Dr. Jonathon Sullivan and Noah Hayden continue their Barbell Health podcast series, this time discussing in-depth the strength prescription for the sick aging phenotype.

This episode laid out Noah's thoughts on exercise & programming criteria, and an important discussion into the role the criteria play for the coach.

You can check out more of Sully's work on the Greysteel YouTube channel.

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Strength Prescription

In the last podcast, Sully & Noah discussed the problems with conventional medicine and its inability to treat the sick aging phenotype.

Keeping the notion of medicine, with the intent to actually address your athlete's root problems, helps frame the problem (and the solution).

If force production underlies the various fitness attributes, and strength is force production, clients need to gain strength.

Because strength helps all the physical attributes, barbell exercise need to be incorporated into the exercise prescription the client receives.

As the client progresses, conditioning (especially HIIT) can be added, but initially, a simple, linear progression provides enough stress.

Dosage Criteria for the Strength Prescription

If we think about this under the concept of medicine, be start to think about dosage, the frequency of the dosage, and what exercises fall under that prescription.

Barbells are good. Strength is good. How do we pick exercises.

What follows is Sully and Noah discussing the traditional 4 exercise selection criteria, then Noah positing criteria for programming.

Sully suggests the exercise criteria are a post hoc justification of the exercises coaches would program anyway. Certainly, for most coaches, these criteria become engrained, and rarely (if ever) are they running through these criteria to choose an exercise for their lifters.

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