Variables of Assessment in a Weight-training Program
by Mark Warren



        When most people put a weightlifting protocol together, they are modeling their volume off of a magical number that makes them feel good inside- you know, for the pump or extra TUT (if you don’t know what this is, it is very important to hypertrophy as you will learn below). Then, with no science or training background-based influence on the protocol’s parameters, they pick a frequency their favorite pro uses, exercises that “isolate to stimulate” , that can be performed while reading a book, and make sure to take every set to failure to “reach every muscle fiber.” Seems like the training the pros use, eh? And without the use of a pro’s trainer a.k.a. steroid guru, this makes for a synergism of chaos. The following will address some of the most important variables to keep in mind while designing a training program. Note: this will not show you how to make an “optimal training program.” Optimal is neighboring bullshit. It will show you how to make a sensible approach, as well as give you spiffy training programs at the end which, with newfound glee in my convincing theory, you will probably take as the holy grail of training and never deviate from. At least you’ll be making gains.

Frequency

        One very important aspect of training is frequency. Training frequency is the how often you train your muscles in a given time period. Most commonly, it is number of times you work a given body part or movement in a week.

        Popular belief, thanks to the steroid boom of the 80s and Max-OT, is that hitting each muscle once a week is the best way to go. Steroids allowed people to train once a week while maintaining anabolic signals to muscles throughout the week. For those not doping, protein synthesis stops (no, not completely) within 48 hours of training a muscle. Does that mean you should train each muscle every other day? Not necessarily, though I have had much success in the past doing so. There are other neurological and physiological systems that need recovering. Some people may take longer to recover than others. This all depends on a host of factors including age, diet, training volume, and going to failure in the routine. If protein synthesis drops off after 48 hours, there’s a lot of time left in the week during which, with no further stimulation, there will be minimal amounts of protein synthesis going on. What to do? Hit it again! For new trainees, I recommend hitting each muscle every other day (of course with very, very low volume), or 3 times a week. More advanced trainees can use a frequency of twice a week. This isn’t to say they can’t train three days a week- it’s just that they will probably need more time to recover since they will be pushing much more taxing weights. I wouldn’t train less frequently than hitting a muscle every fifth day.

Compound Movements

        Imagine the skinny kid doing set after set of preacher curls and every chest machine he can find. He gets stronger, of course, because of his age and concurrent hormonal milieu conducive to growth under a stimulus as little as that achieved by bouncing a rep or two on the bench press and walking around to make sure everyone saw. You were probably that kid once. You didn’t grow much after you’d been training for a while did you? If yes, good for you. You should start a sensible program and enter bodybuilding competitions.

        Pick up a heavy log. What muscle did you use? Not a muscle, but rather, a group of muscles no doubt. The human body was made to work together. Why not train the way your body was made to work? Effective exercises might emphasize only a particular group of muscles. However, they include more. Compound movements allow one to use more weight, and thus, stimulate more hypertrophy (explained later). Compound movements allow you to hit more than one body part at a time, thus shortening training time and reducing risk of overtraining. Compound lifts cause the greatest rise in testosterone and growth hormone secretion. When you use compound lifts, you are training your core as well. Since your body is learning to operate as a whole, you reduce the risk of injury and muscle imbalances. With a stronger core, your stability will be greater on other exercises as well. Each compound exercise will have a small carryover to the next. Many favorite compound exercises are squats (first and foremost), overhead presses, and most pulls (cleans, deadlifts, chins).

        It is very easy to overtrain with a misuse of certain compound exercises. Some of them are just so heavy that they tax your body profoundly (deadlifts come to mind). Some exercises hit many bodyparts but, unaware of this, trainees will still try to train them on their own, resulting in much more work on the muscle than it should have. The main thing that comes to mind here is bench pressing and shoulders. The bench press is conventionally thought to be a chest exercise. However, all bench pressing of any variation heavily hits the shoulders and triceps. Extra shoulder work is not necessary and is, most of the time, a hindrance on gains because of the added stress and prolonged recovery. Triceps may need additional work but not much. The additional work should also not be as taxing as bench pressing. The aforementioned applies to many exercises. Squats hit hamstrings heavily depending on how they’re done; pull-ups and chins both hit back and biceps fairly well (and even posterior deltoids, as with most pulling movements). 

Failure

        This one has been beaten to death. Odd, because failure is absolutely not needed, and this assertion is definitively true based on literature. 

        Let’s talk about recovery. When you push that last rep out, it takes much more time than it’s worth to recover from. We’re talking recovery in the short and long term. It will take longer before you can work that muscle again (and as stated above, frequency=good, unless androgen use=high, then it doesn’t matter). It will also take longer before you can do another set that workout, or will decrease your performance much more so on the following set(s). Say you are doing military presses. You go to failure every set. Your reps are as follows: 10,8,6,5. Not too bad, eh? And that’s if you’re in decent shape. Now let’s see what you could have done if you hadn’t gone to failure: 9,8,7,7. Going to failure resulted in more reps on the first set, but look at what followed. It totaled 29 reps. The not-to-failure sets resulted in 31 reps. Now which is better? More time under tension is achieved with the same weight when not going to failure. Plus, the trainee will recover faster because training to failure is extremely taxing to the Central Nervous System (CNS). Generally, it is advised to stop one rep shy of failure- sometimes more (reasoning described just below).

TUT

         This goes along with the aforementioned failure argument. Time under tension (TUT) is very important in muscle breakdown (and thus supercompensative recovery). Too much time under tension may lead to overtraining. Too little may lead to cutting yourself short in muscle breakdown. It has been proven that the average trainee can only take up to, on average, 50 reps per weeks for a muscle. Now, the more advanced the trainee is, the more work they can do without overtraining (which will be discussed later).  Some can go up to 100 or 150 reps per week, perhaps higher if they are volume training and staying very far from failure.

        TUT isn’t as easy as the number of reps completed though. There’s also the tension factor. The number of reps is the time, the weight is the tension (hence time under tension). Now, which would cause more hypertrophy: 8 sets of 3 reps, or 3 sets of 8 reps? 8 sets of 3 reps! Yes- very contradictory to popular belief that higher reps (8-12) is better for bodybuilding. Let’s analyze. 24 reps are completed for both methods. But, the tension is greater for the 8 sets of 3 because you can handle more weight for 3 reps. And, with lower reps such as 3-5 or so, you are forced to use many more motor units (MU’s) to lift the heavier weight. There is a downside to this scheme, however. For one, higher reps may help joint health. This doesn’t have so much bearing as the next argument. The 8 sets of 3 will be much more punishing as far as recovery goes. Since such a great load is used for the same unit of time, there is much more fatigue generated. This method should thus not be used so much because you’d just burn out too quickly. To prevent too much of this fatigue, it is smart to stay fairly clear of failure when using such techniques. If doing 8 sets of 3, use your 5 or 6 rep max for all sets. If doing 6 sets of 4, use your 6 rep max.

Repetitions

        You gym teacher probably told you 8-10 reps for mass, 3-5 reps for strength, and 15-20 reps to “tone”. The fact is there can be a lot of variance with plenty of hypertrophy. As mentioned earlier, the heavier the load lifted, the more MU’s are activated. This is extremely important because more MU activation will result in more total muscle breakdown during exercise per the same amount of reps. So why not just max out on an exercise and move on? Well, you’d only be doing one repetition. It doesn’t matter if you activated every MU in your muscle, they were only worked for one rep. This goes back to TUT. One rep is not sufficient time under the tension. As I said earlier, heavier loads will result in more hypertrophy, given that the same amount of reps have been completed for each load, so more sets are done with the heavier loads, but staying away from failure to avoid overtraining. Therefore, the number of reps should be kept relatively low (1-8 reps) most of the time. This is also why hitting a certain number of reps in a week is more important than hitting a number of sets. Now, higher reps aren’t always bad. They induce sarcoplasmic hypertrophy and even myofibril hypertrophy in muscle groups with more slow-twitch dominant fibers (biceps, forearms, quadriceps for some). A down side to low reps is that they cannot be done for the same TUT as higher reps too much because they will cause too much strain. Hence why the following routines have a variety of rep ranges.

        Oh, and about the high reps to “tone” or lose fat- this has no bearing. A caloric deficit is what will decide the fate of your “toned-ness” unless you’re taking repartitioning drugs or are a genetic freak (high reps wouldn’t be necessary anyways. There are arguments for high-rep-induced metabolic and hormonal changes that make it easier to lose fat, but this is hardly significant. Diet first. Back to the training article…

Repetition Speed
      
        Repetition speed is another important factor in TUT. Obviously, if each repetition is the same speed, the more repetitions performed, the more TUT accumulated. The other variable in TUT is the speed of each repetition. If each repetition is done more slowly, the TUT will also increase.

        There is more to repetition speed than it’s relation to TUT. There are many arguments for muscle fiber type conversion, fiber recruitment, etc. To put it plainly, one shouldn’t worry about it too much. Lower weights in a controlled manner, and lift them a bit quicker. Explosion is not necessary on the upward (eccentric/against gravity) part of the lift, but it is done for neurological adaptations such as speed work in many programs, as it causes a greater efficiency of using more muscle fibers pseudo-simultaneously. Force = mass x acceleration. If you increase either the load (mass) or the acceleration (speed of lift), you will generate more force. More muscle fibers are thus required to generate this force. With speed work, these muscle fibers won’t be loaded enough to hypertrophy much, there will mainly be a better mind-muscle connection where the athlete learns to use more muscle fibers at one time. This is why heavy loads are recommended for hypertrophy.

Fitness-fatigue Theory and Application to Underreaching

         At the beginning of a training cycle, good gains in both size and especially strength are expected. However, in week 4 or so of intense lifting, the poundages stop going up so nicely, or even come to a dead halt (unless you haven’t been consistently lifting for a year or so). What the…?

        The reason is fatigue. As you begin the intense lifting, you make good gains, and not much fatigue is present. You may add 5-15 pounds to each lift every session for two weeks. The next week, you have more fatigue accumulated. You add perhaps 0-10 pounds to each lift every session. On the 4th or 5th week, no poundages go up, or maybe a squat increased by 5 pounds. Enough fatigue is built up such that the gains are not seen. This fatigue may not be perceived because the athlete may feel fine. But if the weights are not going up, there is probably too much fatigue for them to see the gains.

        Let’s have a look at how fatigue “covers up” fitness. When starting out, 10 lbs may be added to a Barbell Row in a week due to changes in fitness. 2 lbs of fatigue may have been built up (use your imagination- by two pounds of fatigue, this means that enough fatigue such that it subtracted 2 lbs away from the added weight gained in fitness occurs). So then net fitness achieved is 8 lbs added to the Barbell Row. The next week, 8 pounds is added due to fitness, but 4 pounds is subtracted because of fatigue building up (4 pounds of net fitness achieved). The third week, 6 pounds of fitness and 6 pounds of fatigue is achieved, resulting in zero net weight increase on the row. A fourth week may be done and will probably be much like the third. It depends on the lifter.

        This is where underreaching comes into play. As the lifter above goes into the 4th or maybe 5th week of training, a lot of fatigue has built up, hiding gains by fitness. Underreaching reveals them. Underreaching is basically taking it easy for a week or two to get rid of fatigue. It is often a week off, or a couple easy weeks, or a week taken at 60-70% intensity (notice I said intensity, not percentage of your previous poundages). Fatigue dissipates 3 times faster than fitness! Therefore, taking time off for just a little while will get rid of most of the fatigue that may have been generated during the intense training, but will not diminish much (or any) fitness at all. This means that when you return to the weights with more intensity, you will have more strength because there will be much less fatigue and even the strength gains you didn’t see before while you were loading will now appear. 

        A note should be taken that not all programs call for an underreaching period. There are many programs that call for exercising a muscle, and then waiting until fatigue is totally gone before exercising it again. These programs are less effective because it is hard to know when to hit the muscle again and it is very easy to constantly undertrain or provide insufficient frequency and resulting stimulus. Also, planned underreaching weeks are great to stick vacations in or other things that pop up. Overreaching allows more total fitness to be achieved in a cycle because there isn’t a wait until total fatigue is gone before using the muscle again. The fitness is masked at first, but revealed after only one week of taking it easy.

        Also to note is that overtraining and overreaching are not the same thing. Overreaching is a good thing, and only results in temporary stop in gains, which will then be translated to good gains. Overtraining is more like a long-term problem during which psychological issues may arise. Overtraining may result from month after month of heavy lifting with no weight increases (because of an enormous amount of fatigue) and no underreaching. Symptoms may include: loss of libido, loss of hunger, not wanting to train, loss of or stagnant strength/size gains, and a weak immune system.

Training Splits

Upper/Lower split:

Monday
Squat 3 x 8
Leg Curl or Leg Extension (whichever was worked less on squats) 2 x 8
Calf Raise 3 x 8

Tuesday
Bench Press 8 x 3 @ 5RM (or 6 if stamina sucks)
Weighted Pull-ups 3-4 x 8
BB Curl 2-3 x 8
Tricep Pushdown 2-3 x 8

Wednesday-Off

Thursday
Squat 8 x 3 @ 5RM (or 20-rep widowmaker when feeling fatigued)
Leg Curl or Leg Extension 2 x 8
Calf Raise 3 x 8
Maybe some ab work (2 sets of whatever…how big do you want your abs to be? Not big)

Friday
Bench Press 3 x 8
Barbell or Supported Rows 3-4 x 8
DB Curl 2-3 x 8
Overhead Tricep Extension 2-3 x 8

Weekend- Off

        The preceding was a workout that should work for pretty much anyone. The setup is very easy to remember. Arm and calf work can be dropped without making too much of an effect on hypertrophy in those areas as they’re hit fairly well with the compound movements. Make sure to drop them if they’re making you too fatigued.

3-day split:

Monday
Squat 3-4 x 5
Bench Press 3-4 x 5
BB Row 3-4 x 5
BB Curl 2 x 8
Skull Crusher 1-2 x 8
Calf Raise 1-2 x 8

Wednesday
Deadlift 3 x 5
Standing Overhead Press 3 x 5
Pullup 3 x 5

Friday
Squat 3-4 x 5
Bench Press 3-4 x 5
BB Row 3-4 x 5
EZ-bar Curl 2 x 8
Behind-the-back Tricep Pushdown 2 x 8
Calf Raise 2 x 8

        Beginners will need to do the bare minimum as far as sets go. They may also need to take out all arm and calf work for a couple months, then slowly add. Many may recognize the above as very much Bill Star’s 5 x 5 routine. It is a modification, and the original is extremely effective.

Every other day:

Monday
Squat 2 x 8
Bench Press 3 x 6
Chest-supported Row 3 x 6
BB Curl 1 x 8
Overhead Tricep Extension 1-2 x 8
Seated Calf Raise 1 x 8

Wednesday
Powerclean/Deadlift 3 x 6 or lower reps
DB Incline Bench Press 2 x 8
DB Curl 1-2 x 8
Tricep Pulldown 1 x 8
Standing Calf Raise 1-2 x 8

Rinse and repeat.

Some people like a varied rep range from one workout to the next. The following routine is one in which lifters may get away with not underreaching on much.

Varied reps every third day:

Monday
Squat 5 x 5
DB Incline Bench Press 3 x 8
Weighted Pull-ups 3 x 8
BB Curls 2-3 x 8
Tricep Pulldown 2-3 x 8
Seated Calf Raise 2-3 x 8

Thursday
Squat 3 x 10
Bench Press 5 x 5
Barbell Row 5 x 5
DB Curls 2-3 x 8
Tricep Pushdown 2-3 x 8
Seated Calf Raise 2-3 x 8

Sunday
Deadlift 5 x 5 (or 3 x 5 if lifting 200% bodyweight or more)
Incline Close-grip Bench Press 3 x 8
Incline DB Curls 2-3 x 8
Standing Calf Raise 2-3 x 8

        With all of the above routines, stay one rep from failure on every set (unless stated otherwise). On the Upper/Lower or every third day splits, failure is acceptable on a couple sets or so but try to stay away. Many exercises can be changed (always keep squats). Deload/unintensify when the weights stop going up at a reasonable pace, or mental/physical fatigue sets in.