During my first ever live Facebook Fan Page Q&A last night, I received the following question, and wanted to use today's post to expand on it:
Q: How do you go about measuring volume in strength and conditioning programs? I feel like it's glossed over in a lot of textbooks and courses when it comes to programming.
A: This is an incredibly tough question to answer - and trust me, it's a question I've given a lot of thought!
Early in my career, I tried to come up with elaborate equations to calculate volume, but it was tough for a number of reasons (many of which I discuss in my e-book, The Art of the Deload).
First, not all exercises are created equal. A curl can't be weighted the same as a deadlift variation, for instance. The more joints an exercise involves and the greater the distance the bar travels, the more stressful it is.
Many people will make the argument that because one can use more weight on the deadlifts than the curl, the total volume (total reps x load) takes care of itself. The problem is that it doesn't take into account the distance the bar travels or the amount of muscle mass involved. Let's say a lifter can deadlift 500 pounds, quarter-squat 500 pounds, and barbell supine bridge 500 pounds. I can guarantee you that the 500 pound deadlift takes of a toll on the body than the other two because there is greater amplitude required and muscle mass recruited. The "total tonnage" argument is a sound one, but not a perfect one.
Second, all volume isn't created equal. Imagine having three crazy stressful training sessions back-to-back-to-back on Mo-Tu-We, then four days off. Then, take the exact same training loads, but space them out Mo-We-Fr. I guarantee you that the body's perception of the stress of the third session will be far greater in the first scenario - which to me is the important reason we consider volume in the first place. Timing and overlap matter.
Third, let's say that you go in to the gym fresh and squat on the first day of the training week. We'll say that you do four sets of five reps at 315 pounds for a total tonnage of 6,300 pounds. Then, exactly one week later, you go in and do 15 sets of lower-body training, and then go and squat at the end with the goal of getting that 6,300 pounds of "volume" again. Since you're exhausted, you need to do ten sets of two reps instead. Wouldn't that volume of squatting hit you like a ton of bricks? The duration of the session and your accumulated transient fatigue changed the game.
Fourth, not all lifters are created equal. At a body weight of 185 or so, I hit a 660 deadlift, and after I this lift, my entire body hated me for about a week.
My wife (an optometrist) freaked out when she saw that I'd bursted some small blood vessels in my eyes and face (it actually looked like I had freckles for about four days). As I recall, I did about two sets of lunges after this pull before realizing that I should shut it down for the day. I wasn't hurt; I was just exhausted.
Conversely, for a 1000-pound deadlifter who outweighs me by 150 pounds, this is speed weight.
And, to really exaggerate my point, imagine a brand new female lifter who is learning to deadlift with the training plates (10 pounds/side = 65 pound deadlift). If she does a whopping 11 reps (65lbs x 11 = 715 lbs), she'll have accumulated more volume than I did on this day.
In short, "appropriate" volume is 100% specific to the lifter's experience, age, gender, training goals, fatigue status, injury history, competing demands, and a host of other factors that I didn't even cover!
That said, when it really comes down to it, it's just something you learn in time by observing, writing, and trying out hundreds/thousands of programs. It's like a sixth sense for me by now.
I will, however, make one observation that never seeks to amaze me:
I'm always surprised at how much volume it takes to attain a level of fitness, but how little volume it takes to maintain that level of fitness.
To that end, most strength and conditioning coaches devote their entire career to finding a good mix of a number of factors to offer clients and athletes a great training effect, but we'll never know what an "ideal" mix of these factors is simply because factors like volume can be so cumbersome to interpret. For that reason, writing strength and conditioning programs will always be as much art as it is science.
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20 Delicious Protein Powder Recipes (That Aren't Shakes) - A big congratulations goes out to former Cressey Performance intern and current superstar Roger Lawson on his first article for LiveStrong.com. Whole foods are "where it's at," but this article will show you ways to sneak protein into diets of those clients who just don't get quite enough in their normal diets. Plus, the desserts and pancakes look really good!
Are Assessments Overrated for the General Population? - This is a thought-provoking post from John Izzo. I often think that some trainers go too far to show folks everything that is wrong with them on the first day, rather than using it as an opportunity to build confidence and get progress started. Assessments are incredibly valuable, but they need to be tailored to the individual. If you know someone is completely deconditioned can't do a lunge, for instance, it shouldn't be part of your assessment; you can just assume it.
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One of the biggest concerns players have when it comes to in-season strength and conditioning programs is whether or not a particular exercise will make them sore. It's a valid point, when you consider the profound effect soreness can have on a baseball athlete's performance - both physically and mentally. As such, it's important to select exercises that provide a great training effect, but won't necessarily create a lot of soreness for a player.
The first important point to recognize is that strength exercise familiarity will minimize soreness. In other words, if an athlete has already done an exercise in the previous 7-10 days, it shouldn't make him very sore (if at all). This is one reason why I like to introduce new exercises in the week prior to the start of the season; we can "ride out" those exercises through the first 4-6 weeks of the season without worrying about soreness.
Of course, once you get past that initial stage, it's a good idea to change things up so that athletes will continue to progress and not get bored with the strength training program. One way to introduce new strength exercises without creating soreness is to minimize eccentric stress; so, essentially, you're selecting exercises that don't have a big deceleration component. This is tricky, as most athletic injuries occur from poor eccentric control (both acutely and chronically). So, we can't remove them completely, but we can shoot for a 50/50 split. To that end, we'll typically introduce our more intensive lower-body eccentric strength exercises (e.g., Bulgarian Split Squats) on a day when an athlete can afford to be sore (e.g., the day after a pitcher starts) for a few days. If that isn't a luxury, we'll simply go much lighter in that first week.
To that end, here are five "general" strength exercises I like to use in-season with many of our athletes.
1. Step-up Variations - I'm normally not a big fan of step-ups for off-season programs because they don't offer a significant deceleration component, but they can be useful in-season when you're trying to keep soreness out of the equation. Anterior-Loaded Barbell Step-ups are a favorite because they still afford you the benefits of axial loading without squatting an athlete.
2. Deadlift Variations - It goes without saying that I'm a huge fan of the deadlift (check out this tutorial if you need suggestions on How to Deadlift), as deadlift variations afford a host of benefits from strength, power, and postural perspectives. They're also great because there isn't much of an eccentric component unless you're doing stiff-leg deadlift variations. With that in mind, we utilize predominantly trap bar and sumo deadlift variations in-season.
3. Sled Pushing/Dragging - A lot of people view sled training as purely for metabolically conditioning guys, but the truth is that it actually makes for a great concentric-only strength exercise while helping to enhance mobility (assuming you cue an athlete through full hip extension on forward pushing/dragging variations).
Just make sure to keep the load heavy and distance short.
4.1-leg Hip Thrusts off Bench - This is a great "halfway" exercise with respect to eccentric stress. For some reason, even if you lower under a ton of control and with additional load (we drape chains over the hips), this exercise still won't make your posterior chain sore. A big shout-out goes out to Bret Contreras for bringing it to the forefront!
5. 1-arm DB Bulgarian Split Squats from Deficit - The asymmetrical load to this already asymmetrical (unilateral) exercise allows you to get a training effect without a ton of resistance (especially with the increased range of motion provided by the deficit). It'll still create some soreness, but it's another one of those "halfway" exercises where the soreness isn't as bad as you'd expect, especially if you phase it in a bit lighter in week 1 of the new strength training program.
These are just five of my favorites, but a good start, for sure. Of course, we still need to do a better job of educating "the masses" about how important it is to even do an in-season strength training program!
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Here's this week's list of recommended strength and conditioning reading.
The Walk-On - This article by Jim Wendler should be mandatory reading for an high school kid who hopes to play college sports - and not even just the walk-ons. It's a great story about hard work, humility, and why the process is as important as the destination.
The New Rules of Lifting for Life - Alwyn Cosgrove has been a great friend and mentor to me for years - and this book is a great resource, too. I view this as excellent "gift" material; it's something you can recommend to a family member who wants to get fit, but needs direction. Lou Schuler is Alwyn's co-author, and his writing is always very engaging.
Scariest Fitness Trends - Adam Campbell interviewed me for this compilation for Men's Health, and it was subsequently picked up by Fox News. I think this is another one you can simply forward to a relative who trains like an idiot and needs direction!
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It goes without saying that poor adductor length is a huge problem in many of the athletes I encounter, particularly those participating in sports (e.g., hockey, soccer, baseball) involving a lot of extension and rotation. As a result, we always spend a lot of time with self myofascial release, static stretching, and mobility exercises for the adductors.
As I've written in the past, though, after you transiently reduce stiffness in a tissue, you want to build some stability through that newfound range-of-motion. Unfortunately, it isn't exactly easy to load folks up in the frontal plane, and some folks still won't be able to get in to a lateral lunge position without pitching forward. Enter the Dumbbell Goblet Lateral Lunge, which borrows the "counterbalancing" benefits we see with a traditional goblet squat to allow us to get back "into" the hip and build some longer-term mobility in the frontal plane.
I don't worry about folks really loading this up; in fact, form tends to break down a bit if you go heavier than 40 pounds with the dumbbell. We'll usually include it as the last exercise on a lower-body day, for 2-3 sets of 8-10 reps.
We spend a lot of time focusing on building strength and power, but a lot of times, movement quality gets overlooked. Here's an exercise that helps you to improve the latter without forgetting the former. Give it a shot and let me know how it goes!
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Q: What are your thoughts on the right amount of volume, intensity and frequency on core exercises ranging from bridging variations to ab wheel rollouts from the feet for the intermediate to advanced lifter looking to decrease back pain and get out of anterior pelvic tilt? Is it possible to make progress for a while, but overdue it on volume, intensity or frequency and actually have your core get weaker or stop progressing/responding, and start to experience back pain and anterior pelvic tilt again?
A: This is an outstanding question, and I can really go in a number of different directions with it.
First, let me say that the single best way to get out of excessive anterior tilt is training oneself to not live in anterior tilt! No amount of exercise will undo the damage you can do with your daily posture. That’s the easy part of this response, though.
Next, I’ll say that I absolutely believe that we can overdo it with “core-specific” exercises.
As a parallel, just consider the shoulder. The glenohumeral (ball and socket) joint is heavily reliant on both active (muscles/tendons) and passive (capsule/ligaments and labrum) restraints for stability. If you overdo it with rotator cuff exercises and train the cuff to excessive fatigue, individuals lose dynamic stability and can’t maintain the position of the humeral head in the glenoid fossa. Overuse conditions and injuries can occur. I wrote about this in an old series, How Much Rotator Cuff Work is Too Much? - Part 1 and Part 2.
Similarly, the lumbar spine relies heavily on both active and passive restraints. People can overcome lumbar ligament and disc injuries to live pain-free if they maintain adequate soft tissue control. Likewise, many sedentary folks can live pain-free in spite of poor soft tissue function simply because the challenges of their daily activities don’t exceed the tolerance of the passive restraints (these are the folks who often blow out their backs trying move couches).
That said, we have to be careful about overreacting to this realization. Just as the trend of doing thousands of sit-ups in the past few decades created a ton of back pain, you see a lot of completely deconditioned individuals who are hurting, too. There has to be a middle ground between the two. So, you could say:
Optimizing core function is really a delicate balance of exercise selection, volume, frequency, and intensity.
Unfortunately, I don’t know that we have a perfect (or even close to perfect) answer with respect to all of these factors, as everyone is different. Consider the following:
1. Flexion-intolerant backs must be treated differently than extension-intolerant backs.
2. Trained athletes probably need a lower frequency because of their sport participation and neural efficiency, but can handle a greater intensity and more complex exercises – and need to prepare the core for fatigue over an extended period (e.g., soccer game, tennis match, 100-pitch outing).
3. A sedentary individual probably needs a greater frequency of low-intensity exercises.
4. In-season athletes must be careful not to do too much work and pre-fatigue the core before competition.
5. Those with congenital laxity (loose joints) likely need a greater frequency of core work for “neuromuscular reminding.”
6. The general exercises we can do in a weight room or rehab setting must be complemented by sport-specific activities in the appropriate volume. When general volume goes down, specific can go up – and vice versa.
7. Athletes with a previous history of injury – or known diagnostic imaging red flags – may need to do more just to maintain.
8. Everyone’s definitions of “core” is different. I view the core as pretty much everything between the knees and the shoulders – but the truth is that poor core control can also lead to elbow and foot/ankle issues; should we include those joints as part of the equation?
9. Everyone’s definition of and “core stability exercises” is also different. Rollouts – an anterior core stability exercise – were mentioned in the question above, but I’ve never had more soreness in my anterior core than after doing heavy push presses. Simply holding a weight overhead forces our anterior core to work to prevent lumbar hyperextension (the photo below shows what happens when the anterior core isn't properly engaged).
As you can see, the “how much is too much” question is a big, fat, hairy one. Ask 100 fitness professionals and rehabilitation specialists, and they’ll all have different answers – and even then, it will still be dependent on the athlete/client/patient. We can’t even effectively define “core,” let alone “core stability exercises” to answer today’s question.
Taking it a step further, only 15% of low back pain has a definitive diagnosis. One could make the argument, therefore, that only 15% of core function can be adequately assessed/interpreted. We’d like to think that we know exactly what is going on with a spine, but it’s just not reflected in the research.
The good news, though, is that while most people encounter low back pain at some point in their lives, the overwhelming majority of them do get better with rehabilitation. We just don’t know what’s optimal - and I’m not sure we ever will, but we are getting a lot better, thanks to the availability of both research and anecdotal experience of rehabilitation specialists, fitness professionals, and folks who have stayed healthy.
This is one reason why I’m so proud of the Functional Stability Trainingseries from Mike Reinold and me. The two of us collaborated in the past to bridge the gap between rehabilitation and performance training, and we have done it again with project.
Whether you’re a fitness or rehabilitation professional, or exercise enthusiast or athlete looking to learn more about how to effectively prepare the core, train around various lumbo-pelvic injuries/conditions, or learn about developing power in the frontal and transverse planes with medicine ball drills, there is much to be gained from watching Functional Stability Training.
To sweeten the deal, the entire series is on sale for 20% off through the end of the weekend. You can check it out HERE.
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Here's a list of strength and conditioning stuff you should read/watch for the week. The theme of this week will be Functional Stability Training, our new resource.
Integrating Medicine Balls in a Strength and Conditioning Program - This is the introduction to my medicine ball presentation from the event, and it also highlights a few of our overhead medicine ball stomp variations. FST also includes a bunch of rotational medicine ball exercise progressions we utilize, as well as mobility/activation drills we utilize as fillers between sets.
To Arch or Not to Arch? - This old blog post talks about arching when one squats. It might not be all it's cracked up to be.
Here's this week's list of recommended strength and conditioning reading:
Get Stronger by Doing Less - This was a guest blog I wrote over at MensHealth.com on the topic of managing training stress.
Foot Positions in the Squat - Here's an excellent post from Charlie Weingroff. Actually, I'd call it epic; he clearly put appreciable time and thought into it.
Why President Obama Throws Like a Girl - I usually bring this one back to the forefront every opening day, but completely forgot to do so this year. Since there is a chance that he won't be president next opening day, I figure I might as well milk this content for all it's worth now. I didn't hear about him throwing out a first pitch anywhere, so I wonder if this old post made him insecure. I hope not, as we're losing too many good baseball players to basketball nowadays, anyway!
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Assuming you haven't been living under a rock for the past few years, you've surely learned that ankle mobility is imperative to long-term lower-extremity health in strength and conditioning programs and actual sport participation. If you need to learn why, check out this old post of mine: The Importance of Ankle Mobility.
While I think the industry has done a great job of highlighting the need for incorporating ankle mobility drills in one's warm-up, I'm not convinced that we've done a good job of "exhausting" our creativity when it comes to those drills, as most of them occur purely in the sagittal plane. While poor dorsiflexion is definitely the biggest issue at the ankle - and dorsiflexion does occur in the sagittal plane - I think we miss the boat when we only work on getting dorsiflexion in isolation. In reality, you need multi-planar ankle mobility to be prepared for life's events, so it's advantageous to train it a bit in your warm-ups.
So, I bring to you the wall ankle mobilization with adduction/abduction. It's just like a regular wall ankle mobilization, but when you get to end range, you gently rock back and forth between adduction and abduction (and internal rotation and external rotation, in the process) to make it more of a multi-directional movement that also challenges hip mobility a bit. A special thanks goes out to Kansas City Royals pitcher Tim Collins for helping with the demonstration here:
A few important coaching cues/notes:
1. Everyone always asks whether or not I care what the back foot/leg is doing, and I don't. Just focus on the front side.
2. The individual should feel a stretch in the posterior lower leg, not a pinching in the front. If there is pinching in the front, it's a good idea to refer out to a good manual therapist. In the meantime, you can train ankle mobility more conservatively with a rocking ankle mobilization:
3. If the individual's heel comes up off the ground, slide the foot closer to the wall to regress the exercise.
5. We usually perform this as three reps per leg, and each rep has a few glides toward adduction and abduction. You can use it during the warm-up, or as a filler between sets of compound movements. I like it between sets of deadlifts, since you're already barefoot or in minimalist sneaker.
6. If you're a heavy pronator (really flat feet and knock-knees), you probably don't need to do the adduction (rock in) portion of each rep.
Here's a list of recommended strength and conditioning resources for the week:
Elite Training Mentorship - This continuing education resource we introduced last month has started off with a bang, as we've gotten a lot of great feedback. It'll update twice per month, and the first happened yesterday. Content came from Dave Schmitz (two in-services and two exercise demonstrations) and me (two in-services and two exercise demonstrations). My in-services this month were "Understanding and Managing Congenital Laxity" and "Understanding the Hip Adductors." Updates from Mike Robertson and BJ Gaddour will come later this month. Click here for more information.
9 Strategies to Train Around Lower Body Pain - Speaking of Mike Robertson, this is a great article he had published at T-Nation this week.
Pressing Considerations for the Older Lifter - This was a super-detailed post from Jim "Smitty" Smith on what the seasoned veteran of strength training programs needs to keep in mind when doing a lot of pressing.
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