Program Design: Expectation vs. Reality

My experience as a personal trainer has taught me that no client, and moreover, no training session is the same. It’s an extremely rare occurrence to see an entire training program be completed start to finish as written in its original format. This is because people are not machines. Life is fluid. No one walks into every single training session 100% ready to go. Clients may be underfed, under slept, distracted, sore, tight, irritated, or any number of other factors that change how to “optimally” train on any given day. Then there’s always the unpleasant experience of working around gym closures.

In the muscle building context, an untold number of articles will explain that the major driving force behind sustained muscle growth is ever-increasing volume performed per muscle group. Volume is described in a few different ways depending on who you ask, but in general, it can be defined as the total number of (sets x repetitions x weight) performed by any given muscle group. While this concept is generally accepted as true, it is not without its flaws.

The typical issue that many novice trainees will experience is an overly fanatical adherence to literal volume-driven muscle gain. The problem with this is that the above-mentioned plethora of daily irritants will inevitably cause this strict dedication to one more rep, one more set, or one more pound to create a counter-productive training environment.

Simply, it is not realistic. You will have days where linear progression just isn’t possible.

The true unifying characteristic of any effective training session is that the muscle being exercised is exhausted. This doesn’t need to come from an arbitrary number of sets or repetitions, but rather, it should come from skilled application of exercise physiology.

Daily exercise selection, technique, mind-muscle connection, and ultimately, the ability to be fluid in your method of generating an adequate training stimulus is what will sustain forward progress. Remember, most often training programs will oversaturate a trainee with exercises, sets, and repetitions as a method to mask unrefined exercise technique behind the pervasive red herring of “increased volume”. This is abundance in absence of skill.

Increasing training volume over the course of your lifetime is the background driving force of muscle gain; however, it is the background driving force over the course of your lifetime. On a more day-to-day basis, by applying a basic understanding of exercise physiology concepts (as outlined in the previous several blogs), we should be armed with enough knowledge to create a training session on the fly that is adequate for whatever condition you find yourself in. Instead of being overly fixated on improving daily volume, most trainees would be better served focusing on improving their understanding of muscle building mechanisms and manipulate training variables in order to produce them.

Best,

Eric