what that entails. We did some dryland training, a bunch of off-ice skating imitations that skaters do to get in shape in the summer when they aren’t skating. We went into the weight room where I just kept my mouth shut and hoped the ‘coach’ wouldn’t hurt the 10 year olds by making them do very heavy leg presses.  There was also a sharpening clinic that I skipped; I went and had lunch with Bryan Haycock instead.  I mean, why learn to sharpen skates?  I wouldn’t ever be doing it, right?

At some point on Day 1, they put us on the ice and it was an absolute nightmare.   I was skating on short-track skates which are completely inappropriate for the big oval.  And I was clueless about what to do.  The little kids, all of whom had been doing this for years were zooming around me as I tried not to die. I sort of hacked around for a while, the coaches were not great.  In fact, one of them, in response to a technical question I had simply blew me off  “Oh, don’t worry about that.”  What an asshole.

I woke up the next day almost unable to walk but I was there to do camp so off I went, soreness be damned.  I had gone to an extra open-ice session and attended every session on the ice that I could.  I wanted to know that, no matter what happened going forwards, I had gotten on the ice and done everything at camp that I could.  I had made the trip and, dammit, I was going to do it all.

Early Sunday, camp ended and I went back to Austin.   On the way out of the Oval I picked up a copy of Derek Parra’s autobiography “Reflections in the Ice” which I’ll talk about in a second.  I devoured it in its entirety on the plane.

Arriving back in Austin, I sat and thought.  And thought.  And thought.  The reality was that I had been there for years not doing much beyond selling books, playing on the Internet and spending too much time at strip clubs.  As noted, the girl I was dating was completely nuts.  It wasn’t a terribly fulfilling life.  There was still the issue that the only inline races available were marathons (40-50km) and I didn’t want to race those.   Without 10k’s to race, it looked like my return to skating was going to come to a rather abrupt end.

Summing up so far: I was 34 years old, Torino was 1.5 years away, I had a brand spanking new pair of ice speedskating boots and no inline circuit to race.

Can you see where this is going?

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Regrets

Now, I have many things in my life that I can look back on with regret. Girls I should have talked to, girls I should have slept with, things I should have done very differently at various times in my life.  I also have a personality type that tends to ruminate on the past a little bit too much.  Unfortunately, constantly stressing over what you should have done or could have done is useless; focus on what you can do now.    You can’t change the past, you can only learn from it and not make the same mistakes going forwards.  Well not more than a half-dozen times anyhow.

And the more I thought about it the more I realized that I would look back on my life with great regret if I didn’t chase this one dream.  That is, going to Salt Lake and trying to speedskate, make an Olympic team.  Something.  I knew full well that the odds of me doing anything were slim.  But let’s face it, folks who start when they are 5 have no guarantee of success.  I had nothing to lose and everything to gain.  I had enough prior regrets without making this one another one.

So I made my decision: I was going.

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Inline to Ice: Part 1

There is actually a small tradition of inline skaters making a successful switch to ice. KC Boutiette is, so far as I can tell, the first to do this. He switched from pro-inline to ice and made an Olympic team his first time out although the rapidity with which he got good on the ice is a bit exaggerated.

I mentioned Derek Parra above, after being a world-class inline skater, he switched to ice.  Although it took him 8 years to do it, he won a gold medal and set a 1500m world record at the Salt Lake City, Olympics.  But reading his book on the plane ride home is a big part of what gave me the belief that it was at least worth making the attempt.  He had started relatively late and won his gold medal at 32 years old which at least gave me some hope that an old fart like me could do it.

Chad Hedrick is the most recent example; arguably the best inline skater ever, he switched to ice and won a World Championship 1.5 years later.  What is often under appreciated is that he had skated indoor inline and played ice hockey his whole life in addition to dominating inline skating.  This gave him a complete skill set to adapt to ice speedskating quickly.  His teammates call him “The Exception” and his ability to go from zero to World Champion in 1.5 years is an example of that.

In recent years, indoor inliners have made the switch, they have the corner skills that lets them succeed on the ice.  In fact, US Speedskating, for lack of their own development program, has started trying to recruit more inline skaters; probably in hopes of finding the next Chad.  Unfortunately, he was a one in a milion athlete.  Most inliners who have tried to make the switch give up after 2 years of frustration. It’s tough going from best in the world to just another skater in a new sport and most have quit.

In any case, between not doing anything in Austin and inliners showing that they had the ability to make the transition my decision was made to go for it.  I think my biggest hangup was that I was still training my girls for powerlifting, this was the one thing that I truly got some type of meaningful enjoyment out of at that point.  I didn’t feel good leaving them.  I dithered in telling them but when I did, as I should have expected, they supported me 100%.  They understood completely what I needed to do.

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Are You Crazy or Just Stupid?

I made an announcement on a message board and, shall we say, reactions were mixed.   One of the common reactions was “Are you out of your mind?”  Well, yeah, probably.  But that wasn’t really news.  People often ask me if I suffer from insanity and I tell them “No, I enjoy every minute of it.”

Another common reaction was “Do you really think you have a chance of making an Olympic team?”  I had trouble explaining my mentality about it but, essentially I went with the intention of succeeding, but I accepted the reality that I would probably fail.  I didn’t expect to fail but I fully recognized that as the most likely possibility; does that make sense?  But as I noted above, I could have started when I was 5 years old and the odds of making a team were slim.  How many thousands of athletes in any sport dedicate their lives and don’t make a team?  My chances were even slimmer given when I was starting.  But they would be absolutely zero if I didn’t try at all.

Perhaps the most overwhelmingly common reaction was from people expressing how they wished they could do what I had to do: just pack up their lives and go chase a dream (albeit a crazy one).  Either they had family or work obligations or were simply too scared to take the chance.  The fear of failure was too much for them to even try at all.  For whatever reason, I sensed an element of jealousy that I was doing this and they couldn’t (or wouldn’t).

The final reaction I got had less to do with skating and more to do with Salt Lake City.  “You’re moving to Utah?”  “Seriously?”  “Why?”  I won’t go into the whole SLC thing, it’s not worth the energy.  I’ll only note that the specifics of long-track speedskating make facilities difficult (it’s essentially a full-sized running track made out of ice, it covers 7 acres) and there are three US facilities.

The first is in Lake Placid which is outdoors.  No thank you.  The second is the Petit center in Milwaukee (or Wisconsin depending on who you ask).  Miserably cold and I hate cold weather.  The final one is the Utah Olympic Oval.  SLC is cold but dry and at least tolerable.  It was the best of the worst in terms of where I could pursue this.

But succeed or fail, my attitude was this: I knew that I would regret it for the rest of my life if I didn’t try.  Sure, I might fail utterly.  I could live with that.  What I couldn’t live with was the life of regret wondering “What if I had tried?”  Of not knowing what might have been.  I knew that years down the road I would have yet another regret to add to the list if I didn’t do this.  I couldn’t face that, it scared me far more than failing to reach a nearly impossible goal.  I had nothing holding me in Austin except the girls I was training, everything to gain and nothing to lose. So I was going.

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Wrapping Up the Austin Caper

I had been in Austin about 7 years at this point, having moved down shortly before finishing my first book.  I’m not one that handles change well but, at this point, the fear over change was less than my desire to go chase a dream.  I had a bunch of stuff to wrap up before leaving Austin and threw myself into my training in preparation.  I’ve written about this in a little ranty piece called Training Secrets.

I had foregone weight training for inline but realized after my time on the ice that it required a great deal more strength.  I got back in the weight room, worked through the soreness and threw myself into the most intense training I had ever done.  At one point I was training legs 6 days/week, 4 weight days and 2 jumping days.  That was on top of maintenance aerobic work, technical work and some GPP (walking in a weighted vest every night).  I trained 3X/day most days.   I might not have a clue what I was doing on the ice but I wasn’t going to lack for fitness.

A month later, I had gotten rid of everything but the essentials: my computer, my books and my skates (I should probably add my PS2 and a tv to play games/watch movies on). I left Austin for Salt Lake City, with a quick stopover to visit a friend in the Fort Worth Area.  I knew literally nothing about Salt Lake City beyond where I’d stayed for camp.  Two days later, I pulled in and went to the same Extended Stay Hotel.  I was in Salt Lake City.  To speedskate.

Now what?

To be continued in No Regrets Part 3.

As noted in No Regrets Part 1, I’m turning off comments for this series of posts.  The first reason is so I don’t have to delete the invariable trolling.  The second is that I’m also not interested in atta boys or whatever.  I spent the last 5 years pursuing this goal for myself.  Whether folks supported it or thought I was an idiot was never relevant to what I was going to do.  So neither positive nor negative feedback is needed nor wanted.

Now, I also don’t usually write articles like the one I’m about to write.   Back when I had that separate blog, I talked more about myself since I tend to think of blogs as a place for people to chatter inanely about themselves.  I don’t consider this a blog (it’s a website, dammit!) and try to keep the content simply informational; I don’t like babbling about myself.

But this piece, while being a bit of chatter about myself does actually have what I think is a relevant point.  It’s also a bit out of my normal style since I also don’t usually do a lot of rah-rah motivational type stuff.  Anyhow, I’m getting ahead of myself.

Introduction

For the past 5.5 years, as many of you know (and some of you probably don’t), I’ve been living in Salt Lake City training full time at the Utah Olympic Oval (aka the Fastest Ice On Earth).  I moved up here in the late summer of 2004 to pursue a singular goal which I’ll get to in Part 2.

The speedskating season ends around mid-March anyhow and, in past years, about this time I have often written something that related to an end of the season kind of thing.  The article I wrote on Goal versus Process Oriented Training was related to that. This year is different.  This year I’m done ice speedskating.  As in done done.  I mentioned this in Methods of Endurance Training: Putting it Together, I’m moving back to outdoor inline where I belong.  My ice career, such as it was, is done.

To understand what I want to talk about, and you may have an inkling of where I’m going with this by the title of the article, I need to back up a bit.

.Where This All Started

I only vaguely remember watching the Olympics as a kid, it rings a vague memory and I’m sure I watched speedskating. I was 10 when Eric Heiden won his 5 gold medals, I vaguely remember some of the Dan Jansen stuff.  I don’t recall it really grabbing me (in the way that most athletes are grabbed by their sport at a young age) at that time.  Maybe looked cool but that was it.

I went to college at UCLA to study exercise physiology in 1988; I was involved in recreational gymnastics at the time.  The entire group I worked out with was into this new fad of a sport which was inline skating.  While inlines had been around since the 1970’s, the late 80’s was when the first boom hit.  All my friends skated and played roller hockey every Friday.

At some point I finally got around to getting a pair of skates.  To say I sucked is an understatement of vast proportions.  I had roller skated maybe twice as a kid and had no clue what I was doing.  But something about it grabbed me and grabbed me hard.  I was determined to get better and the way I figured this would happen was by skating a lot.

So I skated every day.  I literally lived on my skates and it sort of became a running joke, I was never without them; either on my feet or hung over my shoulders.  I’d skate to class, to work, between classes and I remember with fond memories skating the giant concrete playground that was Los Angeles for hours at a time.  The whole place is paved and you can literally go from the ocean to downtown and never stop.  It was paradise.

My closest friend and I would go on these epic multi-hour skates.  Just cruising, or riding stairs.  All day all the time.  Usually to build up a big appetite for all you can eat Sushi (skating home after that was always interesting).

In the early 90’s, a race circuit developed.  My friend had ridden bikes competitively for years and it sounded like good fun.  So we went to some 10k races.  And I was hooked.   I had competed in triathlons briefly in high-school and loved competition.  I eventually got my first pair of racing skates and that was all I worked towards.

At some point during college though, I had gotten the idea to do ice speedskating.  Probably a function of watching the winter Olympics or what have you; I genuinely don’t remember what put the idea in my head.  Problem was I had no clue how to get into it.  I’m still not sure in hindsight how I expected to get started.  Magic, I guess.

In any case, I went back to Nashville after school and raced for another year or two.  My final year of racing, I placed top 10 overall or top 3 in my age group of every race I entered.  I couldn’t ever break through to the next level but I was right there.  Then, in trying to get to that next level, I burned myself out and overtrained myself straight into the ground.  I got to the point that I couldn’t face training anymore and I hung up my skates.  That was about the time of the Bodyopus experience and I went from one extreme to the other; from 20+ hours/week of endurance training (with far too much at far too high of an intensity in hindsight) to the weight room exclusively.

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Time Passes

I spent years rather futilely pursuing strength related activities.   I had always enjoyed lifting weights, did so all through college and did quite a bit while I was inline racing both in college and afterwards in Nashville.   I did a powerlifting meet and put up decent raw numbers but around 2002 I came to the stark realization that I’d never be more than mediocre in the weight room or in any form of competition.  Make no mistake, I loved pushing weights.  But I didn’t have the hormones or the talent to be great at it (some would argue that I wasn’t even good at it but I think my numbers disagree).  And I missed competing.  Especially in something I might actually be decent at.

So I decided that I was ready to go back to the one thing I’d ever been good at and that was inline skating.  I broke out my old equipment and started redeveloping my aerobic base and doing what I thought was technique work (based on various resources I’d gathered).  It didn’t help that Austin was a horrible town for skating.  Just awful.  I was very limited in what I could do.

But there was another large problem: the 10k circuit that I’d raced in my 20’s no longer existed and I didn’t really want to do marathons (40-50 km races).   I emailed some race promoters to find out what had happened to my beloved 10k distance. Essentially, they told me that 10k’s were no longer financially viable.

The pros didn’t want to fly all that way to race for 15 minutes and citizen racers love a shirt with marathon on it; they wouldn’t come out for shorter stuff for the most part.  So everyone moved to that.  But I was locked into the idea of racing at the 10k distance.  I’d note that, even there, the inline race scene is dead in the US.  There are a handful of races but for all practical purposes, outdoor racing is a dead sport here. Even odder is that it’s still huge everywhere else in the world.

Discovering this really deflated me a bit, I had spent at least a year at this point working towards this goal and now it looked like that goal no longer existed.   I guess I could have done bike racing but it never really appealed to me the way skating did.  I wanted to skate and there wasn’t skating to be had.  I didn’t know what to do but the solution would be found shortly.

To be continued in No Regrets Part 2.

Quick note: I’m turning off comments for this series of posts.  The first reason is so I don’t have to delete the invariable trolling.  The second is that I’m also not interested in atta boys or whatever.  I spent the last 5 years pursuing this goal for myself.  Whether folks supported it or thought I was an idiot was never relevant to what I was going to do.  So neither positive nor negative feedback is needed nor wanted.

As readers may or may not know, I have been in Salt Lake City, Utah for the past five years involved in long-track ice speedskating.  While that chapter of my life is coming to an end shortly (and I’m returning to outdoor inline racing as described in a previous article), with the Olympics currently in full swing and speedskating being of great interest, I wanted to review a new book that I suspect most would never be made aware of.

The author of this book is a skater by the name of Eva Rodansky who I have been lucky enough to become friends and teammates with. During my 5 years here, she was always sort of on the periphery, I knew her, we would joke around but we never really interacted beyond that.  During one awful summer, her coach and my coach tried to work as a team; it was a disaster because her coach simply overtrained and injured everybody (except me, since I wouldn’t do his idiot training).

She was told repeatedly by some of the best coaches in the world how great she could be and, much to my dismay, I watched her talent summarily wasted by incompetents who were more interested in their own glory than her success.  My coach and I spent years wishing he could work with her and train her properly so that she could achieve her vastly under-tapped potential.  Didn’t happen.

Last summer, on a whim, she came out to one of our inline workouts.  Something clicked for me that day skating with her and she and I pulled a set that I’d have thought impossible as much as a week before.  At lunch, my coach and I essentially browbeat her into considering a comeback and another run at the games.

She decided to come back to the ice and train and, to put her talent in perspective, after 2 years away from the sport, and perhaps 4 weeks back on the ice, she skated one tenth over the Olympic qualifying time in the 1500m going about 80% effort.  For various reasons, she decided that taking another run at the Olympics was not worth it to her emotionally or physically.  However, she continued to train and she and I became good friends (I also learned a ton from her in terms of skating).  Ultimately she capped off her career by setting three Master’s International records that I suspect will stand for quite some time.  Would have set a fourth if not for having been sick the week before.

Which is all a very long way of introducing Eva’s book, Winter of Discontent: An Athlete’s Experience of Speed Skating in America, which I’m actually going to review now.  The book represents several years of writing (and sometimes ranting, if truth be told) about her career and her experiences in speedskating.  While she was skating, she had blogged (sometimes quite angrily) about her experiences with skating.  That, along with many earlier experiences, had branded her as a troublemaker in the sport.

But, with all of those blog posts underneath her, and much more to say, she had wanted to write a book about her experiences in the sport.  She said that it was to get the truth out about US Speedskating.  While I think that was part of it, I think just as big a part was getting the anger out of her system; a catharsis if you will. Putting it all to paper let her get it out of her system while skating for fun with our group let her remember why she started in the first place.  She truly loves the sport of speed skating; it’s the federation and politics that are the problem.

I’ll tell you upfront that I am a bit biased towards this book as I helped her to edit it and bring it to fruition; and she is a friend.  Make no mistake, the writing is all hers.  I worked simply to clean up some bits and help her with the myriad details that make finishing a book of this scope monumentally nightmarish.  Even if that wasn’t the case, I’d still be saying the same things about it that I’m about to say.  My involvement has no bearing on what follows regarding her book.

In brief, Winter of Discontent is a very good book, telling essentially two separate but interacting stories.

The first is her personal story, how she got interested in skating at young age, made Category 1 (essentially national level) after 4 months of training, her two barely missed Olympic teams, her world cup successes and failures.  There’s much more of course, her retirement to get a masters in biology, her return to sport and training full-time towards the Olympics all while holding down a job in a lab.   Note that there isn’t the happy ending to Winter of Discontent that tends to be part and parcel of such books.  No gold medals, no world records, no parades.

Certainly she had her successes and with proper coaching could have been truly great but mostly she was simply dumped on by the federation and other, protected skaters, constantly all while being mishandled by incompetent coaching.  One person, a higher up in the federation, once said of her “No one cares about Eva Rodansky” but I disagree.  She has friends, skaters and non-skaters alike, that watched her immense potential ruined by a federation more interested in politics and personal grudges than in sending the best skaters the country has to offer to compete at the world level.  Those people care about her.  So do I.

And that brings us to the second story in this book: the story of the US Speedskating governing body.  And it is not a particularly nice story.  With the Olympics at full tilt, most of the stories people hear are about the good, the athletes, supported by their federation who overcome great odds to take home the gold for their country.  Sadly, much of that is smoke and mirrors.  People don’t like to hear about it but the amount of corruption that goes on in sporting federations is immense.  From politicians on the take to bribery to countries buying their way out of failed drug tests, the games are big money and that means corrupt people in a position of power who use the athletes to their whim. And the athletes often have no choice but to go along with it; it’s that or be kept from pursuing their one solitary goal.

In terms of US Speedskating specifically, the problems range from  unqualified individuals running the facilities to coaches  and bureaucrats who misappropriate money.  Having rescued US Speedskating from ruin, perhaps Stephen Colbert will follow by looking into where that money ultimately went; because it sure wasn’t to the athletes.  One of whom had to pay his own way to the World Cup with the understanding that he would be reimbursed if he placed high enough. Had he not had the money, he couldn’t have gone to the event.  How that facilitates his long-term development is beyond me.

More specifically to Eva, a good example of the type of thing that goes on was used as part of a grand overtraining experiment (in an Olympic year no less); half the team was deliberately allowed to fall of the edge to gather data.  Data that already existed and was never used.  The coaches did this knowingly, without the consent of the athletes, all while telling the athlete it was their fault for not being able to handle the training.

There are also plenty of stories of athletes being singled out; either put on the team when they didn’t deserve it, or kept off the team when they did. It goes on and on.  And every time you think it can’t get worse, it does. Like a coach who had a long-term romantic relationship with a skater on his team, making sure she was protected and kept on the team when she didn’t deserve it. It just goes on and on.

And that’s the second story in this book as Eva ran into all of it throughout her career.   She was tagged as a troublemaker from the get go and this caused the federation to work against her in almost every way, from denying her ice time, denying her therapy and all other manners of behaviors that kept her from having a chance at meeting her potential.  Simply because they didn’t like her.

Never mind that she could have performed at the highest levels.  Nevermind that at Torino, one particularly petulant skater decided that she wouldn’t skate the 1500m, leaving the US team with no women to compete.  Had Eva not been left off as alternate, she’d have at least been able to step to the starting line to represent her country. But because of a personal grudge, and Eva not being with the team, the US simply had no-one skate. Basically, the federation was more interested in politics than in seeing the US succeed in the sport.

Through Winter of Discontent, Eva tells both her story and the story of US Speedskating.  And it’s not always a nice story.  But I think it’s an important one for people to hear which is why I want to make people aware of it.  Whether you have an interest in sport in general or speedskating in specific, this book may make you aware of some of the things that really go on in high-level sport that you won’t hear about otherwise.

I’ll be blunt: if you’re the kind of person who needs their sports books to be full of happy endings and Rocky-esque moments, this is not the book for you to read.  If you want a true insider’s view of high- level sport in what is admittedly a niche sport (and make no mistake, I’m sure athletes in all sports could tell similar stories), this is a book you will want to read.  It pulls aside the veil of smoke and mirrors to let you see the real story of what goes on.   This is the story you won’t see on NBC between shots of Apollo Anton Ohno winning gold, it’s not the story you’ll see in the major news media.  Because it’s not a story people want to believe is true.  But it is.

At 400 pages length across 30 chapters of varying length and only $29.95, Winter of Discontent is a steal of a book; it can be purchased from Eva’s website at USSpeedskatingdirt.com. The book is written in a very easy to read conversational tone; Eva is a good writer which is part of why I encouraged her to finish the book even if it meant a lot of stress and late nights to get it done while the Olympic games were going on (almost nobody cares about speed skating the rest of the time).

And since I think it’s so important of a book (and I’d note again that I helped edit the book and Eva is a friend), I’m going to sweeten the deal. If you order Winter of Discontent within the next 2 weeks (between now and March 8th), simply forwards you sales receipt to wod@bodyrecomposition and I’ll send you a single use coupon (good for one year) for $10 off of any purchase you make through my store.

You can use it to purchase any of my current books (and the coupon will work with any other offers) or save it for upcoming projects (of which one should be ready to go in a few weeks).  Even if you don’t want the coupon or care about my books, if you’re interested in sports in general or speed skating in specific, I highly recommend this book.  It’s a story I think you should read.

So that’s Winter of Discontent: An Athlete’s Experience of Speed Skating in America.  It’s not a happy book at times but it is an important book in my opinion.  So go get it and read it (or let people you know who might be interested in it know about it).  You may not like what it has to say but sometimes that’s not a bad thing.  The truth may not always be happy, but sometimes that’s the best way to have your eyes opened.

In that context, a question I have gotten enough times to make it worth addressing is whether active rest or passive rest is ‘better’.  That is, is it fundamentally better to do something for active recovery or better to just take the day completely off?  Not surprisingly, not even coaches and top athletes can agree on this so today I want to look at both the concept of active and passive rest as well as some potential benefits and drawbacks to each.

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Defining Terms

First some definitions.  Passive rest should be pretty easy to understand, on a passive rest day you do nothing.  No training at all.  Some might allow for something like a brisk walk.  But basically this is a day completely off.  Sit around, do nothing, relax, recover.   I don’t have much else to say about passive rest beyond that for the time being but I’ll come back to it near the end of this article.

In contrast, active rest (aka active recovery) refers to a workout done at a reduced intensity and volume of loading (relative to a normal workout).  So a road cyclist might do an easy 45 minute spin on the bike at a heart rate of 130 beats per minute.  A weightlifter might use a light day of training, at 75% of maximum for sets of 3-5 (noting that 75% of max is a weight you could generally do 10-12 reps to failure with so this is very sub-maximal) as an active rest day.  Fundamentally, active rest is just meant to be a light/easy day.

I actually have some rules of active recovery that I’ll come back to at the end of this piece when I make some recommendations but, basically, an active recovery workout should not be fatiguing at all.  When I have trainees do an active recovery workout, the primary criterion is that they should finish the workout feeling better and fresher than they started.  If they are more tired coming out than going in, they did too much or worked too hard or both.  Again I’ll give specific guidelines at the end of the article.

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The Goal of Active Rest

As coaches and athletes came to the early realization that they couldn’t just train at 100% day-in, day-out without blowing up, the idea of having harder and lighter days came into vogue.  At least in the endurance world, the hard day-easy day approach is usually attributed to Bill Bowerman of Oregon.  Other sports including weightlifting found out early on that alternating harder and easier days helped avoid problems and this eventually evolved into various cycling schemes (including the fairly popular heavy/light/medium approach).

Eventually, this idea was taken a bit further and easy days were taken to be active recovery days.  Even there nobody can seem to agree what the exact purpose of active recovery days are.  In the endurance world, it’s often argued that active recovery days sort of ’stimulate the metabolic pathways of recovery’ without contributing fatigue; basically it helps you to recover more quickly.

In contrast, others argue that active recovery has no truly active role in hastening recovery, rather it simply doesn’t add training stress (while allowing the athlete to get some light work in) so that the recovery that will take place anyhow can take place.  Essentially, the active recovery is passive in terms of its effects on recovery; for what little sense that makes.  Personally, having trained both ways, I probably tend towards the second interpretation.  I can’t say that easy workouts really seemed to help recovery. Rather they were a way to get in some training, burn a few calories, maybe work out a bit of soreness without adding to the overall stress while recovery from the previous heavy day went about it’s business.

In some sports, it’s often argued that active recovery training helps to repair damage from high-intensity days.  This seems to be the most prevalent in swimming theory where concern about metabolic damage from acidosis (which occurs during high-intensity swim training) can be countered with recovery/regeneration training.  Basically, you repair any damage to things like mitochondria with lots of recovery swimming.  I’m not sure this idea has been adopted by other endurance sports to any great degree.

In the weight room, the same basic arguments could probably be made.  Some would argue that getting a light workout in the weight room (perhaps a Tue or Wed light workout after Monday’s heavy day) pumps some blood through the tissues, helps to remove waste products, etc.  Some advocate drinking a carb/protein drink during this type of training as the increased blood flow from even light training should help to carry nutrients for growth and recovery to the muscles (the same idea can apply to endurance training, as well).  An old idea in bodybuilding was to perform ‘feeder workouts’, high rep light workouts meant to pump blood and nutrients to worked muscles a day or two after a heavier day.

Frankly, I can’t recall seeing any real research on the topic one way or the other; in a practical sense, I’m not sure it matters whether active recovery training is having a direct impact on recovery (hopefully positive) or is simply allowing fatigue to dissipate while getting the person training.   Of more practical relevance are the potential benefits of the training.

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Pros and Cons of Active Rest

I’ve actually already described some of the purported benefits of active recovery above even if nobody can really agree on what active recovery actually does: from actively promoting recovery (by activating metabolic processes) to simply letting recovery happen without adding training stress to regenerating damaged mitochondria or whatever; these are all potential benefits of active recovery.  But there are more.

For sports with a technical component (which is most of them), active recovery can essentially double as a technical workout.  Since the intensity is low, the athlete can focus on some aspect of technique (either to correct or perfect it depending on where they are in their learning process) and do it under conditions where proper performance should be achievable.

While this is generally true for all sports (with a very few exceptions), it’s especially true for sports with a huge ‘feel/groove’ component.  Activities such as the snatch in Olympic lifting or most swimming technique require that athletes keep in touch with them almost daily or they lose their feel for the movement (and the more precise the movement patterns are, the more this tends to be the case).  Doing them for light work on active recovery days allows the athlete to keep their groove; that’s in addition to any extra technical practice benefits that are gained.

I’d note that this assumes that they aren’t so exhausted from the previous day’s workout that proper technique is impossible.  In which case, the potential benefit can become a negative; the athlete is so tired that they ingrain poor technical habits during the recovery workout.  This would be a situation where some sort of non-specific cross training (just to move some blood, etc.) might be a better choice.  After a heavy Olympic lifting day, for example, one of my trainees will often do a light recovery workout with pump work on machines.  It’s non-technical, moves some blood but doesn’t require coordination or mental focus.  She gets the ancillary benefits of some training without having to worry about the technical aspect of training.

But for athletes who can use proper technique during recovery workouts, active recovery is a good way to get in some technical reps and keeping their groove/feel while also getting any other benefits from active recovery (metabolic, recovery, otherwise).

As noted, athletes who sip on a dilute carb/protein drink during active recovery sessions can actually take advantage of increased blood flow to working muscles. Whether for strength/power athletes seeking growth or endurance athletes who need to replace muscle glycogen and resyntheize damaged proteins, that alone can help with recovery whether the training itself has any real benefit.  I’d note that if this is the explicit goal of active recovery sessions, then the primary sport needn’t be practiced. So long as the same muscles that are worked in the main sport are used, the nutrients will be carried where they need to be. So a runner can give his joints a rest by riding a bike or doing something non-impact will still getting increased blood and nutrient flow to fatigued muscles.

As an added potential benefit, athletes who have or are having body composition control issues, active recovery can be a good way to burn some extra calories to help keep body weight or body fat under control. An extra benefit in this regards is actually psychological; simply, some people stick to their diets better on days when they do some activity.  Day’s off invariably turn into a “I didn’t train so I’m not going to worry about good nutrition.” kind of day and an active recovery session may be the only way to keep them from blowing their diet.

I’d note that some athletes simply don’t do well with complete days off.  Some of this is specific to the groove/feel sports I mentioned above but even for other activities, some athletes simply don’t handle complete days off well physiologically.  For whatever reason, and this is highly individual, they come back flat and unable to perform after a day or two completely off.  Back in the day weightlifters and other strength/power athletes such as throwers used to talk about doing ‘tonic’ workouts, basically light days meant to keep their systems ramped up for heavy training days.  Again, this is highly individual but does happen.  The trainee mentioned above is like this, total days off flatten her out for Olympic lifting.  Some sort of activity prevents this.

And that brings me, at last, to the biggest potential con of active recovery days which actually has less to do with the active recovery concept per se and more to do with human nature.  As I mentioned in the definitions section above, the point of an active recovery workout is that it is a light, low-volume workout meant to either promote or allow recovery without causing more fatigue.  But humans often have poor self-control and that’s where I see active recovery going wrong.  All too often trainees go into the gym or start a workout with the intention of it being an active recovery day.  Then they start screwing it up.

If they feel good, they start pushing the intensity and turning it into a workout.  Or, because they figure that there’s no point in driving 20 minutes to the gym, changing clothes, working out for 20 minutes and then going home, they decide to go ahead and do a full workout. Volume increases, they push the intensity just a bit more than they should and they justify it for whatever reason.  And they turn what should be an active recovery session into a workout.

And, as I discussed in Keep the Hard Days Hard and the Easy Days Easy, they end up doing more harm than good.  Rather than ending up alternating a hard workout with an easy or active recovery day, every workout ends up in this middle intensity range because the easy days become so hard that the hard days can’t be hard enough.  In that case, where the person simply has no self-control, the concept of active recovery does more harm than good and they should just stay the hell out of the gym (or stick to nothing more than a brisk walk).  I’ll mention this again when I sum up.

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Pros and Cons of Passive Rest

For the most part, if you take what I wrote above and just reverse it, you have this section.  Honestly, the primary benefit of true passive recovery days (e.g. no training at all or nothing more than brisk walking) is for people with no self-control in the gym.  If you can’t keep the intensity and volume where it should be for active recovery, don’t train at all.  If you’re the type who simply must go hard or not at all, you’re better off staying out of the gym, off the bike, etc.  Or try learning some self-control.

I’d mention that even with the benefits of active recovery, most coaches advocate and most athletes take at least one day per week of complete passive recovery.  This is probably as much mental as anything.  It’s very different to know you have 6 days of training ahead of you and then a day when you can sit around and watch television compared to knowing that you have to train every day for the next 21 or more days straight.  Because anybody can make it through 6 days of training.  And going 21 days without a break tends to just make people lose it.  There’s something about blocking off the training into more manageable chunks that makes it more mentally survivable.

Finally, I’d mention again that for some individuals, complete days off seem to do more harm than good, they flatten out (and this is especially true for high-intensity sports like sprinting and weightlifting) and/or loose their groove and feel.  In that case, active recovery may be the better choice but again with the caveat that it must be kept under control.  In that vein, some Olympic lifters will actually break the ‘one day off per week’ rule and do a very short squat workout on Sunday, otherwise they flatten out between Saturday and Monday. When I say short, I mean short, 30 minutes start to finish if that and light and snappy.

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The Rules of Active Rest

Ok, those are the pros and cons of active and passive recovery, now let’s talk about the rules. I’m going to assume that you’re incorporating active recovery workouts and I’m going to assume that you have the self-control to keep them under control.   Here are the rules of an active recovery workout:

1. Volume should be 1/2-2/3 of a normal workout.
2. Intensity should be perhaps 60% maximum heart rate for endurance athletes and up to 75% of 1RM for weight trainers.
3. You should finish the workout feeling better than you started.

So say you’re an endurance athlete and your normal workout is currently an hour.  An active recovery workout for you might be 30-40 minutes (1/2-2/3rds of your normal volume) at a HR of 120-130 (~60-70% of maximum).  Some will push this up to the very lowest level of aerobic conditioning (130-140 HR for most activities) but even that may be pushing it.  If your typical workout were longer, your active recovery workout might be similarly long.

So if you normally go 2 hours, active recovery is 1 hour to about an hour 20 or so.  If you’re an elite cyclist doing 6 hours/day on the bike, well, first off you’re not reading this site for advice.  But your active recovery workout might be 2-3 hours.  As noted above, some athletes may benefit from doing cross-training activities for active recovery; runners especially can benefit from plugging in non-impact cross-training to give their joints a rest.

For weight trainers, the same basic idea holds although there are more options since intensity can be varied in more ways.  The percentages can either apply to the load on the bar (e.g. work at 60-70/75% of maximum), total reps done relative to maximum or both.  So an Olympic lifter who normally works in the 85-90% range for doubles might do light triples at 70% of maximum for a handful of sets. A powerlifter might do something similar, doubles or triples with 60%-70% of maximum for a few quick sets (almost speed work but don’t even think about using bands or chains).

A second approach is to use a percentage of the heaviest day rather than percentage of maximum; most heavy/light/medium systems work this way.  So if you work to a 5 repetition maximum on Monday in the squat, you might use 75% of that weight on Wednesday for 5 reps as the light day.  If you squatted 200X5 on the heavy day, you’d use 150X5 on the light day.  Alternately. if you were doing sets of 12, you might use the same weight as for a heavy set of 12 but only do 6-8 reps (50-75% of your maximum rep count).

Basically, there are a lot more programming options in the weight room and different people respond to different things relatively better or worse (some prefer to keep the same weight on the bar but do less reps, others prefer lighter weights with the same reps, some do better with lighter weights and less reps) with the only suggestion I can make being that you adhere to rule 3.  If you don’t come out of the weight room feeling better than you went in, you went too heavy.  Keep experimenting until you find the loading that keeps you clicking technically but doesn’t fatigue you.

And let me reiterate point 3 again: ideally you should finish the active recovery workout feeling better than you started.  At very least you should feel no more tired when you’re done.  If you’ve increased your level of fatigue, you went too hard, too long or both.  In which case passive recovery is probably the better choice because you have poor impulse control.

Finally, as noted above, some athletes like to consume a dilute carb/protein drink during active recovery workouts, the increased blood flow from training carries nutrients to worked muscles and can only help with recovery. I’d suggest perhaps 30 grams of carbs with 10-15 grams of a fast digesting protein (e.g. whey or soy) per hour of activity or so.  Enough to get some nutrients to the muscles without consuming so much that you counterbalance the caloric expenditure of the training.

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Summing Up

I was asked once on a forum whether active recovery was better than passive recovery which is waht led to this article.  I told the person basically this which sums up this piece “Done properly, active recovery is better than passive recovery under most circumstances.  But if you can’t do active recovery right, passive recovery is better.”

Recently the split squat in one form or another has come sort of the forefront due to a rather popular strength coach’s belief that the split squat (more specifically a rear foot elevated split squat) can and should replace back squatting for athletes.  While I won’t go that far, the split squat can certainly be a useful movement in many situations.

One is when a bilateral leg imbalance, that is a strength differential between the right and left legs, develops for some reason.  The split squat is one of many ways to go about correcting this.   A second place where the split squat can be useful (and this seems to be the main thrust of the strength coach mentioned above’s argument) is when the low back is limiting squat poundages.  Since there is far less low back involvement (as a function of both lighter loads and a more upright torso) compared to back squatting, split squats and their variants can be used to either limit low back stress or as a secondary movement for legs after the low back has been fatigued (e.g. after deadlifts when something like squatting would go poorly because the low back will give out).

Additionally, in situations where a lifter either must use lower weights (e.g. they only have access to a limited amount of weight as dumbbells for example), a split squat can still provide some overload to the legs while requiring less absolute load.  There is also some interest in ‘unloading the spine’ for athletes and, again due to the lower absolute loads used combined with less forwards lean, split squats would be a way of achieving that.

I would note that some lifters can use loads in the split squat that actually approach their back squat numbers, this is especially true if they actually squat to parallel or below; so the premise that a split squat automatically lightens the loads used or needed is not necessarily correct.  There are two major reasons for this apparent contradiction: how can someone possibly use more weight in a single-leg movement than a double leg movement.

The primary reason is that the range of motion on the split squat is lower than a parallel or full squat.  So using a split squat so that you can use less weight may actually not have the desired effect.  A secondary reason especially applies to tall lifters for whom low back fatigue/weakness or a massive sticking point in the middle tends to limit their back squat weights.  By avoiding the weakest portion of the movement and taking the low back out of the movement, often heavier weights can be used in the split squat compared to a below parallel or full back squat.

Of course, many if not all sports are done unilaterally (e.g. single leg alternating which is involved maximally) and an argument is sometimes made that one-legged work is more specific to sports for that reason.  As I discussed in the article Squats vs. Leg Press for Big Legs – Q&A, the Aussie track team uses the one-legged leg press for this reason; it’s worth noting that it’s used in addition to heavy bilateral loading and I’m not really going to get into the specificity of training argument here.

Sufficed to say that the split squat can be and is a useful movement and, as always, that means doing it correctly.  So lets’ look at how to do it (and some of the common variants) correctly.

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Muscles Targeted

As would be expected of any compound lower body movement, the split squats hits a variety of movement with the glutes, hamstrings and quads being primarily involved (with the degree of involvement depending on the variant performed).  The upper back is involved in holding the bar of course and while there isn’t as much involvement of the low back compared to a back squat (due to less forwards lean), the core musculature is still clearly going to be involved.

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Basic Technique

First I want to show the basic start and end position for the split squat. The start position is on the left, bottom position is in the center. Note that the back knee should not be touching the floor at the bottom position.  It will be close but should not touch or slam into the ground. I’ve also shown the proper upper body position (without weight) with the chest high and elbows under the bar (mostly)  in the far rightmost picture.

Split Squat Start

Split Squat Bottom

Chest Up

Key things to note here are that, in the top position both knees are slightly bent with the feet split fairly far apart. In the bottom, both knees make roughly a 90 degree angle in the bottom position. From the bottom position, the lifter simply stands back up, of course.

Moving to the back view, it’s important for the feet to be the proper width from side to side. The picture below shows the proper width, note that the legs are both straight relative to the torso with the feet at roughly hip width.  I’ve shown both the start (left) and finish (right picture) below to show the proper leg positioning.  Please note: it does look like the lifter’s left leg is angled out a bit below but that’s because of the camera being in the wrong place.

Start: Back View

Finish: Back View

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Variants

In terms of exercise variants, the split squat can be done in one of three different ways depending on what muscles the lifter wants to emphasize.   The ultimate determinant of this is where the front foot and weight ends up in the bottom position.

In the left photo, I’ve shown a quad dominant split squat, notice that the knee is pushed very far in front of the front toe, the weight is on the ball of the lifter’s foot. In the middle, I’ve shown a split squat that will hit quads/glutes/hams fairly evenly, the front knee has moved forwards slightly but the lifters weight is at mid-foot in the bottom position. Finally, on the right, I’ve shown a glute dominant split squat, the shin stays basically vertical and the lifter sits back with the weight on their heel.

Quad Dominant SS

Even Split Squat

Glute Dominant SS

Of course, if you take these same types of variations to lunging, you end up with even more potential variants depending on if the lifter steps forwards, steps backwards, walks continuously, etc.  All of the same basic concepts apply.  As well, the back foot or front foot can be elevated on a step. A Bulgarian split squat is typically done with the back foot up on a high bench; often the hardest part of the movement is setting up with weight.

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Common Errors

Moving on to common errors, it’s not uncommon for lifters to drop their chest/round their upper back in this movement (just as they do front or back squatting).  A proper chest raised/upright torso position is shown on the left, a dropped chest on the right.  The latter tends to be common with lifters with poor flexibility.

Collapsed Chest

In addition, there are a couple of very common technique errors that show up with split squats (and lunging).  One of the most common mistake that people make in terms of foot position and that’s to have the back foot far too close to the front. A proper back foot bottom position is shown on the left, the foot too close position is shown on the right.

Feet correct

Feet too close

As noted under basic technique, in the bottom both knees should be at a roughly 90 degree angle.  As you can see in the right picture, the back knee is bent far more because the back foot is too close to the front foot.

A second common error has to do with leg position front and back.  As noted in basic technique, the feet should be hip width with both legs forming a straight line with the torso.  Perhaps the most common error is for people to try to place their feet too close together as if they were walking on a tightrope; this makes balance nearly impossible.  A second error is to have the back leg too far out to the side which puts a lot of stress on the back knee due to the angle involved.  I’ve shown proper foot position on the very left, feet too narrow in the middle and left leg too far out on the right.

Proper Foot Width

Walking the Tightrope

Feet Too Wide

A properly performed barbell split squat, with weight at mid-foot is shown in the video below.

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Programming

While I’ve shown the split squat being done with a barbell, obviously the movement can be weighted with dumbbells or other means (e.g. weight vest) as needed.  Grip can become an issue with dumbbells as people get stronger but the set up can be easier as the bells can be left on the floor and simply picked up rather than having to set up out of a rack.

Some have also advocated split squats done with the bar held on the chest, as in a front squat.  This apparently used to be a very popular accessory movement for Olympic lifters who split cleaned.  Like the front squat, this tends to throw more stress  onto the quads and forces the lifter to work harder to stay upright which may or may not be beneficial.

In terms of actual programming, as noted in the introduction, split squats can be used as a movement in their own right in situations where avoiding low back stress is required, or when a lifter is limited in how much absolute load they either can or want to shoulder.

More commonly, the split squat is used as a secondary leg movement (generally following a 2-leg compound movement).  Generally speaking, very low reps tend to work poorly in the movement and sets of 5 or higher would be more common.

One big drawback to split squats (and this is true of all one-limb movements) is time as accomplishing the same amount of total sets can take twice as long since each leg is being worked separately.  In this vein, my preferred approach is to do all repetitions for one leg, take a rest (usually a minute) and then work the other leg, alternating in this fashion until all sets have been performed.

While many like to go straight from one leg to the other, I find that lifters tend to get into systemic/cardiovascular fatigue and the second leg worked always suffers for this reason (e.g. if you do 10 reps on the right leg and go straight into a set of 10 on the left, the left leg set will be impaired due to generalized fatigue).  Taking a short break between legs avoids this.

Finally, for lifters with a strength imbalance (these are not uncommon side to side), you should always start with the weaker leg and let it set how much work you do with the stronger leg.  So if you can only do 100X5 on the weaker side, even if you could get 8 or 10 reps with the stronger side, you should stop at 5 reps.  Otherwise the strength imbalance will never go away.

Doing one or two additional sets with the weak side only is another option to help fix a strength imbalance. So a lifter might do 1 work set with the strong leg (to maintain strength on that side) and then 2-3 sets with the weaker leg.  It would be even more important here to rest sufficiently between sets.  Let’s say a lifter was going to do 1 set for the left leg and 3 sets for the right.  They might do their first set for the right, rest 1′, first set for the left, rest 1′, second set for the right, rest 1-2′, third and final set for the right.

In Beginning Weight Training 2, I examined in some detail what some of the primary goals of beginner weight training are including developing an overall base of strength (and/or muscularity), developing work capacity, learning how to perform the lifts, etc.

Finally, in Beginning Weight Training Part 3, I looked at some of the research (and experience) dealing with the loading parameters that are appropriate for beginners.  I’ve summarized them below as a launching off part for today’s final article where I’ll lay out three different basic weight training programs and talk about things like progression, when to change things, etc.

1. Intensity (percentage of 1 rep. maximum): 60% or a weight that could be done for ~20 repetitions to failure
2. Volume (# of sets): 1-3 sets per exercise/muscle group.
3. Reps/Set: Variable depending on the circumstances and both high and low reps can be appropriate here
4. Frequency: 2-3X/week
5. Workout design: Generally a full body routine
6. Exercise Selection: Highly variable depending on the circumstances

And with that I want to jump straight into examples of three different beginner programs.  The first is the Starting Strength program as developed by Mark Rippetoe (and reproduced here in full with his permission).  The second is a beginner program as outlined by my mentor, it would represent another standard approach to a barbell based routine based around the big compound movements.  Finally, and primarily to offend the barbell purists, I’m going to reproduce the basic machine-based program that I used with the majority of my beginners.

For each routine, I’ve indicated the overall routine (in the case of Rip’s Starting Strength, there are two workouts alternated each day) and the sets and reps used.  I’ll make some comments below the chart before getting into other topics relevant to beginners.

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Notes on the Above

Sets and reps in the Starting Strength Program only include work sets, warm-up sets (ranging from 1-3 sets) are not included.  I’d strongly suggest that anyone interested in that program purchase Mark’s excellent book Starting Strength 2nd Edition.

For the basic barbell program, generally only one movement would be picked from each place there is a list.  Note that, initially, deadlifts would be performed at each workout, as the weights got heavier over time, deadlift would be alternated workout to workout with shrug.  One could easily set up a more ‘balanced’ routine with more movements as well (e.g. squat, deadlift/shrug, flat bench, rowing, overhead press, chin up/pulldown, abs).

The numbers next to the exercises in the machine routine are the workout at which I taught them.  So in workout 1, they’d do leg press, chest press, row and crunch (which I’d note pretty much hits everything).  In workout 2, they’d perform the first 4 movements and add the movements with the number 2 after them (calf raise/shoulder press/lat pulldown).  In workout 3, they’d add the final movements of leg curl, arm work and low back.  At that point, what happened depended on whether or not I was still working with them but building it up in this fashion allowed me to get them performing the full set of movements by the end of a single week of training without feeling like they were being completely overloaded with information or exercise.

Before you leave me nasty comments below, please remember this routine was being used typically with older folks with no previous (or bad experience) with exercise and my goal was to break them in without breaking them.  So I used a very gradual and easy progression to ensure that they didn’t feel overwhelmed and weren’t wrecked with soreness.  As well, in many cases, I never moved them past a single work set.  This allowed them to complete the entire routine in roughly 30 minutes leaving time for cardio/etc. without requiring endless time in the gym.  For those individuals with those goals, this was an appropriate approach.

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General Comments on the Above Programs

If you look at the above three programs, you can see that they all share some basic generalities.  They hit the entire body in some form or fashion and use a variety of movements. Certainly the number of movements varies a bit from routine to routine.  Starting Strength uses the fewest movements, the generic barbell routine more and my machine approach the most (since I’m a bit obsessive about balancing out pushes and pulls and people always bitch if you don’t give them direct arm work).

Perhaps the biggest visible difference is the choice of sets and repetitions per set: Rip’s Starting Strength using multiple sets of low repetitions, the barbell and my machine program use fewer sets of higher repetitions.  I discussed the relative merits of each approach in What’s the Best Way to Teach/Learn a New Exercise – Q&A and, as always, there are pros and cons to each.

In terms of overall volume (total sets), the Starting Strength and general barbell program are closer than they look; the first uses more sets of lower reps (and again warm-up sets aren’t indicated above) on fewer movements and the second uses fewer sets of higher reps on more movements.   This is especially true by the time you factor in warm-up sets for the Starting Strength approach.  As well, and as discussed in the highly recommended Starting Strength 2nd Edition, there are other movements (Romanian deadlift, rowing of some sort etc.) that can be added to the basic Starting Strength program later on to make it a bit more ‘well rounded’.

As noted above, my machine based program was aimed at total beginners seeking, usually, general health/fitness.  They were generally older, had no previous experience in the weight room and had limited time to exercise.  So I needed something that was time efficient, got the job done and that I could get them to a basic level of competency on quickly without overwhelming them.  Again, in different contexts, either with individuals with different goals or who had had previous lifting experience, or what have you, a different approach was used.

And if you’re wondering why I’m beating this particular dead horse, it’s because I predict with 99% certainty that someone will read this article series and state that “Lyle McDonald only advocates a single set of machines for everybody.”  And that’s simply not the case.  Rather, it’s simply that I take into account the Importance of Context when it comes to training.  And the context of a 35 year old female with no training experience and limited time to exercise is different than a 19 year old male who eventually wants to compete in powerlifting.  And what I’d do in that each situation would be completely different.

Finally I’d note again that all of the above assumes an injury free individual with no major imbalances coming into the gym, an assumption that is often incorrect.  In specific cases, very different approaches (with more remedial work on stretching or almost rehab type movements) might be indicated or necessary but that is far beyond the scope of this article.

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Warming Up: General

One thing I briefly mentioned  above and want to touch on again is the topic of warming up.   Now, I did a rather detailed look at warming up for the weight room in Warming Up for the Weight Room Part 1 and Warming Up for the Weight Room Part 2 but want to touch on it again here.  Generally speaking, some type of general warm-up (cardio, body weight movements) would be done to generally warm-up the body.

With beginning clients, I often had them go ahead and get their cardio out of the way at the front of the workout.  Yes, this is usually thought of as taboo, certainly generating excessive fatigue with cardio prior to lifting isn’t usually a good idea.  But it was a way to ensure that they did it, gave me time to talk to them about various topics relevant to training (e.g. explaining fundamental concepts to them), etc.  As well, many couldn’t do a full 20 minutes at the outset anyhow, by doing 10 minutes of cardio up front and another 10 minutes at the end of the workout, they were able to accumulate 20 minutes at that first workout without feeling overwhelmed.  Over time, they would work up to a full 20 minutes continuously.

If you’re wondering why I didn’t have them do cardio on alternate or off-days, the simple fact is that I learned that most wouldn’t do it.  Sure, they’d tell me that they would but it would somehow never get done.  So I’d make them do it while I was there.  Yes, it’s a waste of their training time to pay me to watch them on the treadmill but that’s better than it not getting done at all.

Now, at the time, the major types of flexibility imbalances that many see these days didn’t seem as prevalent (or I wasn’t smart enough to recognize them) and I never actually did any sort of mobility or stretching work with clients.  To a degree, at least, full range weight training acts a stretching stimulus but, in the modern world, given the situations many deal with, this would be the place for any type of dynamic warm-up or whatever to come.

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Warming Up: Warm-Up Sets

Which brings us to warm-up sets for the exercises themselves.  As I discussed in the warming up articles linked above, warm-up sets serve a number of purposes not the least of which is technical practice.  However, for rank beginners, effectively the warm-up sets are the work sets.  That is, the weights are and should be so light to begin with that there is really no major difference between warming up and work weights.

Of course, over time, as trainees grow stronger, this will change.  Put differently, looking at the general barbell routine above the three sets of 8-12 or what have you are all the sets that are being done.  In the initial stages,all three sets are effectively warm-ups; this is especially true in the first few weeks of training where the focus should be on proper performance of the movements rather than weight increases.  After a month or so (may be more, may be less), one of the three sets may become a true warm-up set prior to two heavier work sets.

The same basic concept held for my beginner machine routine.  Even in the case where I didn’t add a second set (and I often didn’t for total beginners simply seeking general health and fitness), when things started to get heavier a month in, I’d add  a single warm-up set to the main movements (leg press/chest press/rowing).

For more about warm-ups for the Starting Strength program, I’d suggest you get Rip’s book since the topic is discussed in some detail there.

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Where to Start?

As I discussed in Beginning Weight Training Part 3, beginners not only should start with light weights and a relatively low volume but will make rather significant strength gains from doing only that.  Which brings up a question about starting weights and what to begin with.  While I have seen various systems that gave specific suggestions for starting weights (e.g. squat with 1/2 body weight or whatever), I don’t think they are a good idea for total beginners.  Because even if they represent some reasonable average of where to start, they can’t possibly represent everyone.

And, since I tend to be rather conservative in a lot of things, I always believe in erring on the side of too little than too much.  You have little to lose and everything to gain and it generally doesn’t work in the opposite direction.  Basically, if  you start too light, you can always add weight over the first couple of workouts (or even first couple of sets of that first workout if more than one are being done).  Start too heavy and things go wrong fast; the person might get injured, or they get so sore that they never come back to the gym or they simply have their form go down the toilet which is demoralizing (which also might drive them out of the gym).

So where to start?  Even that depends and what I’d start with for a young male would be very different than for an older female.  In the first case, starting with a 45 lb bar for a bench press might be appropriate.  For a female a 45 lb bar might be far beyond what she has any chance of lifting and I often started beginner females with 5 lbs per hand on DB bench press or on the lowest setting for the chest press.  But, again, this is very context dependent.  Age, gender and whether or not the person has a competent coach all feed into this.

I’d note that in some cases, going too light can be detrimental to proper technique.  I’ve found that some trainees simply have trouble ‘feeling’ what’s going on when things are too light (e.g. a young male might find that squatting with just the bar is harder than squatting with some weight).  In that case, adding weight until they can feel what is happening is necessary but the weight may not be increased very much beyond that initially.

Finally, there is one major exception to starting weights that I should mention and that is the barbell deadlift (a similar comment could apply to the powerclean from the floor).  For proper performance of either movement, it is critical that the bar start at the appropriate level; starting too low (as a function of using small plates) simply won’t allow the trainee to use proper form.  If training plates (either wooden plates or light plates with the same diameter as 20 kg/45 pound plates) aren’t available, then the trainee either has to find a way to start the bar at the right place (e.g. off of blocks or pins in the power rack) or start with 135.  What won’t work is starting with 85 lbs with a 45 pound bar and 10’s on the end; the bar will be too low to do the movement correctly.

When in doubt, in the beginner stage, I would suggest starting lighter and building up as appropriate.  The weight needs to be heavy enough that the trainee can feel what’s going on but not so heavy that they can’t handle it in good form for the entirety of the sets.

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What to Add and When to Add It?

The name of the game in improving all aspects of fitness is progression.  Essentially the stimulus that made you fitter the last workout (or week, or month, or year) may no longer be sufficient now.  Something has to increase at some point in time; that doesn’t mean every workout necessarily but if nothing ever progresses, fitness will never improve.

Now, how often and what to increase would be the topic of another series of articles since there are many options that are relatively more or less relevant depending on the situation.  With regards to strength training specifically, I’d highly recommend  Mark Rippetoe, Lon Kilgore and Glen Pendlay’s excellent Practical Programming for Strength Training as one of the better written and more easily accessible looks at progression in the weight room.

But specific to beginner training, I’m going to focus primarily on increasing volume and/intensity while ignoring other possibilities (frequency or density mainly).  Now, whether or not you progress the number of sets really depends on where you start.  In the case of Starting Strength and the general barbell program described above, increases in volume would be inappropriate since they both start at a volume that is more than sufficient for beginners. That is, since the trainee is starting with roughly 3 work sets for each exercise, there would be little point in increasing that, especially in the first weeks or months of training.

In the case of my machine program, you’ll note that it lists 1+ sets of 8-12 repetitions and I should probably explain that.  With that population, a single set was generally more than sufficient given their goals and time demands.  But in other situations, increasing volume (to a maximum of 3 sets per movement) would have been appropriate. In that case, my approach would have been to first build them up to the full set of exercises over the first week of training.  Then in the second week, I’d have added a second set to the 4 main movements (indicated by the #1) in the fourth workout, then a second set to the #2 movements, etc.  Basically, it would take about 3 weeks to build them up from a single set of 4 movements to 3 sets of all of the movements (and I’d probably stop at 2 sets on stuff like arms and crunch/back extension).

An example of that might be an older individual (in their 40’s) with no previous exercise background.  Even 3 sets of 6 exercises on the first day might completely destroy them and I do not find that to be a good way to introduce people to the weight room or exercise in general.  In contrast, a single set of 4 movements done after a bit of cardio on the other hand is more than tolerable and gets them started on the right foot.  It might only be 30 minutes of activity but that’s 30 minutes more than they did the day before, they come out of it without feeling exhausted or miserable and, sometimes, even look forwards to the next workout. And that’s how you get them to keep coming back.   Increases to volume can follow later as they adapt to the training.

But outside of that specific situation where you start with a single set and build up to multiple sets over the first few weeks, that is, when you’re starting with multiple sets of a bunch of movements, the main focus will be on increasing the weight on the bar.  Which brings up a discussion of how best to do that and when and by how much.

In my mentor’s barbell program, his suggestion was this:

Don’t add weight to any lift until you can complete all of your sets while maintaining good form. It is normal while learning to have some wobbling, and it would not be unreasonable to stick at the same weights for a month (when you first start) before adding weight. You want to be in control. After you have that control, you should be able to add weight at least once per week.

Essentially you would be working with relatively light weights and perfecting form for the first month.  After that, you might move to increasing weight once/week (e.g. every Monday) and then keeping it the same for the entirety of that week.  Then you’d increase again.

In  contrast, Rip’s Starting Strength Program typically focuses on adding some weight to the bar at almost every initial workout.   I’d mention that, by and large, it tends to be easier to add weight to lower repetition sets and this explains at least part of the discrepancy between the routines.  As well, there is a huge difference here in the coached vs. un-coached lifter.  Having a coach watching and cueing you on every set, and knowing that you can safely add weight to the bar is far different than adding weight to the bar yourself when you’re completely out of control technically.

As noted in previous parts of this series, clearly both approaches can be effective depending on the situation.  My experience is that most (especially young males) have poor impulse control and always add weight far in excess of what they can handle properly; before they know it, they’re ‘moving’ a lot of weight but in terrible form.   They may benefit from only attempting a weight increase weekly and/or using a higher repetition range to protect themselves from themselves.  In contrast, people with a good coach and/or with better self-control may be able to make lower repetitions and adding weight more quickly work.

In my machine approach, you might have noticed that I gave a fairly broad repetition range of 8-12 reps per set and this ties into this bit of the discussion.  A relatively generic approach to progression in weights is something called a double progression.  In that approach, you first add repetitions to the set; when you hit some top end of reps, you then add weight.  And that’s what I did with the program: when the trainee got to 12 repetitions:

1. In good form
2. Without massive struggle on the last 2 repetitions

I’d add weight at the next workout.  Depending on the movement and the amount of weight added, they might get to 12 again or be dropped back to 8-9 reps (very occasionally lower).  Over the next workout or two, I’d have them build that back up to 12 and apply the same rules.  Basically, it was sort of auto-regulating, their actual performance on the exercise determined when they went up.

I’d note that #1 above is the key, I always taught my trainees to only perform the number of repetitions that they could do properly; that they should never break form to get the next rep.  If that meant that they only got 10, so be it.  When they got to 12 with a repetition or two left in the tank, the weight would go up.  If they got to 12 but it was clearly still a struggle, I’d usually have them repeat the weight again at the next workout; at that point it would always be much easier indicating time for another increase.

This actually ended up having a number of benefits relative to this article series.  First and foremost, it provided for fairly easy progression.  With a handful of exceptions (usually overhead press and leg curls), folks would make progress at every workout.  Not only would their form improve workout to workout, they’d see that they were getting stronger as weight on the bar built.  That provided a massive amount of positive reinforcement which was so key in keeping them coming back.

As well, over the first few weeks of training, I’d start to gradually push them a bit more out of their comfort zone.  So while the first two weeks were invariably super easy, at about week 3, I’d start pushing them a bit harder encouraging them to get one more rep where they might have previously stopped.   As well, as they learned the movements and got better at pushing themselves a bit harder (and they usually wanted to get to 12 reps to get the next weight jump), they’d start to develop that ability to push.  But it would happen so gradually that they never felt overwhelmed or exhausted; this was another aspect of ensuring that they kept coming to the gym long enough for it to become habit.  Invariably by the end of 8 weeks, they were working harder than they ever thought possible, but had never really noticed that increase in intensity.  It just sort of happened.

Which isn’t me saying that that’s the best way to do it, clearly the approaches discussed above regarding Starting Strength or my mentor’s approach work.  And, again much of it depends on the technical complexity of the movement (e.g. squat takes longer to learn than leg press) and whether or not the person has a coach.

A related question is how much weight to add to the bar when you do go up.  Again, I recommend conservatism, there is usually little to be lost by adding weight in smaller increments initially (e.g. I’d rather see someone add 5 lbs per workout and do it three times per week than to throw on 15 lbs at one workout and have their form fall apart).

Certainly, younger males tend to be able to add more to the bar than older females (or females in general).  As well, the movement being done affects things (primarily as a function of how much weight the person is using).  You can add more weight to a 135 lb squat than to an 65 lb overhead press.  This ends up being a judgement call; I’d only suggest that, when in doubt, add less rather than more.  It may simply mean that you add weight more often but that’s still not a bad thing.

.Variety for Beginners

It’s taken as almost an article of faith that ‘variety in training’ is required for optimal performance.  This is something I’ll write about at a later date, for now I want to focus on beginners.  For the most part, I don’t advocate variety in training for beginners, at least not over the first 2-3 months.  The reason, again has to do with motor learning and this is especially true if you’re performing complex exercises like squats, deadlifts, etc.

In the initial stages, nearly constant practice is needed on those movements to learn and start to perfect technique.  At the same time, some trainees do start to get bored and I mentioned that one goal of the beginner stage (especially for physique oriented folks) is finding out what movements work best for them.

Now with my general health/fitness trainees, since I didn’t usually teach them complex stuff and their goals were different than other folks, I wasn’t so concerned with keeping them on the same movements forever; let’s face it, you can do a competent leg press in a workout or two.  Usually around week 8 or so, after they’d basically mastered the first set of movements I’d showed them and made some nice gains, I’d introduce them to some other movements or variants of the same movement.

So a chest press or dumbbell bench press would get swapped out for an incline dumbbell press or a flye movement.  Or if I had started them on machine chest press, I’d teach them the DB equivalent.   Shoulder press would get swapped out for lateral raises. I’d show them some other arm movements or abs or low back.  Or whatever.  Sometimes I’d swap out everything in total, other times I’d swap out one of the workouts and keep the other one the same.  In some cases, if they had decided that they wanted more intensive training than general health/fitness now would be the time to start the process of teaching squats and such.  It simply depended on the specifics as to how I approached it.

But what about other goals, the aspiring physique competitor or powerlifter or what have you?   If after 2-3 months of basic training someone is still progressing/shows affinity on the big movements, my tendency would be to keep them in to at least some degree and some coaches simply stick with those big movements seemingly for eternity with the main variety coming from differences in loading and programming.   Technical training is ongoing and keeping practice of the big movements in only continues to reinforce good technique.

However, swapping out one of three weekly workouts for a different set of movements would be appropriate as well.  If nothing else, the new movements will have to be programmed lighter and this would make the third day (perhaps Wednesday on  Monday/Wednesday/Friday approach) a light day surrounded by two heavier days.  This tends to allow a bit more recovery and may help to keep the heavier days progressing better.  For folks still oriented towards the major barbell movements, front squats, Romanian deadlift, variations on rowing (bent over barbell row) or what have you could be brought in on the alternate day to provide variety not only in movement choice.  In some routines, where the rank beginner might have been doing both squats and deadlifts in all three workouts, they might continue to squat on Monday/Friday and deadlift on Wednesday.

Another approach would be to add a single set of an alternative movement after the big movements.  So back squats could be followed up by a single set of leg press or front squat, flat bench by an incline pressing movement.  Note that this wouldn’t even be considered until maybe 3 months of consistent work on the basics had been performed but would start to represent a bridge towards higher volume intermediate routines.  I’d mention that this can lead to really long workouts depending on how many movements are being done.

Alternately, someone who just wasn’t built to squat or hadn’t made much progress on it despite doing everything ‘right’ might consider dumping the big movements (yes, I know blasphemy) and trying something else.  This is especially true for physique oriented types who don’t have to do any exercise beyond that which makes them bigger.  Anyone interested in PL’ing and to a lesser degree strongman better learn to deal with squats/bench/deadlift or pick another sport.

If you simply suck at squatting and aren’t ever going to not suck at squatting, find something else.  Could be leg press, could be one of a million one legged barbell movements (that often corrects for poor back squatting mechanics), could be a lot of stuff.  But if you don’t have to squat by dint of your sport choice, and only care about being buff, now is the time to find out if your more suited to other movements.

Even in that case, if someone is at the stage where they have given the big compound an honest effort and simply aren’t cut out for them, I don’t recommend massive variety at this stage.  Pick a new set of movements (or at least swap out one workout), start them light to learn them and stick with them for 6-8 weeks to see if they work better (you can gauge by progress in terms of weight on the bar or growth or whatever).  Then, if desired, you can consider swapping out again for another 6-8 weeks block.

This also has the benefit of putting in an informal de-loading period since you always have to start the new movements lighter.  I don’t generally worry about deloads for rank beginners, at least not in a structured fashion.  Rather, they should be allowed to progress (or not) as they get used to training.  But swapping out at least some movements at the 8-12 week mark can introduce a brief delaoding period since the weights on the new movements will become very sub-maximal again for at least the first few workouts.

I would note and this is just because I saw the question come up on a forum regarding this series that applying the type of gradual progression I’ve outlined above is really all that is particularly important in terms of the connective tissue adaptations that I mentioned as being important in Beginning Weight Training 2.  With continuous progressive stress (that doesn’t exceed the tissue’s capacity), those tissues will adapt. But the key is keeping your ego in your pants and adding weight gradually over time.  As mentioned, connective tissues adapt the most slowly and the main criterion in being able to handle heavier loading later on is simply patience and time.

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Other Stuff: Cardio and Stretching

A quick word on other stuff relevant to beginning training.  Although it depends entirely on goals, the inclusion of moderate amounts of low intensity cardio at this stage can help with overall training tolerance and improve recovery and such.  For those eventually seeking size gains (and especially those who have a poor appetite), some cardio can often help to increase appetite (as discussed in Cardio and Mass Gains).  As well, for those seeking fat loss, the introduction of cardio not only burns some calories (not nearly as many as you’d hope) but can start to get sluggish fat burning pathways working again.

Stretching can also play a role, as I’ve mentioned in toher parts of this series.  Many folks these days have massive inflexibilities or imbalances (e.g. tight hip flexors and tight pecs/anterior delts are common) and fixing these is part of  the whole package.  That’s on top of often being required to perform certain exercises safely in the first place.  Stretching can be performed at various times around workout or on off days (or before bed), and each has it’s pros and cons that are beyond the scope of this article.

Moving to the Next Level

As I noted in Beginning Weight Training Part 1, a true beginner may remain in the beginner stages of training for a solid 3-6 months (with some variance depending on the specifics).  In the above, I outlined at least the first 2 blocks of 8-12 weeks (if you count the second block as being a place where you potentially switch out some movement).  At that point, 6 months down the road, the trainee would either be a very advanced beginner or ready to move to the intermediate stages of training.  For some, the beginner stage might last as long as a year.

Again, this would depend on the specifics of the individual and their goals and all the rest.  But, as a generality,  if someone were still making solid progress with beignner routines (progress = increases in strength and/or size), I wouldn’t change anything. If gains had slowed or stopped, a variety of things could be tried.  One would be a simple deload, backcycle the weights for a few weeks and build back up.  That often gets people past early plateaus and making progress again.

If not, moving to a split routine or more volume or slightly heavier loading might be considered (at some point I’ll put up my intermediate bulking routine in article form).  I’d only remind people of the comment I made in Beginning Weight Training Part 1, training should always be focused around making the most gains from the least training.  Don’t move to an intermedaite level of training simply because you want to.  Do it because beginner stuff has stopped working.

I’d make the point again that one huge assumption that is going into what I’m going to write is that the individual has no underlying issues (such as muscular imbalances or injury) that are oh so common in the modern world.   In those specific cases, an ‘imbalanced’ program may be required to fix things.  But since I can’t cover that in any detail, I’m going to draw up what is basically a ‘balanced’ beginner routine.

Today, I want to look at some issues related to loading parameters for beginners including intensity, volume, frequency and exercise selection.  Quite a bit of research has actually looked at these topics in beginners (I’m unaware of much on exercise selection) and that goes a long way towards guiding the development of proper beginner programs.

Since I ran a bit long (as usual) today, on Friday, I’ll finally put all of this together and present some fairly ’standard’ beginner routines along with suggestions on how to start, progress, when to change things up, etc.

Intensity

As I discussed in What is Training Intensity? there are a number of different definitions of intensity that are often used in the weight training world; for the purposes of this article, I’m going to be using the definition of intensity as percentage of 1 repetition maximum (1RM).  Now, 1RM refers to the absolute maximum weight that you can lift for one repetition.  You can think of it as 100% of capacity.  Training loads have often been set relative to that in terms of the percentage 1RM used.

And in the context of beginning training, research has routinely found that beginners will make the same strength gains whether they work at 60% 1RM or 90% 1RM.  That is, heavy or light doesn’t matter, it all generates the same strength gains.     And this fact ties into several of the comments I made in the earlier parts of this article series.

First and foremost, recall from Beginning Weight Training Part 2 that most of the initial gains in the weight room are strength gains due to neural adaptations with the real growth coming later.  Second, it’s usually easier to learn technique with lighter weights (I’d note that often a weight that is too light can be more difficult because lifters can’t feel what’s happening).  Third, lighter weights are safer for joints and connective tissues which have to adapt to handle heavier loads (a slow process that occurs primarily through consistent gradually progressive training).

Basically, there are a lot of advantages to working at lighter weights (but increasing them over time) in the initial stages of training and, as it turns out, beginners will get the same strength gains regardless of what they do.  60% of 1 repetition is very light (most could do 20+ repetitions with it if they had to) but, as noted, will generate the same strength gains as working with 90% of maximum (which most might get 3 repetitions with).  In that vein, being able to do more repetitions with a given weight (a topic I’ll come back to in a second) is a good way to get in a lot of practice and that’s a huge part of the motor learning that goes on with new skills.

I would note that, over the first weeks and months of training, weight will need to be added to the bar as the trainee gains strength and conditioning.  Depending on how progression is performed, the percentage of 1 repetition maximum the trainee is actually using will tend to gradually go up over time.  Still, there is likely to be no real benefit for folks in the beginner stages to be working much over 80% of 1 repetition maximum (a weight most could do 8 reps to failure with).  Essentially, start light and add weight gradually as long as technique stays solid.

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Volume: Number of Sets and Reps/Set

In the same way that training intensity can have multiple definitions, people use volume to refer to different things.  For some it refers to the number of sets, others count reps, others count tonnage (sets * reps * weight on the bar).  Here I want to first discuss the number of sets and then look at the issue of repetitions per set.

And, in general, research in beginners has found that a single set of an exercise will provide the same basic strength gains as multiple sets of an exercise. I’d note that not all studies find this and some still support the idea that multiple sets provide better gains than a single set even in the initial stages (I’m not going to touch the issue of number of sets for non-beginning trainees in this article).

Now, both a single set and multiple sets of an exercise can have benefits for total beginners.  Single sets are time efficient (a full body workout may only take 20-30 minutes) and an easy way to break into training without getting broken for those with a low fitness background.  At the same time, multiple sets provide more times to practice the movement which tends to facilitate motor learning (assuming the trainee can do all sets without becoming too fatigued).

Multiple sets of an exercise also go towards building up work capacity (i.e. the ability to handle higher volumes of training).  A practical compromise on this issue might be to start with a single set at the first workout (this is what I always did with beginning personal training clients) and then add sets over the first few weeks of training.  I’ll come back to this a bit more on Friday.

Moving on to sets per repetition, a general tendency for beginning weight training routines was to use highish repetitions; with beginners, I generally used a rather standard 8-12 reps per set with beginners but some advocate even higher.  The basic idea is that this keeps the weight on the bar low and allows the trainee to get more reps (e.g. 3 sets of 20 gets 60 repetitions per exercise).

The problem, as I discussed in What’s the Best Way to Teach/Learn a New Exercise – Q&A, is that high reps, even with very light weights can cause a lot of fatigue and form breaks down.  Some advocate using multiple sets of lower repetitions (e.g. Mark Rippetoe’s Starting Strength approach uses sets of 5 with anywhere from 1 to 5 work sets depending on the movement) to avoid this problem.  As I noted in the linked article, the danger with that approach (especially for un-coached macho trainees) is going too heavy too quickly.

So what’s best?  I’d say if you have poor impulse control, staying with a lower number of higher rep sets (e.g. 1-3 sets of 8-12 repetitions) may keep you from doing something stupid like going too heavy too fast.  If you have decent self-control or a competent coach (to keep you from doing something stupid), more sets of lower repetitions can clearly be very effective and may be the way to go.

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Training Frequency

Training frequency refers, rather simply, to how many days per week a given type of training is performed.  As you might guess, this impacts on a number of different things relevant to beginners.  Research on the topic suggests that, contrary to more advanced individuals (who seem to get the best strength gains with an average training frequency of 2X/week per muscle group), beginners get better strength gains with a frequency of three times per week.

Research has also found that lifting twice per week for beginners will provide approximately 80% of the strength gains of lifting three times per week (I’d note very tangentially that cardiovascular training needs to be done three times per week to generate adaptations).  I can’t recall seeing anything to suggest that lifting more often than 3X/week is better for beginners in terms of gains in strength.

From the standpoint of motor learning, a higher frequency is probably better; the more often a trainee can practice something, the faster that they’re going to learn it (again, assuming that practice is occurring under non-fatigued conditions).   I’d mention here that the most common approach to training beginners is to use the same full body workout (e.g. the entire body is trained at once) at each of the three weekly workouts.

Of course there are exceptions (Mark Rippetoes Starting Strength alternates two basic full-body workouts so that each workout gets done 3 times every 2 weeks) and, again from a learning standpoint, I think there is much merit to this approach.  Performing the same basic set of exercises at each workout gives beginning trainees the most practice on them, this is key to proper motor learning.

For the most part, I don’t like split routines (where the body is split into various parts) for beginners  for a number of reasons although they can be appropriate under the right conditions..  A basic upper/lower split type of routine can be made to work but trainees have to keep the volume and intensity well under control in the beginning stages or they will get themselves into problems.  As well, split routines do reduce the opportunity to learn the movements with frequent practice.  This may be outweighed by other potential benefits.

I would never use a typical bodybuilding split (where only one or two muscle groups is hit at each workout) with a beginner.  NEVER.  Of course, I’d almost never use them with anybody but for beginners they accomplish nothing relevant to beginner goals.  They allow volume to be far higher than necessary and they don’t give the trainee sufficient practice since each exercise is being done perhaps once every 7 days.

Drawbacks to training three times per week are scheduling, especially when a full body routine is being used.  That generally necessitates training on alternate days per week (e.g. Monday/Wednesday/Friday or Tuesday/Thursday/Saturday) and for some trainees that causes problems.  Moving to twice per week avoids this as more training flexibility is allowed.  A basic split routine can also avoid these problems since they tend to allow a little more flexibility in terms of what days can and cannot be trained on.

I’d also note that training frequency is probably a place where differences may be seen depending on the ultimate goals of the weight room.  Someone only looking for general strength health/fitness may be more than served by only lifting weights twice/week with no need nor desire to move past that.  Other days are then freed up for cardiovascular conditioning or other types of exercise. The gains obtained by adding that third day of weight training may be more than outweighed by the time requirement/scheduling or what have you.

Athletes using the weight room to improve performance may also be well suited by only lifting twice/week although this depends massively on the demands of their sport and what else they have to do each week.  If nothing else, they may simply lack the time to get into the weight room more often than that, even in the beginning stages.  Once again, this depends on what else is being done in training.

For those aspiring to either the physique sports or powerlifting/strongman or what have you down the road, getting into the weight room three times per week is probably mandatory.  Since lifting makes up the primary training in those types of activities, developing good technique/work capacity/etc. in the weight room is going to be relatively more important.  And unless trainees get used to training three times per week in the early stages, they’ll have trouble adding a fourth or fifth day later down the road.

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Exercise Selection

And finally we come to exercise selection.  I made a few comments about this in Beginning Weight Training Part 2 and, again, don’t want to do a hugely detailed look at the topic in this article.  For now, I’m simply going to repeat my comments from Part 2 in that exercise selection for beginning trainees is a bit more complex than ‘compound is better’ or ‘isolation is better’ or ‘free weights are better’ or ‘machines are better’.  Honestly, I’m not aware of much research on this topic and rather want to look at some of the pros and cons for beginning trainees.

Certainly, compound free weight exercises (e.g. squat, bench press, deadlift, etc.) have most commonly been used for beginning weight training programs.  The Starting Strength program, for example, is a rather classic example of this  and is based around squat, bench press, deadlift, power clean, and overhead press.  And for anyone who’s been involved with weight training for as long as I have, it’s hard to see problems with those exercise selections.  Other programs (and the ones I typically use) often include more movements such as rowing or chinning/pulldowns; mind you, (male) trainees always want to know where the direct arm work is.

Make no mistake, I’m a huge fan of squats, bench press, deadlifts, overhead press, RDL, etc.  These are movements that I think most should have at least some competency with and the beginning stages of training are a good time to get that competency.  How much of a given training program they will make up down the road, of course, depends but at least learning how to do those movements is important.  If for no other reason than to learn that they aren’t a good fit for a given trainee (you won’t know until you try).

Yet, for many trainees, trying to do so may be an exercise in either futility or pointlessness.  And, as noted in Part 2, unless someone is competing in powerlifting (where squat, bench and deadlift must be done) or Olympic lifting (where clean&jerk, snatch must be done), there is no single exercise that anyone must do for either general strength or hypertrophy.  Rather, the optimal exercise for a given trainee for a given goal simply depends on so many factors that I’m not going to get into much detail here.

Some of this is simply one of levers.  As I discused in Squat vs. Leg Press for Big Legs – Q&A, some trainees have horrible levers for squatting and get very little leg stimulus out of it for either leg strength or size.  In that case, another movement or *gasp* a properly performed leg press can be superior.   There are plenty of other examples and I’m sure I will lose much credibility by admitting that, when I was personal training, I almost always started beginners with machines.

Now, before you jump down my throat in the comments section, I want folks to honestly consider something as I go off on a bit of tangential rant: in all the time you’ve been in the weight room, how many people have you ever seen with good squat, deadlift or bench press form (I’m assuming here that you know what good form is yourself)?  How about power cleans?  Ever seen much of anything in most commercial gyms that didn’t make you cringe?

Because unless you train in a serious powerlifting gym or with Olympic lifters, the odds are that you’ve seen very few people performing those movements anywhere close to correctly.  But honestly take the time to count them up in your head, the ones who were doing it even close to correctly.  How many have you seen.  10, maybe 20?   If that.  And that’s out of how many hundreds of people you’ve seen training.

Hell, I’ve been training since I was 15 and coaching since my early 20’s in one form or another; I can’t imagine the thousands of people I’ve seen attempt those movements.   And the number using proper form…let’s say that most of them I coached myself and the exceptions are just that.  But let’s be generous and say that 1% of people squatting, benching or deadlifting are using anything approximating decent form.

I’m probably being very generous here since I can remember most of the exceptions I’ve seen explicitly (I always go talk to the person to find out where they learned how to do the movement so well); that’s how few of them I’ve seen.  With one or two exceptions of people who managed to self-teach themselves proper form, invariably every one of them had had a competent coach in their past making them learn proper form.  Or I was training them.

The sad reality, and if you step back from dogma that ’squats and deadlifts rool’ for a second, is this: most wouldn’t know proper form on a squat or deadlift if it bit them on the ass.  Personal trainers sure don’t know how to teach them as a matter of course; the reality is that most personal trainers don’t even have good technique themselves.   Hell, go look at Youtube, there are plenty of ’strength coaches’ that couldn’t teach a competent powerclean if their jobs depended on it (which, if you sort of think about it, should, but I digress).

And while there is an enormous amount of information on how to learn those movements out there, the fact is that teaching yourself anything is very difficult.  Can it be done?  Sure.  Can it be done by most?  Well…..

Of course, you can use terrible form on machines as well and the real fact is that the form seen by ~99% of trainees on ~99% of movements in ~99% of commercial gyms is usually crap.  But, assuming that the person is going to be using crappy form at least machines will keep them from getting crushed under a bar or (probably) blowing out their low back like a poorly performed deadlift will.

Which brings me back to my point about exercise selection and why I typically used machines with beginners.  Some of this was, mostly, practical.  I often had only three sessions with trainees before they were going off on their own.  And you can’t get someone to level of safety and competence in complex movements like a powerclean, squat, bench or deadlift in that time frame.   But I could do it with leg press, chest press and row machines or whatever.  And since most of those trainees had general fitness/health as a goal, I wasn’t terribly concerned; that they got into the gym was arguably more important than what they did.

When I knew I had longer to work with someone (e.g. the powerlifters I trained in Austin or one of my current trainees who can’t decide whether she wants to Olympic lift, powerlift or just be buff), or someone had loftier goals, mind you I would take the time to teach the big movements.  But only because I knew I’d have the time to get technique to where I wanted it with those people.

This is actually a point I’ll come back to in Part 4 in terms of deciding how to set up a beginning weight training program: are you being coached (competently) or not. Because someone who is being coached hands-on for their first 3-6 months of training will likely be doing something very different than someone who is going it on their own from Day 1.  And I’d make different suggestions/recommendations for those different situations.

As well, many beginners, especially folks who are older (and especially if they are overweight) are intimidated enough going into the weight room in the first place.  Giving them activities that they could ‘get’ quickly was part of providing the positive reinforcement that they needed to keep them coming back.  Put differently, if at the first workout you give a brand newbie trainee something that does nothing but make them feel like an uncoordinated spaz, odds are they won’t come back.  So you have to give them tasks simple enough to do well right off the bat.

Mind you this gets into a whole separate discussion of psychology and personality.  My experience is that those who aspire to bodybuilding or performance sports are often a bit more driven and, in that situation, even starting with more complicated things may not be so offputting. Given their ultimate goals, I’d be a lot more adamant about teaching them the big movements first (and, again, starting to determine optimal assistance movements down the road).

Basically, the point I’m trying to get at regarding exercise selection for beginners is that it depends.  And you will probably see the most variance here depending on the ultimate goal.  Do I think learning the big compounds are useful for most trainees?  Yes, of course.  However, that doesn’t mean that they are always appropriate in the beginner stages.  Issues of technique, coaching, psychology go into that and what I’d suggest for someone would depend very much on the specific circumstances.

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Summing Up

And that wraps up Part 3 where I looked at loading parameters for beginner training routines.  Since there is no benefit to be gained by going heavier compared to lighter (and many benefits in terms of going lighter), that’s the best approach: start light and gradually add weight as technique and strength improve.

In terms of volume, anywhere from 1 to 3 sets can be effectively used and both low and higher volume training have benefits in terms of time requirements, motor learning, work capacity, etc.  A reasonable compromise is to start with a low volume of training and build it up (if that is required by the ultimate end goal of training).

In terms of sets/repetition, both higher and lower repetitions can be used depending on the specifics.  higher repetitions keep the weight on the bar lower and may allow for more practice; this is offset by the potential for fatigue to make technique go badly.  Lower repetitions avoid issues of fatigue but people who have poor impulse control or who aren’t being coached tend to add weight too quickly and get themselves into trouble.

Frequency of training for beginners should be between 2-3 workouts/week generally of the full-body type.  There are exceptions to this but I’m going to stick with generalities here.

Finally there is exercise selection which, Internet dogma be damned, is more complex than ‘do squats, deadlifts and bench presses’.  I addressed some specific issues relating to exercise selection here and this will hopefully all make more sense on Friday when I truly wrap it up with some specific workout examples along with guidelines on how to progress things over the beginning stages of training.

Read Beginning Weight Training Part 4

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.