Welcome to the Choose Hard podcast, the one and only fitness and nutrition podcast that goes way beyond just training and nutrition and helps you choose hard and transform your body and your mind. I'm your host, Cody Mcbroom, and today we are going to dive into training principles for body transformation. So today's going to be the five. I would call them pillars of program design.
These are five things that are unbelievably important when it comes to ensuring you have a program that is built and designed to actually get you results. There is so many people that follow programs that aren't even programs they are training. Plans that are just a list of exercises. They're not. It's literally like, what do you feel like doing the gym? Let's just go have fun. Let's go use some machines. Let's get a sweat. It's training without direction.
And so if you're somebody who wants to train with a purpose, you want to train with a specific direction, and most of all, you want to do those things in an intentional way that actually leads you to the destination. You're after it. Takes you to the result. You are chasing the goal that you really want to achieve. This podcast is for you, and I'm going to try to boil down these five principles in such a simple and streamlined way that you can
literally take this podcast. You can go create a program based on what you hear, or you can use this as a filter against what you're doing in the gym against the plan you're following and ensure that you are doing the right things in the right way to get you to the right goal. So let's dive in the five principles that I'm going to touch on today. And I'm going to run these quickly and then I'm going to break each one down
individually. The five principles are simple movement patterns, is #1 #2 is volume ranges #3 is progression methods #4 is individualized exercise selection. And the final one is having fun. It's it's literally, and I would say, you know, in a funny way, this is how we make America fit again. And quite literally, because if we're not having fun in the gym, we're not going to stay in the gym. And if we don't stay in the gym, we're not going to be fit. We're not going to be healthy.
We're not going to get bigger, we're not going to get leaner. That it's just plain and simple. The only way to ensure that we have consistency over the long haul is if we find a way to enjoy the gym. Now, if you are feeling good in your movements, if you are choosing the right exercises for your body, if you are doing the right amount of volume, if you're doing all these things I talk about today, you're going to get results. And at the end of the day,
results are fun. Getting results is fun. So even if there's parts of the process that suck, welcome to the club. Everybody who is chasing a goal in the beginning, it just sucks. Like that's just part of the game. That's part of the game for success in anything. So whatever goal you are chasing, there's going to be parts of it that aren't fun. There's going to be parts of it that are stressful that are taxing and fatiguing and and and grueling and, and can.
Feel like a lot of work, but if it leads you to a result that you really really want. And that part is fun. So just hang with it, keep going, and you'll have fun. Now, the other side of it is I think there's a lot of ways to make things fun within the program. Like if you're doing an exercise that you just hate and it takes all the fun out of the workout plan, stop doing that exercise 'cause I promise you there's other exercises.
In fact, I'm going to give you a rubric essentially that allows you to individualize exercise selection. And if you just follow that guide or that rubric that I'm going to give you, you can find a different exercise that's going to give you just as great of results without you having to do something you hate doing and not having fun doing it. OK, so all right, going into the first one, movement patterns. So in order to maximize movement capacity, we need to maximize
neural and muscular capacity. And, and what I mean by this is like, you can't just do one part of this. If you are somebody who is chasing muscle growth, you can't only train with bodybuilding style training. You can't only do pump work. You can't only do my muscle connection work. You have to do some kind of strength work too. You have to do some kind of mobility and flexibility. You have to be explosive. You have to train these different intensities and
systems. Otherwise your body's not going to work well in synergy. And that part is really, really important. And so I have this in front of me and it says movement, and then it says nervous system control. Muscular system manipulates skeletal system. And what that means is that your nervous system controls your muscular system, and your muscular system manipulates the skeletal system. And if you understand this, you can understand why everything is
so important. Your nervous system is the it's in an easy way of describing this. This is how your brain connects to the muscles, right? This is how your brain, which is, let's say this is the computer, this is the nervous system, sends a signal to control the muscular system. And then by control, I mean contract. It's going to contract and fire your muscles in a certain way. And when you contract or fire your muscles, it manipulates the skeletal system, which is your
joints. So if my brain tells my bicep to flex, my elbow bends, Really simple. Same thing with your quads and your knees, your hips and your quads for your for your hip joint, your glutes and your quads. For your hips, I should say your core for your spine. Like if we can develop each of these systems, we can avoid injury, we can build more muscle, we can get stronger, we can be more athletic and explosive. It's so unbelievable.
This is why when I train people for purely just muscle growth, a lot of times I still do incorporate some kind of explosive movement or some kind of heavy lifting. And if it's not in their weekly routine, then I might integrate it every once in awhile. There's times where I'm going into a bodybuilding prep with somebody and I might not include it on a weekly basis because it's very taxing and we're dieting really hard, doing a lot of cardio.
Like we don't want to just keep. Adding things on their plate. But if somebody's in their offseason, if somebody's just a general person trying to build muscle and get lean, you bet you're going to be doing some explosive movements followed by some heavier lifting, then followed by the bodybuilding stuff that they that's going to lead them to our primary goal 'cause you're going to get more out of the bodybuilding work if
you start with the other two. And it's because your body needs to work in synergy with each other, all these different systems. OK. And so knowing that we have. 5 main movement patterns that the training program needs to include. So we understand that there's the nervous system, the muscular system, and the skeletal system. So we need to be able to connect these three, basically the brain, the muscle and the the
joints. Then we need to look at the movement patterns that all exercises stem from. I shouldn't say all exercises the primary exercises stem from. There's going to be some isolation exercises that don't fall into these categories. Like a lateral raise is actually going to be shoulder abduction, and you're going to have shoulder abduction in a pushing movement, but you're not going to be pushing anything when you're doing a lateral raise.
What I mean by that is when you're doing a bench press, you're pressing horizontally. But if you actually look at the shoulder joint, you are working in shoulder abduction, your shoulders coming outward. But if you're doing a lateral raise, you're not pressing anything, You're just doing a lateral raise. It's just isolated shoulder abduction, right? Same thing with knee flexion. Knee flexion is going to be involved in a squat.
But we're gonna just talk about the squat, not knee flexion, because knee flexion in an isolated sense is like a leg extension. You don't need it. OK, So when we think of these movement patterns, I'm gonna talk about right now. These are the primary movement patterns that your training program must contain. So we have the different energy systems or the different systems of the body, nervous system, muscular system, skeletal joint
system. Then we have the movement patterns push, pull, hitch, hip hinge, squat, and core. Core is not a movement, but follow me, push is going to be anything that is pressing weight. You can be pressing overhead, you can be pressing horizontally. I'm going to recommend for the push and the second one pull, which is the same thing as a row we're talking about. Horizontal first. This is where it gets a little bit more complex. I would say Step 1 is just understanding push, pull, hinge,
squat, core. You do those, you're good. I don't care if you're doing a horizontal push or vertical push. Like are you pushing something great? Are you pulling something great? Are you squatting great? Are you hip hinging, RDL, hip dash, deadlift? Great. You doing something for your core? Ideally a carry or some kind of plank variation. Those are going to be the most functional and probably useful core exercises for for day-to-day function.
Not the best part of per trophy, but again, we're talking primary. Step one is primary movements for for life, for function, for athleticism and just the baseline foundation of fitness. Then we go into level 2. Now we're talking, I would say push, row, press, pull and we could look at, you know, and this is just opinion and semantics. I consider this is always to be interesting for people. I wish I could talk to the person listen this, but it'd be interesting for to hear your
thoughts. When you think of push, do you think of like a horizontal, like a chest press or do you think of a overhead press? I think of a bench press, a push. I feel like I'm pushing in front of me. Maybe it's 'cause you push somebody over, it's, it's horizontal, it's in front of you. And when I think of press, I think of overhead. And so as you, as you, if you could pay attention to how I said it, I said push row, then
press pull. Because I look at a row as a horizontal and a pull as a pull down like a vertical pull. And so it's more important to stay in the horizontal movement plane than it is the vertical movement plane. And so I'm going to program somebody a row before I do a pull down or a push before I do a press because it is going to require less shoulder mobility and extension. And most people do not have the the best shoulder mobility. A lot of people have bad posture, so on and so forth.
It's also more commonly, it's more common to see that people can easily activate the muscles better in a horizontal movement plane. So. Level 2 is kind of taking these, you know, push, pull, hip hinge, squat and core into a more, I would say diverse and expanded set of movements. So we have push, pull, hinge, squat, core for level 1. Level 2 we have push, row, press, pull, hip, hinge, squat, lunge.
Core. So the core is still going to be something functional for your core, but I added a second squat pattern. Technically a lunge could be a squat pattern, but it can be hip dominant, it can be knee dominant. The point is you should be doing something unilateral. So level 2, we're going a step further with these movement patterns and then level. 3 is
where. We add isolation and movements for hypertrophy, muscle growth and that's going to be shoulder abduction, it's going to be hip extension inflection for the glutes and stuff like that. OK. And so, you know, to apply what I'm talking about here, the application of this is number 1, you got to make sure that your training, the program includes each of the five primary movement patterns throughout the week.
OK, so throughout the week you should be seeing push, pull, hip hinge, squat and something for your core every week, no matter what. I don't care what your goal is, strength, muscle growth, fat loss, endurance, like anything, if you are training your body, you should be doing these five fundamental movement patterns. You need to include at least 50% more pulling than pressing unless you're in a
specialization phase. And what I mean by that is if I have, for example, 10 sets of pushing and pressing movements, whether it's overhead or it's horizontal, I need to do 15 or more sets per week of pulling and rowing. So I'm going to do 50% more pulling and rowing movements and I am pushing and pressing movements. And the reason for that is really just about shoulder health. Your shoulders are going to be much healthier if you develop the muscles in the back.
And also your back has some of the biggest musculature in the body, especially for men. Women, your biggest musculature is probably going to be on your lower body. Men, it's both lower body and your back, but like for the upper body, your back carries the majority of your muscles.
And so it's really important for shoulder health and for overall strength that carries over into these other compound lifts and movement patterns and body parts #3 incorporate unilateral exercises in each training session, but not at the expense of bilateral exercises unless you are injury prone. And So what this means is that you should be doing some kind of single leg movement in every session, single leg or single
arm. So if I'm doing upper body day, I need to have at least one movement or exercise that is a single arm movement, whether it's a one arm pull down, A1 arm row, A1 arm bench press, A1 arm overhead press, even a curl, you know, 1/2 feeling landmine press, anything. We want to have at least one unilateral movement per session. You can have more than that for sure. And sometimes it's really smart to do more than that.
But we don't want to remove bilateral because you should be also able to do regular 2 legged movements, a regular squat, a regular hinge, a regular press, a regular row, and we want our left and right sides to work together. However, sometimes there are cases where I will remove almost all bilateral movements if we have an injury.
So for example, mostly with a low back injury, somebody has a back injury, I'm going to be doing a lot of single leg work because it reduces the weight on the hips and spine dramatically. OK. And then the last thing is just regardless of your goal, train each primary focus, the nervous system, the muscular system and the joint skeletal system. And the way I look at this is explode, lift and move.
If you be explosive, whether it's a jump or a jam ball throw or like an explosive press, you're going to be training your nervous system predominantly explosive work and really low Rep strength development. So strength to power development specifically trains your nervous system more than anything lifts, you know, we want to overload the muscular system that's going to train your muscular system and then move, just focus on movement quality and in big ranges of motion and flexibility
and stuff like that. Because that's going to train your skeletal system as well as your muscular system, of course. But you're going to get the most out of your joints in the ranges of motion that you can do when you really focus on move. So explode, lift, move. And so that's the application of step one, which is just the movements in general, right,
movement patterns. The second thing in the five principles is your volume ranges and really just understanding how much volume you actually need in the gym. And in my experience, most people need more volume to build muscle and transform their body than they realize. Most people think they can get away with not doing so much. And a lot of times people take poor advice about volume from honestly, really advanced trainees who call themselves trainers. They could be a trainer.
However, they've been training themselves for a really long time, and most likely they already have very mature musculature, meaning they have a lot of muscle in their body #2 they're probably really strong. So their loads are really high. And if your load is really high, even if your reps are low, your total volume is still really high. Your sets times reps, times load. It goes up because you're lifting a lot of weight and you
can't. Do a lot of weight and a lot of reps all the and a lot of sets all the time. It just doesn't work. So they're talking about their own experience with that, right? And #3 they've been in the gym for so long that their joints are banged up. So if you've been in the gym for 30 years and you're freakishly strong and you're, you know, advanced in the gym and you can fire your muscles really well, you don't need as much sets because you can activate your muscles better.
You're advanced. You've been in the gym for so long that you've got to be careful of aches and pains. And on top of all of that, you're strong enough to where your total tonnage volume is so high regardless of the amount of volume you do on paper that you can get away with less volume. I mean, not to mention when you're really advanced, you're not really growing much anymore anyway. So somebody will talk about how you don't need much volume, but it's like you're just maintaining, right?
There's a lot of really, really advanced influencers, like gym goers that are influencers and they're telling people to not do a ton of volume, not do a bunch of stuff. And meanwhile they're not, they haven't changed their physique in years. They're doing the same stuff because they're just maintaining what they built years ago, right? And I think that's terrible. That's a terrible point of view or person to take advice from because you're trying to create a transformation.
So first let's define volume. So volume is going to be the total tonnage or sets performed. So like the the key definition of volume is going to be tonnage sets, times reps times sets. We usually track this on a weekly basis or on a per exercise basis. So your bench press has a total tonnage this week. You know 4 * 10 * 200 lbs equals blank. That's your tonnage for today because you did four sets of 10 with 200 lbs at the end of the
week. You can calculate all your sets for the chest and you can really look at your total volume, your set volume throughout the week. That's another way to look at it. But total tonnage and sets are typically the two ways we define volume and look at volume. From a metric to measure intensity is going to be the. Total load on the bar. It's not to be confused with effort, which is how hard you are training and how close to
failure you're getting. And then frequency is how often you train a muscle group or movement pattern. So if I'm doing a high frequency for powerlifting, I'm going to look at movements, bench press, and how many times a week I'm bench pressing. If I'm looking at hypertrophy and trying to build muscle, I'm looking at the bench press from a chest perspective. I don't care if it's a barbell, A Smith machine, a dumbbell, or it's a. Family push up anything that involves your chest.
How many sets per week am I doing for that volume wise and the frequency, how often am I training the chest right? Those are the three main terms we need to understand when we're looking at volume. I'm not going to dive deep into intensity and frequency because right now we're really trying to talk about transforming your physique.
And although intensity is important, it's the load on the bar is less important than your effort, how close to failure you get and how much total work you're doing in the gym volume, because the effort you are creating. And I guess the load is going to be important too, because you should have a load that is going to match your, your, the
required effort. You know your RIR reps reserve, which I'll get to in a SEC because that's going to lead you to reaching a point that's close to failure and that's going to stimulate maximal muscular tension when we reach a point of maximal mechanical tension which. Is what they call tension on the muscle. Mechanical tension is what creates hypertrogen. It's what causes your muscles to grow. The volume is how much of it we do. OK, so mechanical tension is a true driver of muscle growth,
right? And this is just a tension applied to the muscle during an exercise. Tension applied to a full range of motion is the next level of this. And this is really, really important because range of motion being full, a really good long full range of motion encourages the lengthened portion of a movement. So for example, a squat, that is
the bottom range. When you get to the very bottom of a squat and your knee is at maximum flexion, your hips at maximum function, we're going to stretch the glutes in the quads as much as possible under load. You have a bar on your back that's going to lead to the most growth and mainly muscular, easier on CNS and joints than pure strength. So for example, your nervous system is going to be involved.
Your skeletal system's obviously going to be involved, but the main system we're working here is muscular, which is obvious. If we're focus on hypertrophy, build a muscle, then of course the main thing we're going to be training is the muscular system. And then volume is the metric to track tension. So it can be tracked by sets per muscle group per week or sets times, reps times load, which is tonnage, like I said before. But the main point is that, you know, mechanical tension is the
thing that causes hypertrophy. Volume is just the thing that helps us measure. That's how we measure how much mechanical tension we're creating in our training. And then we want to split up our volume in thirds.
So if our main goal is strength and 2/3 of our training should be strength, if our main goal is hypertrophy, which is mainly what we're talking about when we're thinking of a transformation, we're looking at fat loss in muscle growth, either of which we're going to train for muscle growth. And that's what this podcast is about 2/3 of our training volume should be 4 hypertrophy, which means probably in the 8 to 12 Rep range and then some in the 15 to 20.
We don't need to be hitting sets of three and such. Maybe if we're doing some explosive work in the beginning like a speed bench before going into chest day or a explosive chest throw with a ball with a lightweight ball. So we can be explosive, which is just going to set us up for success in the movement patterns that we want to overload in.
But nonetheless, the point is that 2/3 of our training should always be geared towards the main focus that we're after, OK, with frequency, you know, studies show two to three times per week is going to be most optimal. And the point is, is we don't want to just hit a muscle once a week. It gives us too much time between sessions before we, you know, create tension on that
muscle again. And so in order to simulate maximal tension, we actually want to limit how much we do in a single session on that muscle, which again, I'm going to talk about here in a SEC. Because if we do too much, we have dimension returns, but we want enough to stimulate maximal tension and keep loads and reps in in reaching close to failure
as high as possible. We all know that if you know, if you do like 4 different exercises of hamstrings, by the third one, your hamstrings are smoked and you're not really lifting heavy. You're not able to go through a good full range of motion because your your form is breaking down. So we actually want to do less in that session so that we can do more with less.
Meaning we do more weight, more reps, get closer to failure in the few sets we do in the few exercises as we do on that session, and then recover after a couple days and do the hamstrings again. So rather than training them once a week and trying to just demolish them, we actually will get further ahead by doing them twice a week or maybe even three times a week, depending on the muscle. It's a smaller muscle because we can recover faster than we would if we were just doing once a week.
And then of course, you know, strength is a learned skill. It's mostly neurological. So we want to probably train if, if strength is goal, like I said, powerlifting, you know, bench press squad, we probably want to train that, you know, three times a week because it's like throwing a baseball. If we're going to be a great baseball pitcher, you don't just
throw the baseball once a week. You throw the baseball numerous times a week because you want to get that repetitive movement in and that motion in and connect the brain to your your mechanics. So you get great at throwing the baseball that way. So per session volume is something really important. This is what I was referring to with diminishing returns in a single session. And so if we look at this graph, if you're watching on YouTube, I have a graph on the screen right now.
If you're on Spotify or Apple, go subscribe to the YouTube channel so you can see these. But essentially we have this graph and it shows one to two sets. So the bottom row is sets per session per muscle group. And then the right is just hypertrophy. So how high this this line goes on this this graph is basically how much hypertrophy we're going to get. And as you can see, we have, you know, one to two sets, one to three sets per muscle per session.
And we're going to have a lower stimulus. And as we go from like 1 to 3 all the way up to four to six sets in a single session for a muscle group. And so I'm talking again, like let's say chest, for example, if I do one to three sets, so let's say one set or even three sets of chest work, that's a low stimulus. So we're not going to get a ton of growth from that.
If we do anywhere between 4:00 to six sets at a single session, which could be three sets of bench, three sets of flies, we're going to have a moderate stimulus. We're going to get more when we reach close to 7:00 to 9:00. So this is our seven to 10, so 7-8 or even up to 10 sets and a single muscle group in a single session. So that would be like 4 sets of bench and three sets of chest
flies. And then let's say like two to three sets of push ups as a finisher or some kind of dumbbell press or a cable press or something as a finisher reaching, you know, 8-9 or 10 total sets of hitting the muscle. We're going to maximize that most likely in that 8:00 to 9:00. After. 10, it's the tipping point. So 10 is the tipping point. When we go beyond ten sets in a single session for muscle, we're going to see a diminishing
return. And the reason we see a diminishing return is because they see that muscle protein synthesis starts to drop off. There's also the fact that it's a diminishing return because when you get beyond tensets, you can't lift heavy, you can't lift hard, you usually can't lift with good form. So it's unlikely you're going to
have a good quality training. You're probably going to have junk volume at that point, but when we get to about 10, we need to just know that we're going to be at a tipping point. So you could do like for the, again, chess as the example, five sets of bench press and five sets of chess flies. I have a program in the tailored trainer that is called 4 day physique. I believe it's a men's program. It's great and it's literally it's a push, pull legs, upper
body program. And you'll see on a push day, you go five sets of bench, five sets of flies, five sets of military press, 5 sets of lateral raises. It is about as simple and black and white as you get 4 exercises, 2 muscle groups, five sets each. You're maximizing going to the highest amount of sets in a single session that you can go and still stimulate growth. And then you're backing off and go to the next muscle, right? And so, and these are working sets.
So obviously if you got to do a couple warm up sets, don't worry about those. But the point is, is that that's going to be the maximum we can get. And so more is not always better, but minimal is not good. So when people say you want a low volume training program for muscle growth, they are literally not only wrong based on anecdotal experience of anybody I've ever worked with, but they're also wrong from a point of how the mechanisms of hypertrophy work from a scientific lens.
Mechanical tension placed on a muscle and doing more of that leading to more growth. You can only do so much in a low volume program. But on top of that, we also have the fact that every single research study done on muscle growth shows higher amounts of volume, which is more mechanical tension place on a muscle in a single week is better. And so we know that the tipping point is 10.
So we want to stay in that say, let's just say for easy math for everybody from a beginner to an advanced lifter, anywhere between 5:00 and 10:00 sets for a muscle group on a single session and then you want to move on, OK. And then when we look at this from a per week perspective, it's more of a bell curve. It's a little bit different. So if you're watching this, you can see it. But if you're not, I have volume on the left side and I have
experience level on the bottom. And we'll see newbie on the far left, advance on the far right. So the further you go on this bottoms, the the bottom of this graph, the more advanced you get in your experience. And we'll see we have 10 sets per muscle group per week for volume for the newbie, 20 sets for the intermediate because that's right in the middle. It's why it goes up to 20 sets, which is probably the maximum most people need, and then down to 10 sets for an advanced
lifter. So we actually go back down in volume. Now, the reason I say this relates to what I had mentioned earlier about what like some of these old heads in the industry will say and tell people you need less volume to build muscle. No, you need less volume to. Recover enough to actually build muscle. If you do too much volume you get fatigue and can't recover. And recovery is where muscle
growth happens. But because this person is old from a standpoint of years in the gym, experience in the gym, I don't mean like literal age-old. I mean, they got to be at least. I would say in their mid to late 30s, just because you have to have at least 20 years of experience in the gym to really be able to say this. But at a certain point you're not able to build as much muscle because of age, obviously #2 you're too strong to do that.
You're gonna get hurt doing that much volume so you can place more mechanical attention on the muscle by load and you don't need to go as high in sets. And that's why it's a bell curve. It goes back down as you get more experienced and advanced and being able to activate fire and maximally fatigue a muscle as well as lift really heavy with good quality form because that comes with experience.
You can actually taper off your volume and do a little bit less in the gym and still maximize results. But for most people, we're going to be in that 10 to 20 range. And that goes very well with the five to 10 range per session because if you're a newbie, you can do five sets in one session, five sets in another session for a single muscle group, that's going to be 10 a week. If you're optimizing frequency, which is 2 to three times a week, right?
So 2 * a week you're hitting a muscle, you do 5:00 and 5:00. That's 10 total volume for the week. That's perfect for somebody more intermediate to advance that needs more volume. You do 10 sessions like I talked about in that Pure Physique program in the Tailor trainer. And then you do it again on the second push day, let's say of the week or the second chest day, upper body day. Now you have 20, somewhere in the 15 to 20 range. And that's going to maximize hypertrophy.
So really, really cut and dry way of looking at volume. And, and how we apply this is pretty simple. Assess your current volume in the gym and increase it by 10 to 20%. Because most research has shown that more volume leads to more growth. But there was a few outlier research studies that showed less volume. So doing low volumes actually
led to more growth. And the only way they were able to rule this out was to actually take people's training program, assess how much volume they were doing. And instead of saying, OK, this is a high volume study, everybody's doing 30 sets of chess this week, which is they've done studies with 30 up to 40. Instead, they said everybody's going to increase by ten, 1520%.
And so it's not the total amount of volume, but it's how much you increase it. Because somebody at a newbie stage doesn't need to go to 40 sets or 30 sets or 20 sets. They need to just increase a little bit. And so it can rule out the fact that at times, yes, there's outliers, but also if you drop 40 sets per week on somebody who is brand new, they're just going to be too fatigued, they can't
recover, right? Or they're training like a wimp because it's too hard and they can't lift heavy and do that much work and then they don't grow because they're not recovering. So point being is assess your current training and based on what research shows, increase that by anywhere from 10 to 20% of total weekly volume and you're going to see the best results as far as muscle growth goes. Be cautious of volume loads by constantly assessing joint health and overall fatigue.
When loads increase substantially, volume needs to
taper down accordingly. Meaning if you are paying attention to how much you are lifting, as you get stronger and you lift heavier and heavier and heavier, just be aware that you might need to taper down your volume because you're getting to a point where injury is like going to happen because you can't have the volume dial and the intensity dial cranked way up. And then prioritize a low intensity, moderate frequency and high volume training
program. If your goal is primarily muscle growth or I should say physique transformation progression methods. So the third pillar or or principle of this is progression methods. And this one's pretty simple because obviously if you're not progressing in the gym, you're not going to progress your physique. We need to ensure that we are getting stronger, that we are doing more training, that we are doing harder training, that we are challenging our body.
It's this stress recovery stimulus that we are after, or I should say stress adaptation stimulus. So we need to stimulate the muscle with a stress which is going to be overload, A weighted stretch, a heavier weight, more reps, more volumes, something to stress the system in a way that it has not yet been stressed before then. We need to be able to recover from that so that we can adapt. Right. And so if we're not doing that,
we're not going to grow. But the problem is, is that if we do that and we recover and then we go back to the gym and do the same exact thing we did last week, well, maybe it'll work. But then if we do that again the next week and the next week, we're not going to continue to grow because we're not creating a new, harder, stronger, bigger, more stressful stimulus for the body to adapt to. It's not going to adapt to what it doesn't need to adapt to.
It's not going to adapt to what it's already adapted to from before. So the ways we can progress are pretty simple. Movement capacity. So how you're loading the movement, movement variations and stuff like that. Load progression. So adding weight over time, volume progression, adding sets per muscle group per week over time, volume, load progression. This is where we're adding total tonnage. So if we are doing 4 sets of 10 with 200 lbs, can we do four
sets of 10 with 205, right? Or can we do four sets of 11 with £200? That's going to lead to more total tonnage because four times 10 * 200 is less than 4 * 11 * 200. It's a greater amount of total tonnage that we are accomplishing split progression. So adding days per week, which is just going to lead to more volume, more mechanical tension density and work capacity. So how many rounds or volume done within a certain time
duration. This is going to be great for conditioning, but also it's, it's also going to be good for your mitochondria, your capillaries, blood flows, things like that. And then intervals, adding intervals, duration endurance can be better for conditioning.
But the point is, if we look at all these really like movement capacity, your ability to load at different move through different ranges of motion, how you're loading it and adding load over time, how you're adding sets over time, how you're adding volume loads of total tonnage over time, split progression, all these things really they're only going to work as a form of progression to transform your physique if it is leading to more mechanical tension placed on the muscle
over time. Which means your total tonnage needs to go up. Your sets times, reps times weight, the total amount of pounds that you move week to week needs to go up in order to accomplish that. It's why in the tailor trainer there's there's a total tonnage tracker. So it actually shows you how much total tonnage you're doing. It'll calculate your sets times
your reps for each exercise. And so it'll increase that and show you how much total tonnage you are performing so that you can ensure you're doing more of that 'cause that is the most granular and detailed way to track your progressions and track your volume of mechanical tension to ensure that you are seeing progress from. The work you're doing in the gym. In fact, we're actually working on a feature in there, hopefully it'll be out soon, where you can
track this per muscle too. So you can click the lats and it'll take all the lat based exercises and actually show you how much total volume, total tons you're doing for the lats in a given week. And that is going to be one of the best ways to track because you can see how much total work you are doing for the lats and ensure you're following what I'm talking about here today accurately to lead to progression if your goal was black growth. So really a bit simple with that.
And the only other thing I would say for load or, or progression method is just to understand there's, I like to look at this from a four step process, especially with any beginner, because you can't just start stacking weight, stacking sets and so on and so forth. Because some people might be listening being like, well, maybe I'm I'm recovering from injury or, or I'm not great lifting in that way. Like I can't do a bull grain split squat perfectly.
How am I supposed to add load or sets, right? So step one is skill acquisition. This is mastering the skill, the movement pattern. Step 2 is pacing and tempo. So before we add. Any weight or reps or anything, we're going to slow down the eccentric. We're going to add a pause at the bottom. We might even slow down the concentric, the positive, the upward motion.
But the point is, is that once you accomplish the skill of the movement, now let's control the movement and really master how well we can control it. We can add pauses, we can add segments. So doing like an RDL in a segmented fashion would be stopping at like 1/4 way down all the way down, quarter way up all the way up. So you're adding pauses throughout the range of motion.
It's just ultimately you're owning that exercise, you own that exercise and you are controlling every single part of that range of motion. Step 3 is overloading the pattern. Now that we're actually mastering the movement and we're able to control it so well, we can start to add load to that movement. And then Step 4 is increasing volume. So we've done the skill of it, we've learned the movement, we've been able to control it and really own that exercise.
Then we're going to overload it with weights. And then once we feel good overloading with load, we're going to add sets or reps and start to accumulate volume through total tonnage or we're going to accumulate total tonnage through set volume and Rep volume. So that how we can build muscle. And it's really simple.
Step 1234. You do it that way on any new exercise or if you're just new in the gym, you do it in that four step process for every exercise that's going to lead to a safer and more productive progression scheme over time in your training. So you know, to apply this really just, you know, progress your training no matter what. First and foremost, just make sure you're getting better in the gym. You're getting stronger, you're doing more sets, more reps, you're doing harder exercises.
Like if you're not challenging yourself consistently, like if you're not doing more in the gym, you're not going to get the results you want. OK? Choose a progression method that matches your goals as well as your training program. So certain exercises and certain ways of training are going to be more. It's going to be easier to add sets per week. It's going to be easier to add a pause here and there, or it's
going to be easier to add load. Just match your progression method with the type of exercises you're doing for your program, but also make sure that it lines up with your goals. If your goal is muscle growth, then you should probably be looking at adding reps and sets because that's going to lead to the most total tonnage, right? Like 4 * 8 * 205, even though you lifted 5 lbs heavier, maybe even 210, like 5 to 10 miles
heavier. That's great, but that's less total tonnage than 4 * 10 * 200. So you could have added a Rep or two and done more total tonnage and that might lead to more muscle growth. However, there is diminishing returns there because if you just keep going up in reps, you're never getting strong enough to add more load. And so there's going to be also be times where we need to sacrifice total tonnage in order to get stronger so that we can lift heavier for the same amount of reps.
So we might actually go back on total tonnage for a couple weeks to then take 10 steps forward on total tonnage. But regardless, match up your progression method with your training program. As well as your goals. Right, don't just add weight to the bar and stay in the low Rep range and just keep getting stronger and then wonder why you're not building muscle. OK, and then progress your volume for the most muscle growth. This really just like cut and dry simple progressive volume.
If you goal is muscle growth, progress load. If your main goal is strength and then progress the movement pattern and quality. If your main goal is flexibility and mobility, individualizing exercise selection is going to be next. And and then we just have one more, I believe, which is fun. Yes. OK, so for exercise selection, there is AI have a seven step process and I'm going to go through those pretty quickly.
And we're going to link to another episode I did because I did a whole podcast on exercise selection. And I think it's really important. And if you can watch the YouTube video for this, because it's just it's so good to see the graphs and everything on screen. And I can take you through a rubric that shows you how to grade certain exercises, but I just want to explain why this is so important and then just give you the titles of the seven.
Because I think if you just understand why it's so important and you hear the seven titles, it'll encourage you to go listen that podcast because it really does deserve a full hour, which is what I give it. Now, people often claim to have the best exercises for muscle, but it's typically just an ignorant thought from an inexperienced trainer because
everybody is different. For example, like the the slide I'm looking at while I'm talking you through this, there's a picture of myself and my best friend who is also somebody I lived with on occasion, also owns a fitness business. His name's Cody Smith. He's been on the podcast a bunch of times. Well, Cody Smith is 6 foot 5 and Cody Mcbroom me is 5 foot 9, so he is a lot bigger than me. So when we train together, the exercise variation has to be
different. We can both be training our upper body and doing a chest movement, but the chest movement for somebody his height with his wingspan is dramatically different than mine. Because the, and This is why I say that when somebody says they have the best exercise for your glutes, they're ignorant. They don't know what they're talking about because there is no best exercise for everybody. There's the best exercise for you.
And if you understand how to individualize exercise selection, if you understand or you learn from a coach like myself or my team who does this process for our clients when they work with us one-on-one in training, then you will understand how important this is and how big of a difference it makes. So there's that limb length, flexibility, mobility limitations, neurological efficiency. So your skill and your experience level in the gym, your preference, your muscle
focus. So like you could be, we could both be doing a squat, But if you do want to build your glutes, and I don't want to build my glutes, we have a different squat pattern. And that is also going to change if we have different limb lengths, if we're not the same height and stuff. So all these things are really, really important. And I think it's, it's so valuable to understand these each individually. So please go watch that YouTube video.
I think it would be really, really helpful for anybody. This now, step one in that video, I break these things down, the video and the podcast so you can go watch or listen to. I break these seven steps down. Step one is your goal. You have to make sure that you're choosing exercises that line up with your specific goal #2 is goal specific movement. So once we have the goal established, we have to also make sure that the movement itself is going to line up with the goal.
For example, we have to have a goal of hypertrophy. Then we have to know that we still need to do a hip hinge, whether our goal is hypertrophy or strength or you know, mobility, flexibility, movement, stuff like that. Now we have to choose a specific type of hip hinge. If my if my goal is strength, I'm going to be doing a heavy deadlift from the floor, probably a trap bar deadlift because it's. Easier to keep. Your hips and spine in a good position, meaning I can overload
more. If I can overload more, I'm going to lift more weight. That means I'm going to get stronger. If my goal is hypertrophy, I'm probably going to do a stiff leg deadlift. It's going to be lighter weight, straight bar. I'm going to keep my hips higher than I would with the trap bar and I'm just going to stretch the hell out of my hamstrings under load because that's going to lead to the most muscle
growth. So I have my goal and then I have to choose specific movement patterns to match up with that goal. And it's not just the movement of hip hinge, it's the exercise within that movement pattern. Step 3 is the mind muscle connection. This is just a sign that you're training the right muscle group. So if you're doing an exercise and you're trying to choose the best exercise for your triceps and you choose an exercise and you don't feel your triceps when you're doing it, that is not a
great exercise for you. Mind muscle connection is not everything. It doesn't mean it is the key driver of hypertrophy. And the pump in the muscle isn't even that important for for hypertrophy, but it's a proxy. It tells you that you are in the right place training the right muscle. And now you can emphasize the load, the volume, all these other things to ensure you grow it. So you should have a mind muscle connection #4 is localized muscle soreness.
So following that last point and basically on the same kind of standpoint or, or lens, if I'm feeling it in the local muscle while I train it, I should also feel soreness in that local muscle. If I train my triceps and then the next day my shoulder hurts or my elbow is really painful or like my forearms are burnt out, well, that means I trained my forearms and I banged up my elbow and shoulder joint. That is not what an exercise I want to do. The next day. My triceps should be sore if
anything, right? Not my joints, not a different muscle. So you want to make sure that you have a localized muscle soreness for the muscle you were training the next day or the days following #5 is progression potential. And this is just a simple idea that this exercise has the potential to progress. If I'm doing a dip for my chest and triceps, how much can I really progress that over time? Once I'm doing 20 reps, I should
probably add some load. Well, I can only add so much load to a dip without hurting my my tendons, ligaments, and joints, especially around my shoulder and chest. So I'm probably going to move on from the dip at a certain point and I'm not going to use that as a main movement week to week to progress. But a bench press I can add load over time. I can do low reps, I can do high reps I can do a dumbbell variation. I can do a floor press, A Smith machine press, a hammer strength
press. There's a lot of bench or chest press exercise that I can do. And so the progression potential of that exercise is really high, making it a good exercise. SFR, which is created by Mike Izzertel, it stands for stimulus to fatigue ratio is just the amount of stimulus and the ratio of that stimulus compared to fatigue. So a dead lift again, as an example, has a pretty high stimulus, I guess actually it really doesn't as a neural
stimulus. But if you really think of a heavy dead lift, you don't wake up sore in one place the next day. If you do a bunch of heavy dead lifts, you're just sore head to toe like your whole body's sore, which is great. But for muscle growth, it's not really targeting anyone place, which is why the dead lift is not a great exercise for muscle growth whatsoever. And you're going to be extremely fatigued. So the stimulus is low to anyone muscle, but the fatigue's high.
Now a barbell, stiff leg, RDL, the stimulus is extremely high for your hamstrings. Still a deadlift, but now I'm getting a lot out of it because the stimulus is so great on my hamstrings. Maybe the fatigue is somewhat high too because it is a bigger lift. You can usually go heavy, but that's OK because the stimulus is really high and the fatigue is still not nearly as high as a normal deadlift or a dumbbell lateral raise, for example, or a
cable lateral raise. It's a great stimulus in my shoulders and the fatigue is really low. I could do them the next day. I'm very rarely going to get sore and have a lot of fatigue lingering from doing a lateral raise. So the stimulus to fatigue ratio is phenomenal. Most of your training should have a high stimulus to fatigue ratio, high stimulus, low fatigue, a really good stimulus to fatigue ratio. I should say really high stimulus, really low fatigue,
right? You can have one or two exercises throughout the week in each session, you know that have a high stimulus and a high fatigue. But no matter what, most of your training should be a high stimulus, low fatigue, especially if your goal is muscle growth. And you don't want to have too much high stimulus, high fatigue exercises because you can probably do even more throughout the week if you choose high
stimulus, low fatigue exercises. This is specific to body transformation and muscle growth. And then lastly #7 injury risk. Choose exercises that have a low injury risk because the lower the injury risk, the less likely it is you're going to get injured, obviously. And if you get injured, you can't go back to the gym. If you can't go back to the gym, your total volume per week sucks. It's really low, and you're not going to progress week to week, month to month.
OK. So running through those things is really important. And applying that information, again, look at every exercise you're doing and just ask yourself those seven things. And if you want a more in depth and detailed way of tracking and look at those. Like I said, go check out the the podcast and the video I did on exercise selection and it'll break all that down. So the last point #5 is where I put MAGA Make America Fit again, a little joke here. And it's really just about
having fun. If you don't have fun in the gym, you're just not going. To. Be consistent. People are not going to consistently be in the gym, so you yourself are not going to follow a program consistently and adhere well to it over time. But also, if you're training clients, if you're a coach, your clients are not going to consistently hit the gym and be excited about the gym if it's not giving them some excitement, some challenge, some fun, so on and so forth.
And there's a lot of different ways to do this. A lot of it's just mindset and coaching them properly. But also you can really look at like daily and weekly PRS, right? I want to see people hitting PRS with Max reps How many rounds they did in a density set? Did they add load to the bar? Like tell me about your PRS. The more we reflect on PRS, the more excited we get about training 'cause we are winning, we are doing better.
But a lot of times people won't notice if they're not tracking and you're not intentionally telling them to look for. These PRS emphasize specific body parts. So help them feel the muscle they're after. If somebody comes to me and they want to train with glutes, I want to make sure that they leave their sessions that have glutes in it and their glutes burn and they are on fire.
That is the point. And I love like I get hit up all the time for people doing the tailor trainer and they DM me and they're like, dude, my arms or my chest or my glutes or my hamstrings are on fire after blank session. I do that intentionally and in the tailor trainer, which by the way, I haven't talked about this much, it's free now like there
is a premium version. So if you want the full access to all my programs, you want to like be able to train week after week, you want to use the full tracking system, all that stuff, you got to pay for it. Obviously it's dirt cheap, 29
bucks. But if you want to check out everything, if you want to try it out, if you want to use some of my programs, but you don't want the full access, you can get the freemium version and you can train almost on any program for up to three weeks completely free. So it's not even a seven day trial. It's beyond that now. So go check that out. But nonetheless, I want to make sure that people do this.
So in the programs, I break it down in the video and I talk about that like this is what you're going to get out of this program. And I want to make sure they understand that. Create challenges within the plan, whether it's time based sets, Amraps, there's little competitive natures or competitions with themselves or with others in the gym that you create for them. Make it so that they can compete against themselves and create challenges that push them and get them excited.
Intensification methods are next. Drop sets, myo reps, Amraps, things like that. It's just ways to intensify training. I have a whole podcast on that as well, and it's really, really cool. I think that podcast might actually air this week or next week or something if it's already out. We'll link it in the show notes though, because we have already recorded that it should be out soon. And then last but not least, get results. If you're getting results.
People are having fun no matter what and there's a lot of different types of intensification methods you can do. There's a lot of different challenges you can do. There's a lot of ways to emphasize the specific body parts they're after. There's a lot of ways to track and and really highlight and get them to reflect on their PRS. But no matter what, again, make training fun. If you can make training fun,
the gym becomes a lifestyle. The gym becomes part of your life, part of your client's life. And that is the most important thing 'cause that's what keeps them in the gym for weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks and months and months and months and ideally years and years. Because we should never stop training our body, whether we're training three days a week or six days a week or maybe six
days a week right now. And eventually it goes down to two or three days a week and you go on hikes and you're active. Doesn't matter. We should be active. We should be moving our body. It's what our bodies are designed for. Our bodies are meant to move. Our bodies are meant to resist load, resist tension and develop muscle and strength. And I want to encourage everybody to make sure they're doing everything they can in their programs to make that possible and to make it fun.
So that's a wrap on this one. Going back to the beginning to say what we did here, really simple foundations of training program design. Number one, movement patterns #2 volume ranges #3 progression methods #4 individualizing the exercise selection and #5 make training fun for anybody in the gym. I hope that you can listen to this, use this as a filter for your programs. I hope this can help you write programs better. As always, I just appreciate you listening as I appreciate you
being here. I love being able to spread this information. This knowledge on training nutrition minds is what I love to do. So thank you for being here. Thank you for being a part of the Choose Hard tribe and culture. Please go leave us a five star rating and review. Check out Tailored Coaching method dot shop if you want to grab a choose hard hat or journal and I will catch you next time on the Choose Hard podcast.