PROGRAMMING AS I SEE IT: PROGRAMS VS ROUTINES

**INTRO**

 

Typically, I write these things from start to finish, to include the intro, but this time I save it for last and I’m glad I did, because this grew into a BEAST of a post.  My original intent was to just jot down a very basic understanding of programming as it relates to training, ultimately demonstrating the difference between a program vs a routine (a quest I’ve undertaken on many occasions).  However, as Dan John has observed in his own writing, the more you try to simplify things, the more complicated they get, which is why he’s written 3 books (over 600 pages total) on Easy Strength, which is a workout that was given to him in 6 sentences.  And I actually ended up cutting this short, because I could see it still running away from me as I was writing it, but I feel like this is a good enough baseline for the “common man” to be able to understand what programming is and is not.  This is not a manual on HOW to program, as I am not a coach and I have trained no clients.  Instead, this is more an explanation for what makes a program a program, and how to recognize the facets within a program for what they are and what they do.  With that, let’s start at the beginning, as that’s often a good place to start.

The stories are cooler in the Old Testament vs the New anyway

 

**STIMULUS AND FATIGUE**

Yeah, it's pretty much this

 

Fundamentally, all a program has to do is balance two variable: stimulus and fatigue.  All other elements of a program serve these two masters.  Stimulus is necessary in order to promote growth (from here on out, this will refer to growth of muscles, but this honestly applies to all manner of growth, to include conditioning, GPP, speed, power, strength, etc), and fatigue refers to the accumulation of damage/exhaustion one encounters through the pursuit of that stimulus.  These two forces are on opposite ends of the scale: the more we stimulate, the greater fatigue we accumulate, and as fatigue accumulates, unless we find a manner to recover from it, we lose our ability to stimulate any further.  Because it’s not the training that causes us to grow: it’s the RECOVERY from the training that results in growth.  If we just keep mashing that stimulus button and don’t ever find a chance to recover, we train ourselves into the ground and get smaller and weaker.

 

So we understand the intent of a training program: find a way to generate the necessary stimulus to trigger growth while ALSO finding a way to manage the fatigue that is accumulated so that we can continue the process of stimulate/recover in order to continue growing.  We are trying to find that goldilocks of total training volume.  It is this understanding that drives the structuring of a training program.  One can train 1 day a week or 7 days a week, so long as they are balancing stimulus and fatigue, which is why protocols like HIT can exist alongside the Bulgarian Method.  So what variables do we have in order to trigger stimulus?

 

**FREQUENCY, VOLUME, AND INTENSITY**

Just not all at the same time

 

We have training frequency (how often we train), training volume (how much we train within a given session) and training intensity (in this instance, how heavy we train, rather than “perceived intensity”, which is to say, how hard the training feels).  Much like stimulus and fatigue, these 3 dials must be properly adjusted in order to allow FOR that balance of stimulus and fatigue.  If you turn all 3 up to max, you get max stimulus AND max fatigue, which means no recovery, and ultimately burnout.  If you turn all 3 down all the way, you get no fatigue AND no stimulus, so you still don’t grow.  Once again: finding the balance is part of what makes a program a program, rather than a routine.

 

Breaking things down further, we can understand stimulus through the lens of volume on multiple levels.  Above, I wrote “within a given session” just to give vector to the conversation, but ultimately, with a program being a program, we’re going to understand volume from a wider perspective, to include weekly training volume and training volume within a training cycle.  Is it possible to “overtrain” in the span of one day?  We can call that “overreaching”.  We’ve seen/heard the stories about people doing their first crossfit class and developing rhabdomyolysis, and you can certainly do something like the 10k swing challenge in one day and push yourself too hard, but typically, in the discussion of “overtraining”, we’re referring to pushing beyond the bounds of recoverable fatigue for a long and consistent timeframe to the point that recovery is no longer possible without SIGNIFICANT intervention, such as multiple weeks away from training.  Which, in that regard: an intelligently designed program will seek to mitigate this, ideally through intelligent application of training volume across the duration of a training cycle.  So what are ways to effectively manage volume?

 

Herein we have the other 2 variables at play: frequency and intensity.  If we determine how much volume we need in order to trigger the desired stimulus to grow, we now have to determine how we want to divide this volume in order to effectively trigger stimulus without overcoming our body’s ability to manage the fatigue.  This is how you see programs that can be so wildly different yet still effective: they’re finding the volume needed to grow and parsing it out as necessary.  HIT style training may only have “one” workset, but it tends to include a lot of ramping up TO that one set, and once that one set is done, it’s followed with a bunch of intensity modifiers to eek out even more reps, pushing way into the recovery well of the trainee and absolutely obliterating them with stimulus…which is why the training is so infrequent.  Contrast this with more traditional higher volume training, which employs more worksets and tends to leave reps in reserve, which allows a better opportunity to recover from session to session, allowing for more frequent training in order to continue to trigger the same amount of stimulus.

A pretty good demonstration of the effects of both methods

 

And in all this discussion about fatigue, I haven’t even discussed the OTHER element of a program that makes a program a program: fatigue MANAGEMENT.  Because as we’ve discussed: if we overcome the body with fatigue in the pursuit of stimulus, we ultimately regress.  An intelligently designed program needs to find some way to deal with all of this.  One of the simplest ways to do so is a prescribed deload: a period of time with reduced, if not completely eliminated, stimulus, in order to allow fatigue to mitigate.  Matt Wenning talks about incorporating these into Westside style conjugate, and Jim Wendler includes them in 5/3/1, Tactical Barbell refers to them as “Bridge Weeks”, and I honestly first learned about the idea from Pavel Tsastouline’s book “Beyond Bodybuilding”, but John McCallum wrote about downtime in “The Complete Keys to Progress” and really, the precedent exists in a LOT of other places as well.  Like getting an oil change BEFORE your engine blows up, the idea of a deload is that it’s PREVENTATIVE maintenance: you take the deload BEFORE you need it.  Because as we’ve discussed: when we push too far into fatigue, we overwhelm our ability to recover so much that we require significant intervention.

 

However, for some trainees, “deload” is a dirty word.  Some believe that you can effectively manage stimulus and fatigue simply with intelligent programming, and that an intelligent program, by definition, is one that does not NEED a deload.  There’s enough people out there that can make this work that I believe it’s true, and ultimately it’s going to require a solid understanding of your own body, fatigue indicators, and an ability to only push as hard as necessary to generate stimulus in your training.  I know some dudes even make use of specific fatigue tracking software, to include monitoring of resting heart rate increase and the “pen tap test”, as a means of monitoring fatigue status.  In either instance, once again, we observe what makes a program a program: it has SOME form of fatigue management in place.

 

 

There is also room for discussion for ACTIVE fatigue management.  Which is to say, the elements of recovery.  Ignoring non-training ones, such as sleep and food (to which the Barbarian Brothers are famous for saying “There is no overtraining: only undereating and undersleeping”), along with things like ice baths, massage, etc, one can actually slot into their program training that has a restorative function rather than a function of stimulus.  Dan John refers to these as “tonic workouts”, and we’ve also heard of feeder workouts (not the same thing as feeder sets) and simple recovery workouts.  Here, the intent is to just get some light, restorative bloodflow to the muscles that were trained, in order to promote quicker recovery between workouts and alleviate soreness.  Light conditioning can also have this impact, with walking being one of the best examples.  One is not going to recover themselves out of a state of overtraining with these approaches, but they CAN be a useful means of immediate fatigue management in the scope of one’s overall programming, and they also tend to be a missing variable in many of the “programs” that are created by those lacking awareness of these principles.

 

**THE OTHER STUFF: PROGRESSIVE OVERLOAD, SETS, REPS AND MOVEMENTS**

All the small things...yes, I'm really dating myself here

 

Notice how I haven’t even discussed progressive overload, sets, reps or movement yet?  Yet, when a new trainee wants to discuss their “new program”, ALL that want to talk about are sets, reps and movements.  This is why program design is best left NOT to new trainees.  Which, on that note, they tend to overfixate on progressive overload, as though THAT is the answer to all programming concerns (or, more specifically, the answer to “what makes this a program and not a routine?”)  And yes, there is a significant issue of wheel spinning amongst the general populace, wherein they just go to the gym, move around a bunch, go home, and repeat for years on end, without producing any actual results because they’re not actually challenging themselves to IMPROVE during their sessions at the gym, but progressive overload is NOT the silver bullet it’s made out to be: it’s simply A manner of generating stimulus.

 

 

We’re going to get into “no true Scotsman” territory here, because technically what I’m about to say can be understood to mean “progressive overload”, but let’s appreciate what they layperson means when they say it: doing MORE than you did the last time you were at the gym. Super Squats makes this simple by keeping the sets and reps the same on the big set of squats (1x20) and telling the trainee to just add 5-10lbs to the bar each time they squat: that’s as basic as it can get with progressive overload.  You can also do this with a classic “double progression” approach: you pick a rep range (8-12), start at the bottom of that range, work up to the top of it over a series of sessions, then add weight and start the whole process over again.  There are other methods as well, but ultimately, all these methods accomplish is creating the STIMULUS we discussed earlier in order to trigger a growth response from the body.  In turn, commonly defined “progressive overload” is NOT necessary as a means to grow: it’s simply A way to grow.

 

John Meadows was notorious for never repeating the same workout twice: he’s always change things from workout to workout, and this was by design.  This allowed a natural form of autoregulation for the trainee, preventing them from becoming too skilled at a lift to the point where they were more improving their ability to RECRUIT motor units into the lift to maximize poundages lifted (which, in turn, can elevate the risk/consequences of the lift) and, instead, forcing them to focus on generating the necessary degree of strain in order to create the stimulus to grow.  The old adage “the body doesn’t know how much you’re lifting” holds quite true: one does not need to lift more weight from training session to training session, NOR do they need to increase reps/sets/volume/tonnage, etc: they simply need to generate the stimulus necessary to trigger a growth response.  What this DOES require is for a trainee to be in tune with their body enough to know when they’re actually pushing it to the point of triggering growth, which is why progressive overload tends to be the more preferred approach to “guarantee” results, but we say all this to acknowledge that this is simply A manner to achieve stimulus, with stimulus itself being more the primary concern of the roots of a program.  And, of course, I bring up Meadows, but he’s not alone in this approach: Jon Andersen also employs it, as did Ivan Putski, and if you read Jamie Lewis’ “365 Days of Brutality”, you’ll find that MANY old school musclemen were far more “ad hoc” in their training, choosing movements that DAY and just going hard on them until they were done.

 

Polish power BEFORE Mariusz

 

While on this discussion, some other methods we can employ to progress training include increasing training density (getting the same amount of work done in less time), increasing the speed that the bar/weight moves, improve our control over the weights, lift the same weight for the same reps while under a greater state of fatigue (Pavel Tsastouline had a great program based on this where you’d do the same exercises every day but switch the order of them), etc.  These metrics become helpful when we discover that we are, in fact, human and not necessarily always capable of adding weight to the bar every session.   

 

 

What else do beginners fixate on when it comes time to “write a program”?  Sets and reps of course.  And really, it’s just reps, because most beginners only the numbers 3 and 5 when it comes to sets (no one does 4 sets of 4, ever).  Beginner trainees tend to believe that rep range ultimately determines outcome of training, wanting to know what they strength rep range is vs the hypertrophy rep range vs the endurance rep range vs the cardio.  With just the briefest of scrutiny, all of this falls apart: we’re told that 8-12/15 is the “hypertrophy range” and anything above that is endurance/cardio…until you do Super Squats and live your life around a 20 rep squat set that makes you grow like an absolute weed for 6 weeks.  Or Dan John’s “Mass Made Simple”, which has you do a set of FIFTY reps with your bodyweight by the end of the program and, once again, triggers a LOT of growth.  Where else have we seen programs that trigger growth?  10x3 was very popular in the mid to late aughts, because it took the 3x10 convention and turned it on its head…and it STILL worked for creating hypertrophy.  Although we also found out we weren’t nearly as innovative as we thought, because Bruce Randall pitched the idea of flipping sets and reps in order to get in more reps with heavier poundages back in the 60s.  But it’s also interesting how that same 10x3 that promotes hypertrophy can ALSO promote speed when executed per Westside Barbell’s “Dynamic Effort Method”.  Heck, I always get frustrated when people see the 10x10 of Deep Water and assume it’s the exact same thing as German Volume training, because it’s a testament to how much folks only look at the sets and reps and never the actual PROGRAMMING of a program. 

 

What am I trying to get at with this diatribe?  Sets and reps are merely mechanisms available to determine/control the VOLULME of the training, which, in turn, is simply a mechanism meant to achieve stimulus without overexceeding the fatigue threshold.  The body isn’t a computer that you program with a certain formula of sets and reps and it spits out a predictable outcome: we’re simply employing these sets and reps with an intent of achieving the outcome of enough stimulation without too much fatigue.  In turn, sets and reps WILL vary by individual and can very well vary from day to day based off the needs of that individual in the moment.  Do “cookie cutter” routines work?  Absolutely: I’ve employed plenty of them myself, but the ones that DO work tend to be designed by someone with enough coaching experience that they CAN extrapolate a very GENERAL approach to training that will work with the majority of people.  When you’ve coached a few thousand athletes, you have a pretty good grasp of what generally works, and you can scribble that out on paper and give someone something that will get them some results, similarly to how a decent dietician can guesstimate the general amount of calories you should consume along with the foods that will trigger the least amount of inflammation/gut issues and promote the most general health (Hell, I suppose Stan Efferding can do both of these things, and so did John Meadows, and probably Justin Harris is a good pick, and Jon Andersen seems to be knocking this out too).  However, a brand new trainee, trying to extrapolate FROM the extrapolation, is setting themselves up for failure.

 

Stand on their shoulders, or else you'll get trampled

 

And from here, we have the discussion of movements, which, once again, those without experience simply sees as a means to train a MUSCLE, not understanding that the intent of the training is, once again, to generate stimulus to grow.  “Isn’t it stimulus of a MUSCLE to grow?”  No: stimulus of THE BODY to grow.  That seems like the same thing at an initial glance, but in the case of the former we observe trainees develop what Dan John refers to as “Frankenstein’s Monster training”: leg extensions for the quads, leg curls for the hamstrings, glute bridge for the glutes, flyes for the pecs, raises for the shoulders, etc.  There’s nothing wrong with isolation exercises, and focusing on a muscle is a great way to ensure that it grows, but herein we’re understanding two different types of stimulus: local (the muscle being targeted) vs systemic (the entire body).

 

This is why big heavy compounds are so prized in the world of physical transformation: yeah, they target a lot of muscles, but they also put the entire BODY under load, which, in turns, triggers that stimulus FOR the whole body to grow.  The squat will have the trainee place a heavy bar onto their spine and stand there for the duration of the set: signaling to the WHOLE body “we are going to need to get bigger and stronger so we can hold loads across our frame”.  This is how we get that wonderful hormonal response to training, what Dan John refers to as “The Hormonal Cascade”, which he admits he lifted from someone but I can’t remember who that is at the moment.  Consequently, it’s also why these movements are also quite uncomfortable and, in turn, frequently avoided by new trainees, much to their own downfall.  Their hope is that they can carefully curate the perfectly selected collection of movements that expertly targets each individual muscle they wish to train while avoiding anything that causes pain, discomfort, or awkwardness in order to achieve an awe-inspiring physique…but if it were that easy, EVERYONE would be jacked.

 

**ON TRAINING TO FAILURE, SPLIT STRUCTURE AND REP RANGE CONFUSION**

Let's not pretend that we all understand what it means to "train to failure" the same

 

Further into this pitfall, these trainees misunderstand what the stimulus to grow ACTUALLY is, hyper-fixating on the need to go to failure in order to trigger said stimulus.  Yes, training to failure CAN signal the body that it needs to grow, but it is not NECESSARY to do so, nor does it necessarily do so as well, AND, it can in fact have the opposite of intended effect, wherein it generates too much fatigue to be able to recover, resulting in REGRESSION rather than progress.   If we take High Intensity Training (HIT) as an example of “to failure” employed effectively, we observe how significant appropriate recovery is to the HIT protocol, with very infrequent training necessary in order to be able to recover from the very hard training.  We saw the same thing with Stuart McRobert in Brawn, and with the infamous “Super Squats” program.  Along with that, we see that these protocols make use of HARD compound exercises ALONG with training to failure to generate this stimulus.  Meanwhile, new trainees with hyper-fixate on training to failure and will intentionally pick movements that make training to failure EASIER to accomplish, because they are more concerned with the “to failure” aspect than the “hard movement” portion of “hard movement to failure”.  Lateral raises to failure, leg extensions to failure, curls to failure, etc.  Because they’re so concerned with achieving failure, they select no movements that put them under a total systemic load, and they short themselves on their results.  Meanwhile, they’re obliterating the muscles they CAN train, pushing beyond the point of their own recovery ability, and end up just spinning their wheels, training stupidly easy movements stupidly hard.      

 

This has already grown into a monstrous tome, and I still have some ideas that I want to throw out there and don’t have the patience to find a way to weave it in, so I’m just going to spit them out and then try to summarize.  Another dead giveaway of someone just Mad-Lipping their way through a program is not considering the impact of one’s day’s exercise to another.  I also get a great chuckle when I see a chest/shoulder day right before leg day, because this tells me this trainee has never tried to hold a barbell across their back when their pecs and front delts are SCREAMING at them from yesterday’s workout.  The other is on rep ranges: the notion that certain rep ranges have certain impacts tends to ignore the reality that certain movements simply benefit from certain rep ranges.  Instead, we get myths like “the rear delts need high reps to grow”.  No, it’s not that: try doing a heavy triple for a face pull: it’s not going to work.  It’s going to become a row.  To actually be able to hit the damn muscle, you have to take the weight down, which makes the reps go high.  In turn, you’re not training ineffectively if you end up doing a few hundred reps of band pull aparts: that’s about the only way you can get volume there.

 

**CONCLUSION**

Is anyone still there?

 

In summary, programming is a matter of balancing stimulus and fatigue: we must generate enough stimulus to promote growth while not generating enough fatigue to hinder/regress growth, cause injury, or enter a state of overtraining.  This represents the ideal total volume of training: balancing that razor’s edge.  To manipulate/control that volume, we can control the frequency of training, the volume within individual training sessions, the intensity of that training, and the implementation of fatigue recovery via a deload.  From there, the training plan itself is a matter of selecting movements that will generate stimulus on a systemic level, in order to promote whole body growth, along with on a local level, in order to provide targeted growth.  Sets and reps are merely a mechanism in order to achieve that desired total volume: there’s no wizardry with rep range equating outcomes.  Instead, it’s more the case that certain movements simply lend themselves to certain rep ranges.  Similarly, progressive overload isn’t the panacea it’s made out to be: it’s simply A method of ensuring that the desired stimulus to grow is utilized, typically in the instance of a trainee who lacks the body awareness to be able to push hard enough irrespective of the exercise being implemented.  In that regard, training to failure is also not necessary in order to generate this stimulus, and the pursuit of failure above all else can frequently result in ignoring the real variables necessary in order to grow.