Topic: How to construct your own workout routine v1.2

[Steven Low]

I put the next version (v1.2) of HTML on my new blog here:

http://eshlow.blogspot.com/#TOP

This is mainly because it's getting too big for forum posts (have to use multiple on some forums). PLUS, I am now able to add in some anchoring for easier navigation. Enjoy.

(I suggest reading the above link b/c it has the updates not present in the one below, but if you want to you can.)

Steve


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How to construct your own workout routine

     One thing I want to emphasize before we go any further is that training itself will *NOT* put on any muscle mass or burn off fat. A good diet is the ONLY way to lose fat or gain muscle mass or vice versa. Training coupled with a good diet accomplishes this; however, I will not be discussing any diet in this article.
     I've recently been asked by a lot of people advice on how to build their own workouts according to their specific goals. It's not a hard process, so I feel that this article will be helpful to everyone on how to construct a routine to focus on your goals. Anyway, let's get started.

     I've decided to rewrite and add to some of the guide as apparently some people still don't get it. This will be an even more comprehensive version including new sections on explosiveness/power work as well as further elaboration into my recommendations for newer trainees. I am going to be providing a Q&A at the end to reasonably common questions such as soreness, overtraining, and other things of this nature so hopefully this will expand as more common questions are asked as I will probably not discuss a lot of these within the article itself.

     Please note I will include links if I feel I need to. As I am writing from primarily memory there may be a few mistakes so call me out of it if you know of any; if there's a few concepts you want some elaboration on feel free to google them first before you post to try to ask me because that really gets annoying. Since this is not a paper or anything that is getting published I don't feel compelled to source any or all of my information as this thing is already 15 pages long at the time I am writing this introduction. Hate me if you will but again most of this is easily found on the net with a good google search.

This is not complete and will be updated accordingly as I finish more sections.

Additions since 1.0:

v1.1
Added sections for III. (indepth look at muscles/CNS), V. (hierarchy of a routine), IX. (Q&A)
Elaborated more on goals section as people were having problems
~40-50% completion of hierarchy of a routine
~25-33% completion of muscle/CNS
Added parts on warmup in hierarchy
Added Power to the strength category; 0% complete


   Table of Contents

   I. Goal setting
   II. The terms of exercise
   III. An slightly more in-depth look at the muscles and central nervous system
   IV. Exercise selection
   V. Hierarchy of a routine
   VI. Routines for power and strength
   VII. Routines for endurance & metabolic conditioning
   VIII. Specific programs
   IX. Q&A to specific questions

Note: if your browser supports searching then it might be faster to open that up and type in the section you want to go to.

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   I. Goal Setting

     First, you need to determine your goals. Good goals are tangible feats that you can accomplish. For example, being able to do 10 dips and run 400m in 60 seconds are both good goals. An example of bad goals would 'gaining muscle mass' or 'improving broad jump' or 'improving fitness.' They are bad goals because they are not defined – gaining 10 lbs of muscle or improving your broad jump 6” would be good goals. Anyone can say they want to gain muscle mass, but it takes commitment to write down that you are going to aim to accomplish a particular feat. Good goals are tangible ones that you can cross off your list like you would a grocery list. Making good goals is not only critical to developing a routine, but it keeps your motivation up which you need to succeed.
     Here are some examples on what are good goals versus what are bad goals:

Bad goals: get toned, gain muscle mass, lose fat, work my pullups and dips, work my precisions, do more dashses, handstands

Good goals: gain 10 lbs of muscle, lose 10 lbs of fat, do 40 pushups, 10 muscle ups, deadlift 400 lbs, 100 precisions, 100 rolls, do 1 minute of handstand work a day

As you can see, they generally all include NUMBERS. They are able to be obtained in the sense that you achieved a status and then you can move onto another new and harder goal. These are the types of goals we want because then we can begin to construct a routine around them. For most goals that can be quantified, one can see the logical progression in obtaining them – if my goal is 10 pushups and I can do one, then I need to work my pushups capacity so that I can get 2 then 3 then 4 and so on until I hit that 10. For others such as planche work, for example, there needs to be some creativity to sufficiently strengthen the muscles using multiple different exercises. Mostly, this just comes into play with tough bodyweight exercises though and a lot of them have been answered by people like Coach Sommer's planche and front lever progressions, beastskills.com, drillsandskills.com, and places like these so check there instead of asking questions that have been asked thousands of times already.

One good model if you are still having trouble is SMART:
Specific
Measurable
Action-Oriented
Realistic
Time and Resource Constrained

Make sure your goals are at the very least modeled SMARTly!

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   II. The terms of exercise

     Now, let's define some terms so that you are familiar with what I will be talking about. These will be VERY important and are critical for understand not only how to construct a routine but to also understand how your body works and how other routines work even if you aren't constructing your own routine and using another.

   ~The repetition continuum has strength at one end and endurance at the other. At one end, we have strength which is gained at low repetitions and heavier weight where a 1 repetition max (1 RM) elicits the most strength. On the other hand, endurance occurs with less weight and more repetitions where being able to do hundreds of pushups would be an example of extreme endurance.
   There are three VERY important point to take away from the repetition continuum. (1) First, strength and endurance cannot OPTIMALLY be developed at the same time since they are opposite of each other. This is why if you can do 50 dips and you start working weighted dips, your 50 dips will probably be a lower 30 or so the next time you try. (2) Developing maximal strength increases the potential for maximum endurance. This is why cyclists often work maximum strength work in their offseason. However, the potential for endurance must be realized by actually doing endurance work after strength is developed. (3) Strength takes longer to develop than endurance/conditioning.

More details: http://www.startingstrength.com/files/sample200.pdf
Updated since Mark Rippetoe took the other one down:
http://web.archive.org/web/20060710184848/http://www.startingstrength.com/files/sample200.pdf

   ~Intensity (how 'intense' an exercise is) is how tough an exercise is for you. This is generally defined in RM such that 1 RM is the highest intensity while 20 RM will be at a lower intensity.

   ~Volume or Load can be defined as the total amount of weight lifted in a workout. 10 dips and 10 handstand pushups at the bodyweight of 100 would exert 10*100+10*100 = 2000 lbs on your triceps for the whole workout.

   ~Frequency is how often you train or workout. Pretty simple.

   ~Failure is when you cannot complete an exercise with good form. I feel this is necessary to define mainly because much of optimal training especially strength requires that you stop short of failure most of the time. Although failure can, at times, be used effectively, it should be the exception not the rule.

   ~The Central Nervous System (CNS) stimulates muscle contractions. Initial gains in strength for the first 2-3 weeks that beginners often see are based upon increasing neural connections and efficiency of the CNS to stimulate muscles to contract. CNS fatigue from going to failure early in workouts often leads to a decreased capacity to lift heavy weights later which results in less stress being placed on the muscle to force it to adapt to become stronger.

   ~The Energy pathway systems are composed of the phosphagen pathway, glycolytic and aerobic pathway. The phosphagen pathway encompasses the ATP-creatine phosphate (phosphocreatine) pathway which is used to rapidly supply ATP from used ADP. This system is one of the initial ones your body uses especially for short term energy needs like sets in weightlifting. The glycolytic pathway is the biological catabolism of glucose to pyruvate/Acetyl-CoA. This system is used to produce energy when the phosphagen pathway is depleted. If the demands for energy from the muscles are too much for the glycolytic system to provide, the oxidative phosphorylation system takes over which utilizes the citric acid cycle, mitochondria and oxygen to produce ATP.
   These pathways, like the repetition continuum, do not switch on and off when one is exhausted. They are all always running at the same time, but one is emphasized over the other at certain times. Here's a good illustration of the process in two different activities (it's a bit off scale.. area under each color curve should be the same):
http://img511.imageshack.us/img511/2624/exerciseenergypathwaysdm4.jpg

   ~Metabolic conditioning (metcon) is a form of workout which exhausts the body's muscles as well as energy pathways. Generally, metcon exercises are performed in a row one right after the other to exhaust the body fairly quickly. A workout done for time to push the participant to go through it as quickly as possible with as little breaks as possible can be considered metcon. Circuit training is a form of metcon. The CrossFit program utilizes many metcon exercises in its WOD.

   ~Programming will both be encountered as you become stronger. Generally I wouldn't worry too much about these terms and what they mean for you now as you will come to understand that the complexity of training needs to increase as your strength increases to near its max potential. More on this will be forthcoming in sections VI and VII.

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   III. An slightly more in-depth look at the muscles and central nervous system

     This section is actually going to be very brief look at how muscles and the central nervous system interact on a largescale method to move weights. Obviously, I cannot be indepth as needed as chapters are written in anatomy books on this stuff; however, I can provide at least a decent background beyond the terms discussed above.

Here is a very short summary of how muscles are organized. This will be elaborated more later, but this knowledge is imperative to know as we will go from the CNS where everything begins to the innervation of muscles and how they respond.

     Muscles are organized down to a cellular level. A muscle is made up of many fascicles. These fascicles are made up of muscle fibers. Then the muscle fibers are organized from structures called myofibrils. Myofibrils are composed of long chains of the smallest type unit of the muscle that can provide a contractile force called a sarcomere. In short:

Muscle -> fascicles -> muscle fibers -> myofibrils -> sarcomere

     The central nervous system (CNS) is composed of the brain and spinal cord and is primarily responsible for handling sensory input, information processing and decision making and the primary thing in training which is obviously motor output. Once the brain makes a decision, it stimulates the primary motor cortex in the brain to send action potentials down to motor neurons which innervate specific muscles.
     Along these lines, the motor neurons innervate specific muscle fibers. Each motor neuron has approximately three to thousands or so muscle fibers it innervates. The less fibers that a motor unit has, the more precise and fine movements you can get. Therefore, the dexterity of your hands comes from many motor units with fewer numbers of muscle fibers in each unit as opposed to the quadriceps which have few motor units with many more muscle fibers because its movements are on a larger scale. A motor unit innervates RANDOM fibers without each muscle (so they can be on different fascicles).
     These motor units are grouped according from high to low depending on the force production needed. If the force production needed is low, the first motor units recruited are “low threshold” which are primarily composed of slow twitch (type I oxidative) fibers. This is primarily because slow twitch fibers have very strong endurance qualities and can sustain contractions because of the energy produced by oxidative phosphorylation for hours. Secondly, we have our “medium threshold” motor units which are composed mainly of fast twitch (type IIa oxidative-glycolytic) fibers which contract with a higher force (and speed) than the slow twitch fibers. These derive energy from glycogen and then through oxidative phosphorylation as the energy need exceeds the muscle's glycogen stores. Lastly, we have fast twitch (type IIb glycolytic) fibers which contract the fastest out of all of the fibers. These fibers use energy from glycogen only and therefore tire very quickly as their glycogen stores run out.


In progress!

P.S. I hope you don't hate me too bad for leaving you hanging... but again, this stuff is fairly easily google-able.

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   III. Exercise selection

     This is not a hard concept, but it can be difficult if you want to do more types of bodyweight exercises. These will mainly be dependent on what type of goals you choose.
     Generally, full body training is the most effective way to gain both strength and endurance especially for beginners, and this guide will mainly be focused on such. Therefore, compound movements like squats, deadlifts, bench press and others will for the most part be emphasized much, much more than isolation exercises like triceps extensions and biceps curls. This is not to say that biceps curls are useless especially if your goal is to gain 18” biceps. However, they are not usually particularly useful when you can work multiple muscles at the same time instead of just one.

     Let's say our goals were to hold a straddle planche (strength), 100 pushups (endurance), run 3 miles in 18 minutes (cardiovascular endurance), and to increase our broad jump from 6” to 8” (power). Choosing exercises to fit your needs should have two basic things in common which are (#1) exercises that work the movement of the exercise you want and (#2) exercises that work the muscle groups or capacity that you need to develop.
     For planche, we would have isometric strength holds like tuck planche holds and advanced tuck planche holds. These would fall under working the specific movement. There are other exercises that work the same muscle groups (deltoids, chest, biceps) required for planche as well such as pseudo planche pushups or tuck planche pushups. Exercises that work the deltoids hard as well like handstand pushups are also viable.
     For 100 pushups it is critical to work the movement a lot. This is where #1 would be emphasized a lot. Doing a lot of work with the triceps is critical to develop both the CNS and energy system pathways to allow for proper muscle contraction to do all 100 pushups. Corollary exercises like handstand pushups (HSPUs) which also work the triceps are needed less because HSPUs are more strength based as they are more intense, and therefore one would be able to do less of them (working energy systems less). The CNS is also not worked on the pushup movement while doing HSPUs obviously.
     For cardiovascular endurance basically you just need to run a lot. Start by working up to running 3 miles and then start shaving off time by pacing yourself for each ¼ mile and such. Mixing up aerobic runs with high intensity interval training (HIIT) is particularly effective at working the cardiovascular component needed. Fartlek is also another viable option.
     For increasing the broad jump, practicing broad jumps are needed. Technique is definitely one thing that many people (including myself) need to work on to optimize the distance gained. However, beyond that strength and power need to be developed which is often the most important part. Power, which is the most critical component, can be developed through explosive movements like olympic lifts. Strength can be developed from exercises like deadlifts, squats and other leg exercises. Plyometrics can then be used, if necessary, to turn the strength developed into explosiveness.
     As you can see, a certain blend of actual movements and related movements or training can be used to work towards goals depending on the situation. Strength or power goals like improving jumps or speed often will focus on explosive training with only a little emphasis on actual movements. Endurance goals often focus on doing the actual movement a lot to get the CNS and energy pathways up to par to complete them. And last but not least, isometric strength holds benefit most from doing the movement itself and related movements.


Here's some pictures/links to exercises:

planche:
http://www.dragondoor.com/articler/mode3/229/

HIIT:
http://www.mindandmuscle.net/mindandmuscle/magpage.php?artID=86&pageNum=1
http://www.musclemedia.com/training/hiit.asp
power running

fartlek:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fartlek

Broad jump and posterior chain analysis:
http://www.americanparkour.com/smf/index.php?topic=3046.0

Here's a link of many exercises to get you started if you are having trouble:
http://www.exrx.net/

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   IV. Hierarchy of a Routine

     Building a routine should follow a few simple rules namely to maximize the amount of training 'ability' you have in a single workout. For example, if I had to do a 2 mile run, do a 1 RM of squats, test my vertical leap and hold a handstand as long as I can which order would I do it in to maximize my results? This is precisely what this section aims to accomplish. Mainly, I am going to outline the general structure and then explain.
     Here is the structure:

1. Warmup
2. Skill or technique work (handstands, flips, L-sits, gymnastics tumbling, breakdancing work, etc.)
3. Power, isometrics, eccentrics work
4. Strength work
5. Endurance, metabolic conditioning, tabata method, interval training, gauntlets, circuits, etc.
6. Static flexibility work & cool down

     Warmup is first. This should be quite obvious and if you do not agree you should just stop reading. Basically to get in optimal mode to do work a couple things need to happen. The core temperature needs to be higher which means that the chemical reactions in the muscles will take place faster leading to better contractile function of the muscles. Also, heart rate and blood flow should be elevated to provide oxygen and nutrients to the muscles and to export the waste generated by said muscles. A fairly light sweat is a good sign that you are warmed up enough to start working out.

Here's a couple of examples:
http://www.crossfit.com/cf-info/faq.html#General7
http://www.americanparkour.com/content/view/254/327/

     Skill and technique work should ALWAYS be second. There is very little fatigue as just the warmup has been performed as well. Once your muscles and body is warmed up and primed to go, this is the optimal time for the body to learn new skills or movement patterns.
     Good skill and technique practice should be emphasized here. If you are practicing poorly such as sloppy form handstands with loose legs that are flopping all over the place, the body memorizes such patterns and will remember them. Therefore, when you go to practice them right it will be that much harder to change your ways. If you're too fatigued to practice just stop. Do not give a half effort to practice. This is the easiest way to get hurt and just learn poor movements.

     Power work, isometrics and eccentrics are solidly in third place. The reason I would put these here is because they all require a very large stimulus from the central nervous system (CNS) to operate effectively.


In progress!

lol, again leaving you hanging.. but I feel this is necessary because I never provided an outline structure so at least you know a general structure you can use for making such a routine.

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   V. Routines for power and strength

     I am mainly grouping this together because they are very similar in how they are trained as opposed to endurance.
     Power and strength are not one in the same. Strength is clearly the amount of force you can exert while power is the amount of force you can exert over time. Power is interesting because working it gives some benefits towards strength while the vice versa (strength to power) is not always the case. For example, olympic weightlifters who use power for clean and jerk and snatch often have very strong deadlifts and squats while, on the other hand, powerlifters often have very poor power output.

     To be straight out frank here for beginner lifters I recommend a *FULL BODY* routine which incorporates approximately 1-3 exercises for legs, 1-3 for pushing and 1-3 for pulling per session. Quite a few of the examples of routines I will go over are variations off this. Do not be fooled. It is generally best for beginning lifters to follow a full body routine for each workout because this will be THE most bang for your buck especially if you have time constraints on working out. One very good example is Starting Strength (which is discussed later in various programs) which follows a linear progression for adding weight each workout. Initially, a M,W,F setup will be effective and it is imperative that you are improving EVERY workout because your body will adapt very quickly as you are new to exercise.

Power is in progress... this is mostly just previous strength stuff from before!

     As you may know from part II, constructing routines on strength relies on working out with low repetitions per set and heavy weight or tough progressive strength bodyweight exercises. Generally for people that are newer and even intermediate in weightlifting 5 repetitions works pretty well to build strength with some endurance (credit to Starting Strength). 2-3 RM are much like 1 RM and can be used with training albeit the sets need to be pretty high to get enough volume in the workout the stimulate muscle growth. With that said let me say a couple general rules on certain exercises you are putting in your routine:

   1. NEVER go to failure. Always stop 1-2 repetitions short of failure or a couple of seconds with isometrics. Failure puts a lot of stress on the CNS and will therefore prolong recovery time both during the workout and possibly for days afterwards. This does not allow you to adequately put enough stress on your muscles to grow stronger which limits the effectiveness of your workouts.

   2. Always rest at least 2-3 minutes between sets. Sometimes with strength you want to rest up to 5-7 minutes between sets. Resting a lot gives the muscle enough time to recuperate so that you will be working muscular strength. If you do not allow them enough time to recover then you are going to start working the energy pathways in your muscle cells rather than the contractile strength of the muscle. The shorter the rest time, the more the exercises become like metabolic conditioning and endurance. So keep your rest times at least above 2 minutes if not more.

     I think the first concept with a strength routine that should be learned is how to manipulate volume correctly. Since I post on a bodybuilding board as well as many others, tons of people are concerned with overtraining and soreness and what they all means. Managing volume with a strength routine is one of the most important aspects to keep you progressing but to not do too much or too little. I like alternating day strength routines like m,w,f so I'll go over the general concept for that, and then I'll discuss multiple day in a row routines such as m,tu,th,f and other variations.

     So with a simple alternating day routine such as a m,w,f or 3x a week routine the volume should be somewhere around 25-50 total repetitions per muscle group. What I mean per muscle group with compound movements is for the upper body push/pull exercises. For example, handstand pushups and dips both work chest, triceps and anterior deltoids. Pullups and rows both work biceps, lats and back. If you are well conditioned to handle a large amount of work, the numbers may be even higher to somewhere around 50-75 repetitions or maybe even more.
     Isometrics are interesting in particular because how long you do them influences how many “repetitions” they could count as. If you were doing Coach Sommer's 60s planche and front lever progressions, then I'd count it as anywhere from 15-25 reps depending on how many sets you did it in. For example, if you were able to do the 60s in <= 3 sets, the exercise itself is not that intense for you and therefore will count as probably about 15 repetitions. If you were between 4-7 sets then it will probably count about 20 repetitions, and anything more than 8 sets would probably count as 25 repetitions or even more. The more sets, the more intense the exercise is for you so the above is just a general guideline/suggestion, but it gives you an idea of how to equate isometrics to total repetitions to construct your own routine.
     Going on the previous paragraphs, an overview of constructing a routine would be something like this:

   1. If we are doing 5 repetitions per set then it could be 3 sets of exercises for 3x5 or 2 exercises for 4x5 or 5x5. You can even mix it up with one 3x5 and one 5x5 or whatever you want to do depending if you need more repetitions for a particular exercise (for CNS adaptation), on how you are feeling or if you're short on time.

   2. Another option is Pavel's 3-5 rule which is 3-5 exercises for 3-5 sets of 3-5 repetitions. It works particularly well here. If you are newer, you probably want to be doing 3ish exercises for 5x3, 4x4 or 3x5. If more advanced add in another exercise or two.

     Now that you have an idea of how to construct one let me go over a sample routine. This will give you an idea of how to put one together if the above was not clear or if you just want an example. Let's say our goals were to obtain a planche, front lever, increase broad jump 12” and deadlift 2x bodyweight.
     The exercises you might have chosen could look something like: cleans (broad jump), snatches (broad jump), deadlifts (deadlift), squats (deadlift), planche isometrics and progression pushups (planche), front lever isometrics and progression pullups (front lever), weighted dips (planche) and weighted pullups (front lever) and/or rows and HSPUs. For simplicity since we have 2 isometric moves we are working towards, we will break our routine into 2 different workouts.
     Workout A would be done Mon, then Workout B on Wed, Workout A on Fri, Workout B Mon, etc. Instead of two rest days on the weekend you could continue alternating days if you want. A sample routine would look somewhat like:

      Workout A – do not forget to warm up for each exercise
   1. 60s of appropriate planche isometric
   2. 4x5 deadlifts
   3. 4x5 power cleans (DLs and cleans are too similar so we separate them)
   4. 3x5 appropriate front lever progression pullup
   5. 3x5 weighted dips
   6. 3x5 weighted pullups

      Workout B – do not forget to warm up for each exercise
   1. 60s of appropriate front lever isometric
   2. 4x5 cleans (big power movements before heavy compound)
   3. 4x5 squats (can be DLs again if DL is really being emphasized)
   4. 3x5 appropriate planche progression pushup
   5. 3x5 weighted pullups (could also be rows if you want)
   6. 3x5 weighted dips (could also be HSPUs if you want)

     If you feel like your strength is progressing really slowly with 3x5, perhaps add more weight or increase the volume by adding more sets. This is just one setup of how to implement a routine with tangible strength goals. As we can see the legs are getting two 4x5 which is 40 repetitions and the push & pull muscles of the upper body are getting two 3x5 each which is 30 repetitions. One final note is that if you are going to add in conditioning afterwards, you will probably want to drop exercises 5 and 6.
     For routines that go consecutive days such as m,tu,th,f, there are a number of ways to set up this. One of the most common is push-pull days or light-heavy days.

   1. With push-pull, all of the exercises would be categorized into push and pull. So Workout A would contain say deadlifts, power cleans, planche isometrics, dips and HSPUs. Workout B would contain cleans, squats, front lever isometrics, weighted pullups and rows.

   2. With light-heavy you could keep the same setup as the sample workout above, but on Mon you would do a light day where you used light weights and did 3x5 or even higher repetitions such as 3x8 or 3x10. On Tues you would go heavy which would be what is posted above. On Thurs you would go light with the workout you did on Tues. On Fri you would go heavy with the workout you did on Mon. If you only have one workout and not two like the example above, you can modify it so you go light with 3x8 or 3x10 the first day and then 5x5 the second day.
   The general theory behind light-heavy days close together is that the light day will hit slow twitch fibers because they are geared towards endurance (higher repetitions) while the heavy day will hit the faster twitch fibers because they can exert more maximal force (low repetitions, heavy weight).

     The possibilities with push-pull and light-heavy days are pretty much endless. You could even combine light-heavy with push-pull. The great part about consecutive day workouts is that they generally allow you to hit the muscles with a lot more frequency during the week which, if you manage your fatigue correctly, you will be able to make faster strength gains. Optimally strength is gained by training with high frequency, not-to-failure with heavy weight and low repetitions.
     A lot of what you do will depend on your conditioning level. If you make the routine and it is too hard for you, then scale back the amount of repetitions or add in an extra rest day. You will inevitably have to work up to the capacity to perform a lot of these routines especially if you are new. If you are advanced and have tons of free time, you can be working out 4-6 times a week and even twice a day if you manage fatigue correctly. For example, two sets of 3x4 in the morning and then the same in the evening for a muscle group. High frequency stimulates very rapid CNS and muscular adaptation, so if you do not burn yourself out you can make very quick strength gains. This example is, of course, at the extreme end of the spectrum.

More Examples

     A few questions were posed to me as to how to program multiple workouts into a week. One question was based on integrating 6 total workouts into a week. The other was about 6 total workouts 4 of which were 2 heavy push and 2 heavy pull while the other two were 1 light push and 1 light pull. Let's take a look at some specific examples (the ones above) to give you an idea on how to program these right.

        1. Let's say you are trying to integrate 6 workouts with low-medium volume into a week. Putting one everyday of the week such as Mon-Sat would be pretty rough on the body because it is indeed 6 weeks in a row. It can be worked up to (like elite gymnasts and olympic weightlifters do); however, it generally takes a while to do this because a higher conditioning level is needed. On the other hand, we can integrate them easily if we do 2 in a day. In this case, the question was posed to be as to which would be better for a Mon-Fri workout – A) 2/0/2/02 or B) 2/1/0/2/1 to which I responded that C) 1/2/0/1/2 would be best. C would be best due to the fact that from a fatigue management standpoint we want to plan our routines such that the days with the heaviest amount of work are before a day off to give the body ample time to recover. The gains you would get from each would probably be similar, BUT you would be able to sustain C longer without overreaching/overtraining which would lend itself to increased frequency over a couple of weeks and thus better strength gains.

        2. Alright, so let's look at the example of 4 heavy (2 heavy push, 2 heavy pull) and 2 light (1 light push, 1 light pull). In my opinion, this is actually very sustainable routine, and, due to its high frequency, you will make strength gains very rapidly on this type of routine as light days will help out a TON if not just for CNS efficiency and motor coordination. The question originally posed to me was whether a routine of Mon-Sat (Sun off) of heavy push/heavy pull/heavy push/heavy pull/light push/light pull would work. Well, it could since you are working opposing muscle groups you technically have 48 hours between each workout. However, constant repetitive stress as a whole on the body isn't that great from a fatigue management standpoint. A better option would be to combine light push with heavy pull and heavy push with light pull. This would cut down the workouts to 4x a week with more rest days. An example of how this would look is:

Mon - heavy pull
Tues - heavy push
Wed - Rest
Thurs - Heavy pull, light push
Fri - Heavy push, light pull
Sat - Rest
Sun - Rest

     Light should generally go before heavy because lighter days don't fatigue muscles & CNS as much (and hence less chance for burnout the next day), but in this case it is not possible so we alternate them instead. Consecutive days of light-heavy/heavy-light is not a big of factor for fatigue as 4 consecutive heavy days in a row is, *and* there is ample time to recover from fatigue on Sat and Sun instead of going straight into more workouts like the 6 consecutive workouts had. Adding in light days on Mon-Tues is also not as of a big deal as well because of the rest day on Wed, but that type of volume would probably have to be worked up to by increasing your conditioning level.

Here is another good example of how to do this (page 46 is main post but read the others for a good background):
http://www.board.crossfit.com/showthread.php?t=24494

Here is another more recent variation with two more routine constructions:
http://www.board.crossfit.com/showthread.php?t=26612

     Ending Notes: At 85-90% of 1 RM *all* muscle fibers in the large muscles are being recruited which means approximately 3 RM will recruit pretty much all of the muscle. Therefore, 3 RM is probably the lowest amount of repetitions in a set you want to go. Add to that the fact that it is hard to get enough volume to successfully continue strength gains (as 15x2 to get 30 total reps is wayyy too many sets) and 3 RM is appealing for near optimal strength gains. In this sense, 5x3 is the same volume as 3x5 and 8x3 is nearly the same volume as 5x5. The trade off comes in the fact that even though with 3 repetitions you can use more weight, it will take more overall time because you have more sets and have to rest between sets. Still, the lower RM will elicit better strength gains. Keep this in mind if you are working on particular difficult exercises especially bodyweight ones because sometimes those 3 RM will help out quicker than subbing an easier 5 RM.
     Also, switching between 3 RM and 5 RM like in the light-heavy days (like switching from 5 RM to 10 RM) is a good way to change your program if you are plateauing. This is another example of programming incorporated into a routine.
     Here's some information if you're interested in some more in-depth material (with studies) on muscle fiber recruitment and rate coding (rate of muscle fiber firing):

http://www.drdarden.com/readTopic.do?id=394848

[Steven Low]

--------------------------------------------


   V. Routines for endurance & metabolic conditioning

     I grouped endurance and metabolic conditioning into the same category because they work similarly on the biological level. High repetitions that work endurance require a high amount of CNS adaptation as well as energy pathway efficiency to constantly produce ATP. Metabolic conditioning requires the exact same adaptations, but is a bit heavier on the energy pathway efficiency since you are going to be doing more exercises and somewhat lighter on the CNS. So, in summary, endurance work requires very high CNS adaptation and high energy pathway efficiency while metabolic conditioning medium CNS adaptation and very high energy pathway efficiency.
     One of the most important attributes of these workouts besides reaching your goals is that they both work towards increasing your work capacity. This means that if you suddenly decided to start strength training (or even if you're combining strength training and endurance/metcon) your muscles and CNS should be able to handle more work during a workout which allows you stress them more for increased growth without overtraining.

     Building a routine is pretty much exactly like strength training except without the exceptions. The only general thing to note with both of these is that failure is fine to go to some of the time and in some cases most of the time. The biggest instance of where failure is fine most of the time is metabolic conditioning which has such a high energy requirement because of the different exercises done that it does not put as much stress on the CNS as it does on the energy systems. Therefore, it will not burn out the CNS that much while it will stimulate your muscle cells to make their energy producing more efficient thus increasing your work capacity for the next workout. Doing this “through the burn” is akin to pushing your lactic acid threshold (glycolytic pathway).
     On the other hand though not going to failure can also be utilized well with endurance and metabolic conditioning. Again, with metabolic conditioning, if one stops short of failure, their work capacity for the workout will be increased and therefore allow them to complete it sooner. This increases the amount of work per the amount of time (e.g. total power output is higher). This is akin to a higher intensity because although it is not like a 1 RM exercise, the total intensity is distributed throughout the body more by different exercises instead. This is one difference where metabolic conditioning is more like strength than endurance.

     Metabolic conditioning workouts are not that hard to do. Basically you want to pick anywhere from 2-5 exercises that you normally do more than 10+ repetitions of them. Then you can arrange them however you want and set an arbitrary number of repetitions for each exercise to do usually somewhere between 25-75% of your max ability. Then pick a number of rounds you will do each one like 3-5 and then go through all of the exercises as fast as you can. That's just a simple form of a metabolic conditioning workout.
     There are also other various forms of metabolic conditioning with different protocols. I'm just going to outline two of them, but you will see the point:

        1. High intensity interval training. We've gone this before with picking exercises but HIIT (along with fartlek) are good ways to work all of the energy systems in your body because it depletes them very fast. These are generally composed of full all out sprints for a short period of time like 15-30 seconds followed by jogging (or walking if not conditioned) for the rest of the 45-30 seconds. This will build up both the aerobic and anaerobic pathways in the body very quickly which lends towards good metabolic conditioning as well as cardiovascular health. The links are still above if you want to go check them out now.

        2. Tabata protocol is very similar to HIIT except it is done with exercises instead of running in jogging. For instance, let's take a look at bodyweight squats. Basically with the tabata method utilizes a period of on and off activity. Generally cycles run on 30 or 60 second intervals where you go all out and then rest. So with bodyweight squats in a 30s interval you would do as many squats as you can in 20s and then rest for 10s. After that time is up, repeat the process for multiple rounds usually 5 or more. The 60s protocol works on the scale of 45s on and 15s off. Again, pretty much a different type of metabolic conditioning workout that works all of the energy systems in the body very rapidly. Go to here for some more information:

http://www.t-nation.com/findArticle.do?article=04-046-training

     CrossFit has a whole host of different types in their FAQ where most of them are based on completing them in the least time possible. I would suggest looking at them to see what you can do if you want to create your own. If not, you can just use CrossFit workouts for metabolic conditioniong. Examples of metabolic conditioning workouts from CrossFit:

http://www.crossfit.com/cf-info/faq.html#WOD0

     Now, endurance is pretty simple and has one added benefit when transferred to strength training. Since endurance promotes a large amount of CNS adaptation this carries over as strength to *the specific exercise*. So if you were working endurance dips for 50 repetitions, this will also help your weighted dips should you decide to do them. It will NOT, however, lend strength to other triceps, deltoid and chest exercises like pushups or handstand pushups at all. I refer to this phenomena as “specific strength” which is pretty much strength related to that exercise from doing it a lot.
     Usually there's a couple of exercises that people want to improve to high repetitions like pushups or pullups or dips. These are fairly easy exercises to accomplish without weight given you come in with a good base of strength. Increasing endurance can be completed in a couple of ways:

   1. One of the general ways to do endurance exercises is to go to your max obviously. Failure is optional as it can help, but failure on the first set is often not encouraged as it decreases the maxes for subsequent sets. The total amount of repetitions for the whole workout will usually be higher if failure is not hit on the first few sets. So, for example, if I could do 20 dips and want to increase my numbers up to 50, then one workout for endurance could be 3x18. If I only did 15 then a 5x15 would probably be possible. The higher number you pick, the less sets you will probably be able to do so be wary. Generally, the best workout is one that maximizes the amount of repetitions per workout so 5x15 would be better than 3x18 since it is 75 repetitions versus 54. Some people are more naturally inclined to endurance exercises than others (e.g. more type I slow twitch fibers), so they might be able to do closer to their endurance RM for more sets than others. Find out what your body can do, and go with that.

   2. Grease the groove (GTG) method is basically a way to increase your endurance and specific strength in an exercise very fast. Basically what you want to do like 5 times interspersed throughout the day (say, before breakfast, brunch-ish, after lunch, right before dinner and right before you sleep) is to do submaximal sets of pullups and dips. So, for example, you do 8 pullups and 4 dips. 5 times during the day you would want to do 5-6 pullups and 2-3 dips for one set each and then just stop and go about the rest of your day.

For some more information on GTG see:
http://www.dragondoor.com/articler/mode3/69/

   3. Ladders are a fairly simple concept. Basically, you start a timer and do 1 repetition of the exercise then wait until the minute is up. Next, you do 2 of the exercise and rest until the minute is up. Continue this progression until you cannot complete the ladder any longer. A minute is an arbitrary amount of time so if you want it to be 30 seconds instead or 2 minutes you can make it as short or long as you want. Also, if you want you can increase the amount of repetitions you do by twos or threes or whatever you want.

   4. Pyramids as basically the same thing as ladders except without a time requirement. After you “climb up the ladder” you also climb back down. For example, if you got up to 7 repetitions with pullups and failed on the set with 8, then you could do 6, 5, 4, 3, 2 and 1 to finish. Like with ladders you can also do it by twos, threes or whatever.

     There's tons of other methods to increase endurance; however, I have just outlined 4 of them. Creating a workout isn't that hard as generally you are probably only going to have one exercise per the muscle group you are working. For instance, if you are working up endurance dips, it is probably not a good idea to try to do endurance pushups or handstand pushups as well because your triceps will be pretty much burnt out afterwards. You can generally do about 4-5 types of exercises in a totally endurance workout – legs (squats, pistols, jumping squats, etc.), core (abs and back), a pull exercise (inverted pullups, rows, pullups, etc.) and a push exercise (dips, HSPUs, pushups, etc.). This general rule applies back to if you are trying to combine strength and endurance/metcon at the same time.

Addendum
     I wrote this for a couple of fitness boards, so I feel I must comment on this specific topic since Parkour has skills and techniques like gymnastics or any other sport. Parkour and its techniques are generally considered skill training and/or in the endurance/metcon category. For example, quadrupedal movement is an excellent technique for body awareness and coordination, and I would consider it more as a skill technique unless you are walking more than probably 200-400m with it. Vaults and wall climbs are all considered considered techniques/skills rather than under endurance unless you are doing absurd amounts of them and getting exhausted. Demon's skill training and conditioning gauntlets, WHEN you use them, are considered endurance because you are exhausted your body performing different skills. Therefore, plan your workouts with these things in mind accordingly.

--------------------------------------------


   VI. Specific programs

     I'd like to note that a lot of programs are out there that can fit some of the goals you have (links provided at the end).

   CrossFit is a good example of mostly metcon program suited towards improving 10 components of fitness. While it is not specifically geared towards strength related goals, the conditioning level improvements it provides (specifically from metcon) is great for people like law enforcement or military where you need to be ready to go at all times. Conditioning level is important for increasing the volume of workouts as well which lends towards better strength training.

   Mark Rippetoe's Starting Strength is an excellent program for beginners to increase their strength in a number of core lifts with emphasis on the squat. I highly suggest this program for anyone looking into increase their muscle mass significantly, or anyone who is going to be doing any high impact activities in the future such as football, basketball, track and field, Parkour, etc.

   Bill Starr's Linear 5x5 Intermediate is an excellent strength program designed for the intermediate lifter to keep pushing the envelope on strength gains. Many people off of Starting Strength go to this program because it includes includes some programming to keep the strength gains coming. There is also an advanced version as well.

   There's other programs out there and some are good for particular training, but others are not so good. Based on the concepts about training I outlined in part II and how you found out to apply them in parts IV and V you should be able to determine whether a particular routine will be effective. A program like High Intensity Training (e.g. HIT a la Mike Mentzer) would obviously be suboptimal because it involves 'obliterating' your muscles once every week and letting them rest until you do it again. As we know, that would not be a good way to train either strength, endurance or metcon at all so it is not particularly effective unless you're on steroids. That's just one case, but if you look at the principles behind each program you should have no trouble figure out if it works or if it doesn't.

Links:
1. Crossfit – http://crossfit.com

Good elaboration on the important of conditioning level: http://www.rosstraining.com/articles/workcapacity101.html

2. Starting Strength (the book costs money, but I would recommend getting it):
http://startingstrength.com
http://forum.bodybuilding.com/showthread.php?t=998224

3. Bill Starr's 5x5 Intermediate:
http://www.geocities.com/elitemadcow1/5x5_Program/Linear_5x5.htm


--------------------------------------------

   X. Q&A to specific questions


In progress

[Matt Hudson]

I'm halfway through and I'm loving it Steve, however it's time for me to catch some shut eye, but you better believe your candy ass that I'm gonna read this thing thoroughly more than once.. lol
Great job.

[pinkyturtle]

Wow, great article! Definitely got a lot of information out of it!

[Steven Low]

No update but here's a nice overview of section III from some author on t-nation if you wanted more info fast without me having to update this:

http://www.t-nation.com/article/performance_training/maximal_force

[Chris Salvato]

is it me or do you have 2 sections labeled as III???

[Steven Low]

is it me or do you have 2 sections labeled as III???

Yeah... poor editting when I moved stuff around. :p

[FlyHigh]

im sorry i wasnt sure were to post this... i know it not parkour relevent either, but here it is, My bro wants to know what kind of workout to do in order to be able to weild any kind of sword (katana,claymore,short,foil) think samurai, highlander, gladiator, and three musketeers

[Matt Hudson]

a parkour workout will help him out for sure, btw, you should have asked in the general fitness forum

[FlyHigh]

ok thanks

[Tom "Hayabusa" Johnson]

I have a question regarding a personal routine if I still want to include the APK WOD.  If skill training is prioritized right after the initial warm-up, does that mean that after my warm-up, I should practice my handstands, balancing, vaults, etc., and then do the WOD?  Because if so, I've been doing it backwards for the past week or so...><.  It would also explain why my skill training hasn't felt as effective....

[Chris Salvato]

I have a question regarding a personal routine if I still want to include the APK WOD.  If skill training is prioritized right after the initial warm-up, does that mean that after my warm-up, I should practice my handstands, balancing, vaults, etc., and then do the WOD?  Because if so, I've been doing it backwards for the past week or so...><.  It would also explain why my skill training hasn't felt as effective....

Yes.

Anything that is technique based is done DIRECTLY after the warmup.

If you wait until after strength work then you will be too fatigued to execute the movements properly which causes stunted progressions and/or regressions.

[Tom "Hayabusa" Johnson]

Well, that explains a whole helluva lot...lol.

[tombb]

First one small side point and then a question:

A good diet is the ONLY way to lose fat or gain muscle mass or vice versa.

Just from a purely academic point of view this is not quite correct, because genetic and hormonal responses can actually have a much bigger impact than diet or exercise.
But of course I do agree with your statement in practice, since we generally only control diet and exercise, and generally use our diet to be the bigger constraint in our energy balance (and in manipulating indirectly hormones like insulin, gH, cortisol, etc).
Still it's at least interesting to keep in mind that if you have the right genes activated you can grow muscle and lose fat even without any exercise at all or any change in diet.  Consider for example what a single defect in the myostatin gene can do in cows, where blue belgian cows have a double-muscled phenotype and look like huge bodybuilder-cows, and yet they don't do more exercise or eat grass any differently than their normal fat cows counterparts with a fully functional myostatin gene. Similar mutations have also been found in a few instances in people, who usually ended up naturally steering toward bodybuilding (probably saying "putting up muscles is so easy, I don't know why others have a hard time with that"). To a much smaller, subtler degree there are many other small individual differences that explain how progress in one aspect or another might take more effort than it did for someone else.
But in a way a lot of our efforts in choosing the right diet and exercise programs is mostly to convince our body to activate certain types of responses (muscle growth, fat loss, etc) which from a theoretical point of view can be turned on even in the complete absence of exercise (or diet, growing muscles in the absence of calories and proteins would be dangerous to one's health but definitely possible). But again that was just a philosophical side point and besides there are advantages to using exercise to control muscle growth and other conditioning responses like bone thickening, flexibility and vascularization in a more orchestrated and balanced way.

Anyways, sorry for the side track.

I actually had a question about Parkour related to this thread. This is my first post and I just tried to start learning parkour a few days ago, and had some very nice and skilled people walk me through a few movements, which was great. Being my very first try, I now have some muscle soreness (not injury, pain or overtraining, just soreness from muscles recovering/growing in my forearms and shin muscles) from doing new types of movement I wasn't used to.
I'm happy about it since it's giving me time to actually look up some of these tutorials, warmup instructions etc, which are very informative (so much to learn about), but I expect that at least the first few weeks I might run into this problem of getting a big conditioning response and longer lasting muscle soreness, which brings me to my question: "Do you guys have any advice on how to best alternate different training and even resting when soreness is unavoidable/desirable?"

I read the nice long guide in this thread (although I still have to go through some of the external links), and it starts to address it,

tons of people are concerned with overtraining and soreness and what they all means. Managing volume with a strength routine is one of the most important aspects to keep you progressing but to not do too much or too little. I like alternating day strength routines like m,w,f

but it seems to just say "control the intensity of your exercise to avoid (excessive?) soreness/overtraining and maximize strength gains" (unless I am reading it incorrectly), which doesn't necessarily answer the question of what to do when you are already sore and know you will be sore for even 4-6 days.

For example, in bodybuilding people can isolate muscle groups so they can work out every other day but really give each major muscle group almost a full week to recover, to maximize gains in mass during the recovery phase. I don't know anything about parkour yet but it seems like it might be harder to isolate and separate things even for non-technique training (it seems to have more whole-body exercises), although I would be interested to know if people do that or not.
In the example given in this thread, you do dips, squats and pullups on every strength workout day, which gives only 48 hours of rest for each muscle group, yet that is the time where your muscles should generally feel the most sore, based on physiological muscle growth processes (not the lactic acid soreness you feel during/after training but actual macrophage recruitment, inflammatory response, myoblasts proliferation and recruitment etc leading to hypertrophy).
I imagine for parkour you are less interested in maximizing hypertrophy or muscle recovery and more interested in maximizing other types of conditioning specific to technique and execution (e.g., fiber type switches, vascularization/innervation, cardio, flexibility, coordination) but if that is the reason could you please explain a bit more what would be the tradeoffs, reasonings etc or point me to any existing detailed information about this type of topic? I should use the search function but I am too new to even know what keywords I would use in this field to search for this question.
I can definitely understand other considerations like wanting to do training that closely imitates techniques or tries to condition multiple aspects at once, but I would be interested in understanding better the rationale for various choices specifically to optimizing training and scheduling, also because it seems at least plausible that some of those (like muscle mass and strength) could be advanced more rapidly by less integrated and more isolated focused training requiring its own scheduling considerations.

Maybe my question has a simple answer like "you want to avoid soreness because it interferes with your technique training", in which case I guess I might want to know any general rule of thumb regarding how to decide whether to train techniques or what to do once you are already inevitably sore (not overtrained or injured or in pain, just sore as a bodybuilder might be for 5 days after working out a muscle group).

Sorry for the long post and thanks in advance for reading and helping me out, as I said I am new and know almost nothing about parkour/free-running and I am very interested in any suggestions or help from everybody here. Thanks

[Steven Low]

First one small side point and then a question:

A good diet is the ONLY way to lose fat or gain muscle mass or vice versa.

Just from a purely academic point of view this is not quite correct, because genetic and hormonal responses can actually have a much bigger impact than diet or exercise.
But of course I do agree with your statement in practice, since we generally only control diet and exercise, and generally use our diet to be the bigger constraint in our energy balance (and in manipulating indirectly hormones like insulin, gH, cortisol, etc).
Still it's at least interesting to keep in mind that if you have the right genes activated you can grow muscle and lose fat even without any exercise at all or any change in diet.  Consider for example what a single defect in the myostatin gene can do in cows, where blue belgian cows have a double-muscled phenotype and look like huge bodybuilder-cows, and yet they don't do more exercise or eat grass any differently than their normal fat cows counterparts with a fully functional myostatin gene. Similar mutations have also been found in a few instances in people, who usually ended up naturally steering toward bodybuilding (probably saying "putting up muscles is so easy, I don't know why others have a hard time with that"). To a much smaller, subtler degree there are many other small individual differences that explain how progress in one aspect or another might take more effort than it did for someone else.
But in a way a lot of our efforts in choosing the right diet and exercise programs is mostly to convince our body to activate certain types of responses (muscle growth, fat loss, etc) which from a theoretical point of view can be turned on even in the complete absence of exercise (or diet, growing muscles in the absence of calories and proteins would be dangerous to one's health but definitely possible). But again that was just a philosophical side point and besides there are advantages to using exercise to control muscle growth and other conditioning responses like bone thickening, flexibility and vascularization in a more orchestrated and balanced way.

Anyways, sorry for the side track.

Yes, genetics play a big factor... well in some cases at least. Initially, I am suprised (after reading the whole post) of your knowledge of myostatin mutations, different phenotypes, and hormonal knowledge.. but lack of knowledge on all around training. I assume you've had a science education of some sort?

I actually had a question about Parkour related to this thread. This is my first post and I just tried to start learning parkour a few days ago, and had some very nice and skilled people walk me through a few movements, which was great. Being my very first try, I now have some muscle soreness (not injury, pain or overtraining, just soreness from muscles recovering/growing in my forearms and shin muscles) from doing new types of movement I wasn't used to.
I'm happy about it since it's giving me time to actually look up some of these tutorials, warmup instructions etc, which are very informative (so much to learn about), but I expect that at least the first few weeks I might run into this problem of getting a big conditioning response and longer lasting muscle soreness, which brings me to my question: "Do you guys have any advice on how to best alternate different training and even resting when soreness is unavoidable/desirable?"

Soreness comes when basically you do physical activity that your body is not used to. It can occur because of increased intensity, frequency, volume or a myriad of other factors (including poor diet, lack of sleep, etc.). Basically though training while sore is not necessarily a bad thing unless for example the soreness is pretty crippling and limiting workouts. In this case, it would be better to focus on recovery techniques and things to alleviate the soreness such as massage, stretching, Epsom salt baths, increased hydration, fish oil supplementation, etc.

I will discuss this a bit later with your questions.

I read the nice long guide in this thread (although I still have to go through some of the external links), and it starts to address it,

tons of people are concerned with overtraining and soreness and what they all means. Managing volume with a strength routine is one of the most important aspects to keep you progressing but to not do too much or too little. I like alternating day strength routines like m,w,f

but it seems to just say "control the intensity of your exercise to avoid (excessive?) soreness/overtraining and maximize strength gains" (unless I am reading it incorrectly), which doesn't necessarily answer the question of what to do when you are already sore and know you will be sore for even 4-6 days.

In this case you should do some light exercise/recovery work (increases blood flow to muscles to help them heal faster) such as light jog, maybe some pushups or whatever you need to do to get the heart rate up. Stretching, massage and all the other stuff I listed above would help.

The point I would want to make here with crippling soreness is that you want to avoid it at all costs because it interferes with your training. This is most prevalent when you're just starting working out and don't have a high conditioning level built up.

For example, in bodybuilding people can isolate muscle groups so they can work out every other day but really give each major muscle group almost a full week to recover, to maximize gains in mass during the recovery phase. I don't know anything about parkour yet but it seems like it might be harder to isolate and separate things even for non-technique training (it seems to have more whole-body exercises), although I would be interested to know if people do that or not.
In the example given in this thread, you do dips, squats and pullups on every strength workout day, which gives only 48 hours of rest for each muscle group, yet that is the time where your muscles should generally feel the most sore, based on physiological muscle growth processes (not the lactic acid soreness you feel during/after training but actual macrophage recruitment, inflammatory response, myoblasts proliferation and recruitment etc leading to hypertrophy).
I imagine for parkour you are less interested in maximizing hypertrophy or muscle recovery and more interested in maximizing other types of conditioning specific to technique and execution (e.g., fiber type switches, vascularization/innervation, cardio, flexibility, coordination) but if that is the reason could you please explain a bit more what would be the tradeoffs, reasonings etc or point me to any existing detailed information about this type of topic? I should use the search function but I am too new to even know what keywords I would use in this field to search for this question.
I can definitely understand other considerations like wanting to do training that closely imitates techniques or tries to condition multiple aspects at once, but I would be interested in understanding better the rationale for various choices specifically to optimizing training and scheduling, also because it seems at least plausible that some of those (like muscle mass and strength) could be advanced more rapidly by less integrated and more isolated focused training requiring its own scheduling considerations.

As I have said before, the best strength gains are made with the highest amount of frequency. Clearly, this means that you have to manage volume and intensity very well to avoid overtraining. For example, in strength dominated sports like Olympic weightlifting and gymnastics, the athletes are training 5-6 days a week for multiple sessions per day. How can they do this? Well, their conditioning level is fairly high (because they have been trained to deal with it) such that their muscles are fairly resilient to muscular damage. Also, the volume is kept fairly low (in the strength work overall). Oly weightlifters for example on a Bulgarian cycle may be working with upwards of 90% 1 RM for 5x during a day. However, they may only get in about 15-20 total reps more or less so the volume is actually lower than if they were just doing a set of 5x5 for an exercise. The body gets a strong strength stimulus because it can recover from session to session, BUT the muscles are not damaged as much because of the low volume even at high intensity. Thus, this can be done many days a in a row.

Basically, we don't want to go down to the physiological level on this because it would SEEM to tell us things that aren't true. Why would you do 1 workout a week for muscle groups to let muscles recover that long when you can train your muscles 5x during a week and get a much better hypertrophy and strength stimulus? Because you THOUGHT muscles take that long to recover? Muscles can still recover concurrently training. Athletes train much more than most BBers think they should and at higher levels they all have bodies that many would want to have. Basically, when training for performance and even hypertrophy I would ignore most split routines because their frequency is just too poor to stimulate any decent adaptations (without... anabolic.. assistance..).

In any case, for some more reading check out elitemadcow link and/or dual factor theory. For novices it's good to be a linear progression such as Starting Strength though.

Maybe my question has a simple answer like "you want to avoid soreness because it interferes with your technique training", in which case I guess I might want to know any general rule of thumb regarding how to decide whether to train techniques or what to do once you are already inevitably sore (not overtrained or injured or in pain, just sore as a bodybuilder might be for 5 days after working out a muscle group).

Sorry for the long post and thanks in advance for reading and helping me out, as I said I am new and know almost nothing about parkour/free-running and I am very interested in any suggestions or help from everybody here. Thanks

Yep, we already covered that one... rule of thumb is if you're getting back into training do less than you think you should and then ramp up into workouts. This will keep soreness to a fair minimum and only take a week or two to get your body used to the volume you want to train at.

Soreness is not something to be desired because it tells us nothing about the effectiveness of the workout (only that you did something that was more than your body could handle as we previously discussed). Thus, avoiding it as much as possible is IMO the correct way to go because crippling soreness hinders workouts.

Hopefully after I finish my applications I will update to v1.2

[tombb]

Thanks for your answer Steve, I think I understand a bit more now and I will read up from the links you suggested (dual factor theory and elitemadcow) as my next step. I also look forward to your version 1.2 and future versions.

I do have perhaps too heavy of a science background for my own good, which might cause me to over-think some questions, but I guess as long as I can get good answers from people and sources hopefully I'll be ok in the end

Just to let you know where I was coming from, I was mostly thinking in terms of hypertrophy, which is not completely correlated to strength or performance but still nice to have (I would think especially as a first step or to establish a nice base to then condition further).
My general understanding is that while other muscular adaptations like fiber type changes are mostly changes in protein expression and can be trained any time, hypertrophy and hyperplasia are actual increases in number of nuclei, mitochondria etc in muscle fibers due to additional myoblasts fusing at the site of injury and therefore strictly require fiber damage and an inflammatory response. As you know myotubes can't reenter the cell cycle (multiply), so this mechanism is the only way to actually increase nuclei and organelles in them.  This does take necessarily longer than 48 hours, as it has multiple sequential steps and physiologically mesurable responses that lasts even longer than a week.  Also I would suspect that trying to reduce inflammation could in theory decrease the growth and recovery response, as cytokines from the inflammatory response at site of injury cause satellite cells near the basal lamina to start to proliferate and migrate, and intracellular swelling facilitates them in reaching the site of fusion.

While training during these growth and recovery mechanisms doesn't necessarily interfere with them, I am not sure that it would be as effective, and we do know that undesirable overtraining can happen in the right (or wrong) circumstances, including badly designed overlaps of training sessions. Of course you can also have soreness due to many other mechanisms (including just vascularization) which have a much shorter recovery time.

It's been many years (5+) since I looked at the literature on this so there might be new results or considerations I am not aware of, but the points I mention above would be from articles like:
Exercise and the Immune System: Regulation, Integration, and Adaptation
Satellite cell regulation following myotrauma caused by resistance exercise
It might not have as much relevance to parkour if I understand you correctly (and again I will know more after I look at the links you suggested) since it seems that most of the training in parkour is focused mainly on performance (without worrying about hypertrophy) and therefore it can and should be trained much more often, but you might find those papers interesting if you were not aware of them (or if you have different views on that line of research of course I am interested in hearing them).

[Steven Low]

My general understanding is that while other muscular adaptations like fiber type changes are mostly changes in protein expression and can be trained any time, hypertrophy and hyperplasia are actual increases in number of nuclei, mitochondria etc in muscle fibers due to additional myoblasts fusing at the site of injury and therefore strictly require fiber damage and an inflammatory response. As you know myotubes can't reenter the cell cycle (multiply), so this mechanism is the only way to actually increase nuclei and organelles in them.  This does take necessarily longer than 48 hours, as it has multiple sequential steps and physiologically mesurable responses that lasts even longer than a week.  Also I would suspect that trying to reduce inflammation could in theory decrease the growth and recovery response, as cytokines from the inflammatory response at site of injury cause satellite cells near the basal lamina to start to proliferate and migrate, and intracellular swelling facilitates them in reaching the site of fusion.

While training during these growth and recovery mechanisms doesn't necessarily interfere with them, I am not sure that it would be as effective, and we do know that undesirable overtraining can happen in the right (or wrong) circumstances, including badly designed overlaps of training sessions. Of course you can also have soreness due to many other mechanisms (including just vascularization) which have a much shorter recovery time.

It's been many years (5+) since I looked at the literature on this so there might be new results or considerations I am not aware of, but the points I mention above would be from articles like:
Exercise and the Immune System: Regulation, Integration, and Adaptation
Satellite cell regulation following myotrauma caused by resistance exercise
It might not have as much relevance to parkour if I understand you correctly (and again I will know more after I look at the links you suggested) since it seems that most of the training in parkour is focused mainly on performance (without worrying about hypertrophy) and therefore it can and should be trained much more often, but you might find those papers interesting if you were not aware of them (or if you have different views on that line of research of course I am interested in hearing them).

Uh, very little fiber type change (type IIb to type IIx does occur some), NO quantifyable hyperplasia in humans.

I'll take a look at the study later.

But as for your doubt on training 5+ times a week I still disagree. I have been doing so for more than a year (and yes, I do have to take 5-7 days off every 4-6 weeks), but my strength increases are extremely quick. As far as damage goes, it is mitigated by conditioning level which increases muscle resistance to stress.

Think about it this way. Say you're doing a 5x5 routine 3x a week. What IF I decreased the volume to 3x5 and started doing it 5x a week instead. This is the SAME EXACT VOLUME. Except I can "recover" 24-48 hours in between each session as opposed to 48-72 hours. I can use heavier weight with the 3x5 and frequency training increases + heavier weight increases recruitment, synchronization, etc strength increases in CNS. Heavier weight also stimulates more contractile protein increases (hypertrophy). The only downsize is slightly more stress due to increased weight (NOT volume). But that's not enough to make any noticeable difference.

Hi Steve,
Sorry to bother you with a message, I didn't want to make another post just to ask you a side question about which link to read up from. I followed through the elitemadcow and their training primer, and found a link to http://www.higher-faster-sports.com/PlannedOvertraining.html
(I couldn't see a specific link to dual factor theory in your post)

Is this a good link to what you were suggesting? It seems to be based mostly on performance and I understand its general point about fatigue vs recovery and intentional overtraining followed by bouts of rest, but I am a bit taken back by the general vagueness and tone of this article and the other ones you pointed me to.
For example terms like "fitness" and fatigue are very broad umbrella terms that are more descriptive than mechanistic. Also I understand the need to make it more intuitively clear to everybody with analogies but some of those seem very handwavy and I would have rather heard the actual mechanism and experimental evidence or tests instead.

So I am wondering if there is a more detailed article that has more references from actual studies, more quantification and more detailed mechanisms.
To a small degree I am aware of various training methods/philosophies, and various justifications for cycling training, choosing load and frequency, explain slower progress through fatigue in different systems (nervous, hormonal etc) but it's always much easier to integrate them or contrast them if I can see the actual supporting reasons and details rather than just the conclusions and intuitive analogies.

I hope when you have time you can reply to this, with a message or in your thread if you prefer.
Also in case you wanted to know about my background to better answer my question, you can see my homepage by just adding .com to my forum name, but as I said I only started to do parkour last week (once) so I have a big learning curve ahead of me.

Read everything in section II of the madcow site.

If you want something specific for more advanced/elite athletes, read up on periodization. This series is pretty good.. let me know if you want something more .. applicable:
http://www.abcbodybuilding.com/periodization1.php
http://www.abcbodybuilding.com/periodization2.php
http://www.abcbodybuilding.com/periodization3.php

As far as hormonal, the literature is fairly vague, and you'll have to do self research unless you're looking for something specifically in which case I may be able to give you an answer.

[tombb]

Thanks, I will read up on the periodization links you included, I see they have a list of references for further reading at the end which hopefully should address most of my questions.

Uh, very little fiber type change (type IIb to type IIx does occur some), NO quantifyable hyperplasia in humans.

While I was mentioning that just in passing under the umbrella of protein expression changes (which includes a lot more things of course), I did want to make a point about muscle fiber type changes, because I thought it was a well established scientific fact that you can and will have switching between any and all types of fibers (1, 2a and 2x or 2b for human/animal).
The distinction itself is a bit artificial as muscle fibers transition say between slow oxidative typeI and fast twitch typeII fibers in a more gradual way from one set of characteristics to another, so it's a bit arbitrary to decide in those cases when a myotube can now be fully called one way or another (this is very common in cell biology actually whenever you have numerous transitions between cell types like in immunology or stem cell differentiation sequences). Every characteristic of their working definition, like protein expression (myosin chain types), number of mitochondria, vascularization and metabolism is subject to turnover, adaptation and change in response to exercise. This has been demonstrated in humans as well as in animal models.
If I had to put it in those intuitive-sounding analogies that I don't usually like to hear as the only explanation, that's why people are not strictly born marathon runners or sprint runners but can actually transition from one to the other and do ok, while showing a marked change in proportion and number of fiber types of one type or another (e.g., you are not just born with say 30% of one and 70% of the other and able to only change the respective size of each, rather you can also change their proportional number through exercise by causing some of those fibers to switch type to whatever you need).
However I wouldn't say this just because of a hand-wavy analogy. Rather I would say this is a well-established scientific fact because of the extensive amount of studies that demonstrated and measured these changes in humans and animals, and even figured out the molecular mechanisms for each of the changes that occur in these transitions.
As a bit of an overview, see for example
Training effects on the contractile apparatus
Or for more specific details on exercise-induced increase in mitochondria numbers
Contractile activity-induced mitochondrial biogenesis in skeletal muscle
And for an example of an inducible repeatable switch from type II to type I (this one in mice since they used gene manipulation directly)
Regulation of Muscle Fiber Type and Running Endurance by PPARδ
or in Rats (where early studies had some trouble showing transition from type II to type I but later were able to demonstrate it):
Fast-to-slow transformation in stimulated rat muscle

That's why I would say fiber type switches between any of the 3 forms is a well established fact with a known and clear mechanism. If you have any evidence, literature, studies or reasoning that suggests otherwise I would be of course very interested in examining them.


In terms of your comment on hyperplasia and hypertrophy, I wanted to make sure we did not have a misunderstanding on the nomenclature.
The examples I given of myoblasts from satellite cells traveling to the site of myotrauma and fusing with the damaged myotube is not hyperplasia, it's still hypertrophy (as the number of muscle fibers does not increase when myoblasts fuse to existing myotubes), and it is again a well established mechanism occurring often in humans in response to exercise.
The word hypertrophy is a bit problematic because it's one of those vague descriptive terms, it doesn't say if the muscle increased in size because of water retention, blood volume, increased in contractile protein (from more transient increases in protein expression), or a more permanent adaptation like the increase in nuclei and organelles like mitochondria and ribosomes from entire myoblasts fusions.

At some point in my post I also mentioned in passing hyperplasia next to hypertrophy just because it can happen through the same mechanism under the right conditions, basically if the myoblasts arrive at a site of muscle injury and they happen to be in much larger number with less myotubes to fuse to and enough empty space, they will tend to align to each other, fuse with each other and differentiate to new myotubes. If you every tried growing myoblasts in cultures that happens a lot even spontaneously. That's the only reason why I mentioned them together really, although the end result is quite different (in terms of number of fibers).
On hyperplasia I would agree that it's a lot easier to demonstrate in animals, since you can do studies like injecting them directy with IGF or tying a big weight on one limb for weeks/months and then count the increased number of fibers directly, that's how we know for sure it can and does happen in animals. For humans I would still strongly believe that it can happen as well but again we are talking about a more severe stimulus and precision in measurement that is hard to replicate/produce in humans without getting in trouble with some ethics board
The question about fiber number increase in humans in response to exercise is a bit complicated by the fact that fiber numbers are estimated. Even studies that have been used in the past to suggest that hypertrophy is unlikely to happen from normal exercise in humans actually are careful to point out that they did see muscle fiber numbers increase after training in a subset of their test subjects (some of the college men):
from "Muscle fiber hypertrophy, hyperplasia, and capillary density in college men after resistance training"

With respect to fiber number estimates, exclusion of the two GH subjects whose fiber numbers were estimated resulted in a significant increase in the estimated fiber number (from 279.8 ± 65.5 × 10^3 pretraining to 306.2 ± 75.6 × 10^3 posttraining) in the remaining six subjects. Therefore, although muscle fiber hypertrophy was a determinant of overall muscle enlargement for all subjects, the contribution of muscle fiber hyperplasia may have been dependent on the magnitude of type II fiber hypertrophy. These contrasting results suggest there may be differences in how individuals achieve similar degrees of muscle hypertrophy.
Although our subject population was not homogenous for pretraining variables, the degree of muscle fiber hypertrophy and/or hyperplasia after training did not appear to be dependent on the pretraining values for muscle fiber area(s), biceps brachii CSA, or 1-RM strength.

On this point again if you have any specific study etc that you think would contradict any of this please let me know.


Sorry if any of this might seem a bit confrontational (just because we seem to have different background premises on a few things), it's not intended to.  I just want to make sure I understand and share these more fundamental technical aspects with people that know way more than me about parkour and use training that clearly served them well, so I can better understand these various training strategies.

On a final note on your example of volume, I understand the point you are making and I will definitely try to keep it in mind when training, especially in regards to performance-based variables like strength. It still leaves me with some dissatisfaction because by using more descriptive terms like volume, work, fatigue etc rather than well established phisiological responses and mechanisms, it is hard for me to really be able to compare and contrast the expected outcome and being able to say whether this couldn't be optimized even further.
I have of course your very welcome and convincing personal anecdotal experience (and that of I am sure many many others including various sources you pointed to), and some reasonable explanation of the principles behind it and why it works well, which is enough from a practical perspective.
But in terms of curiosity and intellectual pursuit, as you know what happens often is that various slightly suboptimal training philosophies have done fairly well in the past, and yet something newer and better often comes up, maybe because they focused too much on just one aspect or neglected another. That's why it's nice to know the exact mechanisms suggested, the supporting evidence and the unanswered questions or unproven assumptions, so it's easier to integrate new ideas rather than just remaining a proponent for one philosophy or another.

So anyways I'll keep reading up the links you pointed out to me and I will try to put in practice your suggestions knowing they served you very well in training parkour, and I will try to also find answers to some of the extra questions I have from overthinking things on my own, without necessarily bothering you too much hehe

[Steven Low]

Fiber type:

IIa/IIx can express similar to IIb and I depending the training. I really didn't see anything in those studies that made me believe that there's much switching of like type I to type II or vice versa. If it was anything other than that, I would assume that most textbooks would've caught on by now and not be saying in effect "born with it." Then again, they were wrong about lactic [acid]. So.. shrug.

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Hyperplasia:

I agree. It can happen, but it needs the right conditions. What those are.. we tend to not really know yet unfortunately. I have speculated in the past that severe muscle damage (or recovering from something like rhabdomyolysis) where you NEED new muscle fibers is where it can and probably does happen. However.. not particularly applicable to training hence it's just better to say it doesn't exist at least for now (IMO).

And that study isn't particularly convincing (279.8 ± 65.5 × 10^3 pretraining to 306.2 ± 75.6 × 10^3) as the confidence/error intervals are WELL within range of each other and significantly overlap...

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I mean, if you only wanna train 3 days a week go for it. But I would suggest you at least try 4-5 days a week sometime in the future. You will be surprised at the results. I can guarantee that.

As for butting heads.. to be honest I really don't care if you agree with me or not (no offense or anything). A lot of the stuff I have put out is directly based on my own training experiences as I learn as well as reconciling it with information/studies on the web. And, for the most part, if you talk to most of the upper echelon athletic coaches I think you'll find that a lot of the "research" out there disagrees with their training methods.

I mean, seriously, why does weightlifting 6 days a week for 3-5+ times a day work so well for elite olympic weightlifters? I have already told you the answer, but it's up to you to believe it or not. I doubt there's any if at all research on this topic. But there's some random research from X professor that says protein synthesis is elevated for 48-72 hours after a workout. Okay, that's nice but do you really need that much rest time? Did they even do an experiment where they had people working within 24 hours of their previous workout to see what happened? Sometimes practical experience is much better than "studies" or "physiology", and frequency is one of them.

[Chris Salvato]

Read my article on common mistakes -- there is a section in there that goes back to questioning your sources.

As someone who is intimately involved in the research process for several types of biological research applications, I can tell you that research is hardly credible in most cases.

There are bad trainers and bad researchers.  The good in both fields is a minority compared to the bad.

The good in both fields yield results that change the world and their field.  Little research has corroborated with good training methodologies.  Tabata studies are the only studies to make such an impact on the athletic world.  There is a reason for that, you know....and that is something that takes a while to swallow for scientists like myself...