Strength Training Programming
Structuring a strength training session is not as hard or as complicated as social media makes it out to be. Unfortunately peoples livelihoods are dictated by making themselves important, therefore overcomplicated and magical ways of completing tasks are conjured from content creators. In reality athlete or not, I’d estimate that well over 95% of the population would benefit from increasing their general strength levels. To be honest this is probably higher than 95%...
This does become more complicated when dealing with high level athletes, or people that have been training for a long time, but this article is for the >95% of you that need it. Unfortunately what you mainly see on social media, and the media in general is ways of gaining muscle, which is not negative, but for most people I’ve found when they describe their goals, gaining huge amounts of muscle mass is generally not the aim.
The aim generally tends to be more around looking and feeling great. Which I think is where strength training is beneficial. Body building has been typically adopted by many as ‘the way’ that you should resistance train. This in all honesty is likely down to Schwarzenegger’s influence and the hype surrounding young men looking to add substantial muscle bulk. Whilst not a horrible way to train – It’s a lot better than not training at all – It typically lends itself to muscle building mechanisms, rather than strength training mechanisms. This can leave the trainee pretty sore most of the time as the volume per session, per muscle group is huge.
This is where I believe strength training has an advantage over body building type sessions. The trainee can typically train the same amount of times per week, will build muscle (at a slower rate) and will generally feel more fresh. Whilst the training itself bodes well for tasks of everyday life. A body building esque session would usually encompass training specific muscle groups on specific days i.e. Legs, Chest, Back and Shoulders with accessories that compliment these such as back and biceps being trained together.
Whereas there are two common approaches to strength training, these being whole body sessions, or upper and lower splits. There are advantages/disadvantages when comparing the two. Whole body sessions leave your nervous system more fatigued, as the upper and lower splits generally tend to encompass less stress on bigger movements throughout the week. I’ve used both and like both, but tend to use Upper/Lower in season for sport, and whole body sessions for general populations and athletes with a low to medium training age.
So how to structure these sessions, theres a lot to fit in!
This is the bit I think becomes over complicated online, so I will give you a rough sessions guideline you can fill in for both ways of training. The exercises within these guidelines are merely examples, you would not have to use the ones below.
Whole body
1a) Lower Body Push (Squat)
1b) Upper Body Pull (Pull up)
2a) Lower Body Hinge (RDL)
2b) Upper Body Push (DB Shoulder Press)
3a) Accessory One (Previous Injury/Injury Risk Area)
3b) Accessory Two (Core)
3c) Accessory Three (Either of the above, person dependant)
Lower Body
1) Lower Body Push (Squat)
2) Lower Body Hinge (RDL)
3a) Lower Body Unilateral (Step Up)
3b) Lower Body Frontal plane (Lateral Lunge)
4a) Accessory One
4b) Accessory Two
Upper Body
1) Upper Body Horizontal Push (Bench Press)
2) Upper Body Vertical Pull (Pull Up)
3a) Vertical Press (DB Shoulder Press)
3b) Horizontal Pull (DB Row)
4a) Accessory One
4b) Accessory Two
Above is an extremely basic way of laying out sessions, which from my practice has shown to yield fantastic results. For exercises 1 and 2, I would typically prescribe 3-5 sets of under 5 reps. The rest will be 2-3 sets of whatever was needed, for the Upper/Lower splits typically slightly higher rep ranges of 6-10, and the whole body rep ranges will depend on the goal at the time. Example, if we are trying to put some mass on at the time typically higher reps, if we are getting strong lower reps. It is pretty much as simple as that for the vast majority of the population.
The accessory parts of the session are typically core and other under trained areas such as rear delts or lateral hip muscles etc. These change with the individuals needs/goals.
Put a warm up in before the sessions, and potentially a few jumps between the warm up and bulk of the session and you have a very comprehensive training session to follow! Some weekly structure I think well using these are;
3 x Whole Body Sessions
1 x Whole Body, 1 x Upper and 1 x Lower
2 x Uppers and 2 x Lowers
But feel free to use what works for you and your training schedule. If you have less than three times a week to train I would encourage you to use Whole Body sessions as you will have access to the bigger lifts within these sessions on both of your training days as opposed to once a week for uppers and lowers.
Hopefully this has helped answer the question you came here to read around, If it has not and you need some more clarity please reach out! I am always happy to talk about training.
I hope you enjoyed and feedback is always welcomed!
