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When and how to change your training
program is rarely talked
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about on social media, yet
it's crucial for long term success.
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When you start lifting
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all you need
is some effort and consistency
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and you'll reap your newbie gains.
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But after you've milked those sweet newbie
gains, things get a lot harder
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and you need to become more meticulous.
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What I see in many of my clients
is that they get stuck at this point.
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So in this video, I'm going to teach you
how to adapt your training program
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to keep progressing long term
and keep building muscle and strength
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past the newbie stages.
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The first major mistake that I often see,
especially in people
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that come from bodybuilding
circles, is called muscle confusion.
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Muscle confusion,
which I like to call muscle confusion
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confusion is the idea
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you need to shock your muscles
to get them to grow, and your muscle
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should not adapt to the training program
because then you're no longer progressing.
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So you need to confuse the muscle
every time you train it
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to keep progressing.
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This is completely backwards.
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The entire point of training
is that your body adapts to the training.
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This is exemplified by the stress recovery
adaptation curves, general adaptation
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syndrome, the specificity principle...
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Adaptation is literally
the reason we train.
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Muscle growth and strength
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development are adaptations to the stress
that we impose on our bodies.
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Multiple studies have found that excessive
variety in your program
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does not benefit your gains,
and actually shows
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a trend towards worse results,
especially on a volume equated basis.
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For example, the Damas et al. found that
a group of strength training men,
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they trained one of their legs
just doing sets of 9 to 12 reps
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to failure, adding weight
whenever they got above that rep
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range, so implementing
progressive overload; the other leg
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they implemented “muscle confusion”
by doing a different workout
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every time. One of the workouts was the
same workout that the standard group did,
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and then one workout was an eccentric
only version.
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In one of the workouts they added sets,
they went up to six sets,
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in one of the workouts
they went higher in repetitions,
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and then they also tried
to progress over time.
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And the result was that despite training
with significantly more volume,
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they did not actually gain more muscle.
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The “confused leg”
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didn't gain more muscle,
even though it was trained with more volume.
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And normally in studies,
we do see that when you add volume,
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because this wasn't like an overly high
volume study,
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you gain more muscle, provided
you can recover from it,
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but that shouldn't
have been an issue in this study.
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And these results were replicated
by Angleri et al. in 2022.
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Another study by Baz-Valle et al.
found that in strength trained men
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doing the same workout
with the same exercises all the time
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led to non-significantly,
but greater results than a group
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doing a different exercise
every workout on a volume equated basis.
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So overall, it's quite clear that doing
a lot of variety in your program
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does not benefit your gains, and there's
no need to “confuse” your muscles.
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If anything,
it seems to have a slightly worse
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results relative to the volume
you put in.
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A mistake very closely related to muscle
confusion is program hopping.
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Many people feel that they need
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a new program every 2 weeks, 4 weeks,
and there's absolutely no reason for it.
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It's it doesn't have any benefit.
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You could implement a new program
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just because you got bored
of the last one,
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but you have to realize
that you're giving up some things
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when you change program.
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When you do the same exercises
the body adapts to those,
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and there's a repeated bout effect
that reduces muscle damage.
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Moreover, and this is
probably the most important thing,
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sticking to a certain program
of the same exercises allows you
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to implement progressive overload
in the long run, and strength development
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in the short term is almost entirely
unrelated to muscle growth.
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If you're gaining strength on an exercise
that you've only been doing
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for a couple of weeks,
that doesn't mean much.
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If I have you do, especially something
like split squats, for example,
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you're going to gain strength
on that very rapidly.
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The reason for that is not
because you're getting bigger,
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the reason is primarily that your body is
learning, specifically the motor cortex,
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the part of your brain
that coordinates movement
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is learning to coordinate
the movement better.
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You have better balance,
the movement is more subtle,
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the body learns when to recruit
the glutes, the hamstrings,
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how much antagonist co-activation
there has to be...
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So it's learning to perform
that movement pattern.
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Most of the strength gains
you get in the early weeks of training
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are due to this coordination improvement,
not due to muscle growth.
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There can be muscle growth,
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but you cannot measure it objectively
with short term strength gains.
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In the long term strength and size
correlate extremely strongly.
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I've talked many times about studies
where you have powerlifters
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and you measure their strength and their,
like, their powerlifting stats,
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Wilks score, IPF scores,
they also measure their body composition.
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There is an extremely strong correlation
between those.
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So in many of these competitions
actually you could just put powerlifters
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in a DEXA scanner
or a body composition scanner,
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the rankings would be almost identical
to their competition rankings,
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which is kind of ironic
because we tend to think of powerlifting
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as like the sport where you have massive
distinction between strength and size,
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and powerlifters
exemplify strength over size,
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but in reality, the bigger powerlifters
are the better powerlifters.
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Very consistently
in research size and strength
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correlate extremely strongly
in these types of athletes.
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So in the long run your strength gains
are a good marker of your progression.
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And if you're not progressing
long term on certain exercises,
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if you don't have at least a certain
set of what I call benchmark exercises,
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then you don't know
if you're getting more muscular.
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And if you don't know
if you're getting more muscular,
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you don't know if you are progressing,
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and therefore
if you need to change your program.
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Because the best reason to change
your program
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is because it's not resulting
in the desired training adaptations.
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And physiologically speaking
that is essentially the only reason.
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All of your program modifications,
other than for psychological reasons
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like variety or boredom,
should be based on progression.
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Progression is the number one criterion
for how to adapt your training program.
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If you are progressing well, don't fix
what isn't broken.
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If you are not progressing,
you need to update the program
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because the definition of insanity
is doing the same thing
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over and over again
and expecting different results.
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So how exactly do you update a program
based on your progression?
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Well,
you need to look at the type of plateau
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or type of stagnation
that you are experiencing.
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This is the chart I teach to my students
in my online Personal Training
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Certification course.
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You have to look at the type of plateau
and you can see here you have basically
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3 types of plateaus: systemic,
multiple exercises for the same body
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part and one exercise.
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If your plateau is limited
to one exercise,
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your adjustments should probably be
for that one exercise.
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What many people do
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is they start stalling on one
or a few exercises,
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and they feel
the need to update the entire program,
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or just switch program.
That is still program hopping.
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You should have targeted adjustments
that deal with the lack of progression
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that you are experiencing,
and that fix that progression.
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So if you have one exercise
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that's not progressing, often
what you can do is
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you can just update the progression model
for that exercise.
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For example, you can decrease
the rep targets with intensification.
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You can implement daily undulating
periodization for that exercise.
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Reactive de-loads
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and plateau breakers are things
you should pretty much always be doing.
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And if all else fails
you can switch out that exact exercise.
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Sometimes it's not realistic
to progress on an exercise.
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For example, lateral raises.
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That's not an exercise
where you're going to implement
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progressive overload
on for years ahead of time.
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You know, like, your lifetime progression
on a lateral raise
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might be up to 20 kilos, for many people
-not even,
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so you're just not going to implement
progressive overload very long term
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for an exercise like that.
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But if it's like squats, bench press,
you know, the power lifts, the compound
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exercises, there you should be able
to progress very long term
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and there it's probably more important
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to keep those exercises in
as a benchmark exercise and then change
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the accessory exercises
to add variety to your program.
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If your plateau is limited to multiple
exercises, but for the same body part,
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then you probably need to update
training parameters for that body part.
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And this is also quite common.
You see that
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people, like women for example,
they have trouble with their shoulders,
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and then you see that lateral raises,
overhead presses and other shoulder exercises,
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they all kind of start
stalling at the same time.
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You also see this in men
when they've been training biceps
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and chest
for much longer than other body parts,
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and then those body parts will start
stalling sooner than, say, their legs.
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So in this case, you want to, in
particular, look at the training volume.
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If you have simply gotten more advanced,
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then you might need higher
training volumes for that body part.
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It could also be that the body part
is you’re overtraining it.
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You see this with men
that they devote too much attention
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to the chest and the mirror muscles
as opposed to the non mirror muscles,
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in that case, you might benefit
from a reduction in training program,
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but usually over the long term,
as you get more advanced
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you should be able to handle higher
training volumes instead of lower ones.
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Over your training career as a whole
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your training volume
should probably be increasing on average.
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If you have a systemic lack of progress,
so you're just not progressing at all,
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like there are multiple unrelated
exercises that are not progressing
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that should be progressing,
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that means there’s something
systemically wrong.
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So in this case, you should look at things
like your training,
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your sleep, your stress levels,
or simply your overall program design.
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If you set the volume at a certain level
it might just be excessive,
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or it might be too little.
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One way that you can look at that
to see if you have excessive volume
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or too little volume
is to look at what happens
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if you implement an additional rest day.
If you implement an additional rest day
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and then you do progress,
that means the volume is probably too high
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and if you add volume
and you start progressing faster
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than the volume was probably too low.
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One issue there is that short
term progress is not necessarily
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the same as long term progress.
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If you add some volume for strength
development
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often that doesn't immediately
translate into gains,
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because strength is not as responsive
to training volume as muscle growth.
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So don't be discouraged
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if you add some sets and you don't
immediately see better progression.
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You should be progressing in some way,
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but it's not like you're going to see
that you're going to progress
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50% faster or something.
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Another thing you can look at to see
if your volume is too high or too
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low is your work capacity.
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In exercise science
we have something called
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the fatigue index, which is essentially
just how many reps you lose across sets.
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And most people,
when they lose a lot of reps across sets,
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that indicates high fatigue.
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So if your reps, they stay at like 12,
12, 12, 12,
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that indicates
there's not a lot of fatigue.
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And in fact,
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you should be questioning
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your training efforts in this case
because you're
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probably not training close to failure.
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There should be neuromuscular fatigue
and your reps should go down.
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Some women have extremely high
work capacity and they can train very hard
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and maintain their reps.
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Men, it's very,
very unlikely that you can do 4 sets,
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especially if your rest interval
is not extremely long,
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you can hit the exact
same reps every time
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if your first set
was as many reps as possible.
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So if your work capacity is very high,
like your reps, you don't lose all of reps,
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that's an indication you
can probably increase the training volume,
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if your work capacity is very bad,
you lose a lot of repetitions,
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your fatigue index is very high,
and that's an indication
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you probably benefit
from a lower training volume.
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So this is basically the general template.
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I'm not going to go into the specifics
in this video,
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because it would be essentially
my 10 month course for how to implement
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a whole training program
and how to adapt it over time,
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but I hope this gives
you like a conceptual framework,
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what I feel a lot of people are missing,
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that you should base your program
adjustments on the progress that you have.
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And if you are stalling,
you're not progressing as you like,
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your rate of progress is below
that of the desired rate of progress,
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then you should make changes
to your training program that specifically
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deal with the lack of progress
that you are seeing.
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This goes for both your body
composition progress, in your nutrition
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and in your training program,
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which is measured by strength development
and your body composition changes.
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Measure long term progress,
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in general, it's
good to stick to a certain program,
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or at least keep
certain benchmark exercises
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in your program over the long term.
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This allows you to implement progressive
overload, monitor that you are progressing
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and see where you are not progressing
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to make changes in your training program
that specifically deal
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with the lack of progress
that you're seeing.
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And if you keep doing that, you keep
iterating that process over time, then
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you should see that you have a program
which gradually changes over time
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and continuously maintains
your desired rate of progress.
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Right. I hope that helps
you make long term gains.
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If you like this
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ed-type of evidence based fitness content,
I'd be honored if you like and subscribe.
00:11:35
If you like this video,
00:11:36
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that appreciates science, just like me.
00:11:40
You'll probably also like
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00:11:42
For fitness professionals
I have the Henselmans
00:11:44
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00:11:46
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00:11:49
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00:11:52
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00:11:56
Check out the link in the description
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00:11:59
I hope you'll enjoy it.
