Practical Weight Training Guide

This is a guide on how to structure your weight training. I’m not sure why I, with all of the stuff that’s already out there, decided to write this. I guess I just wanted to put my own thoughts on paper. I’ve been doing weight training for a good 10 years now. I moved through many life phases in the meantime, with incremental degrees of seriousness. New cities, busy schedules, commitments, fun life stuff. And all the while I’ve been training consistently for multiple times a week. Sometimes once or twice, oftentimes three or four times. I’ve consumed a lot of fitness advice in that time, and I think I’ve internalized most of the good stuff. So, drawing from my experience, I hope this guide helps those who want to take their training seriously while balancing it with work and life commitments. Even if you don’t intend on using this program, think about how you currently manage your physical fitness. Try to seek something that fits neatly with your lifestyle. Don’t go all in on some way-over-the-top program. Instead, pick something reasonable, easy to follow and effective. The best fitness program is the one you keep doing!

Introduction

It can be really hard to sift through all the bullshit in the world of weight training. In fact, there’s a whole market for people saying they have gotten rid of all the bullshit, just for you, and then they sell you their own bullshit. At a discount, if you’re lucky.

The thing is: much of the online fitness advice is given by full-time fitness influencers, and it’s geared towards full-time fitness influencers. Work-out 6 times a week every week, never eat anything unhealthy, do roids. Try doing that while balancing important things: study, work, kids, friends and family. You won’t be able to stick to it, and frankly, you probably shouldn’t want to (unless you really, really do want to prioritize fitness).

What I’ve tried to do is go through my mind and write down the things I do that work. I have tried to be as transparent as I can be about the reasons for doing something.

Some general comments on this program:

• It is catered to my own lifestyle; and I’m studying working and doing lots of stuff other than weight training;
• It is opinionated, and there’s stuff in here you could disagree with. Take the stuff you do like and use it in your own training.
• I’m a man, and my exercise choice has been influenced by it. Still, there’s no reason women can’t use it.
• It assumes you know how to perform the exercises with good technique and assumes you know how to search the internet for help if you don’t.
• It requires intrinsic motivation to push yourself enough. Be strict and honest about your schedule, the effort you’re putting in, and where your priorities lie.

Core Principles

I think there are four principle the program adheres to:

• Flexible. It must work with every schedule. Skipping a day shouldn’t be disastrous (I’m looking at you bro split). You should be able to plug and play with exercises, switch things up, keep yourself engaged.
• Simple. Don’t do weight tracking. If you train more than once every fortnight, you’ll remember what weight you did last time. The exercise selection is limited, with a small selection of high quality exercises to choose from.
• Efficient. Don’t be in the gym for hours. Minimize passive resting by doing supersets or accessories. This saves time and helps with cardiovascular fitness as an added bonus.
• Safe. The goal is to minimize injury-risk and maximize long-term efficiency. Always a day of recovery, full body workouts, efficient warm-ups, injury prevention, and more.

Training intensity

Intensity is defined as weight $\times$ volume, where volume is sets $\times$ repetitions. If I did 3 sets of 12 in squats with 80 kg, the intensity amounts to $80 \times (3 \times 12) = 2880$. Basically, it’s the total amount of weight you lift. Keep this value relatively constant over work-outs. No need to calculate it, but be mindful of the work you put in and the way your body reacts. Don’t do two highly taxing squat workouts in close succession. If you’ve done a lot of lower back work, don’t also be going heavy on rows. Common sense stuff.

The reason not to be doing this is because you’ll feel lethargic the next day, or feel nauseated after the workout, and that is just not fun. It’s also not sustainable, and it’s risky because your technique will suffer, leaving you vulnerable to injuries.

There’s a certain sweet spot where you’re maximizing progress without getting injured. It takes time figuring out where yours is.

Training Frequency

There’s a large body of research roughly saying that Muscle Protein Synthesis peaks at 24 hours and declines after 48 hours. This is one of the biggest reasons advocating full-body training, instead of body part splits. After a 2 days, not much is happening anymore in your muscles in terms of progress. If you’re doing the bro split and only train chest on mondays, you’re losing out on a lot of progress. If my schedule allows out, I leave only one day in between workouts.

Active recovery is encouraged on rest days. Go do cardio like cycling, walking, running or swimming. Go outside and touch grass, take someone you like with you.

Picking a rep range

Periodization is a systematic way to organize your training variables over time. The traditional method, linear periodization, keeps you in one rep range for weeks before changing. A more dynamic approach, daily undulating periodization, varies your rep ranges between workouts. In practice, this mean you can just switch it up. If you feel like doing a set of 5, go for it. If you want to feel the pump, go for a set of 12. If the effort is there, the outcome is likely to be similar compared to if you had stuck to a certain rep range for weeks on end.

Daily undulating periodization makes intuitive sense because different rep ranges target different types of muscle fibers (fast twitch, slow twitch, etc.). If you train for strength on Monday, your muscle fibers optimized for hypertrophy will need less recovery on Wednesday.

How hard should you train?

This is a very important part of progressing with weight training. You’re there to put in an effort. There won’t be improvement otherwise. Be focussed on the exercise your doing. Pay attention. Mind-muscle connection is real. Have rituals before you go under the squat bar. Be determined to finish the set. But beware, don’t ever go beyond technical failure. Even if it means setting a PR. We’ve all seen the guy doing their final reps on bench press, the guy’s arms are contorted in strange angles, elbows flared out, and the spotter is basically doing barbell curls. Don’t be that guy.

Technique tips

• Having proper technique is vital for injury prevention and training effectiveness. It’s a continuous learning process. I very often repeat several cues in my head when I do an exercise. I might be thinking “glutes up, big chest” while doing good mornings. Videotape yourself, especially on stuff like squats. Check in with your butt wink now and then!
• Breathing is important, too. It’s nice to have your breathing sync up with your set. Breathe in, hold, do a rep, breath out.
• No need to do underhand barbell rows. High risk of bicep tendon tear. Probably, not a hard no-no, but still, be warned (I removed several ‘hard no-no’s’ because they weren’t that hard).

Time savers

Supersetting. I really like supersetting multiple muscle groups that don’t interfere with each other. Think pull-ups and dips, curls and tricep extensions, hanging leg raises and leg extensions. Instead of doing nothing for 3 minutes, you do a set of the other exercise. It keeps your heart rate up and helps with cardiovascular fitness, and it feels more athletic, too. And it would literally save 50% of your time if all you did were supersets.

Myo-reps. Did you know that the final reps in a set are most effective? What if you could do final reps more of the time? That’s what myo-reps are for. It’s pretty simple. First you do your regular set, leave no more than 1-2 reps in the tank. Wait 15 seconds, do another set, leaving no more than 1 rep in the tank. Wait 15 seconds again, and repeat. Try and finish and exercise with a set followed by 4 sets of myo-reps and see if you like it. Some suitable exercises: pull-ups, dips, push-ups, biceps and triceps

Ladders. I’ve found ladders to be most suitable for pull-ups, but I’ve used them for other bodyweight exercises like push-ups, too. It works by doing a rep, waiting for a fixed amount of time (I pick something between 10 s and 30 s), then doing two reps, waiting, doing three reps, and so forth, until you fail. That’s one ladder. Now, instead of resting, you wait and immediately start at one rep for then next ladder. I often find myself doing 5 ladders of pull-ups with 15 s rest.

Just do abs. Seriously, there’s always a bar free somewhere. Go do some hanging leg raises while your chest and tris are recovering.

Exercise choice

I’ve compiled a list of exercises organized roughly per muscle group. The list is highly opinionated, and there are more good exercises out there, but if you don’t have a list like this in your head, it’s probably a good place to start.

Each full-body training, you’ll pick one exercise from each major muscle group, and as many accessories as you feel like (or have time for).

Some thoughts:

• Alternate horizontal and vertical pulls and pushes between workouts.
• Train your hamstrings using both straight-legged and knee-bending exercises.

Main movements

Back (horizontal and vertical pulls)

• Pull-ups/chin-ups (weighted, regular, rings)
• Lat pulldown (single-arm, double cable)
• Pendlay row (barbell)
• Incline bench row

Shoulders and chest (horizontal and vertical pushing):

• Dips (weighted, regular)
• Military press (standing, seated)
• Landmine press (kneeling, standing)
• Incline dumbbell press
• Barbell bench press

Quadriceps and hip extensors (lower push):

• Bulgarian split squats
• Walking dumbbell lunges
• Barbell back squat

Hamstrings and glutes (lower pull):

• Romanian deadlift (barbell, dumbbells)
• Good morning (standing, seated)
• Machine leg curls
• Back extensions on the Roman chair

Abs and core:

• Hanging leg raises (straight leg, side bends, toe to bar)
• Cable crunches (don’t be afraid to go heavy)

Calves:

• Cycling
• Machine calf extension
• Smith machine calf raises

Accessories:

• Face pulls
• Rear delt rows
• Curls (on the seated incline bench, preacher curls, hammer curls)
• Skull-crushers
• Cable tricep pushdown

Putting it all together

Train every other day for about an hour. Don’t sit around when in between sets; use supersets, myo-reps or ladders to save time . Train hard, until near-failure, but never to technical failure. Pick one exercise per major muscle group and 1-2 accessories. Switch up the rep schemes and exercises. Go outside and move on days you don’t train.

A final word of advice

It’s impossible to stick to your program all of the time. There will be times, perhaps weeks on end, where you’re unmotivated. That’s normal. You haven’t lost your gains. Just go back and pick up where you left off. It’s no major failure and not a reason to stop. Stopping and starting is part of it.

Of course, weight training likes to be around having a fulfilling social and family life, good sleep, a healthy diet, a fulfilling career. All of these are in constant tensions with each other, and that’s okay.