Strong and Sleek

Dr. Santana and Coach Trent wrap up their mini series on post-novice programming with an important discussion on understanding why you missed reps. The novice linear progression cannot last forevever (or else we'd all be squatting 1,000lbs!), and as the saying goes, all good things come to an end. This means that at some point, you'll miss reps. What do you do then? Some people have the impression that missing reps means it's time to change the program, and that's not necessarily true. Often there are recovery issues at play that can be addressed, allowing the lifter to extend progress on the novice linear progression with a few simple tweaks. In today's episode, Dr. Santana and Coach Trent walk through the The First Three Questions outlined in the Starting Strength method, and a fourth question, related to the stress/recovery/adaptation model.

 

In the Starting Strength article The First Three Questions, Rip identifies three important questions to ask yourself when progress stalls:

How long are you resting between sets?

How big are your jumps in weight between workouts?

How much are you eating and sleeping?

 

The demands of heavy barbell training are high, and many trainees miss the mark on one or more of these questions, especially a few months into a novice linear progression when every lift has become hard. Coach Trent adds a fourth question to the mix: what other stressors are going on in your life? Psychological stress affects physical perormance, especially when it becomes chronic stress. Especially for busy adults with lots of responsibilities outside the gym, you have to account for life stressors in your recovery and programming.

 

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Dr. Robert Santana and Coach Trent explore the Stress/Recovery/Adapation cycle (adapted from Hans Selye's General Adaptation Syndrome) and how it serves as a guiding model for programming decisions in the intermediate phase of training.

 

Weights & Plates is now on YouTube!

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Weights & Plates: https://weightsandplates.com

Robert Santana on Instagram: @the_robert_santana

 

Trent Jones: @marmalade_cream

Email: [email protected]

 

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The novice linear progression (NLP, or LP for short) is a fun time in the training career of a lifter. Never will you make as much progress -- and as fast! -- as you will during LP. It's also brutally hard, especially toward the end. Nevertheless, it comes to an end for every lifter, and people often spin their wheels trying to figure out what to do once the simple A/B program stops working. In today's episode, Dr. Santana and Coach Trent discuss some basic principles of post-novice programming, and point out that at all stages of the game, the main goal is that the weight must go up.

 

Weights & Plates is now on YouTube!

https://youtube.com/@weights_and_plates?si=ebAS8sRtzsPmFQf-

 

Weights & Plates: https://weightsandplates.com

Robert Santana on Instagram: @the_robert_santana

 

Trent Jones: @marmalade_cream

Email: [email protected]

 

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For a variety of reasons, the predominant form of exercise in popular culture is endurance training. Endurance is valorized in the media, with sports like swimming and running receiving prime position in Olympic broadcasts. Military films often depict the hero enduring through miles and miles of trackless jungle and urban wastelands. The overarching experience of endurance training is pain, and pain is relatable. Everyone suffers, or will suffer, from pain in their life. It's even in the popular saying: "no pain, no gain."

 

Strength training, however, does not elicit the same pain response that endurance training does. Strength training does not burn or ache, it is an entirely different experience. Squatting a heavy set of five with a barbell feels like being crushed by a Mack truck; you must overcome an intense amount of pressure in your whole body, while pushing as hard as you can against the weight. Your body dumps adrenaline, increasing your heart rate and blood pressure. The set begins long before you step on the platform too. Hours or even days before the event, the anticipation of a heavy, all-out set of squats gives you butterflies. Strength training is, essentially, engaging with and conquering a fear response.

 

For this reason, strength training is a harder sell in the fitness community. It is socially acceptable to pound a trainee into the ground with endurance training. People will pay dearly for it, in fact! Just look at Crossfit, where they frequently claim "your workout is our warmup." Yet, if you want to build a strong, resilient, muscular body, learning to face your fears and lift heavy barbells is a must. It's a useful skill in the gym, and in life.

 

Weights & Plates: https://weightsandplates.com

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You've tried the templates in the bodybuilding magazines, from the bodybuilding sites. You've tried lifting like the big jacked, ripped dudes on social media... and it hasn't worked. You don't look like them, and your growth has stalled out. For some reason we accept that in sports, we shouldn't expect to perform like pro athletes without elite genetics and many years of training, but in fitness, we expect to acheive the look of people with outlier genetics, years of training, and, often, performance enhancing drugs as well. In today's episode, Dr. Santana and Coach Trent explain why basic barbell training is the answer to a better physique for the vast majority of trainees -- and that includes you!

 

Compound lifts -- the squat, bench press, overhead press, and deadlift -- work the entire body with very heavy weights if you progressively train them, that is, add weight to the bar on a regular basis. Because they utilize so much muscle mass, they can produce a stimulus for growth that no isolation exercise can match, and many of the best physiques in the world were built, at the beginning, with a lot of basic compound lifts. A solid base of strength in these four lifts forms of the base of the pyramid for body composition. A guy that works hard to get his squat to 315 and bench to 225 will have a decent set of legs and chest! Once that is achieved, he can then bring up his weak points with a small selection of assistance work. The same guy squatting only 185 is wasting his time trying to do any assistance work -- he simply needs to drive his squat up.

 

So, if you're tired of not having a muscular physique and "looking like you lift," then re-dedicate yourself to acheiving some baseline achievements on the main barbell lifts. Then, when it's time to introduce some additional exercises, you'll have a much better base of strength to perform them with (i.e. you'll be able to do those lifts heavier, and thus get more out of them) and you'll have a much better idea of where your actual weak points are.

 

Weights & Plates: https://weightsandplates.com

Robert Santana on Instagram: @the_robert_santana

 

Trent Jones: @marmalade_cream

Email: [email protected]

 

 

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Happy New Year! To kick off 2024, Dr. Santana and Coach Trent discuss the biggest ingredient to success in achieiving your fitness goals -- consistency. All the talk about programming and training splits and macros is futile if you aren't taking action consistently to meet your goals. Many people struggle with consistency, however, so they dive deep into the factors that influence consistent action: environment, motivation, and discipline. Dr. Santana points out that every trainee has modifiable and non-modifiable factors in their life, and optimizing the things you can modify, while setting expectations around what you cannot, is important to creating a productive environment.

 

Weights & Plates: https://weightsandplates.com

Robert Santana on Instagram: @the_robert_santana

 

Trent Jones: @marmalade_cream

https://www.jonesbarbellclub.com

 

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Dr. Santana and Coach Trent share some of the lessons they've learend about training, health, nutrition, and human behavior in 2023.

 

Happy New Year!

 

Weights & Plates: https://weightsandplates.com

Robert Santana on Instagram: @the_robert_santana

 

Trent Jones: @marmalade_cream

https://www.jonesbarbellclub.com

 

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A meandering chat about dog training turned into an interesting idea for strength training. Trainees are not so different from dogs -- they have different personalities, different motivations, and different "drives" -- and therefore they will respond best to a program that most closely matches their individual traits. An enthusiastic endurance athlete who regularly runs marathons or cycles long distances, for instance, would likely struggle mightilty on a program that calls for them to frequently hit singles or doubles on the big compound lifts. Likewise, an amateur powerlifter probably wouldn't enjoy the burn and sweating of a bodybuilding workout. We could say that in these examples the lifter would be training in inhibition, that is, against the things he enjoys doing.

 

A better program for compliance (and therefore, better for outcomes in the long run) is one that matches a lifter's natural drive. Endurance athletes still need to lift, but will probably do better with a program focused on 4-5 big compound lifts for sets of 3-5 reps, perhaps only two days per week. Simple and effective for general strength training. This kind of program won't prepare the lifter to hit impressive 1RM's, but it will build muscle, build strength that will carryover to the endurance activities, and won't interfere or take away too much time from the fun endurance training.

 

If you have big goals, however, you may need to train in an "inhibitory" manner for a while. For the average person, taking your deadlift from 405 to 500 may take a couple years and will definitely require some sacrifice in other areas of physical fitness. You will likely have to cut out all non-lifting sports and physical activites while you train for this, and you may have to gain more bodyweight than you want to for those sports to facilitate the lifting. This is not a bad thing, but you should have an end date if you want to stick to your goals. White knuckling your way through two hard years of training is not going to work for most people.

 

Understanding your drives can help you setup a program that you will comply with, and because of that compliance, you'll see results and have some fun in the process.

 

 

Weights & Plates: https://weightsandplates.com

Robert Santana on Instagram: @the_robert_santana

 

Trent Jones: @marmalade_cream

https://www.jonesbarbellclub.com

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One idea in the fitness community that just won't die is that you need to do high rep sets (10's, 15's, 20's) when the goal is to build muscle. What so many people miss in this conversation, however, is that the context matters. To start with, the lift matters! Squats for sets of 10 or 15 are probably not a productive use or your time, because the fatigue generated from heavy compound lifts usually causes technique breakdown as you approach failure. Lying triceps extensions, on the other hand, can and should be pushed for sets of 10 or more.

 

Dr. Santana and Coach Trent break down the idea of high rep sets, and discuss when they might be appropriate and how they deploy them. As Santana explains, most of the bodybuilding advice out there about high rep sets is targeted toward fine muscular development -- advanced bodybuilders chasing muscular growth in specfic areas. But most people trying to improve their physique are really looking for gross muscular development, that is, growing the whole body, and that is best accomplished by heavy compound lifts with assistance work peppered in as needed for more advanced trainees.

 

Weights & Plates: https://weightsandplates.com

Robert Santana on Instagram: @the_robert_santana

 

Trent Jones: @marmalade_cream

https://www.jonesbarbellclub.com

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

 

 

Mark Rippetoe and Marty Gallagher Interview (3 Parts):

Part 1: https://youtu.be/siaDQdpQPRQ?si=jBBEqMFP6drd1mKm

Part 2: https://youtu.be/TxjibbKJ8UE?si=YilgpD6MG6bxAGZG

Part 3: https://youtu.be/RIe_7ODKycQ?si=6t5M2L88a0J7DvGV

 

Weights & Plates: https://weightsandplates.com

Robert Santana on Instagram: @the_robert_santana

 

Trent Jones: @marmalade_cream

https://www.jonesbarbellclub.com

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.