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1. REP RANGES AND ENERGY SYSTEMS

The first thing to understand about programming is that what you are really doing is training different energy systems in your body for improved performance. Depending on your duration of exercise and the amount of force production you are demanding, your body uses different systems to produce energy. By training in certain rep ranges, you can provoke specific adaptations in those systems. Below I'm going to give you a brief breakdown of those systems and the rep ranges that affect them. I won't get too into the Weeds on the physiology of it, but if you have a desire to learn more, you will literally be able to copy paste the terms into Google and get a thorough breakdown.

- 1-3 reps: ATP-creatine cycle. This is used for low duration, high force movements. Anything explosive uses this system. It takes the longest to recover, should be trained first if you are training multiple systems in one day, and it works by improving the ability of your central nervous system to produce a fast and efficient contraction with the muscle you have. It's trained by plyometrics, heavy singles, doubles, and triples, and explosive movements like Olympic lifting. It typically takes longer to recover from these days. 

- 4-8 reps: transitioning from ATP to glycolytic cycle. Still primarily ATP, but at this point you're getting some cross-sectional hypertrophy work. This is where microtrauma occurs -- there are very small tears created in the muscle as a result of the strain, and due to general adaptation syndrome your body overheals these, resulting in greater muscular density. This is often referred to as myofibrillar hypertrophy. Great for building strength, as well as the size needed to improve 1RM potential, and tendon/joint resilience. 

- 8-15 reps: glycolytic cycle. At this point, you are primarily training your muscles to store more glycogen by gassing them out with a challenging weight and a set that will probably last between 30-60 seconds. This improves shorter-term energy production and increases muscle size as your glycogen stores improve. This is often referred to as sarcoplasmic hypertrophy. You will also receive some myofibrillar hypertrophy from this rep range, but it's not as pronounced as with heavier weights. 

- 15-25 reps: stretching the limits of the glycolytic cycle to improve lactate clearance. At this point, you're forcing glycolytic stores to their limits while keeping sets short enough that aerobic system can't really take over to help clear lactate. In short, you generate enormous resistance to fatigue over the long term because you compel improved mitochondrial density, higher capillary density, better H+ buffering (lactate by-product that makes you feel fatigued), and more efficient lactate shuttling (so it can be used for fuel). I really like sets of 20 for this, and I include them in basically every program I write; sets of 15 are not as good as this specific adaptation, and sets of 25 start to get more aerobic "help" instead of forcing your glycolytic system to become efficient at clearing lactate. 

- 30+ reps: aerobic system. At this point, you are improving the rate at which your muscles can process oxygen, so you can use fat for fuel. This is all endurance work, you'll build very little strength or size this way, but this is a fantastic way to condition your muscles for performance once you have a good foundation of strength and size. Most calisthenics fall into this category. - other adaptations that you can specifically train for are speed of contraction (through speed work, using accommodating resistance like bands or chains), isometric strength (through resistance progression in the specific position), and ATP-PC work capacity (through cluster sets). These only matter more when you've been training well for awhile and are plateau breaking, which I cover later. 

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2. PERIODIZATION

Periodization is the term used to describe the structure you use to shift the focus of your training from size to strength over time. Even if you only care about one of those goals, it's very helpful to train in multiple rep ranges because they are complementary to each other. For example, powerlifters only care about improving 1RM strength, but often spend a lot of their offseason trying to put on size and improve work capacity at high weights (lots of sets from 5-8), and then when they want to peak they'll take three months to taper down volume and ramp up intensity (focusing on a lot of singles to maximize 1RM explosiveness at a meet). There are two primary ways of periodizing training: block periodization and undulating periodization. 

- block periodization occurs over a specific block of time, typically 1, 3, or 6 months. One reason for this is that general consensus wisdom is that the ideal peaking cycle is 3ish months, so a lot of strength athletes train in 3 month blocks. There are other reasons, but none are important here. Block periodization is a focus on one type of adaptation for that block of time (e.g. three months of hypertrophy work during a strength athlete's offseason). During this time, they'll typically stay in a pretty narrow rep range because they're trying to maximize a single adaptation. 

- undulating periodization means the rep ranges, volume, and intensity all change on a regular basis (picture an undulating wave on a graph, representing which rep range you're in, or alternatively your intensity). This basis can be daily, weekly, or even multiple times within a single workout. For various reasons I'll go into further down, I think there's a generally optimal answer here. 

- these types of periodization can be combined. For instance, let's say an athlete is in a 3 month hypertrophy block, but they start each month by doing sets of 8 with a given weight, next week it's sets of 10, next it's sets of 12, week 4 is a deload, and month 2 begins back at sets of 8 but with a heavier weight. This is block periodization with undulations within the block. You can do all sorts of stuff like this, and much good programming looks like this, but it's a little needlessly complex for most beginners imo. 

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3. EXERCISE SELECTION

Exercise selection is heavily dependent on your specific goals. Someone training for a strongman competition needs to do the specific movements for their show. Someone who is just training to be strong and healthy probably doesn't need to be doing stone-to-shoulder or keg throws every week. So what exercises are good? Principally, prioritize compound movements (movements involving more than one joint in flexion), especially ones that target multiple major muscle groups. Squats, lunges, deadlifts, bench press, overhead press, all of the Olympic lifts (cleans, snatches, jerks), pullups, dips, and rows are your best movements. Isolation/accessory work (e.g. curls, tricep pushdowns, leg extensions) can be great, but compounds should take priority in your programming.  

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4. PROGRESSION

So, how should you expect to progress? Typically people progress by adding weight to the bar, or doing more reps with the same weight. Adding a given amount of weight each week or each workout is called linear progression. It works exceedingly well for beginners -- enough that Mark Rippetoe was able to make an entire career out of just marketing this concept well. However, there are limits to this -- if you add 5 lb to your squat every week, starting at 135, you are not going to squat 650 in 2 years. You will eventually plateau. So what then? Well, periodization exists to break plateaus, so a well periodized program is probably the first step. The other main types of progression are wave and step progression, and there's a link I'll drop at the bottom to a video that explains these pretty well. A good program will use one of these. But eventually you will plateau on that program too. There are several things you can do to troubleshoot this, and the process of learning how your body responds to different things over the years is one of the main things that you will gain over years of training. The following are different variables that you should examine:

- sleep. If you're not sleeping enough, you won't recover well enough, and if you can't recover, you are literally just damaging your muscles without repairing them. If your sleep sucks, this is the first thing to fix.

- diet. If you're not getting enough protein, you again cannot repair your tissue and you are simply repeatedly damaging it without ever fully healing it. You will regress if you do this over a long enough time frame. 

- volume. Remember how I said volume is sets per muscle group per week? You may be under or over training a muscle group.* I will link to some helpful volume guidelines at the end of this in the links section, but the main thing to consider is that if you are not giving your muscles enough stimulus, they will not grow, and if you are giving them too much to recover from, they will not grow. Adding or subtracting sets per week to find your ideal level of volume can be very helpful. A general guideline for your programming is that you should use the minimum effective volume to progress well. This ensures you aren't eating a bunch of excess fatigue and wear, and allows you to add more volume later if you plateau.

* Overtraining is a wildly overused term by people that don't eat or sleep well, program like total fucking retards, and/or generally are pussies. If you are a healthy adult male, almost all of your recovery issues will be handled by getting 8 hours of sleep, 200g of protein, 100g of fat (preferably saturated), and a ton of vitamin D and zinc. That said, you're just not going to recover from 40 sets of direct chest work per week.

- frequency. You should not train a muscle group twice within 48h. (Core, calves, and traps are the only exceptions to this, and this is still a decent guideline for them.) The reason for this is that protein synthesis -- i.e. recovery -- lasts 48h for athletes who aren't on steroids. After that, you should probably train it again. There are programming exceptions to this, but it's a good general guideline. Some movements like squats and bench press benefit especially from higher frequency. I recommend benching 2-3x/week. 

- exercise selection. Selecting high ROI movements in the first place will prevent this from being a frequent problem, but sometimes it's worth switching in specific accessories to target a problem. 

- weaknesses. The above point touched on this some by implication (e.g. if you are bench press is weak off the chest because you lose tension at the bottom, long paused reps will quickly remedy this; if you fail at lockout, including more tricep volume is often a good start), but this is an incomplete understanding of weaknesses. An example of this is that I am much better at high rep sets than I am 1RM strength; my bench 1RM right now is ~355, but my sets of 12 are at 275, leading most calculators to estimate my 1RM at 385 (a number I certainly cannot do right now). This means that I underperform explosively, so when my bench plateaus the first thing I should do is specifically train my explosiveness/speed of contraction. You should, after some months of training, have an idea which you are naturally better at. If you are entirely untrained, you should develop in all rep ranges because you're likely something of a (very weak) blank slate and have an opportunity to make sure you're well rounded out of the gate. 

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5. COMMON TRAINING SPLITS

There are a few common training splits that work fairly well. 

- PPL stands for Push/Pull/Legs, and it's the split I like the best at the moment. Typically, PPL splits are 6 days on with one rest day each week. Allows for a good bit of volume each workout without taking too much time, and lets you workout most days without impinging recovery. 

- 4x/week is the way a lot of powerlifters and strongmen program, with each day having some combination of bench/back/shoulders and squat/deadlift/leg accessories. The biggest issue with this kind of split is finding the precise balance where you're hitting everything at least twice a week, but nothing back to back. If you decide to compete in something like strongman where you have various very different events, this is a really good structure because you can usually train one day back to back without One example split might be:

• D1: deadlift / leg accessories or shoulder stuff that isn't going to be impacted by training it right after bench on D4 (if you make D1 and D4 your back to back -- but you could also easily omit the shoulder stuff here and make D1 and D2 your back to back)

• D2: back / bench

• D3: squat / shoulders

• D4: back / bench

- 3x/week full body works well because your frequency for everything is high enough that you'll progress well. Downside is that sometimes workouts take longer because getting enough volume for everything to grow can be a bit of a challenge in 45 minutes. For this, I would just alternate squat and deadlift being your main movement for legs, e.g.:

• Wk1: D1 Squat, D2 Deadlift, D3 Squat 

• Wk2: D1 Deadlift, D2 Squat, D3 Deadlift and hit a hinge accessory like RDLs on squat days, and a quads accessory like lunges on DL days. 

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6. BUT HOW DO YOU THINK I SHOULD TRAIN?

- I said above that I thought there was a pretty clear answer for this, at least as regards periodization. That is daily undulating periodization. By training each muscle group in a different rep range each day that you work out, you are continuously targeting a weakness on a consistent basis and ensuring you're somewhat well rounded. This will mean that you put on both sides and strength on a more consistent basis then if you just trained for one of those things, because they are often highly complementary. 

- Many coaches program specific weights for you to hit each workout. These are almost always based on a percentage of your 1RMm and are designed to elicit a very specific training stimulus. I prefer allowing you to pick your own weights, with some guidelines. First, you should always leave 1-2 reps in reserve and generally avoid training to failure. Failure provides little additional stimulus, but it does spike your cortisol, impairing your recovery. If you follow this guidance and begin your sets with your heaviest weight (after warming up), and then reduce weight as needed to hit the prescribed reps, you will be able to add or reduce intensity to meet that goal better than if a coach selects your weights. This is called autoregulated intensity.

- some people like training in different rep ranges within each workout. I largely dislike this because you are not providing as strong a stimulus for an adaptation when you train it with fewer sets. You're going to provoke a stronger adaptation by training in a specific rep range for a lot of sets (e.g. a full workout) than by doing a few sets each time. e.g.: have a full push day where you hit main movements and accessories for 8s, and then have another full push day where you hit them for 3s -- instead of every push day doing your first set for 12, your second set for 8, your third set for 5, your fourth set for 3, etc. The impulse to train everything is good; giving each rep range its own day does that much better. I have some examples of this linked below.- I think that while conventional wisdom for strength athletes is starting to accept the value in frequent hypertrophy and muscular endurance training, conventional wisdom for bodybuilders is much more all over the place regarding their being value in heavy training. I think there definitively is. A fast, efficient, explosive contraction is going to allow you to do heavier weight in your hypertrophy focused rep ranges, creating greater microtears and greater energy demand for glycogen. Bottom line: you should train in every major rep range unless you are a competitive athlete training for a specific sport, in which case it sometimes makes sense to narrow your training ranges. Most normal people can benefit tremendously from being well rounded, and regularly training in every rep range is kind of a long-term cheat code to being more of an athletic freak than most normal people. 

- I noted above that abs, calves, and traps can be trained more frequently than other muscles. This is because they are muscles that are used to constant load of some sort in day-to-day life (e.g. calves are under load every step). You can train them everyday, but I wouldn't do more than four times a week. I'm not convinced you'll get more out of it unless your volume per workout is fairly low -- they still have to recover too. One way you could do this would be hitting one movement for each of them for three sets at the end of every workout; that's only 18 total sets if you are training 6 days a week, which isn't too high for them. 

- I think that over the course of your training lifetime, your major phases are, in order: build a well rounded foundation of strength and size for 5-10 years, and build really robust stabilizer muscles and joints -> condition that muscle for more endurance and explosiveness, or whatever specific sport you like (powerlifting, bodybuilding, MMA/combat sports, amateur strongman, Olympic lifting, etc.) -> maintain once you're 15-30y in and you've maxed out your genetic ceiling and have made your decision about PEDs. 

- I really prefer movements that mimic or prepare you well for day-to-day activities. This typically means movements where you are standing and have to brace, and lots of movements with dumbbells where you must stabilize each arm individually. I especially prefer this for shoulders, because a barbell forces them into a less natural movement pattern. 

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7. MISC

- PEDs: I can give you a lot of generalized guidance on PEDs, but I have no experience with them yet. I'll probably start using when I'm early 30s, maybe very late 20s. My recommendation if you're older is to get bloodwork done and jump on high TRT if you're low, but otherwise avoid PEDs until you've already developed a substantial base of strength and size. 

- one of the primary ways your core is trained is through bracing well during compound movements. Here's a great video on how to do this from a great coach who's deadlifted over 900lbs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aE5hEc6mU-8

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8. LINKS/RESOURCES- good coaches include: Josh Bryant, Shane Jerman,  Tom Haviland, Dawson Windham, Joseph Ferratti, John Haack, Chad Wesley Smith, Derek Thistlethwaite, Taylor Gohn

- videos from Taylor Gohn on periodization and how he writes training blocks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QvwQkqI7k64 / https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SN9lS-rV0co / https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZO-1cszgq8 -- I disagree with him some but it's a great look at what step progression looks like.

- here's a summary of the volume guidelines for each bodypart I referenced above: https://www.reddit.com/r/AdvancedFitness/comments/lyney9/summary_of_dr_mike_israetel_and_renaissance/ -- links to the full articles are in the post.

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9. PROGRAMS

- one I wrote. this is a DUP PPL that should illustrate a lot of the principles I talk about above: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1d6KxPaZxoJDM4x3cXoH-rtL8GYt3lcBHEHncDb_TtQw/ -- this is probably a bit more volume than you need to start with (it's what I'm running right now), but it's a good template to work off of.

- Dawson Windham's free program: https://teamwindham.com/product/freebie/ -- great example of a 4x/week program. HIGHLY rec his other programs too.

- Derek Thistlethwaite's programs: https://www.derekprobably.com/ -- Derek is a world record holder, and an excellent coach. His programs are all good.

- Josh Bryant is probably the best strength coach alive; Derek and Dawson are both his athletes, and he coaches Jeremy Hoornstra and Julius Maddox, the two best benchers of all time (and record holders in the 242, 275, and 308+ weight classes respectively). His programs are here https://joshstrength.com/programs/ but his one on one coaching is where he really offers unique value. He takes any and all clients, assuming they're a good personality fit. Idk what he charges but when I eventually hire a coach so I can squat and pull 700, he's who I'm hiring.

- Brian Alsruhe is an advanced strongman competitor. He has a program for relatively advanced athletes called Dark Horse here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1SYuO8XWRM and here are his other programs: https://www.neversate.com/merch

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probably more info than you wanted, but there you are. lmk if you have any questions.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5584852&forum_id=2Reputation#48097592)

most high level strength athletes peak in their late 30s, but most normal people can progress well into late 40s or 50s, and it's fairly easy to maintain strength even as an old. a 5% decline each year after that is laughably wrong.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5584852&forum_id=2Reputation#48097599)

Now cite yours, 185x5 retard lmfao

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5584852&forum_id=2Reputation#48097811)

https://podclips.com/c/LlCX0U?ss=r&ss2=hubermanlab&d=2023-07-07&m=true

And most germane -- Strength Standards by Age -- notice the drop off starting at 45

https://strengthlevel.com/strength-standards/bench-press

are you nowag or kike? why so hostile?

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5584852&forum_id=2Reputation#48097881)

Here are some that do though:

- https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32740889/

- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6586834/

- https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/proceedings-of-the-nutrition-society/article/effects-of-exercise-training-in-the-elderly-impact-of-progressiveresistance-training-on-skeletal-muscle-and-wholebody-protein-metabolism/40CAACDF7D7CCB3B99AB8A43A8EB4B55

- https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/07315724.1995.10718547

- https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28462115/

- https://academic.oup.com/biomedgerontology/article-abstract/50A/Special_Issue/147/597820?redirectedFrom=fulltext&login=false#no-access-message

- https://www.mdpi.com/2227-9032/12/2/197

- https://archpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13690-021-00573-9

(apologies ahead of time; half of these are paywalled, but I can't find a fulltext I can download and reupload/link ATM, on my phone)

Also, strength standard decline is not a measure of efficacy of training, but rather partially a reflection of the fact that older sedentary populations are weaker than younger sedentary populations so the normal distribution is shifted to the left. It's true that with aging strength declines, but that is much more limited for training populations, and untrained people will make market progress pretty much regardless of when they start.

I am 100% White and one of my monikers on here is literally kikechipper. I am hostile because weak people without much experience naysaying the ability to progress even when old flies in the face of what I have literally seen seen several people do, and comes across as an excuse.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5584852&forum_id=2Reputation#48098000)

Author: Soren "Bob" Odenkierkegaard

you can continue making strength gains until 45, after that its about a 5% decrease unless you mitigate it with steroids

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5584852&forum_id=2#48097595)

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5584852&forum_id=2Reputation#48098859)

I was able to get up to 3 sets of 185 for 5-7 reps after half assing it for a couple of months working with a girl personal trainer

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5584852&forum_id=2Reputation#48097594)

My point was that its fairly easy to build strength without much effort

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5584852&forum_id=2Reputation#48097634)

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5584852&forum_id=2Reputation#48097812)

minds aren't matched

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5584852&forum_id=2Reputation#48098003)

is it true that an ignonimous lifetime of jewy low-t seething inspired your current moniker?

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5584852&forum_id=2Reputation#48099158)