Podcast Transcript: 366 – Tim Ryan – How to Design Exercise Programs and Manage Progression and Recovery (The High Intensity Training Fundamentals Series – Part 7)

Please enjoy this transcript for 366 – Tim Ryan – How to Design Exercise Programs and Manage Progression and Recovery (The High Intensity Training Fundamentals Series – Part 7)

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Lawrence: Lawrence Neal here and welcome back to High Intensity Business. The podcast where we discuss high intensity strength training and provide you with the tools, tactics and the strategies to help you grow your strength training business.

To download and read the transcript for this episode, please go to highintensitybusiness.com and search for episode 366. You can download the PDF transcript there.

Today’s topic is program, design, progression and recovery. This is part 7 of the High Intensity Training fundamental series with Tim Ryan. Tim is a master superstar instructor and owner of Strong Life Personal Training in Barrington, Illinois.

You can contact him to know all about his services to studio owners and personal trainers, including workshops, mentoring and seminars, by going to his website Stronglifetraining.com or emailing Tim to info @ stronglifetraining.com .

Tim, great to see you again. How are you doing?

Tim: I’m well, great to see you!

Lawrence: Perfect. Alright, so excited about this one. Excited, as we sort of start to come towards the latter half of this series sadly. But excited to get into Program Design. So, where do we start with this one?

Tim: Well, we’re starting to get into some good practical things here now with some of the stuff. So with regard to Program Design, I consider this to be a broad topic. Certainly you would start with the concept of designing the workout itself or the workout routine.

But it does go beyond that because you also want to consider the overhaul goals and objectives of the client you’re working with. You also need to consider, things that will get into today, sort of rest and recovery between the sessions, and ultimately you’re striving for progression or advancement and improvement throughout the programming of the various parameters. So, if we think about this in terms of collectively considering all of those things, you see that it is much more than just taking somebody through a particular routine but it does begin at that routine.

Let’s talk about that first, when it comes to a workout design, the first question you need to ask yourself is are you going to follow a Protocol where you are doing a full body workout vs doing a split body part routine. Now of course, talking about the classic high intensity or originally the classic Nautilus training principles Arthur Jones Philosophy, they obviously focus on full body workout and really stress through various different means,  stress the importance of doing a comprehensive full body routine and not doing these split body part routines.

I think generally yes, to this day most of us probably still follow that protocol, certainly with clients. It is obviously the most time efficient and generally effective way of accomplishing that goal. But there could be a need or desire to do split routines and there’s some things that I’ll talk about, when you may consider doing that kind of thing. But starting from the concept of the full body routine, addressing all the major muscle groups, this doesn’t mean every single muscle because, what are there, 600 muscles in the body, so we’re not gonna be doing 600 different exercises but when we’re talking about a full body routine, we’re talking about the major muscle group. Your hips and thighs and legs, your upper back, your chest, your shoulders, your arms. And then the midsection, okay? Abdominal, low back, that sort of thing.

One area where I think a lot of people neglect and don’t do as much is the neck. The neck is extremely important to train, for overall health of the spine, for offsetting any type of stresses and strains that people have particularly in today’s lifestyle with being on computers and phones and having your head hanging down and putting stress on the neck, the vertebrae, lot of the muscles of the upper back. And even, studies have shown that it can help, particularly for athletes, and reducing risk of concussion and injuries, I always include neck exercises.

So, anyway, we’re talking about all those major muscle groups. So, when I take a look at designing a routine, I’m gonna consider that and also consider the implications of doing compound movements. Meaning multiple muscle, multiple joint action movements. Things such as leg presses and pull downs or compound row, chest press, overhead shoulder press, things of that nature versus doing sort of those isolated rotary movements where you’re doing something like a leg extension, leg curl, lateral shoulder raise, bicep curls, things of that nature.

We always hear this idea that the compound movements are going to be more efficient and they’re gonna use more muscle groups, compound movements are gonna be better for building muscle mass and things like that. But it’s not an all or none type of thing. Certainly, you wanna use those compound movements but you wanna use the rotary movements too.  I think a good selection and a good balance of the two types of movements are gonna give you the compliments of both, the advantages of both.

They are certain muscle groups that you cannot train without rotary movements. The neck that we talked about is gonna be a rotary movement. The hamstrings, the calves.

Lawrence: Do you remember, you and I had a massive debate on our first podcast, about the importance of leg flexion for hamstring recruitment. It was not really a debate, you explained to me your view on why you felt that rotary, local movement, was really important.

Tim: Right yeah. They are gonna be those muscle groups that you can’t really address without a rotary movement. So I definitely design routines that involve some of both, on occasions maybe I do certain workouts where it’s mostly compound, if time is limited and you want to get a workout routine with a minimal amount of different exercises or different machines, you know, you’re gonna be able to accomplish that.

Lawrence: If you have a client coming late do you tend to default to a few multi joint, like if they’ve got 10 minutes till your next session, you just go straight to like a big free leg press, chest press pull down, something like that?

Tim: Yeah, exactly. That’s a good point. You know, when time is really limited like that. Generally, if they come in late, I take a look at how much time I’ve got and then make a kind of executive decision on what’s gonna get deleted from the workout and I would delete those the smaller things, probably delete some of those rotary movements and just do kind of the big core, the big three, the big five, you know, type of thing where you’re gonna get your most bang for your buck and be able to cover all the bases in that limited amount of time.

Lawrence: Just to back up for a second, maybe this is a given, but you’re having a consultation with a client before any of this right, which is gonna inform that workout design as well. So you talked about whether you could have a split routine or full body but maybe the consultation might dictate what is potentially best for that client depending on their goals, their schedule, their preferences, things like that, right? So are we going to factor that into this as well?

Tim: Yeah, you know, starting with that, and one of the things I always say is that no matter who you are, what your goals are, what your status is. We wanna try to get a good complete comprehensive routine. We wanna cover all the basis. We want all those major master groups exercises, we don’t want to neglect things. But there are gonna be instances where maybe due to injury, somebody comes in with a preexisting injury or joint problems and things that they just can’t tolerate. That’s gonna maybe cause us to delete various exercises from the routine. May have somebody that’s involved in sports, athletics, pursuit of some sort where you’re not going to train the full body but maybe you’re going to wanna insert exercises that put emphasis on certain areas or maybe smaller things, maybe the grip muscles or something that wouldn’t be as critical for an average person but would be more important for an athlete.

So, you’re gonna take those things into consideration but while still trying to make sure that you’re covering all the bases and not neglecting things. So yeah, we’re doing that consultation. We’re getting focused on what their goals are, what their health history is, see if they have any limitations.

One of the things that I ask somebody right away if they say they have certain injury, whatever that may be, whether it’s a low back or a knee or shoulder, I’ll ask them okay have you found certain movements that just don’t tend to agree with you, you know, just lifting your arms overhead, cause you problems, or you know, doing this of that, try to see if they know certain exercises, or certain movements rather, that cause them problems, okay?

So, from there, I’m going to try to figure out a way: how can I work each muscle group without causing aggravation or irritation to whatever their problem is. Just a quick example, somebody may say: “my shoulders, I cannot tolerate pressing overhead, every time I press overhead, there’s a problem”. So I wanna be able to work the shoulders, but if I can’t do it with a pressing overhead, maybe I can do it with a lateral raise, a lateral side deltoid raise type of thing and a lot of times that movement will be tolerable even though pressing over the head isn’t.

So, there’s a way I can still get at those deltoids, still work the shoulder area, without causing irritation. We’re taking those things into consideration and I would say almost universally with most clients, I’m gonna design a full body routine. As we look at this, one question becomes how many exercises, how many different machines do you include in one workout. I’m sure people have different variations on this theme. You could go from the Doug McGuff original type of Body By Science thing of the big three or the big five, but you could go up and a lot of those Nautilus routines and Ellington Gardens routines from the Nautilus books, a lot of those had 12 or 14 exercises in them. I tend to fall somewhere in the middle of that. Most of my clients, I’m gonna probably do around 8 different exercises, maybe 10 if we’re doing some small things, adding the neck in and so forth. So I tend to focus on maybe doing 8 to 10 exercises in a workout, and then taking a look to make sure that I’ve got some lower body movements, you know hips and thighs. Got something for the upper back, something for the chest, and the shoulders.

Lawrence: Can you give us a very quick example of what one full body workout might look like?

Tim: Oh, yeah, certainly. First, let me address another point. With those exercises and fitting those movements, you also need to pay attention to what order you gonna do these, okay? Now, Nautilus always suggests that you do the largest muscles first and the smallest last. Typically that’s gonna mean addressing the lower body first, hips, tights, so forth, building through the upper body doing sort of the upper back, the chest, the shoulders, kinda finishing up with the arms.

Lawrence: So, the biceps first.

Tim: Yeah, right! You know with the philosophy behind that, the idea was a couple things. One being that, you want to do the larger muscle groups first because those require the most amount of energy and are maybe the most demanding to do. So, you don’t wanna do those at the end of your workout when you’re already tired from other things and maybe you don’t have the full amount of focus in your energy levels to devote to those, you know, bigger, heavy-duty, large muscle group exercises. That would be one aspect, but then, the other aspect is that you want these smaller muscle groups which are going to interfere with or impede the work of those larger muscles. A good example is you don’t want to work your biceps and triceps before you do your chest and your upper back and shoulder exercises because, as we know, when you’re doing any type of pressing or pulling movements, you’re using your biceps and triceps and those.

Lawrence: Unless you’re deliberately trying to pre-exhaust yourself, right?

Tim: If your desire was to have an arm focused routine where you really wanna hit those extra hard and maybe you did a bicep curl followed by a chin up, okay, that’s fine. But if your desire is to get kind of those larger torso muscles involved in the upper back and the lats you wouldn’t wanna do a bicep before a chin up because your arms are gonna give out before you really adequately stress those larger muscles. So, that’s what I mean by that. So, by those rules, you would think that sort of the abdominal exercises and the neck exercises would be done last. Because those are the smallest things. But I tend to put those in the beginning of the workout for a couple of reasons, one being you know particularly when it comes to the neck, training the neck is a very delicate situation, the form and the technique involved with it is difficult for people to perform. You’ve got to focus on body position, maintaining body position, posture, stability, and the exercise and obviously you’re trying to also be very careful and smooth and steady with your movements. So, number one, I find if you’re trying to do that, those exercises at the end of a workout when you’re exhausted from everything else, that’s going to make it very difficult to concentrate on those variables.

Lawrence: That’s a great point. I used to find it so difficult using the full neck, or maybe that was a neck extension, neck flexion […] MedX machines. But I always used to go in and use it and make a note thinking, I need to check if I’m using this machine correctly. So, I totally agree with your point. I think that if you have the maximum energy, you’ve got maximum composure at the start of the workout, that makes sense. We don’t have a neck machine yet, we will do and I’m just thinking that’s probably how we would end up programming it.

Tim: It really does work well in that regard. I’m intentionally trying to sort of build a little warm up into the routine prior to getting to those big heavy duty exercises. So, you know, if you follow the strict letter of the law and say we’re gonna do larger muscles first, you’d walk in the door and you’d go to the leg press. But being totally cold, and literally going from zero to sixty in two seconds or something on the leg press, I think it is good to kind of build in a little preparation a little warm up to get the flow of the workout before you get in something like the leg press. So, not only does doing the neck first allow you to concentrate better on the form and technique but it also gives you a little bit of a light warm up. Gets the blood flow and gets the body temperature going a little bit prior to getting into some of those other things. And I follow the same kind of thing with abdominal exercises. It’s just allowing us to kind of set the pace of the workout a little bit and gradually kinda build into it.

So, I’ll do the neck. I’ll do, you know, the abdominal exercise or torso rotation exercise or something, early in the workout then I’ll move to the lower body movements, legs and hips and so forth and then proceed through the larger upper body movements. We’re thinking about those things and then we are also focusing on always paying attention to not doing certain exercises before another if it’s going to impede your ability to perform that latter exercise, in a bad way. If you’re trying to pre-exhaust something, if you’re doing sort of a chess fly before a chest press or if you’re doing, like you indicated, the biceps and then followed by a chin up or something like that and if your desire is to hit those biceps or pre-exhaust something then, yet what you’re doing as the pre-exhaust is obviously going to weaken you and hinder your ability to do that second exercise, but in this case it’s being done within objective in mind and it’s accomplishing the goal of hitting that target muscle even harder, okay?

If your desire is to get the most out of, let’s say upper back and your lats and those larger upper back torso muscles, you would not wanna do a bicep before a row or a pull down or you know, something like that or chin up. So, kinda think about the implications of those prior exercises you’re doing and is it going to hinder those latter exercises in a bad way. Or is it going to help you know how to accomplish your objectives.

I like the idea, generally, unless I’m doing a big three or something like that. I’m going to do something before the leg press again, as kind of a warm up and preparation for the joints, prior to that heavier leg press type of situation. For example I like to do a leg curl before the leg press or sometimes even a leg curl and a hip abduction prior to the leg press and if you think about that, the leg curl is going to warm up the knee. It’s going to lubricate the knee joint, the hip abduction is going to do the same for the hip joint, and now you go over and you do that leg press and those knees and hips have been prepared a little bit for the loads they’re gonna experience on the leg press. It’s gonna help in that regard and make the exercise maybe a little safer and even your performance a little better because you’ve been warmed up and prepared. 

Lawrence: Will the performance not be impaired if you’ve already fatigue your hips or your hamstrings?

Tim: Yeah I mean the way I look at it, it may impede you slightly. It’s not going to do it in a negative way because if you think about it, the leg press uses your hamstrings. The leg press uses your glutes and your hip muscles. So, what you’re doing is in a sensor, you’re pre fatiguing some of those muscles.Which may slightly affect the load that you’re gonna use on the leg press but the leg press is going to collectively bring all that together.

And just fatigue those same muscles that we would have been using anyway so you know it’s collectively building that overall systemic fatigue and the fatigue of the whole lower body. And I don’t really notice, like I have on occasion, for years and years I always do the leg curl before the leg press, and one time not too long ago, I had a little more limited time and I just did the leg press without anything prior to it. I didn’t find that it was suddenly easier or that I could do more wraps or more time underload. I mean, I failed in about the same time and I don’t think it made much of a difference. I don’t really see that doing the leg curl or something before that is going to hinder you a lot on the leg press.

Those are the kind of things that I’m thinking about and another aspect that I’m looking at is, sometimes it’s uncomfortable to add fatigue to a certain muscle group prior to certain exercises like for example, if you work your quads real hard and let’s say you did a leg extension or the leg press and you really fatigue those quads and if you’ve done any amount of training you know that the quadriceps are a very sensitive muscle group and can get an extreme burn and pump in those muscles. I’ve noticed years ago, if I did leg extension, leg presses, prior to doing a prone leg curl, not necessarily the seated leg curl but the prone leg curl when you’re laying down your stomach, your thighs are pressed into that pad and when you’re curling, bending the knees and curling your your feet up. Your legs are being kinda compressed, your thighs are being compressed into the pads. I noticed pretty quickly that it was kind of uncomfortable to have done the leg extension, leg press and then try to do the prone leg curl and it just, it was distracting. It was uncomfortable. Now with the advent of the seated leg curl you don’t really have that issue so much because there’s nothing really touching your thighs, you’re just in that seated position the focus is real, good, just on the hamstrings without putting any pressure on your thighs so maybe that wouldn’t apply.

Another thing to consider, I wouldn’t do calf exercises prior to the leg curl, alright? Because the calves or the gastroc specifically the gastrocnemius muscle, that participates in knee flexion. If you are pre fatiguing those calves, it’s really going to hinder your ability to work the hamstrings because it’s gonna be like that those calves are starting to give out on you while you’re trying to do the leg press along with this idea of the pump and the sensitivity to having just fatigue that muscle. I find that calf work really hinders the leg curl. So, in any regard, these are some examples of things to consider, not only the implications are, doing certain exercises, gonna negatively impact some other larger exercise that you wanna focus on, but also, kind of the sensitivity issues and just just kinda doing things in a logic, well manner so that everything you’re doing is helping and leading towards the goal of more effectively working each of those muscle groups and not doing something that’s going to hinder your performance in a negative way and perhaps not be as effective.

Lawrence:    One comment on this. I love your point about, being mindful of certain exercises, being uncomfortable of the muscle, it’s like you know, good for blood and it’s uncomfortable from a previous exercise. So if people wanna dive into that particular thing with a bit more detail, there’s a series I did with Luke Carlson and James Fisher. But we also talked about exercises, this theme, among other things. I’ll make sure it’s linked in there in the show notes and Luke during that podcast shared all the rules they have for that. So we basically took those rules and applied them to our business so the same applies to like you know a lumber extension like if you’ve just done a leg press, do you really wanna crank someone into a lumbar extension and bring those pads down on their thighs maybe, maybe not, right?

There are few more examples like that and you just gotta look at your own setup, your own machines to figure out what makes sense logically and then create those rules in your business, so your personal trainers understand that they need to design workouts with those factors in mind.

Tim: Yeah and I’m glad you brought up this lumbar extension thing because there’s a couple things to think about. One thing you just mentioned is that if you’ve just worked your legs then you take them over and crank them in that lumbar extension with all that restraint and pressure down on your legs, it’s just gonna be really uncomfortable you know. That exercise is uncomfortable in that regard just to begin with, so he definitely wouldn’t wanna add to it with that type of approach. But another good point here is that, I never do lumbar extension prior to leg press. In fact I would tend to not even do leg extension on the same day that I’m doing the leg press. Because when you’re doing the leg press, it’s extremely important that your back muscles are fresh and strong, your low back, so that you can provide proper stability and stabilization and support for your pelvis and your hips, to keep your body position stabilized into that back pad and so forth and I don’t wanna be trying to do that leg press with a pre fatigued lumbar lower back region because it could potentially be problematic in that regard.

Lawrence: I noticed that. I was doing lumbar before leg press and I thought it was because maybe it’s a question about effective restraint and I noticed that my hips and hamstring were obviously being engaged. Because [..] it is impossible to completely isolate the lumbar even in the lumbar extension. So they’re being engaged and they’re being fatigued. When I jumped on the leg press I fought well, my performance might have dropped off simply because my hips and hamstrings are already fatigued but it could also be that my lower back is obviously very fatigued as well. And that’s playing a role in that chain. Is that what you’re saying? Is that what you’re suggesting?

Tim: That’s exactly what I’m saying and actually you’ve sparked another point that I wanna make is that, one thing I have seriously notice is if you do the lumbar extension, not only prior to the leg press, but prior to like hamstring work leg curl, you will be severely limited on the leg curl because even though on the lumber extension, the action of the hamstrings and the glutes and so forth are blocked out. They’re not assisting you on the lumbar extension exercise but they are active. They are contracting. They are neurologically stimulated. You are putting a lot of stress on the glutes and the hamstrings, on that lumbar extension exercise in a sort of a static isometric contraction and you will be significantly fatigued to those areas so I have seen, if I do lumbar extension then take somebody over and put them on the leg curl, they are toasted on the leg curl! I have to reduce the weight considerably in order to account for that.

For those reasons, I won’t do leg presses after lumbar extension. I usually won’t do leg curls after lumbar extension. I’ll have a routine where maybe those couple exercises aren’t in there on the days that I do lumber extensions.

Lawrence: I was gonna ask you how you work around it then because it’s difficult.

We’ve just talked about how you almost don’t want the lumbar to immediately follow leg press because of the discomfort in the thigh but then you don’t want to proceed to the leg press of the lumbar because you fatigued the lower back which will impede performance on the leg press. So is it a case of having the exercise on a completely different workout like a workout B, like you suggested. If you have seen that you’re doing full body workout A, full body workout B in a slight deviation to get the most out of each exercise. And, or, can you just space them out? So if you did the leg press at the start of the workout for example, you do a lumbar right at the end, could that work?

Tim: My my first sort of ideal approach would be to try to put the lumbar extension on a totally separate workout like on the B routine or something. And I may do, on the day I do the lumbar extension, maybe my lower body workout is gonna be like the hip adduction, the hip abduction, and the leg extension or something. So, lumbar extensions are not interfering with any of those, and vice versa.

Sometimes it is difficult, we’re just the designing somebody’s routine or maybe somebody’s only training once a week and I’m just having them on one main routine and I want that in there so, then I will resort to trying to separate those two exercises as far apart as possible where that’s a case where maybe I am gonna do my lower body first and do those leg exercises and then put the lumbar extension at the very end of the workout so that there’s maximum distance between having fatigued those legs before that do that lumbar extension.

That usually works pretty well and you just kinda have to consider, due to the constraints of what your routine is and how frequently that person’s training and your A and your B routine or whatever you have. And just kinda make a judgment call on what’s the best approach to minimize the impediments of doing those two exercises on the same workout.

Lawrence: Yeah it makes sense.

Tim: I mean, all these different principles. From there, getting to your question, what would be sort of a sample routine. One question I’m often times asked is, what’s the ultimate routine or what’s the best routine to follow or something like that particularly if I’m consulting with somebody and doing some things or if I’m teaching a new trainer, everybody wants to jump to this idea that there’s some sort of magical ultimate routine and there’s really not, okay?

A lot of different routines can work. A lot of different combinations of exercises can work, as long as you’re following these basic principles that we’ve been talking about, considering the implications of the various effects of certain exercises before others, then a lot of different routines can work.

Lawrence: What’s the popular saying: “The best routine is the one you’re not doing”?

Tim: Right, Yeah!

Well, even if you did come up with the best ultimate routine, it’s not gonna forever be the best ultimate routine because if that’s all you ever did over and over and over and over again, you know, you’re gonna get stale on that. So, there’s gonna, you know, at some point need to be some variation.

Lawrence: For all the program hoppers out there, I empathize because I’m just as guilty you know. You hear about some routine or some modification you could make. I mean it’s very rare that I design a routine for myself and I don’t modify it, within like one or two workouts. I just cannot stick to exactly the same thing.

Tim: So here’s a couple basic routines that I often use with people. So let’s say for routine 1 or routine A, I may have come in and have them do a neck extension or cervical extension exercise. Maybe I’ll have them do an abdominal, you know, MedX abdominal or something like that and then go over and do seated leg curl, hip abduction and then leg press.

Going in with the upper body, I’ll do either a row or a pull down. Then many chest presses, lateral raises. Then maybe do a bicep and a tricep exercise. Okay. And just one example.

Other times if I wanna get kinda more heavy duty type of exercises and a lot of those compound movements, I may do something where, you know again, I’ll start out the workout, if it’s not an abdominal or a neck maybe it’s a torso rotation exercise just again little bit of warm up and do some of those movements and then do a leg curl, leg press and then for upper body I might do maybe four compound movements. And when I do this, I’m gonna do a sort of a push and pull type of routine where I may start with a pull down or a chin up and then go to a chest press, come back and sort of the row, compound row, and then go over and do an overhead shoulder press. So you kinda push pull push pull. What I am looking for here is, I don’t wanna do two different pulling exercises back to back because again you’re gonna kinda just fatigue your arms you’re gonna take your biceps and fatigue your grip. And that second pulling exercise, you’re not going to do very well on it. You’re gonna be limited because your arms are giving out and you’re not able to really target those larger torso muscles that you’re after.

The same thing would apply on, you know, doing a chest press, immediately followed by a shoulder press to pressing movements. Again, you’re kind of just fatiguing your triceps. You’re going to limit yourself on what you can do on that second pressing exercise but if you allow a little bit of a gap and you do that push pull type of thing, you’re gonna perform much better on that second compound movement that second pulling movement or that’s second pressing movement okay so I do that quite a bit with that push pull alternating those those routines.

In the event where you’re going to do a rotary movement. So, if I’m gonna do you know, a chest fly and the chest press on the same day.Typically those I’m gonna do back to back. I’m gonna use that pre exhaustion approach, do the chest fly and then immediately do the chest press and just thoroughly work that target area. Same thing maybe I am going to do a torso pull over followed by a pull down or followed by a row.

Lawrence: Just just on that, just so people mean, some people who wouldn’t understand this, really I am not at all that experienced with using pre exhaust techniques. So the logic is that you’re using a single joint movement, let’s take the chest fly for instance. We’re just predominantly activating the chest right and then when you go into a chest press,

You are continuing to recruit the chest but you’re also using the anterior deltoid, the triceps, to help with the movement, so that you can continue to develop an even deeper fatigue but also continue to train the muscle group. That’s kind of the logic, right?

Tim: Right and more specifically, the logic behind it and you know, Arthur Jones typically, is the one that came up with this. If you do the chest press, as you noted, you’re working not only your chest muscles, your pectoral muscles, but you’re also using your anterior deltoid and you’re using your triceps, right? And of those muscle groups, typically your triceps or your anterior deltoids are going to fatigue first and sort of achieve hips failure first before you’ve really thoroughly exhausted your pectorals.

The idea with the pre-exhaust was to first do an isolated rotary exercise for that target muscle, in this case the pectorals. So you do that arm cross, let’s say, or the 10° chest and you focus on isolating those pectorals and bringing those to failure, and deeply fatigue those muscles. And then go immediately to the pressing exercises, the chest press. And now, your pectorals are pre exhausted or pre fatigued. So now when you consider the relative strengths of the pectorals compared to the anterior deltoids and the triceps, now the triceps and the deltoids are stronger than your pectorals are. So when you do the chest press exercises, it’s not going to give you or be those weak link muscles of the triceps, let’s say giving out before your pecs. You’re actually going to use those fresh, strong triceps and deltoids to continue to push your pectoral muscles to a deeper state of fatigue, and get a more intense focused workout on those pectorals.

So that principle will apply with doing sort of pre fatiguing your lats and your upper back muscles on a pullover exercise prior to doing a pull down or a row, or doing lateral shoulder raise, lateral raise exercises, prior to an overhead shoulder press exercise. All these are examples of sort of pre-exhausting the target muscles and then creating a situation where now those weaker link muscles of the arms are no longer the weaker link and can force those target muscles to deeper levels of effort and fatigue.

Lawrence: This stuff’s great. Now, it’s my understanding and I’m trying to really remember now. That there’s not a lot of evidence or any evidence to show that, doing so, pre exhausting or pre fatiguing or post exhausting, will let you produce greater results in terms of strength or muscle growth. So, the application which I think most of us are using, certainly if we’re using a sort of based evidence approach to our training, is to provide just a different type of experience for a client, right? Or do you think there is more to it than that? Like well hang on, yeah I get it maybe the evidence doesn’t show greater gains, at least that’s what I remember, sorry someone could correct me if I’m wrong, I’m just trying to think about that podcast I did with the likes of James Fisher and Co? Or are there other benefits, psychological maybe, here is the workout, more exciting workout, something different, a better muscular pump, you know, what’s your thoughts on the actual utility of these types of techniques.

Tim: Another great topic.That compound movement, that second exercise. If you’ve done the pec fire, the arm cross or the 10° immediately prior to the chess press, one thing I’ve always noticed both with myself and with clients is, you tend to not ever really make much progress on the chest press exercise or whatever that second exercise is, because there’s no doubt that this pre exhaustion just crushes the muscle I mean, in terms of the extreme fatigue and strain and pump and everything that you get in that target muscle of the pectorals, that can’t be denied, but in term of actual progress, I’ve alway found that you end up not making a lot of progress on that second exercise, that compound movement and you seem to kinda go nowhere with that.

So that would be one thing that I would kinda concur with. In terms of the overall effect or the overall results I know there have been, I’ve seen studies, Wayne L. Westcott PhD, I think years ago did a study and found this kind of advanced techniques and pre exhaust and things like that did kinda enhance results I think. I can’t quote it exactly but I seem to recall some some sort of him advocating that and indicating that they found that it was effective but I do think it was James Fisher and Luke Carlson and stuff have talked about that, you know, perhaps there’s really not any evidence that it produces any better result than just regular standard trainings.

Lawrence: And yet I know that Discover Strength loves using these types of protocols for just giving great workouts. Yeah.

Tim: Yeah. And I think actually, regardless of what the research shows, I think the limitation of the research is that they really don’t have the ability to accurately measure the results, okay? Because, let’s say you do wanna consider okay, doing this pre-exhaustion for the chest and the pecs and whatnot. Does it more effectively build more strength in your muscle mass in your pecs than doing it without the pre exhaust. There is no way to accurately measure, isolating the pecs and measure exactly, did those pectoral muscles specifically benefit from the exercise. I suppose you could do an MRI or something and try to measure the muscle thickness or you know, cat scan, whatever they use to try to measure the muscle thickness, but let’s face it: that kind of stuff has not really been done to the degree of specificity that we’re talking about.

I think one thing that could be the limiting factor there is just the inability to accurately assess whether something as specific as the pectoral muscles has a better effect after pre exhaust versus not a pre exhaust, okay? So, sometimes I think we gotta take this with a grain of salt and just understand that it’s hard to conclusively say whether it does or not.

Lawrence: Let’s spend some time here, if I understand your view correctly, so you are saying, it’s possible that the studies that are out there, and again I don’t know them off top my head and you probably can’t recall or the details of these things, but they don’t make perhaps measure the change in muscle thickness of say the chest, accurately, in these types of experiments and […] that they are typically underpowered in terms of participants. There’s also the fact that you have to have a large type of people to draw some strong conclusions and you would also have to have a crossover, where you have different groups doing different protocols and a control group and you can get quite expensive. So maybe there’s not the interest to do a study like this. I mean, I don’t know how valuable it would be to do a or useful to be to do it, you know, a big kind of pre-exhaust study and it may be it’s already been done and someone can challenge me on that but I’m, or I don’t necessarily agree with or understand your view on is, surely it is quite simple to to measure muscle thickness change. I’ll be sure there is obviously a little bit of measurement error there but so long as you got a big enough sample size and then study design is tight you can, should be able to to measure that.

Tim: Yeah, with that type of thing, measuring the muscle thickness using an MRI or something like that, certainly that could be done. I’m not aware of studies that have been done like that to the degree of specificity to targeting a certain muscle like the pectorals and measuring that and comparing pre exhaust, pre and post, to that. I know they’ve done some of those muscle thickness changes, just generally overall with training, you know, putting somebody through a program and you know, comparing maybe multiple sets, of an exercise versus single sets to failure, measuring the strength, measuring the muscle thickness, and you know, maybe arriving at the conclusion that both methods work about the same and there’s no real significant advantage to to do multiple sets. So I know they’ve done that. I’m not aware of any studies where say, with pre exhaustion, where they’ve specifically looked at say the pectoral muscle and trained one group with just chest presses or something like that, and one group with arm cross followed by chest press doing the pre exhaust and then measuring the pectoral to see which one got better results and and so forth.

Lawrence: Yeah. I think they’ve done a similar thing, where they tested multi-joint biceps versus single joints. So I think they have done that, but that’s different, that’s not testing pre exhaust. If I recall correctly, I didn’t find much difference. There’s also other variables like this study design. I know that a lot of our community have an issue with the way failure is measured and how the participants and studies they’re really pushing to failure and so there’s a lot of these other variables that I know a lot of the community are not happy with.

Tim: You know, it may certainly be true that if you train to failure, you know, a true legitimate failure. You had the motivated subject, a skilled subject that pushed all out momentary failure on say the chest press, okay? That, there’s no value to doing the pre exhaust or something. Now you also have to take a look at, what about all those clients that we all have, that don’t really push the failure, that it’s hard to get people to train hard enough it’s hard to get people to go to a true state of failure because they give up either, pain tolerance or discomfort or they just don’t have the motivation and the desire to work that hard. So now, okay, since we know that they’re probably not really at failure what sort of techniques can we use to get them to a deeper state of failure and now combining, you know, more than one different exercise for a muscle group or in this case, more specifically,

Putting that pre exhaust in place and trying to do the pack exercise followed by the chest press or the lateral raise followed by the shoulder press and doing something to sort of double the effect on that muscle so that there, through that you’re getting them collectively even though they might not reach a true state of failure and either of those exercises, collectively you induced more fatigue and more stimulation for that person that would have otherwise then accomplished if you just did one exercise. I would certainly think that there’s a place for doing either multiple different exercises or pre exhaust technique. Versus, if you compare somebody that is really working hard and really giving you a legitimate effort and training to true failure, maybe in that case it wouldn’t matter because we could have a situation where once you’ve achieved a certain threshold of simulation on the muscle maybe stimulating it even greater than that doesn’t have any extra effect. Maybe there’s just this idea of the overload or whatever that once you’ve achieved a certain level of stimulation the growth machinery, the process has been set into motion, and doing it over again with multiple sets or doing it over again with a different exercise for the same muscle, hitting it twice, maybe it just doesn’t have that much greater effect because you’ve already accomplished  the objective of doing more and more beyond that is not adding to it.

So, it’s hard to tell. I mean, we’ve got some studies that maybe kinda indicate some of this stuff but then, as you pointed out, you’ve got issues of the, well does that person really trained to failure or not or, are some of these techniques valuable. I would throw the same thing like these forced reps or these rep assists at the end where a person is seemingly at failure and you sort of help them do another rep or two after that to try to force them to a deeper state of fatigue. I would say the same thing if you have a legitimate subject that is trying their hardest and giving you an honest 100% effort in not holding back. I don’t think doing those rep assists and things are gonna add anything of value. But if you got a client that’s maybe held back a couple reps short of failure and is giving up on you then, forcing them to do that, not only could you get a little better stimulation and achieve that threshold you’re after. But that is also going to be a way to train that person and condition them to build a tolerance  for that discomfort and for working hard. Where you’re gonna get more out of them and they start to get more accustomed to tolerating that discomfort and maybe they are gonna overtime start training harder on their own.

Lawrence: I think that’s the most important point you’ve made about this whole discussion about this programming, it is that you can get more out of the client. It’s not just about preference, novelty, experience, excitement, about the workout. No, this is a trick to actually get more fatigue and help clients just get more out of their workouts. That’s a view on a hand really taken. Yep.

Tim: Right and the only thing I’d add to this is that. You have to be careful that you don’t get into sort of abusing some of this stuff. Couple things would happen. One, if you are doing a lot of this stuff with a subject that is truly giving you a 100% and it’s a true failure they’re achieving on their own.

I don’t think any of this stuff adds a lot of value and could be sort of an insult to injury and just overdo it with that type of a person.

If you’re doing it legitimately with these clients that you’re trying to get to work harder and trying to get a little more fatigue out of them. I think it’s a good legitimate technique but again it could be abused because if the client knows that every exercise of every workout, you’re going to do this to them and you’re gonna give them all these assisted reps at the end, and keep forcing more and more upon them, they are gonna learn to hold back. They are gonna try to save some because they know what’s gonna happen to them after they, you know, so called reach failure. So you don’t wanna train the person to know that it’s coming and kinda hold back and wait for it, you still want them to try to get it through legitimate effort on their own. So, this should still be used relatively sparingly so that you can surprise the person with it. And sometimes when I do this, I’ll try to do it in such a way that I am almost in disguise where the client doesn’t know I’m doing it. Certain exercises I am getting in a position, you know as they’re coming up to that last rep or so, I’ll get in a position where they can’t see me but I can assist the movement arm to move a little if they get stuck, and  I’ll give them just such a slight degree of help, almost to the point where they don’t realize that I’m helping them and they think they got it on their own. It’s hard to do that on every exercise because it depends on what sort of leverage point you have on the machine and how much load they’re using but in a lot of cases you can just sort of barely assist that movement arm and just tweak it enough that you kinda get them through that rep without them hardly knowing you help them and they did most on their own.

Lawrence: Wow, what? Can you give me some examples? What machines do you help where they can’t see you helping in particular?

Tim: Well, one would be, particularly the Avenger leg press because you’ve got that big lever arm with the weight horn hanging out, you could be standing sort of behind them, slightly in their peripheral view but you’re standing sort of behind them but you’ve got a big leverage advantage. That you can push on that weight horn and assist them through it and if you do it well they’ll hardly know that you helped.

You could do that, sometimes with a pull down, and you could get behind them, reach up and give a little assist on that movement arm. Things like that. I can sometimes do it on the MedX chest press where I can kinda stand behind them kinda where the weight stack is and just give a little bit of help on that movement arm. Things like that. I’ve got the medical lumbar extension, and I can walk around behind them and I can sort of grab that moving arm and slightly assist them and they don’t even know what I’m doing back there. So, you can’t do it on every exercise but you know, I’ll sneak up and, I’m just going to surprise them at the end when they think they’re done and they’re about to just give up and then I’ll step in at the last second and just give them an assistance or to get through whatever sticking point they got there, so.

Lawrence: Just on the MedX seated row, what would you do there for assisted rep, because that’s what we’ve been doing and I’m not sure if this is always ideal, is actually grabbing the forearms of the subject, and then pulling it back. And it has worked well, I’d said to be honest I think that us trainers are doing it to each other I’m not sure we’ve been doing it with clients as much I think that’s partially because you know there’s still kind of that post COVID, reluctant to wanna be too physical of each other. Although that’s starting to really go now I know, people are shaking my hand a lot more so that’s good. Yeah.

But I’m just curious, how do you do assisted reps on the seated row on the MedX.

Tim: I would say generally, I’m gonna assist through the movement arm, and just kinda grab against kind of a lower part of the movement arm near the handles and kinda just assist that pulling back. I have on occasion done kinda what you said where, I’ll come around behind them and I’ll reach out and also to grab their elbows or their forearm, near their elbow and I’ll assist by slightly pulling back on their arms like that. Usually I’ll do that if I have a person who’s not adequately sort of directing the movement trying to bring those elbows back and trying to retract the shoulder blades and so forth. Sometimes what people do is, I call it […] they’re trying to do it all with their arms. They reach a certain point where their elbows stop moving towards the rear and they just start trying to bend their biceps or curl, their wrists or something, and try to move, the movement arm further but by doing that they’re not really moving their elbows any further to the rear end, gaining any greater range of motion or contraction on those target muscles.

So, if somebody’s doing that, I’ll tend tomorrow to often assist through the elbows because not only I try to assist them, I’m trying to get them to focus on moving their elbows to the rear. Keep contracting those upper back muscles getting more range of motion via moving the elbows rearward and not just focusing on moving the machine. So you could do it either way. I think if a person is doing the correct form and Technique and so forth, giving a little assist through the movement arm is probably the better way to go.

Lawrence: Awesome. So sorry if I take you off track there with the program design but those work some good discussions.

Tim: This is all good. You brought up some good points. I’m really stimulating my thinking in a couple points. I gave, right before this, an example or two of a routine and I would say with most people, particularly anybody training twice a week, I’m going to have at least an A routine and B routine. So two different routines that I’ll alternate. So a client training twice a week is gonna get the A routine once a week and the B routine once a week. And the A and the B routine will be completely different like completely two different totally distinct routines that does not repeat any of the same exercises. Now of course you gotta have enough machines or  enough exercises to create two routines. For a facility that only has six or eight machines in total it’s gonna be hard to have an A and B routine.

But if you’ve got the ability to create two totally distinct routines, you can do that and what’s great is this is where it really comes in and works well with combining both compound movements and rotary movements that you can have a collection of both in both routines. What I will do on alternating, if I did the leg press on the A routine, then on the B routine I’m gonna do the leg extension. So both routines are gonna eat the quadriceps but one routine is hitting the quadriceps via the compound movement of the leg press and the other routine is hitting the quads through the leg extension. If you have access to it one thing I really like doing is using the Nautilus hip extension or the hip and back exercise to use that on sort of a B routine. So, you know, on the A routine having done the leg press, you’re using your hips and your glutes, your hamstrings, and your quads. But on the B routine, you know, if you’ve done the leg extension, you’ve hit the quads but you didn’t hit the glutes or the hip area. So, doing say the hip extension or the hip and back, doing the […], leg extension, what you can do is to create though the rotary movement, you create a routine where you still address all the different, sort of functions of the lower body and you’re getting the hips and the quads and the hamstrings and everything addressed through the collection of those exercises.

Same time of approach with the upper body, if I’ve done one or two compound pulling movements or something for the upper back, I’m gonna go on the B routine, get the pull over and use that. I’ve also got a rowing torso, the old Nautilus rowing back or rowing torso exercise which is sort of an isolated rotary. Kinda rowing type of movement. So, you could use that. Obviously, you’ve got the pec fly, arm cross, 10°, you’ve got lateral raises, and whatever you didn’t do on that A routine, you can then compliment that by doing either the rotary or the compound companion on the B routine. If I do chest presses and […] on the A routine, I’m gonna get that 10° chest or that arm cross on the B routine.

Lawrence: I love this. This is exactly how we’ve been designing them as well. Which is nice to hear. In terms of making sure that across both workouts you’re getting a single joint as well as that multi joint, sort of focus on each muscle. Make sure you’re getting all the bases and making it really comprehensive.

Tim: Yeah and again just look at it collectively with your routines. If you’re doing that A and the B routine and a person’s training twice a week you really got a lot of opportunity there to involve a collection of all these different exercises. So, you’re getting the variety, you’re getting the different types of movements you’re addressing the muscles in different ways but your using the advantages of the compound movements complimenting with the advantages of rotary movements and those muscles are really getting, over the course of the week, getting thoroughly fatigued, internally stimulated and trained.

Now it does get a little trickier, if somebody’s only training once a week, I still will have an A and B routine but I won’t necessarily alternate them back and forth, because I feel if you jump around too much and then you end up training each routine only once every 2 weeks, then it tends to e harder to make progress and things like that. So with the “once-of-weekers”, I’ll create kind of the primary A routine, that is really thorough and covers all the basis, and I’ll them do that maybe three 4 weeks in a row, obviously once a week but three or four workouts in a row, they’ll do that main routine and then maybe every fourth workout or something, I’ll throw the B routine on just as alternating kinda variation just to give him a break from that A routine or something, and just just throw that in there. So, sometimes you have to get creative with some of this stuff and just consider what’s going on with the length of time between the routines because if you if you’re jumping around too much or if there’s too long of a period between using various exercises, it’s pretty hard to make progress on on those. You have to kinda work with what your limitations are in that regard. Unless you got any other questions about specific program design, we can start to talk about how this leads into progression, kind of recovery and progression.

Lawrence: No question but just a point I wanna make. You mention about the Avenger leg press and how handy it is for giving an assisted rep on the slide and you did a great video on how to use it, how to actually train a client from start to finish which I really appreciate you did that for High Intensity Business. So we will find that video on YouTube, you actually demonstrate how you do the assist in that video so that’s really good. Good education too. We could obviously talk about program design endlessly, but I think we’ll leave it there and move on to the next point if you want.

Tim: Ultimately, with all of our training, we’re obviously trying to progress, we’re trying to get improvements, trying to adapt and grow stronger, build muscle mass, etc. So, in order to do that we all know that you need to recover from your workout. You need to strive to make progress with each workout. So, when we talk about progression from workout to workout, that can be in the form of training with progressively heavier weight overtime. Or it could be using the same weight but achieving more repetitions or a little longer time underload, depending on where you eat with those two. But in some shape or form, having some sort of improvement workout to workout. I am always looking at if a person has sort of achieved failure in a previous workout, but they did it sort of the upper hand of the rep range or the upper end of the time under load range, then my progression is gonna be adding more weight on that next workout.

In the cases where maybe the person achieved failure on the lower end of the range, I perhaps gonna keep the weight the same and challenge them to go a little bit longer, more time under load or get an extra rep more than they did last workout. So the progression would be that. And sort of the gold standard would be double progression. You know, where you’re gonna add a little more weight and you’re gonna get, you know, an extra wrap or little more time underload. That would be great. But you wanna see that from workout to workout, and be challenging for that and.

When it comes to more advanced situations, those weight graduations are gonna be smaller, okay? Whereas you can see a beginner subject making advancement leaps and bounds with being able to go up and wait. The advanced subject is going to be much less […] and fewer and farther between. A good thing with the MedX machines, you can add in 2 lb increments, okay? And add to legitimate 2 lb, you know, because it’s a short stroke, weight stack, and that’s literally like a real 2 lb increase, where adding 2 lb to a larger stroke weights that could actually be 3 or 4 lb you don’t realize it due to the longer stroke and that’s a topic for another day but at any rate, going up by 2 lb or if you’re using a plate loaded machine, Avenger hammer strengths or something of that nature, you may be able to get these little 1 lb increase that you can put a 2 and a half pound plate, you could get get these little 1 lb micro loading plates. Sometimes people even get these little magnets and things that you can add a half a pound or you know, add ounces. The idea is someway trying to add a little bit of weight so that you can keep making progress and if you add a small enough weight you won’t fall back and lose reps or you won’t lose time under load because you have a little bit more weight on there, be a little more resistance but it’ll be such a slight change that you’ll still be able to perform and meet your numbers, so to speak.

So you’re always striving for that and for sure if I’ve left the weight the same, I wanna see some increase in the time under load or an extra rep on that next workout. So, I’m watching those things closely and particularly in the case where I left the weight the same, I’ll oftentimes tell the client what their sort of time to failure was the previous workout. Let’s just say it was 80-85 seconds, or a minute 25, I’ll tell them: “ok last time you failed at a minute 25, we’re gonna beat that today”. I’ll give them little touch points along the way. I’ll say: “okay, there’s a minute. You got at least 25 seconds just to match what you did last time” you. As they are getting close to that time, maybe they’ll […] and I’ll say: “okay, you just match what you did last time. Now, we’re going for improvement. You gotta get this next rep or you gotta get more time on that” and I find that’s pretty helpful for people to motivate them to get a little bit better. When they got that sort of, that carrot hanging out there, that goal that they know they can reach and particularly when you say hey you’re only 10 seconds away from showing improvement on this exercise, just reach down deep and find a way to give that effort and get at least a little more time today or whatever.

You’ve got an opportunity for positive reinforcement and you know, compliment them on the fact that they did make improvements.

Lawrence: That is a huge part of retention, for clients to see that they can improve and that they are improving. Even just by tiny, tiny margins.

Tim: I usually will sort of recap the workout with the client. Not everybody as some people don’t care, the numbers don’t matter to them.

Lawrence: They just get annoyed by you, like saying: “I don’t care, just stop talking to me”

Tim: Don’t tell me I don’t wanna know what I’m lifting. I don’t wanna know what I do.” But people that do care about that stuff or are motivated by that, I’ll give them a little recap and just, machine by machine go through and say okay: “last time you did this, today you did this and last time was this and today was this.” “You added 2 lb more and maintained the time under load”. Or “you had the same weight but you went 15 seconds longer today” and give them that feedback and again compliment them on the progress they are making. Connect the dots for them. You are getting stronger and stronger. You are making very good progress. In the client’s mind, all they know is that it’s hard work, it’s uncomfortable and the exercises, that failure, sometimes they feel like a failure here because they hit that point where they couldn’t do anymore. But if you’re tying it in and saying, “yeah, you hit that failure point, but you hit the failure point with 2 lb more, 4 lb more than you did last workout or you use the same weight but you went 15-20 seconds longer that was solid improvement.

Both workouts were successful. You’re making progress, you’re getting stronger.” So these are all opportunities to kind of tie this together so, that’s what we’re after in terms of progression, but in order to make progression, you’ve gotta recover from the previous session or the previous workout. How long does that take? Lots of different variables. Lots of opinions on that. I would say generally, most average clients know that they can train twice a week. And still make progress and recover. They have studies, once a week, twice a week, 3 times a week, pretty across the board, most people make very good progress on twice a week training. Three times a week doesn’t enhance that. One time a week is maybe gonna be a little less progress than twice a week. With the average person, I think a twice a week program is good. You’re gonna maybe have these more advanced subjects that are working extremely hard and are motivated and disciplined and are really giving you all and maybe with those twice a week is a little too much. You maybe need to insert a little more recovery time between the workouts and one way of doing this you don’t have to necessarily go from twice a week all the way jumping to once a week. You could do something where if you consider this a twice a week program that means, the workouts are falling on every third or fourth day. So, you workout on Monday, you come back on Thursday. Or you can come back on Friday. You workout on Tuesday, you workout again on Friday or Saturday or something, so, twice a week, those every third or fourth day workouts. If that is not quite giving you enough recovery, then, I think the next step would be to go every 4 or 5 days, okay? So, maybe you train Monday and Friday, on week 1, and then the following week, you do a Wednesday workout. So you go Monday, Friday, Wednesday, and then back on the following week after that, Monday, Friday and then Wednesday. So, if you kinda figured that out, that means you’re training every fourth or fifth day and in fact most of the time, Monday to Friday is 4 days but Friday to Wednesday is 5 days and Wednesday to the next Monday is 5 days. So, you’re really training about every 5 days, occasionally every fourth day. So that’s giving you another day or two of recovery and I think that is really good for balancing that work and recovery and making good progress.

Lawrence: I know we’re not gonna talk about it today but it gets a real challenge with the scheduling, because suddenly you’ve gotta […] session day. It’s difficult, you can’t lock in a recurring session so you end up having less capacity to service more people. That is the problem with six times a month, or in this case 7.5 or whatever it ends up being per month. It’s this scheduling challenge. That’s why a lot of our colleagues default to just once or twice a week and then they will program the workout accordingly. Whilst they might agree that your description on training frequencies for that particular individual might be optimal.

Tim: Yeah, and I think, you know, in terms of sort of the physiological response,

that Monday, Friday, Wednesday, Monday, Friday, Wednesday, type of thing every 5 days or so. That’s maybe that idea that you want but yeah you hit the nail on the head, now you start to get into trouble with the scheduling because maybe the client is not available on Wednesdays or something or they’re not available on one of those days and it’s hard to get consistent and keep getting that pattern down. So, you run into trouble with that. But there’s probably some other things that you can do. If somebody can’t sort of conform to that type of scheduling and if you’re having problems with that. You could perhaps keep them on twice a week routines. But then kind of adjust the routines a little bit so that maybe one of those workouts is sort of a primary workout and the other one is sort of more of a supplementary workout as well. Sometimes what I’ll do is that I’ll have that one main routine that is a good thorough body workout but the second routine might be a lot of these sort of what I would call supplementary exercises where maybe you’re doing the neck, you’re doing torso rotation, abdominal exercise. You’re getting your calves in. You’re doing that abduction, hip, and you’re doing some of those things that are not really gonna interfere too much with everything that you did on that primary workout. So, it allows you to keep them twice a week.

It allows you to still fit a large amount of different exercises in and sort of cover all the bases, and not neglect any muscle groups but you’re also kind of facilitating a little bit of recovery there. So that they can tolerate that and continue to make progress.

Another way of doing this would be to have the second routine or the second workout of the week be sort of a sub failure. You know, maybe don’t quite push as hard. Maybe stop a rep or too short of failure. So that you can again kind of facilitate recovery and not interfere too much with what you did on that previous workout. You can experiment with this and see what works best. I personally have a hard time not training to failure. I’m so conditioned to doing it and when I have a workout where I stop short of failure I feel like, you know, it’s a waste of time or something. I would say in that case if you can’t get the scheduling pattern down then keep them on twice a week but adjust their routines so that you really trying to make that second routine, train a lot of those different muscles that they didn’t really address too much on the first routine and then you kinda minimize the interference between those two things.

Lawrence: I mean I think we are probably talking about quite a rare individual that trains that hard in our particular clientele because you know most people it’s the opposite, most people you are […].

Tim: Yeah. Most people are going to do fine twice a week. One last point to make, you could also keep them on twice a week but do a slip routine. Where Monday they do the lower body, a lot of times I’ll do the neck, neck and the abs and the lower body on say Monday, then Friday do the upper body, you know, chest, back, shoulders, arms, etcetera. So, still two workouts in a week, still staying on the proper twice a week scheduling pattern, just training each of those muscle groups once a week. Lower body once and upper body once and again that’s gonna allow more recovery time in between. You have to experiment, how it’s working for the client? How hard is that client working? Monitoring the progress. Obviously, keeping those details and charting on the workouts and so forth and just. It all comes back to the name of the game, making progress and seeing improvements and not just seeing the weights go up on the machines or reps or whatever but seeing true legitimate improvements and they’re getting stronger, they’re feeling stronger, they’re body is improving and if progress is being made, then what you’re doing is working.

Lawrence: Yeah. One last point and we’ll wrap up. Yeah ,I think this can get quite overwhelming for people and I completely understand that. I think one of my most useful things to have in business is filters. Having a strategy really helps with that. So listeners will have heard me talk about EOS which is entrepreneur operating system. There’s a great book called Traction, you should definitely check it out.

Tim: Luke had talked a lot about that.

Lawrence: It’s Luke‘s favorite book for our industry. Well, at least it was. It might still be. It’s amazing and it’s it just helps you to define, you know, your strategy, what you wanna be known for, and it, see you create me this brand and these these strategic decisions which then helped make your decision so, you can look at all of these things who talks about today and tells us how you wanna design a workouts and how you wanna train people and use this to help determine okay what’s the right path for your business. The other thing is you kinda alluded to it there is you’ve gotta listen to your client right so you’ve got to be really rigorous and thorough in your consultation. You should have check ins whether that’s like a marker workout after like 12 or 10 workouts for example. Where you actually check in and say: “how do you like your workouts, what do you wanna change, how have your goals change, is there any particular muscle groups you wanna focus on?” and then you can tailor the think you’re doing in terms of what we talked about today, around those things. So it’s having rules in place and filters and processes in your business to help you, kind of meet… It’s a simple advice to think some of this, to a degree because I find it personally, every time I have a conversation with you Tim I’m like: “oh it’s just too much”. I mean they’re in a positive way. They’re complimentary. I just wanna [..] with listeners because maybe some people out there like this enriches me and actually I find it gives me more freedom to do more stuff, but for me I find it often I get quite paralyzed, by just the sheer complexity of it all. And so I’m always drawn back to the spirit of the law rather than the nature of the law as Doug McGuff would say and then trying to again as I say again here, use this filter as I talked about as a strategic stuff to help guide me on what’s the best decision for our business.

Tim: The main point here is that you’ve got to have a plan, you’ve got to have systems in place. Alleviate a lot of that feeling of being overwhelmed with all these different variables, but you have that system, you have that pattern you’re following, you have the plan of action to guide you and it makes a lot of this stuff much more manageable.

Lawrence: Sure. So, as we wrap up here, Tim just reminds everyone how they can get in touch with you if they wanna know about your workshops and mentoring and other services.

Tim: Yeah I would say the best thing to do is to go to the website at stronglifetraining.com. There’s contact, methods, email, form submission, phone number, everything’s there and you can reach me by any of those avenues.

Lawrence: Awesome. Thank you Tim. To find the blog post for this episode and download the PDF Transcript if you prefer to read, please go to highintensitybusiness.com. Search episode 366 and until next time. Thank you very much for listening.