Choosing Your Program

We have spent the past several weeks learning how to properly perform many fundamental movements. These movements are called fundamental movements because they are fundamental to how you move and work in everyday life. We will continue to work on our skill with these movements in our workouts, but need to take a look at what our goals are and adjust our individual programs to fit with those goals.

We will use adjustments in our sets, reps and load to personalize our program to our individual goals. These next three weeks you will have a choice between three types of set and reps schemes that will address there of the most common goals for people who train with weights.

Muscular Strength - Going after pure strength goals involves lower reps and heavy weight. Remember heavy weight is a relative term and refers to a percentage of the most amount of weight you can lift USING GOOD FORM! once. While as you get stronger there will be some growth in muscle, this approach does not address size and is for individuals who simply want to get strong. An example of a strength workout would be 7 sets of 3 reps.

Muscular Hypertrophy - This is a size gaining program. You will perform more volume with a different range of weights. The sole purpose of this training is to exhaust the muscle and then allow time for the muscle to fully recover before training it again. An example of a hypertrophy set would be 12-10-8-6-4 Reps of a weight that get heavier as you work your way down in reps.

Muscular Endurance - The muscular endurance training program is for individuals who need their muscles to do continuous work over long periods of time.  The focus is less on the weight used and more on the number of repetitions. An example of a muscular endurance training program would be 3 to 4 sets in the 12 to 15 rep range. This is the perfect program for the endurance athlete or the beginner who is still working on mastering the movements and building that strong foundation.

Decide which of the three plans above meet your goals and for this weeks blog let me know which program you are going to follow and why you chose that plan. How is that plan going to help you reach your goals?