Today’s episode is specifically speaking about a strength or hypertrophy based program. The honorable mention will cover conditioning if that is a part of your program, but this assumes that you have an aerobic base to work with when it comes to your strength training. If you lack an aerobic base, that would need to be an additional part of your program.
Having a strong aerobic base allows you to push for harder and longer within your strength sets. Anyone who tells you that low intensity steady state cardio does not benefit strength and hypertrophy is lying to you.
Of course there is context within that. You will not likely train for a marathon and PR your back squat in the same training phase. But, in separate phases, the marathon training will likely benefit your potential for strength gains down the road. Simply by giving you a high work capacity. High work capacity means you can build muscle. Muscle mass is potential for strength gains. The end.
Now, let’s dive into the 5 aspects of any good program.
This is different than my other episodes on building out a program skeleton and what not. This post would be the specifics that live with in your program skeleton.
First up - really a multi piece aspect.
Squat hinge push pull carry
An effective program can either include all of these in a single day, or spread out within a 3 to 6 day program. All of these could be used in linear periodization or a daily or weekly undulating periodization. Those details are less important than making sure the program includes all of these movements.
The reasoning behind including these movements is to keep a balanced physique as well as strength balance. Something that can happen when we only squat or only deadlift is that we become dominant in those movement patterns and less efficient in the opposing movement pattern. It’s true that some people may favor one of these movements, but it is important that your program includes both.
Generally speaking your deadlift should be stronger than your back squat, which is stronger than your front squat, which is stronger than your overhead squat and so on.
While pulling is stronger than pressing, it is problematic if you can do 13 pull ups and not a single strict dip, right?
I also want to point out that this can be for an individualized program or general programming.
Obviously if the program is individualized to you, hopefully you have done an assessment of some kind to figure out if you need to maybe be squatting two days a week and deadlifting one day a week or doing carries two days a week to bring up your grip strength. But generally speaking, a solid balanced program will include squatting patterns, deadlifting patterns, pushing patterns, pulling patterns and some sort of carry.
If you have strength imbalances and you follow a balanced program, it won’t necessarily undo those imbalances. I hope that makes sense.
I don’t love using the word functional, because all movement is functional by the literal definition of “functional.” But you should be able to squat, hinge, push, pull, and pick up something and walk with it.
I’d also like to point out that I said the word patterns behind each of those because a high box step up is a squatting pattern, a Bulgarian split squat is a squatting pattern, a dumbbell sumo deadlifts is a dead lifting pattern, a single arm kettle bell deadlift is a dead lifting pattern. I think it’s important that we don’t restrict our thinking to only a back squat when we talk about squatting, and so on. Think in terms of patterns instead.
That’s all on that. Hopefully your program includes all of these movements and accessory work that helps build these movements.
Onto the next aspect of a good program.
Progressive overload
This probably seems obvious, but I think it’s important to talk about different ways that we can elicit progressive overload within our programs. I could be wrong,
