Nowadays people are too caught up in the program mentality - they never stop and think, "What principles are behind this routine and do they make sense?" They simply see it as a selection of magical exercises promising super results.
A list of these foundational factors might look something like:
- BALANCE - we want to be sure to maintain an optimal balance of the bodies muscles. Often times people will train the muscles they see "harder" than the muscles they don't. In doing so, the chest, shoulders, biceps, abs and quads get overworked while the back, glutes and hamstrings get under-worked. This can cause some problems. A good way of fixing this problem is always balancing out pushing with pulling movements for upper and lower body.
- OVERLOAD - We have to force the muscles into getting stronger and bigger. Simply working them isn't enough. You need to work them *enough*. The load must be above what it's ordinarily accustomed to (overload). If it's not, you're not providing your body with a reason to positively adapt.
- PROGRESSION - What's an overload today won't be an overload next week, month or year. We adapt to overload by getting stronger. If 100 lbs is an overload now and you use it sufficiently, your body will work to better handle said 100 lbs in the future. Once it's adapted, 100 lbs will be the new maintaining load rather than an overload. This is known as accommodation. Therefore, to elicit further change, you have to progress the overload - and this is a term many have heard before, progressive overload. How quickly your body adapts and thus how frequently you have to progress depends on many factors such as training age (how long you've been training), nutritional status, type of exercise, etc, etc.
- INTENSITY -This is tied in with overload. There is a certain threshold that's required if muscle is going to grow (during sufficient calories) or maintain itself (during dieting). This is the whole concept of "giving your body a reason to hold onto the muscle while dieting by lifting sufficiently heavy weights." It's a good idea to have a loose definition of intensity. Many people confuse it with "working hard." That's not intensity though... that's intensiveness. Intensity, as defined by most strength coaches as simply the percentage of maximal strength. Take the squat for example. If you're maximum effort allows you to squat 100 lbs, training with loads in the 80-95% range of your max effort is more than likely going to be a stimulating or maintaining load. Anything below that is more than likely under this threshold and while it can burn calories and prompt some adaptations in the metabolic/oxidative qualities of the muscle, it's not going to provide you with that overload you're seeking. So intensity of 70-80% and below is really going to be insufficient in terms of building or keeping muscle and this is why the whole "pump and tone" mentality is something I've spoken out against in many instances around here.
- VOLUME - Not only do you need to be above a threshold to get stronger/bigger muscles, you also need to do enough work above this threshold. Using the above example of squats, obviously 100 lbs is providing an overload since it's your max effort ability in the squat. So going in and doing one set of one rep would essentially overload the neuromuscular system. However, you have to take the total amount of work into consideration. Overload is primary, but you also need enough work at said overload if that makes some sense. Without getting too in depth, something like 20-60 reps per muscle each time you train is probably about right in terms of providing adequate work. So call it 30 reps... that can come using 6x5, 5x6, 3x10, 10x3, etc.
- FREQUENCY - Above I mention "each time you train." Our muscles respond to the stress of training by first decreasing its "state." It's like when someone is sick. Their state declines. Then their body responds by fighting off the sickness. More often than not, before all is said and done, their state actually reaches a point above and beyond what it was prior to their sickness. And this is the general stress-response mechanism of the body. Our bodies handle all stress (physical/mental/etc) similarly.
I liken it to a wave (see below). I can't believe I am bored enough to spend the time typing this ridiculously bad graph out... it would save me tons if we were able to embed images here, lol... but the black line is your maintenance "state" or homeostasis if you will. The red line is your actual state in response to training. At first it's at maintenance. Then you train and the state declines due to the stress of training. Then, it comes back up eventually "supercompensating" above and beyond it's original maintenance. I'll attach a picture too so you can better see what I'm talking about:
Now every factor of the body really responds on its own separate wave. What we're concerned about most in terms of muscle's response to training though tends to come back to baseline 2-3 days after you train. That's why the normal body building splits where you're hitting each muscle once per week are sort of silly. We want to build on top of what we already did previously, which would mean hitting that muscle again somewhere along the line where we're supercompensating above baseline. There are many different ways to structure "routines" to fit that time line.
But this is the rational behind my normal recommendations of training each part and/or movement 2-3 times a week with the basic barbell exercises, focusing on something between 5 and 10 reps for 3-5 sets per exercise, and striving to improve your weights over time (not necessarily every workout).
It's pretty hard to go wrong with anything that falls into that realm.
What you don't see here as foundational, necessary principles for all programming are things like muscle confusion, toning with high reps, training a muscle to concentric failure, etc. Though these sorts of things are passed around all the time as Very Important... it's simply not the case. People who don't understand exercise physiology say a lot of things that sound rational and people grab onto it passing it around like wild fire in high winds.
Understand the basics. If you don't - ask someone who does to clarify it until you do. If one is going to confidently navigate his or her way through training in the long term, you need to understand these short-term fundamentals I mention above.
Beyond these fundamentals, there are longer term factors that come into play. We're mainly talking about short-term (acute) adaptation to training above. When you start factoring in the long-term (chronic) and couple it with the individual training needs, that's when you get into periodization which entails altering stress over time in relation to your body. That's a different topic for a different day.
Suffice to say, throw out the bullshit that extends beyond the basics I mention above. Armed with that information you can start seeing what's behind each and every "program" and you'll be able to decipher the ones worth trying or paying attention to from the ones that are garbage.
It should be mentioned, too, that a critical thought process as well as tools of logical reasoning are things I consider far more important than any particular training knowledge or style or program.
People are too quick to pigeonhole "types" of training. The body doesn't care what you call your workout - it "cares" about (in the sense of, 'responds to') what's happening to it.
Same goes for programs. So many people consider "the program" to be a fundamental "unit" of exercise. A program is just somebody's expression of underlying principles. In itself, it's meaningless, but people make it into such a rigid thing.
