Training Rules

[lehman906]

What rules or principles do you guys find yourselves constantly repeating or constantly having to remind yourselves? I have such training ADD that I need to write down some rules and constantly refer to them. As I approach my hundred-and-eleventy-eth birthday, they become even more important. Honestly, I also need a friend to remind me sometimes as well.

These are mine; I’m curious as to yours.

1-Optimal technique is the one you can do without pain. It doesn’t matter if the experts say you should do it differently, because being able to continue and progress something that is “suboptimal” is better than trying to force the best technique and getting hurt.

2-Err on the side of less is more. I know volume is king, but like above, slower progress is better than having to reload or work around pain.

3-Keep the goal the goal. As Stephen King said about writing, sometimes you need to Murder your Darlings. Just because something is cool or fun, does NOT mean you need to add it in to your program. Cut the fluff.

4-Find the exercises that click with you, feel safe, and feel strong, and hammer THOSE. Jim Cornette said that Jerry Lawler would hit hard in safe places, and that’s a good philosophy.

Hit me with your top rules!

[FredM]

Great rules.

I've "learned" this rules as well but I'm too stubborn to apply them. I think I might actually try this year though.

I'd add sticking with what works. Beyond your #4, if doing something over an extended period of time got you measurably stronger without beating you up -- keep effing doing that thing. We'll see if I can actually apply that this year as well.

[5hout]

0. Consistent hard work isn't everything, it's the only thing. You simply must get at it. Program hop? Train around injuries? Try different things? As long as you're working hard and regularly something is improving (even if you have to harvest the gains later). This is my only general rule/top rule.

If I had 2 sub-rule they'd be:

1. Listen to the "average wisdom", listen to the "elite wisdom" and try to understand what both are saying and why. This is basically Chesterton's fence. If both are aligned, think long and heard before going against. If they are not aligned, pick one at random/preference, but try and figure out why when you have time.

2. A new gym toy (when financially responsible) can sometimes help cover a motivation gap.

[CheekiBreekiFitness]

Here are mine, laced with some ranting, and delivered in broken english as I usually do. Applies to meatheads not competitive athletes, obviously.

1. Time+effort+consistancy: Getting big strong and muscular is a problem that can only be solved by brute force. If you get to the gym and never miss a session, lift weights with high enough effort and do that for 10 years, you'll be big and jacked. There is no need to overthink your programming whenever you encounter some minor setback: you're fine, keep grinding, do the work, you'll get there. Nothing can derail a good training block like overthinking. Unless you're some DYEL who started lifting 6 months ago, progress is going to be given in minuscule increments that will add up if you keep at it. Don't worry about progressing "fast enough", if you are progressing at all you are fine. Stop theory crafting to find the "OpTiMal ProGrAM". Do something reasonable and try to adjust as you gain information about how you react to it. It does not mean that you should not try to program intelligently either, see below.

2. More is more: Somehow related to 1, the main factor that determines whether or not you are going to get better is doing more shit and harder shit. Most programming strategies are a means to an end, and this end is doing more shit and harder shit. Also, you can always do more than you are currently doing, believe me. People love to talk about "diminishing returns", but diminishing returns are still returns ! Say dude A trains 4 hours a week and dude B trains 20 hours a week. Is B going to be 5 times more muscular than A ? No chance. But B is still going to be a freak compared to A. This is the sad reality of almost any activity in life: doing more work gets you more results, and there are no hacks. To make matters worse, the most talented people tend to also be the most hard working. Good luck catching up with them with no talent and 3 hours a week of actual work.

3. You can train everyday: Since 2 is the objective, training every day has obvious advantages (providing that you have the time of course). You probably won't be able to max out on squats and deadlifts everyday without breaking yourself, but gradually adding short conditioning/light lifting sessions to your rest days is totally feasible, and like everything your body will adapt to it. Those also have the advantage of helping recovery, in my experience.

4. Balance: Balance is something that seems to be lost in the internet era where people identify as "powerlifters" or "bodybuilders" or "strongmen" or whatever. What happen to just being relatively lean, have some decent muscularity and strength, and respectable cardio (aka being "in shape"). If you do not actively compete in those sports you are not any of those things, you are a meathead, like the rest of us. If you haven't dieted down to 6% bodyfat and gone on stage in a mankini you're not a bodybuilder. Taking gym selfies does not count. If you are just a meathead (like yours truly), I do not think it is necessary to very heavily prioritize one physical quality over the other. You can improve your strength, get larger muscles, improve conditioning, and keep body composition in check all at the same time. And I know because I and many other people have done it. You don't need a "power belly" to make your press move up. You don't need to park closer to the entrance of the gym if you are trying to increase the size of your pecs. You don't need to dial back your lifting sessions to 1/week because you're trying to bring your resting heart rate down. Of course, if you're trying to increase muscle size, then you'll have to accept gaining a bit (keyword "a bit") of fat on your waist line, and if you want to test your 1RM you should probably not attempt to do it while doing marathon training.

5. 30% strength, 50% hypertrophy, 20% conditioning: A simple idea in order to adhere to 4 is to follow a session template of: first lift something very heavy, then lift something relatively heavy very many times to get a hugh pump, then do something that makes you want to sweat and puke. Half of the time is allocated to getting larger muscles (aka brolifting) because in the long run hypertrophy should be is the primary goal long term goal. I am assuming that 80% of the time you are bulking (which you should), but this can be adapted in a brain dead fashion: if you're peaking your strength or deloading just slash the hypertrophy. If you are cutting reduce the hypertrophy by half.

6. Broscience is good science: Training is mostly relentless self experimentation. Do something, log every workout sets and reps, when it stops working try to evaluate how you reacted to the training, then switch to something else and repeat the process. The results you'll get from any training program have so much variance that most lifting advice and template programs are useless anyways. Individualization is the name of the game, but this requires you to work at it and use some of your brain cells, instead of dumping your money at a bunch of spreadsheets. People love to pontificate over "ThE EviDeNcE" but I don't think that "ThE EviDeNcE" actually has anything useful to tell you. You want to know if it works, just go and try it, instead of reading a bunch of pubmed studies about college kids doing leg extensions for 8 weeks (lol !). "ThE EviDeNcE" is always 50 years behind the broscience anyways. You don't need a new meta analysis to know whether or not doing more work makes your muscles bigger: bodybuilders in the 50's already figured that out for you. The actual evidence is in your training log, not on youtube or pubmed. Get off the internet and get in the weight room.

7. Flexible planning: Your body is an extremely complex system with millions of components interacting with each other. And to make matters worse it is interacting with the outside world which results in even more complexity. So thinking that you can predict everything that might happen with high accuracy with a spreadsheet seems far fetched. Do you need a plan ? Yeah absolutely, as gyms are full of people who do random shit and make no gains. But the plan should be flexible enough to actually adapt to your current state. Do you even need a spreadsheet to begin with ? I'm not sure. At least I don't.

8. Hard, not complicated: Getting bigger, stronger and more conditionned belongs in the category of "hard but not complicated" tasks. Rather than complex problem solving and manipulating difficult, abstract concepts, it mostly involve doing a handful of simple things very well, all the time, over a very long period of time. Getting to the gym, pushing yourself, filming your sets, logging your workouts, buying cooking and eating meat and vegetables, doing your conditionning. None of those are complex, and can be understood by a third grader. So instead of worrying about obtaining more information, try to worry about executing the core tasks as well as you currently can.

[SnakePlissken]

About every 3 months I reread Fred Hatfield's 7 Laws of Training to remind myself about writing a program and if they fit my goals.

Few things I've picked up as well:
Alex Bromley - wide bases make tall peaks

Bald Omni Man - when writing a program you have to budget needs and wants just like in finance or your plan will fail

And training has to be enjoyable or you won't listen to it or won't progress well

[lehman906]

Great rules.

I've "learned" this rules as well but I'm too stubborn to apply them. I think I might actually try this year though.

I'd add sticking with what works. Beyond your #4, if doing something over an extended period of time got you measurably stronger without beating you up -- keep effing doing that thing. We'll see if I can actually apply that this year as well.

Application really is the hardest part. I think almost every lifter knows what they need to do, and it’s why they can almost always offer someone else good advice, but following your own advice is the trick.

[broseph]

Some good stuff here; I especially like what @CheekiBreekiFitness and @SnakePlissken said.

I was thinking about this lately because people IRL ask me what I do. Unfortunately, I think the secret is super boring and unappealing; be brutally consistent and try pretty hard. Unless you've been dealt a handful of genetic jokers, progress will add up. You don't have to kill yourself in the gym, nor should you, but it can't be easy all the time either.

The flip side of the "try hard" coin is that maintenance counts as winning sometimes. When you don't have time or energy to lift hard, it doesn't take much to not go backwards.

[Wilhelm]

I think the secret is super boring

Embrace the boring

Never miss sessions electively

Do small amounts of accessories a large amount of days

[lehman906]

You don't have to kill yourself in the gym, nor should you, but it can't be easy all the time either.

Yeah, besides consistency, this may be the most important. Hit hard in safe places. Which then leads to better consistency because you’re pushing hard on the things your body tolerates well

[augeleven]

Super excited to collate these and make some gym rules.

The best I have is
1) set a checkpoint/deadline/goal my training block. This gives me something to push towards and breaks up the monotony of me not getting very strong.
2) If I’m about to pull the plug on a workout because it’s going south, set a 5 minute timer, then reassess. I tend to use short rest times and sometimes local fatigue clouds my judgment, or makes it hard to deal with unmet top set expectations.
3) if Im probably going to skip it at the end of the workout, do it first in the warmup. Things like abs, rear delts and curls. Not optimal, but better than skipping them.

[dw]

Not a rule exactly but a guideline - no dread. If you find yourself really dreading a movement, just find a substitute.

This may not be an option for people that require more specificity (e.g. powerlifters) or are more advanced. For me there is just no need to do a movement that I dislike.

When I look back at some of the insane stress I put myself under with SS and then BBM...smh.

[MarkKO]

1. Do the least possible to achieve the results you want. The least volume, least load, least weight, least variation. This will leave you with room to do more if that is necessary.

2. If you want to find out if something is effective you need to give it AT LEAST three months consistent work. Particularly important with individual exercises.

3. Recovery is a lot more important that what you do in the gym. Sleep , management of stress and nutrition should be where the majority of your focus goes.

4. GPP is critical but you can achieve a reasonable level without extra work if all you want to do is lift weights. You just have to embrace being uncomfortable and push your pace throughout your sessions.

5. If you came into lifting weights without any kind of long standing athletic background you will need to focus on building muscle to achieve most any goal, and the big three or four are quite likely not going to be the best options to do this after about six to 12 months consistent training. You will need to do other exercises in addition to them.

[CheekiBreekiFitness]

5. If you came into lifting weights without any kind of long standing athletic background you will need to focus on building muscle to achieve most any goal, and the big three or four are quite likely not going to be the best options to do this after about six to 12 months consistent training. You will need to do other exercises in addition to them.

This is so important. Consider two lifters A and B whom have been lifting weights for a few week/months, but A spent the last 20 years playing some sport or whatever and B spent the last 20 years on the couch drinking mountain dew while playing his Playstation then they are completely different creatures.

People on the internet will observe A progressing at light speed and B struggling to achieve anything, and they will then go and argue that A has great genetics (or must be on drugs) and B just has terrible genetics, and that lifting is nothing but drugs and genetics (this tends to infuriate them somehow). This type of thinking is common on some corners of the internet that I shall not name.

But in their great wisdom they forgot that A has been training for 20 years more than B (sic!), and that it is going to take B years of dedicated hardcore training to actually even catch up, if they ever catch up.

I also suspect that the so called "high responders" for programs like Starting Strength tend to be people like A. They don't have great genetics, they were just already very strong before even touching the barbell for the first time, and the only thing the program has done for them is to teach them how to apply their already acquired strength to a new task (sets of 5 on the barbell back squat with a belt while staring at the floor).

[Hardartery]

1. Do the least possible to achieve the results you want. The least volume, least load, least weight, least variation. This will leave you with room to do more if that is necessary.

2. If you want to find out if something is effective you need to give it AT LEAST three months consistent work. Particularly important with individual exercises.

3. Recovery is a lot more important that what you do in the gym. Sleep , management of stress and nutrition should be where the majority of your focus goes.

4. GPP is critical but you can achieve a reasonable level without extra work if all you want to do is lift weights. You just have to embrace being uncomfortable and push your pace throughout your sessions.

5. If you came into lifting weights without any kind of long standing athletic background you will need to focus on building muscle to achieve most any goal, and the big three or four are quite likely not going to be the best options to do this after about six to 12 months consistent training. You will need to do other exercises in addition to them.

I would tend to not completely agree with 5. Any success in lifting is going to require a mind muscle connection more than size. The couch potato does not have that, except maybe in the thumbs from using that game controller. If you are out there doing physical labour (Like I was from a very young age and I'm sure some others on here were) you will develop all that you need to make great gains at lifting out of the gate. That alone can carry you a long way before you have to invest yourself into learning something about lifting.
My wife has decided to start lifting, for health reasons. She doesn't want to be a flabby old lady with brittle bones, and weight bearing exercise is the way to avoid that. She never played any sports at all, and got serious resistance from her parents about going to the gym or anything like that so she didn't. She was/is a book editor and copy editor with an advanced degree in English Literature and didn't even play video games. What I am learning from this is that she literally doesn't know how to flex anything. She has some muscle mass in some places (Glutes, lol), but literally no ability to use any of it on command. I have her doing some hpyertrophy style work right now (Which she hates and finds boring) just to try and build a mind/muscle connection. Guys especially take it for granted that there is at least some level of that even if they never played sports. Once she gets some of that she is going to progress like a genetic prodigy. Most of us are spending a lot of energy to simply learn how to use what we have.

[MarkKO]

1. Do the least possible to achieve the results you want. The least volume, least load, least weight, least variation. This will leave you with room to do more if that is necessary.

2. If you want to find out if something is effective you need to give it AT LEAST three months consistent work. Particularly important with individual exercises.

3. Recovery is a lot more important that what you do in the gym. Sleep , management of stress and nutrition should be where the majority of your focus goes.

4. GPP is critical but you can achieve a reasonable level without extra work if all you want to do is lift weights. You just have to embrace being uncomfortable and push your pace throughout your sessions.

5. If you came into lifting weights without any kind of long standing athletic background you will need to focus on building muscle to achieve most any goal, and the big three or four are quite likely not going to be the best options to do this after about six to 12 months consistent training. You will need to do other exercises in addition to them.

I would tend to not completely agree with 5. Any success in lifting is going to require a mind muscle connection more than size. The couch potato does not have that, except maybe in the thumbs from using that game controller. If you are out there doing physical labour (Like I was from a very young age and I'm sure some others on here were) you will develop all that you need to make great gains at lifting out of the gate. That alone can carry you a long way before you have to invest yourself into learning something about lifting.
My wife has decided to start lifting, for health reasons. She doesn't want to be a flabby old lady with brittle bones, and weight bearing exercise is the way to avoid that. She never played any sports at all, and got serious resistance from her parents about going to the gym or anything like that so she didn't. She was/is a book editor and copy editor with an advanced degree in English Literature and didn't even play video games. What I am learning from this is that she literally doesn't know how to flex anything. She has some muscle mass in some places (Glutes, lol), but literally no ability to use any of it on command. I have her doing some hpyertrophy style work right now (Which she hates and finds boring) just to try and build a mind/muscle connection. Guys especially take it for granted that there is at least some level of that even if they never played sports. Once she gets some of that she is going to progress like a genetic prodigy. Most of us are spending a lot of energy to simply learn how to use what we have.

This is a good point. I've seen it myself in people who have trained for some time, consistently, but seem to get nowhere. They have absolutely no ability to recruit a specific muscle to do anything.

[xuerebx]

Yeah I concur - I saw this with my wife. I ask her to flex her bicep (after she had been working out for a while) and it remains 95% relaxed. I used to think she's doing it on purpose but apparently it's because of what you discussed above.

[Hanley]

- be humble, calm, but extremely aggressive

- use evidence/literature as the springboard for your inductive leaps of experimentation.

[AlanMackey]

Here's a big one: never, EVER, try to train your significant other. It'll end up badly.

[quikky]

Here's a big one: never, EVER, try to train your significant other. It'll end up badly.

Been doing that for many years just fine.