Like most people, when I started working out over 35 years ago I made a lot of mistakes. Fortunately, unlike most people, after a few years I learned to exercise more effectively, safely, and efficiently. I could write several books on all the things I wish I knew when I started working out (and I have), but here are a few of the most important:
Your results from exercise have far more to do with how hard you train than how much or often.
Don’t assume you need to perform some volume and frequency of exercise and adjust your effort to allow for it. Train as hard as possible and adjust your volume and frequency to allow for that.
I wasted years doing anywhere from three to five sets per exercise and performing a much larger number of exercises than needed for each muscle group. I was often in the gym for anywhere from one to two hours, four or five days a week. If I had learned sooner that I only needed to perform one hard set per exercise, of only one or two exercises per muscle group, no more than three non-consecutive days per week, I would have gotten better results, faster, and saved myself hundreds of hours yearly.
When it comes to exercise many believe more is better—more exercises, more sets, more frequent workouts, etc.—but your body doesn’t see it that way. Exercise is a stress on your muscles’ ability to produce force, and on the other systems that support them (metabolic and cardiovascular efficiency) and transmit the force they produce (bone and connective tissue strength). The more intense a stress, the greater the demand it places on some system’s ability to perform its function, the stronger the stimulus for adaptation, but also the more energy and resources your body has to devote to coping with and recovering from it, energy and resources which exist in limited supply. The more your body must devote to recovering from the stress the less remains to devote to producing the adaptations stimulated by it.
There is a limit to how much and how quickly your body can produce increases in muscular strength and size and improvements in the other factors functional ability. Exercise will only stimulate improvements up to a point, and the more intensely you train the more quickly you will reach that point as volume increases. Any more volume than necessary to do this is counterproductive; it will not stimulate your body to produce greater increases in muscular strength and size or improvements in the other factors of functional ability, but it will continue to increase the demands on energy and resources for recovery. Again, the more your body must spend on recovery, the less it has for the production of the desired adaptations.
These days I only perform one set of one exercise per muscle group, of around seven or eight exercises per workout, no more than twice weekly, and I am stronger and more fit now at 48 years old than I was at 18.
When designing your workouts go through each exercise and note which muscle groups are targeted (not just involved). Make sure your program effectively works all the major muscle groups, including your neck, forearms, and lower legs (you don’t have to work every one in every workout, though, and some might be better dividing exercises up). Also try to minimize overlap within workouts, so no muscle groups are overworked.
As an example, here is my current routine, consisting of an A and a B workout, each built around a few compound exercises with simple exercises included to address the smaller muscle groups:
Workout A
-
- Safety Bar Squat
- Underhand-Grip Pulldown
- Overhead Press
- TSC Hip ADduction
- TSC Hip ABduction
- Wrist Extension
- Wrist Curl
- TSC Crush Gripping or TSC Pinch Gripping (alternating)
Workout B
-
- Trap Bar Deadlift
- Bench Press or Parallel-Bar Dip
- Seated Row
- Crunch
- Heel Raise
- TSC Toe Raise
- TSC Neck Extension
- TSC Neck Flexion
“Maximum degrees of growth stimulation can be—and should be—induced by the minimum-possible amount of exercise; the minimum amount required to produce certain effects—and once these effects have been produced then additional amounts of exercise will actually reduce the production of increases in strength and/or muscular size.”
—Arthur Jones, Nautilus Training Principles: Bulletin 1
How well you perform an exercise is far more important than how much you lift.
You don’t have to train heavy to train hard.
The quality of your repetitions is far more important than the quantity.
The quality of your repetitions is related to the efficiency of inroading, how deeply the target muscles are fatigued relative to the time under load.
When I started working out I believed the effectiveness of an exercise was related to the amount of work performed—how much I weight I lifted and how many times I lifted it. As a result I performed exercises in a manner that maximized load relative to effort. I know know this is backwards, that effectiveness is related to relative effort—how hard the target muscles are worked relative to how hard they are capable of working and how efficiently they are fatigued (inroad/time = intensity)—and that exercises should be performed in a manner that maximizes effort relative to load.
When you deeply fatigue a muscle, temporarily reducing the force it is can produce, you send a message to your body that it needs to increase the strength and size of the muscle so you will have more strength in reserve and be better capable of movement the next time you encounter the same stress. The better your exercise form, the more efficiently you are able to create and maintain tension in the target muscle groups, the more rapidly you will fatigue them. The more rapidly you are capable of fatiguing the target muscles, the less weight you require to achieve momentary muscle failure within some amount of time.
The less weight you require to achieve momentary muscle failure within some time, the less load on your joints and spine, the lower your risk of injury.
The less time you require to achieve momentary muscle failure with the same weight, the less stress required to stimulate the best possible improvements, the less energy and resources required for recovery, the more your body has to produce the desired adaptations.
When you perform an exercise take your time, focus on contracting the target muscles, and move in a way that keeps them under relatively continuous tension. Avoid doing anything that reduces the tension and causes the target muscles to be underloaded or unloaded. Avoid doing anything that suddenly and greatly increases tension and increases your risk of injury. From the moment you begin the exercise until the moment you unload, focus on using the weight to empty out the target muscles, rather than using your muscles to move the weight.
“If you change your position, path, and/or range of motion to make it easier to lift more weight during an exercise, you’re doing it wrong.
You should be trying to maximize your effort relative to the load, not the load relative to your effort.”
—Drew Baye
Exercise intensely, progressively, and consistently; avoid unnecessary variety of exercises and training methods.
When you learn a new exercise there is a six to eight week period during which much of the improvement in performance is due to learning and becoming more skilled at the exercise and neural adaptations, rather than due to increases in muscular strength and size or improvements in conditioning. Because of this, changing exercises or switching workouts every couple months can appear to break plateaus and keep you progressing. However, what it really does is set you back, since the greatest general physical benefits will occur after this initial phase.
When I started working out there were a few exercises I did consistently, but I switched workouts every couple of months, usually choosing them from whatever bodybuilding magazine I was reading at the time. This was almost as big a mistake as doing too much exercise with poor form.
When you do this it is like taking a few steps forward then one step back. Frequently changing your workouts is not just unnecessary, it is counterproductive for long-term results.
You do not need a large variety exercises to effectively train any muscle group. Just one or two good exercises are enough. If you choose well to begin with you do not need to change exercises at all, much less frequently, to avoid plateaus. In fact, except for making adjustments to your workout volume and frequency to account for changes in your recovery ability over time, or due to changes in the equipment available, you can get great results performing the same basic exercises your entire life.
Consider also, the longer you perform a particular exercise and the more skilled you become at it, the more effective, efficient, and safe it becomes.
“The human system very quickly grows accustomed to almost any sort of activity—and once having adapted to such activity, then no amount of practice of the same activity will provide growth stimulation, although it will help to maintain levels of strength that were built previously. Thus it is extremely important to provide as many forms of variation in training as are reasonably possible; but in practice this does not mean that the training program needs to be—or should be—changed frequently. On the contrary, the same basic training routine will serve a man well for his entire active life.
Another apparent paradox? Only an apparent one; in the first place, the “double progressive” system of training provides a great deal of variation in training—secondly, the three-times-weekly training schedule provides even more variety—and finally, if the training program is varied somewhat one day weekly, then all of the variety that is needed is well provided.”
—Arthur Jones, Nautilus Training Principles: Bulletin 1
Regarding the above, which was written in 1970, it is important to note Arthur would later recommend no more than eight exercises twice weekly instead of a dozen or more thrice weekly.
Main points:
Train as hard as possible, but keep your workouts relatively brief and infrequent to avoid overtraining.
Perform every exercise as strictly as possible, focusing on efficiently loading and deeply fatiguing the target muscles.
Choose a few of the best exercises for each muscle group and perform them consistently.