The methods that worked like a charm 10 years ago are relics by today’s standards. Teaching methods and coaches are evolving, as are the cookie-cutter software programs. In many respects, the convenience of these programs is worth its weight in gold. But are we losing some of the magic when we do it this way?

My Coaching History

I can’t speak for all coaches because I don’t know what they are up against. My story is a bit of an unusual one for a college strength coach. I paid my coaching dues in a unique way. I started at Eastern Kentucky University as an intern in the spring semester of 2000. Six weeks into my internship, my Head Strength Coach, Mike Kent, took the head job at the University of Louisville and had to leave. Because of the relative newness of his position at EKU, the administration was unprepared and asked me to fill in until a search could be conducted for Coach Kent’s replacement. I worked for three months alone, trying to keep an athletic department strength program afloat.

One of the most difficult tasks while filling in for him was programming the way he programmed. Get this: Kent wrote out every individual program by hand. Each team would have either one sheet or a series of sheets that would carry that team for a month or two. He created each plan in Excel, where the exercises would be built into the framework of the sheet. Then he would spend his weekend hand-programming loads for each athlete over the scope of the entire athletic department. One red pen, followed by hours and hours of work. Kent’s meticulous programming ensured every athlete got the level of individual attention that he felt they needed.

The Difference Between Sheets and White Boards

The coach-athlete relationship is an interesting one. When it comes to compliance, athletes are mandated to show up whether they like it or not, and they don’t have a say in their programming. If you are a private trainer or own a gym/box, your clients have more say. But one thing shines clear in all settings — the people training in your space want to feel like they are being given their due attention, not just as members of a group but as individuals.

There are only a few instances where using a whiteboard is acceptable in my facility. Most of the time, we use whiteboards when we are teaching. When we are trying to get techniques dialed in and where loads are not necessarily a priority, the first month or so is a great time to rely on a whiteboard. Again, in my situation, which is very specific, we will also keep a team on the whiteboard if the team members are not showing a level of dedication. Let’s face it, nobody on campus takes weight training as seriously as I do, and there are some teams who “go through the motions.” I advise my assistants to act accordingly. There’s no need to devote hours and hours of programming for a team that will not give an acceptable effort.

Again, I understand that in a CrossFit box, most clientele can be transient and not as consistent as a college team that is required to show up. That makes the individuality piece more of a headache since you don’t know the next time your clients will show up. But nothing tells your clients you are all in with them, like handing them each a sheet with their name on it. It’s a simple gesture that speaks volumes about your commitment to their progress. Yes, it can be time-consuming, but it can also be a difference between a lackluster effort and a herculean one.

Computer Programming Vs. Hand Programming

I have never used a computer to run percentages for one of my programs. I have always done it by hand. And honestly, I have never used a set percentage to assign loads except for deciding loads for the beginning of a hypertrophy cycle based on a newly minted one-rep max. The method I use is one that Coach Kent taught me, and it’s based on that method’s natural evolution after 16 years of doing it that way.

Computer programming based on percentages, to me, makes some pretty bold assumptions for the duration of a training cycle. First off, if you use a linear method as I do, you probably write for eight to 12 weeks at a time. If I write a twelve-week hypertrophy/strength/power program for a football player, code the weeks with prescribed percentages, and then tap in a one-rep max to be our baseline for the percentages, I am asking the athletes to be perfect with their nutrition, their rest, their effort — at all times. And let’s face it, none of them are. It’s nearly impossible for a person to be that dialed-in all of the time.

Hand programming gives me several advantages that a computer will never provide. First, even though I use what looks like an algebraic formula in my head to determine loads, I get the flexibility to adjust on the fly. You need that flexibility when Joe Blow rolls his ankle the Friday prior. Hand programming gives me an out when I realize that the whole team is about to bonk, and an impromptu deload week is what is needed. It allows me (or forces me, really) to get a complete read on each individual and holds my ass to the fire to stay engaged with each of my athletes. You can ask me at any time of a training cycle what the weight on so-and-so’s bench is on his second set, and 99 out of 100 times, I will know what’s going on.

How I Program

If you were to watch me program, this is what it would look like: I have a stack of sheets, and each one gets the signature “pause and think.” I have to look at the athlete’s name and quickly review and remember what this person did last week. Then the writing begins. I will program a sheet twice a week in some training phases, once for the first half, then once for the second. It keeps me as current as possible for each individual.

When it comes to coaching, I am selling an idea. I am selling a formula. I am asking my athletes to have complete faith in me as I make decisions for them. The way I operate gives my athletes complete freedom not to think. They come in, and their job is to be focused and present and, most importantly, ready to perform. I do all the thinking for them days earlier, so they can just come in and kick ass.

Hand programming is part of that. If I hand you a sheet of computer-printed numbers, it will excite you as much as combing your hair or putting mustard on your sandwich. But when I give you a sheet with my handwriting on it, you should see someone who is partnered with you. The handwriting tells the athletes I have taken the time to think about them every day of every week.

The post It’s 2021 and I Still Handwrite My Training Programs. Here’s Why appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

It took me a while to admit. I’d throw that deep self-shame shade on myself because I should have been able to keep to my intentions, schedules, and plans, right? Probably, but I (and you) need to handle ourselves tactfully. If we don’t, the belligerent toddler inside makes things even worse.

I’ve settled on dealing with myself with more open boundaries.

This open boundary concept is how it started—I decided on what I wanted my physical training to look like based on what I genuinely enjoyed.

It meant practicing some:

• Muay Thai
• Jiu-jitsu
• Training a little Olympic weightlifting
• General basic barbell work
• Strength and conditioning type workouts that heightened the ceiling for how much work I could do

Create a Framework

When I drew up an outline, I thought flexible with a planned focus for each day’s training.

But I miscalculated just how much of a madman I am. If someone else showed me this first draft of a flexible outline, I’d have told them it looked like a training program to prepare someone to join the military special forces.

I was trying to set an outline where my workouts were mapped out with room to change and adjust, but I’d get way too mad at myself if I changed too much during a week. So yeah, that didn’t work.

I came up with another idea eventually, though, to get my inner toddler-tyrant to agree with me.

I’d create a framework. Saying framework instead of outline seems like a pointless change in words until you define the term.

Framework means foundation or core.

Discover Your Core Functions and Foundations

I worked through this:

• What was the core of how I want my body to function, operate, and feel? Ok, I have it.
• Next, I asked myself the foundation for the training and activity I needed each week to get and keep this function.
• I thought long and hard about what I needed and why I needed it.
• I analyzed everything that could be called exercise and thought about what physical activities I enjoyed that I wasn’t doing often or wasn’t doing at all.
• If what I was using as exercise didn’t directly contribute to how I wanted my body to feel and operate, it didn’t fit into my framework.
• This selection process kept me from adding too many things and putting too much restriction on myself again.
• You can imagine this freed up some time for me and made it possible to adjust and modify what I did week-to-week and day-to-day.

On days when that child inside was particularly irritable, I could ask him what he wanted because my framework allowed for change and guided my actions without much thought.

We could agree, and I still did what I found truly important at the end of the week.

If you’ve read this far, I’m assuming that you’re like me, even if you don’t know it yet. You’ve probably been criticized for bouncing around, doing too many types of physical training. But you, like me, are probably just curious about how much your body can do.

So this entire essay, as I’ll call it, because I’m incredibly high brow, will be a discussion of what you need to set your framework and why you need it.

I love my physical hobbies. Some of them keep me active and are incredibly satisfying but wouldn’t keep me functioning and feeling how I want if doing them alone.

Some of them, like jiu-jitsu, could be done as my exercise. But to do more physical hobbies, enjoy them better, and prevent injuries, I also need to put myself through specific forms of strength and conditioning training.

Finding what you need and how to fit all you want together is how we’ll figure out your framework.

Alternate Stimulating and Push Days

It’s not about fitting more into your week.

It’s about finding what you can’t do without, what you need, and then throwing the rest out.

If you have a few different interests and physical hobbies, you can’t push yourself to your max each time you lift weights.

Challenging days are fine, but times, where you do push limits should be few and far between.

Hitting maxes in the weight room and red-lining in conditioning activities isn’t building ability; it’s testing it.

You should do most of your strength and conditioning work pretty decently below your limits, including your limit strength and your total volume.

More difficult days, though, should be offset by easier ones.

I’ve started classifying them as stim and push days. Stim standing for stimulating and push is pretty self-explanatory.

The stim days are to be done a day or two before the push days.

If you did some loaded movement four times in a week, it would usually mean you’d do one at the start of a week and again halfway through. If you only planned for two times, you’d start the week with a stim day and end it with a push day.

The loaded movement here isn’t bound to what’s considered standard weight training with barbells or dumbbells. It can be, but it can also be repetitive rounds of the kettlebell, medicine ball, and sandbag movements.

It can also be pushing or pulling sleds or carrying heavy objects over short distances or long ones as you would in rucking.

For Stim Days:

• Choose just 2-4 exercises you can do with ease that are similar patterns as to what you plan to do on your push day.
• The whole point is to prepare your body for the more challenging work you plan to do in a day or two and move through the same range of motion.
• You only need a couple of sets of basic movements with moderate reps for each. If it takes you longer than twenty minutes, you’re doing too much.

For me, it’s often as basic and brief as this:

I do this a day before a push day, where I plan some heavier squatting, Olympic weightlifting movements, and more strenuous training for Jiu-Jitsu.

Why? Because making hinge patterns like RDLs, which get my posterior chain active, always gets me moving and feeling better after the rest days that I usually take on the weekend. It doesn’t take much, but the difference in the quality of my squatting patterns and more demanding training the next day is pretty drastic.

Picking unilateral and trunk and shoulder stability exercises like these help me stave off old nagging injuries and prep me for heavier lifting. In the positions I’ll find myself doing in jiu-jitsu.

Why Alternate Days?

It’s easy to fire hard out of the gate when we start a new physical habit at the beginning of the week.

Week one is easy. But again, this enthusiasm doesn’t last unless we’re one of those genuinely exceptional, disciplined few.

I stopped lying about how much self-control I had, and you should stop lying to yourself, too.

Using this alternating model, we can strike a bargain with our less agreeable sides to get moving at the beginning and the middle of the week, both points when we’re the laziest.

It’s not such an overwhelming burden to do a workout like I just described. It’s short, easy to do, and makes you feel good. The thing is, it gets the ball rolling at the start of your week and keeps it rolling so that you’re more willing and ready to keep pushing on the other days.

Doing such little work seems like a waste of time at the moment.

It isn’t about that moment, though. That little work keeps you going, and you find yourself consistently moving forward.

Some Density Training Is Important

No need to go into exercise triviality, but I’m being liberal in calling this density training. What I am saying you do is focus on how much work you can do within a specific time and change the details now and then.

There are two ways I suggest doing this:

1. The first is to keep the same rep count for the movement each week (or however often you do this) but increase the total time you repeatedly do the same movement(s) using the same weight.
2. The second way is to keep the same time limit each time you do this, but try to do more reps or more weight with those reps in the given time.

You can do this with just one movement or a group of movements for either option.

In both cases, you’re increasing the endurance of the muscles you’re using, improving your ability to do more work over some time, and building on your limit on how much weight you can move and keep moving.

The best and most enjoyable way I’ve found is by using challenging weight, keeping reps low, and setting a time limit that can be steadily increased.

This increase keeps loaded movement training what it should be. It trains my ability to repeatedly create strong physical output and resist fatigue in the working muscles and my body’s complete systemic ability.

I pick at least two complementary but different movements, and I alternate back and forth, resting as needed for whatever total time.

Here’s an example: 8 Minutes:

• I’ll rest for however long I need between the movements to make sure I move well with a challenging weight for the entire period.
• I’ll write down how many times I cycle through these movements after I’m done.
• Then, I’ll try the same two movements with the same weight, rep count, and time limit again after a week.
• I may even do it every week without changing anything for a few weeks.
• Each time I’ll see if I can do more rounds of this without straining myself too hard or sacrificing the quality of my movements.
• If I can get through more rounds keeping these rules for myself, I know that I truly improved my physical capacity in more than just one way.
• I’ve increased how much work I can do in a set amount of time.
• I’ve gotten stronger, not just in how much force I can produce in one effort but also in how I can keep repeating that same effort to make the same amount of force.
• This consistency in itself is a measure of conditioning—my ability to endure stress and recover from it to repeat the same high-force effort over and over.
• If weeks later I do more work with the same weight simultaneously, I’ve increased endurance in all systems of my body.

Eventually, I’ll make it harder. First, I’ll use heavier weights, keep the rep count and time limit, and then increase the total time.

Using complementary movements is essential for this type of training.

Both the movements in my example are hip-hinge dominant patterns. The deadlift is the more general strength movement that can be loaded heavier, while the snatch takes more coordination and learning efficiency. So it complements the heavier deadlift because the total load you can use for the snatch will be much less.

The snatch gives your trunk and hips a mini active rest while still training quick, forceful total body movements and building upper body and shoulder stability.

You’re still adding more training to the muscles of the trunk and hips but allowing for momentary recovery from the heavy work of the deadlift.

Keep Mentally Engaged

Our physical activity needs to be creative; I’ve already made this point.

That means whatever we use as a routine has to keep us mentally engaged.

If we use movements, we have a knack for, but we still find fun in doing, we can challenge ourselves to do more than last time and create a game for ourselves each time we repeat the pattern.

Games keep us interested. Sober commitment to some fitness goal gets stale.

Once we’ve reached a point where increasing the time we do this makes no sense, or we’re just tired of what we’re doing, we can switch up:

1. The movements
2. The implements we use as weights
3. Or increase the load we use for the movements

This game of besting yourself gives you a greater sense of effort and fulfillment.

You get to show yourself how much you’ve improved over the total collective physical traits you can train.

You’re not just getting stronger; you’re able to create strength over and over.

You’re not just more cardiovascularly fit; you’re muscles are learning to endure and recover from more work.

Create a Go-To List of Movements

For this framework to work, you have to keep using exercises that you can rotate through quickly, efficiently, and for long periods without losing the movement’s quality.

• If you can cycle through the movements quickly, your workouts can be however brief you want them, but still effective.
• This isn’t the time to try new exercises where you have to move cautiously and consciously. You can set aside time for skill practice, but they can’t be in your core group of exercises for this density-type training.
• Getting in and out, as it were, demands you be very skillful with the movements you choose and not need an extensive and drawn-out warm-up and prep to get into the high-paced training.
• This training brand gives you the freedom and flexibility to choose and do two shorter sessions throughout the day. But if you can’t keep the sessions short, you’re not saving time or effort.

So, I keep a shortlist of lower-body focused hinging, squatting, and swinging patterns and upper-body pressing and rowing patterns. This is the list I pick from, and you can use it or go by it to form a list that you animate all your own.

Hinge Movements

• Barbell RDL: Fundamental and easy for me to do, given my background in barbell sports; Some prefer using dumbbells or kettlebells, and that’s a great option, especially if you’re training at home and don’t have room for a barbell. For me, it’s easier to load a bar with a weight I know will push me but that I can maintain for however long I set my clock.
• Suitcase Deadlift: (Video above). This movement is excellent for both push and stim days. It can be very challenging with a heavy kettlebell or dumbbell, but you can also rotate quickly through this and whatever other exercises you choose. I think of these for this density-based training on push days because the one-sided loading makes it very difficult but limits the weight you can use. It’s tough for you to stabilize your trunk and keep it from bending to one side. So you work harder without loading yourself with potentially too much weight for the time period you set, as you could do with a conventional deadlift.
• KB Swing: You really can’t go wrong with this whether you’re using them on push or stim day. Adjust the weight, volume, and intensity easily for each day. You can very easily transition to other exercises from here and move through at a steady pace. Lateral or rotational swings are also a great alternative to use to focus on different patterns and muscles.

Squat Movements

• Goblet Squats: For this, you can use kettlebells, dumbbells, heavy med balls, or sandbags. I prefer goblet squats over barbell squats when rotating through exercises in a time limit because it’s easier to pick a bell or ball up quickly and start moving. Unracking a back squat can be quite a process. Clutching a weight in front of the body close to the chest also challenges trunk strength and keeps the quality of the squat movement more evenly as you tire.
• KB Squat Swings: You can think of this as a hybrid hinge and squat pattern, but I put this in my shortlist for squatting movements. Again this is very easy to adjust depending on your focus for the day.

• Med Ball Cleans: For push days, you may have to invest in a heavier med ball, but it’s well worth it. This clean can be a quick, explosive movement you can repeatedly perform that builds coordination, grip, and back strength.

Press Movements

• Barbell Floor Press: Using a barbell for this is great if you’re pairing this with a lower-body movement where you use kettlebells, dumbbells, or med balls. You can set up the bar with your set weight and keep rotating back and forth between the movements reasonably easily.
• Dumbbell or Kettlebell Push Press: I prefer the push press over strict (if you have the mobility and stability) because you can challenge heavier weights but keep the pace.
• Landmine Push Press: An excellent alternative to keep the athletic full-body motion of a push press for those who aren’t ready to push directly overhead.

Pull Movements

• Bent-over Barbell Rows: Great for either day in your alternating training plan; Again, easy to modify and rotate with a dumbbell movement.
• Alternating Bent-Over KB/DB Rows: You can get a lot of volume in with these and move through them quickly.
• Pull-Ups: If you can do them, there’s not much better density training than hopping up there quickly after completing another exercise and repeating it again and again.

I’ve practiced all these movements more times than I care to count, even before structuring my training like this. So, I know if I pick them, I can move through my workout without much thought.

Design a Loose, Self-Adjusting Structure

Practicing with all this, I’ve inadvertently figured out what tools are best for each day. A barbell is suitable for most of what you could do in a stim day if you have enough skill.

You can warm up and easily load it to what you need to give yourself the type of workout you want. Simple movements using dumbbells are also suitable for this day.

Sandbags, medicine balls, kettlebells, or rubber atlas stones are better for push days. You can put them down quickly and move through a whole sequence of movements with little transition.

You can change what you use and how you use it as often as you want, but you’ll also find that having these easier and more challenging days starts influencing your decisions on what to do and how to do it.

The Benefits of a Flexible Structure

The point of the framework is to fit the necessary work you need to feel and look how you want in your daily life without giving it much thought.

Too much thinking, and you’ll talk yourself out of this. But, if you have markers to reach and the flexibility to adjust with the constant changes of each week, you can reach those marks with more consistency and with less effort.

Check out what I mean with this example of an actual week of training I outlined for myself using this model:

Day One (Stim): Monday or Tuesday

• If done on Tuesday, stretch Monday evening (vice versa)
• Every other Monday, try to train muay Thai/jiu-jitsu

Part A:

Part B: Loaded Movement: 2 exercises (4-6 sets 5-8 reps)

Day Two (Push): Wednesday

Day Three (Stim): Thursday

Part A:

Part B: Aerobic: (20-60 mins)

Day Four (Push): Friday

Part A:

Part B: At JDI

Throw Away the Book; Keep the Story

You’ll see that nothing is set in stone. You don’t need to start day one on Monday, or even on the same day each week.

I even write out alternate schedules as to when to do some particular physical activity so that when I’m faced with a giant disruption in my schedule that mentally fries me, I don’t have to figure it out on the fly; I follow my plan B.

My life, probably like yours, changes literally every week.

Some days I need to pick my kids up or drop them off at school or activities at different times or even on different days.

Sometimes I schedule an hour for a meeting, and it lasts two—although I’d rather drop a big rubber atlas stone on my foot than sit in a two-hour session.

If I rigidly wrote a training plan where I was supposed to do a particular exercise with a particular weight for a specific amount of sets and reps, and I missed that day, I’d get discouraged that I didn’t follow through. Then, I’d sabotage the rest of my week because why the hell not?

I already messed up, so I might as well burn it all down.

Setting the mark that I should make a certain pattern of movement, but not choosing a specific exercise or giving myself the rule to change to some other exercise with the same pattern on the day, keeps me from skipping the workout if I don’t want to do what I planned when I wake up that morning.

Routine creates freedom to do what really interests you.

Physical routine is usually the first to go, though on a busy week. So throw away the book and keep the story.

Make it easy to do what you need without tying your hands in too much rigidity.

If you want to learn the best way I’ve ever found to keep yourself free and open, and you live in the NYC/northern New Jersey area, check out this event I’m putting on August 28th, with tickets available here.

The post Prevent Self-Sabotage With a Flexible Framework appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

So, you signed up with the latest cool app that claims to deliver personalized workouts and promises results. You have been diligently following along for two months but are growing bored and skeptical because you do not see the expected results.

Or, maybe you have been attending boot camp three days a week for the last six months. They’re social, challenging, and leave you feeling like you had a good sweat, but you now have some chronic pain in your shoulder that’s affecting your life.

The Advantages of a Personalized Training Plan

Chances are, if your fitness program isn’t personalized, you’re going to run into problems either with the lack of results or, worse still, injuries.

An individualized plan created by a professional coach should consider:

• Your age (both training age and biological)
• Training history
• Injury history
• Current fitness and skill level
• Your schedule
• Your priorities and goals

Here are four reasons to start a personalized fitness plan designed by a professional coach.

1. We’re Like Snowflakes – Consider Our Differences

You probably learned in kindergarten that we’re like snowflakes—We’re all different. We have different DNA, backgrounds, skills, health, injury histories, and on and on.

Chances are you have noticed that your body responds differently to certain foods.

You know the whole, “Why can he eat an entire ring of Brie cheese and feel great, and I find myself bloated with a crippling belly ache?”

The point is: We’re not all created equal. Why would a fitness program be any different?

“Health and wellness must be personalized (and) fitness sits here,” explained OPEX Fitness CEO Carl Hardwick. “People’s circumstances are unique, and an individually designed program meets them exactly where they are.”

This is why OPEX coaches put their clients through a thorough assessment first, which considers their body composition, the way their body moves, and their current abilities.

This provides a framework for the coach to build a program that considers all facets of the unique individual.

As a result, the program can offer appropriate volume and appropriate movements at appropriate intensities for that person.

“Individualization sets people up for success as it works within their capabilities,” Hardwick added.

Or, as OPEX coach Henry Torano explained, “The entire point of fitness is for it to improve.”

And the best way to help clients improve and reach their goals is to “meet them where they’re at” and adjust their training program accordingly.

This flexibility is something a fitness app or a group fitness class can’t provide.

2. Consider Reality and Your True Intention

One of the biggest and most frequently overlooked keys to sticking with a fitness routine long-term comes down to whether or not it’s realistic physically and practically.

This means it needs to consider an individual’s goals, schedule, priorities, and what they’re willing to do.

OPEX coaches work with the clients to figure out their true intention. Not their superficial, “I want to lose weight.” reason, but the deeper reason behind why they want to improve their fitness.

Frequently, people assume they’re supposed to work out five days a week for 90 minutes a day because that’s what their super fit friend does, but this might not be realistic, nor is it something they’re willing to make a priority. So trying to follow their friend blindly sets them up for quick failure.

“Once people realize what their actual goals and intentions are, and that they’re different from others, and most importantly that that’s okay, they will inherently realize their fitness and lifestyle routine will need to be, as well,” Hardwick said.

3. Consider Sustainability

Chances are you have been marketed by the 6-week diet and fitness challenge folks, who promise quick results in a hurry.

Is it possible to see results in six weeks? Absolutely, but it has repeatedly been proven that the strict diet or the overnight overhaul of your life mentality doesn’t last much beyond the six-week challenge.

Hard reality moment: “Individualized fitness is not always the fastest way to results, but it is the most sustainable,” Hardwick explained.

Bottom line: When we push too hard too soon because we’re fixed on seeing quick results, we don’t stick with it for long.

An individualized plan that is carefully progressive, on the other hand, allows you to hop on a path to long-term, sustained results.

4. Consider That Life Is Dynamic

Our lives, from our goals to our priorities to our schedules, change, and you’re going to be the most successful if your training program takes this into account.

What you want from fitness at 30 is likely different than what you’ll be after at 60, so it makes little to no sense to try to ignore this reality and keep doing what you did 30 years ago.

“We change jobs, move to new a place, have kids, etc. All of these could dramatically change your fitness needs, hence your fitness program needs to adapt to that, not the other way around,” Torano said.

Final Thought: Though we rely on technology and apps for so many things in our lives today, something like our health will always benefit from the human touch.

“In a world that relies so much on technology and automatization, I believe people appreciating what’s left of genuine human connection and service offerings,” Torano said. “That is what individualized training is all about.”

The post 4 Reasons to Ditch the App and Begin a Personalized Fitness Plan appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

Julie wants to make the varsity basketball team. Fully motivated and unsure of where to begin, she decides that she will stay late after open gyms and shoot 200 free-throws every day. She finishes all her reps on day one, but it sure was annoying.

The last 100 shots, her mind is anywhere but on the rim. She’s thinking about what is for dinner, what she’s wearing to the football game Friday, and whether Kevin will be there. She rushes through to get home and on with her life. The next day this pattern is only amplified. The shots start fine but quickly dissolve into sloppy, rushed reps. As is often the case, her plan sounded better in theory.

Despite her efforts, Julie is actually getting worse at shooting free-throws. She’d have been far better off, deciding to shoot 50 shots per day and then taking the time to focus, execute, and correct each rep. Instead, she reinforced poor mechanics and actually impeded her own progress.

We do this all the time in training. Rather than focus on quality reps, Julie focused on an impressive sounding, arbitrary number, 200, and determined that by doing more work she was certain to get better.

In my second ever Breaking Muscle piece, I identified the three fallacies driving the More is Always Better myth:

• Do more in less time (density)
• Move more weight (intensity)
• Do more total work (volume)

Today, I’ll revisit these and add nuance.

Quality Over Quantity

“Practice doesn’t make perfect. Perfect practice makes perfect.”

Vince Lombardi

We often forget that strength and power are skills. Much of our training improvements are neurological. Every movement pattern is a complex concert where many muscles, each having different responsibilities and sequence, contract in symphony to balance and drive against resistance.

Neural pathways become quicker and more efficient from crisp, quality reps. Consistent work is essential for skill development, but only when that work is done well. When form and quality falter, we reinforce poor patterns. When it comes to high intensity or technical work, always prioritize quality over quantity.

There are ways to shift a workout and hit the same number of reps while not sacrificing quality. For example, my soccer team was working at 3×5 on the RDL for a few weeks. They were getting stronger, but I started to see more breakdowns in technique than I liked. Using my autoregulated system, too many had allowed themselves to sacrifice form in the pursuit of higher weights.

Photography by Bev Childress of Fort Worth, Texas

My solution was to hold them at the same weights, but shift the plan to 5×3. Athletes were now doing the same number of reps at the same weight, but they were benefitting from those reps because they had the ability to execute.

For an athlete, it is important to remember that, with few exceptions, the weight room is for getting stronger and more powerful. Aerobic or metabolic conditioning should usually be accomplished without weights (we can all think of exceptions, but this holds true for most team sports).

With that in mind, ditch the brutal, gut-busting sets of 20. If you aren’t a bodybuilder, why do a back squat ten times? Even my early year technique progressions are done at lower reps, with longer, controlled tempos. I find I can always get more execution by reducing reps to five or fewer.

Process Over Outcome

Focusing on quantity wasn’t Julie’s only mistake. She determined outcomes ahead of time and lost the process. We see this constantly in sports, training, and life. For example, Billy sets an individual goal, to rush for 1,000 yards this season, and a team goal, to win district. Both are absolutely meaningless.

The 1,000-yard goal is arbitrary. Of course, he’d like to rush for more yards rather than less. It isn’t as if he will just stop running if he reached 1,000 yards. He will run just as hard whether the goal is there or not. Likewise, it is obvious that he’ll want to win as many games as possible. Most importantly, however, he has no control of either goal. The coach might not give him enough carries and the line might not block well enough.

It is good to have a vision of where we’d like to be and to constantly re-imagine where that is based on our most recent feedback, but the focus should always be on process, not outcome. In training, we’ll pick a number and determine that we want to lift that much. In reality, our goal is just to get stronger before we test again in 8 weeks. At that point, we’ll re-evaluate our goals.

So, if the point is to get stronger where do we put our emphasis? Performance keys. Performance keys are the task-conscious cues that help you execute better. For a bench press, that might be: drive heels down and back, fire glutes, bend the bar. For a squat that might be: fill with air, drive elbows forward, and spread the floor.

The point is that our outcomes are always better when we focus on executing in each moment. A process-minded approach requires mindfulness and self-reflection rather blind obsession on arbitrarily defined goals. Create a good plan and set time to re-evaluate. When you are working focus on quality. The rest takes care of itself.

As an ardent meditator, I’ve repeatedly experienced this process. Anyone who begins meditating probably does so for the host of benefits (lower blood pressure, to reduce stress, improved focus, greater patience, etc.).

Yet, what you learn from meditation is that none of those goals can be forced. The more you focus on those outcomes, the less successful you will be. Improvement only comes from letting go of focus on outcomes and learning to experience the sense of flow that drives quality.

You might also like:

• The Myth Of More Is Better
• Find Joy In Your Practice
• 3 Important Questions To Help Recalibrate Your Training Focus
• Regain Your Training Focus: Ask Yourself This
• Stay Focused And Slay Your Goals

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