Help Designing Program

[Asclepius]

Hey all,

I am just starting to do Gymnastic Strength Training™ after getting a hold of a copy of BtGB. However, I need help designing a routine. I will not do the WOD, because I prefer more structured, linear training methods. That is why I plan to follow a steady state training cycle composed of the following:

Monday

Static Hold

- L-Sit (Parallel Bars Low (or Tuck)) / Straddle-L / Manna

Upper Body Pressing

- Pushups (Ring Pushups)

Upper Body Pulling

- Pull-ups (L (straddle or tuck or L)

Pull/Press

- Muscle-ups (Jumping or Negative)

Core

- Leg Lifts (V to L or Single Leg Lifts)

- Straight Body (Back Lever, Front Lever, Whole Body)

Legs

- Single Leg Squats

Tuesday

Static Hold

- Front Lever

Upper Body Pressing

- Dips (Russian or Russian L (if not possible, Single Bar))

Upper Body Pulling

- Row (round tuck)

Pull/Press

- Muscle-ups (Jumping or Negative)

Core

- V-ups

- Straight Body (Back Lever, Front Lever, Whole Body)

Legs

- Jumping Deck Squats for Height

Thursday

Static Hold

- Back Lever

Upper Body Pressing

- Handstand Pushups (Headstand Pushups or Handstand Negatives)

Upper Body Pulling

- Curls

Pull/Press

- Muscle-ups (Jumping or Negative)

Core

- Lower Back

- Straight Body (Back Lever, Front Lever, Whole Body)

Legs

- Hamstring Variations (Leg Curls)

Friday

Monday

Static Hold

- Planche

Upper Body Pressing

- Multi-plane Pressing (Chest roll to headstand)

Upper Body Pulling

- Multi-plane Pulling (Pullovers (***Tuck knees at top***)

Pull/Press

- Muscle-ups (Jumping or Negative)

Core

- Obliques (Half Windshield wipers or circular)

- Straight Body (Back Lever, Front Lever, Whole Body)

Legs

- ??????

Also, every day has Handstand work with the static hold work at the beginning.

Now, for my questions:

1) General comments on how this looks?

2) Is it too much, or too little to be doing? (Keep in mind, I have been lifting for a while now and can currently do L Pull-ups, Jumping Deck Squats to a platform that is about to my chest, Single Leg Squats, and V-Ups (quite easily).

3) I don't have rings. Just keep that in mind (my birthday is coming up soon though ).

4) Should I add in Front Lever and Back Lever work into every day training, or should I keep them at once a week as-is?

5) What should I do for that fourth day for Legs? There are only 3 exercises in Coach's book that for Legs (should I maybe do Jumping Single Leg Squats, or Jumping Deck Squats for Distance?).

Thanks for any/all help!!!

[Philip Chubb]

I will give two tips. First, the WOD is very structured. It is a very big cycle but if you look at it you'll see the routines repeat. It will help you more than making your own routine because it has already been made from figuring out what is the optimal routine.

If you still refuse to do the WOD then start to learn the progressions. Build a base. A lot of high level strong people do too many pushups and crunches in high volume. If your goal is strength then really try to make your workouts progressive.

[Asclepius]

Anyone care to answer my numbered questions without just saying "Do the WOD?" I'm sure the WOD is fine and all, but I don't believe it is appropriate for a novice. Simple, linear programs have been proven to be effective.

[Nicholas Sortino]

Well, if you can do L-pull ups, V-ups, and really high jumping deck squats, I would venture to guess to you are more than progressed enough to begin the WODs (although they are capable of being scaled to almost any level).

For legs, feel free to use weights. Squats, deadlifts, lunges, whatever you want. Or do jumping exercises and NLCs and GHRs if you are determined not to use weights.

Too much or too little is rather subjective. Can you handle the load without getting injured? If yes, then it isn't too much. Are you making gains off of it? If not then it is too little. Optimum is something you will have to work on finding yourself, since it is very specific to you.

If these are near max efforts you may want to consider not doing every body part every day, or do it as a SSC. That is why the WODs work so well. They are on a 28 day schedule and designed to work everything. If you do not want to do them, it may behoove you to find the pattern and design your own workouts based off that. If you still want to do the same pattern each week, I would suggest separating pulling and pushing into seperate days and work more than one exercise in the group on each day. You can also do more than one FSP each day, especially if you are doing them at 50% max. Try pairing opposite FSPs.

[Philip Chubb]

Many people simply get injured from making their own routines and going at it. One thing I don't see is any prehab in yours. What about fixing imbalances? Do you have any now that need to be corrected? Coach always says gymnastics is not like a buffet where you can pick and choose what you want to do here and there. I would at least read over the WODs and get some ideas. You will at the very least need prehab added in. Keep in mind how many people on the very forum have been injured by not knowing their bodies yet though.

[Asclepius]

Many people simply get injured from making their own routines and going at it. One thing I don't see is any prehab in yours. What about fixing imbalances? Do you have any now that need to be corrected? Coach always says gymnastics is not like a buffet where you can pick and choose what you want to do here and there. I would at least read over the WODs and get some ideas. You will at the very least need prehab added in. Keep in mind how many people on the very forum have been injured by not knowing their bodies yet though.

Imbalances pretty much fix themselves when doing compound movements. You're not bodybuilding, i.e. isolating muscles. Things may start out stronger, but over time when worked concurrently with other compounds, everything will even out.

I am very interested in prehab work though, and yes, I have seen how many people have been injured on the forum. Would you suggest a prehab program that I could follow? Keep in mind, I don't have rings yet.

Thanks a bunch man

[Joshua Naterman]

Anyone care to answer my numbered questions without just saying "Do the WOD?" I'm sure the WOD is fine and all, but I don't believe it is appropriate for a novice. Simple, linear programs have been proven to be effective.

You have clearly made your choice then, and by itself there is nothing wrong with that. However, your reasoning and line of thinking is, in my personal opinion, a self-handicap. Allow me to explain what I mean by that.

If you learn more about high level athletic training, meaning training that produces the best possible adaptations in a body, you will find that the workouts are not programmed on a seven day schedule that repeats indefinitely. They rotate through 2-4 weeks, and the variables of exercise rotation, frequency, volume, intensity, and contraction speed ALL are varied from workout to workout based on what the goal of that particular phase of training is geared towards.

As far as structure goes, your proposed program and the WOD have equal levels of structure. Both are set. WODs are not random, and they are not put up for "a good time." It is perfectly fine for you to prefer your workout because it is YOURS, but to somehow think your workout has a higher level of structure is flat out incorrect. The major difference between your program and the WODs is that the WODs have been designed to rotate through ALL of those previously listed variables with the specific purpose of building a balanced level of gymnastic strength and explosiveness throughout the body. It is not physically possible to do the same thing with a 7 day rotating schedule that repeats exactly as is. That does not mean you will not get good results from your program, but it is an inherently limited program. The inherent limits present are the lack of exposure to different levels of all the different types of stimuli.

You are also mistaken in thinking that the WODs are not linear. From one dynamic pull WOD to the next you are expected to (and should expect yourself to) make slow and steady progress just as in a linear system. You don't jump up and down the intensity levels, you make slow and steady progress with the exercises selected, and when it is possible to start making the transition to the next progression you do so in measured steps, just as you would in a so-called linear progression. The major advantage of the WODs is that you are exposed to many different types of stimuli, one after the other, in the various muscle groups. For example, your upper body will cycle through slower tempo work, faster work and truly explosive work before being exposed to the slower tempo work again. This makes it impossible for the CNS to become massively efficient at any one of those things, which makes continuous progress possible. A traditional linear system that only uses one type of stimulus over and over gets adapted to very quickly by the body, and this is why linear systems have a very short lifespan before they have to be changed in order to continue progress. In that sense, they are actually less structured than the WODs as they must be completely re-tooled every 4-6 workouts for maximum gains to continue. By building that necessary variability into what is essentially a steady state workout cycle, the WODs allow for continuous progress without having to sit down and re-design everything on a regular basis. What is actually happening in the WODs is that several linear cycles are being run simultaneously, one for each particular type of stimulus. If this does not make sense to you, I will not be surprised. My entire life, quite literally since I was 7 years old, has been centered around learning and applying all of this stuff, and I have continuously pursued the latest knowledge in the field of human performance non stop. It has actually taken me until quite recently to really understand exactly what is happening in various systems and to see the similarities and differences for what they really are. I do not expect anyone else to do the same without a similar level of investment in the learning process, but it would be nice if you trust me on this one. You don't need to, I don't have much of an ego when it comes to that stuff these days, but I have nothing to gain by telling you all of this. Only you have something to gain.

Short allegory (A story used to explain a concept)

We can safely say that taking a pair of scissors and cutting your hair yourself works, because you are clearly going to be able to rid yourself of the vast majority of unwanted hair. However, it would take a very skilled person to make such a haircut look good all around the head, and that kind of skill can only come from a lot of experience. In other words, lots of time making mistakes while slowly changing how they have done things with each hair cut until they get it exactly how they want it. Even after all this it will still be very hard for this person to cut their hair as quickly as a trained professional and still get the same result, if it is at all possible. The professional is going to be faster and produce a better product in pretty much all cases because of a vastly larger amount of experience cutting hair and because of professional education that has sped up the learning process. You will rarely find a professional that is 100% self taught, we all learn from others even if it is only by watching. Clearly, if the only way to get a haircut was to do it yourself, it would not only be acceptable but ideal to cut your own hair. Paying for a haircut is clearly more efficient in all aspects, so as long as you can afford the price you would always be better off with the professional haircut. Now, if the professional haircut was free, is there any advantage at all to doing it yourself? Some will like the fact that THEY cut their hair and that no one else had a hand in it, but these people are concerned primarily with their ego. For whatever reason, it is very important to them that only THEY be responsible for their results. If they looked great but the work was done by someone else they would feel like less of a person for some reason. For everyone else, what matters is the result. Since the professional can do it better AND faster, they will always go to the professional.

All you have to do is replace the word "haircut" with "work out program" and you have my point. It seems to be very important to you that YOU be the one to design your program. I do not believe there is anything morally wrong with that, but I do believe that I would not be doing a good job as a forum member if I do not point out that this severely limits your ability to make long term progress, and the progress you DO make will be less than it could be as long as you insist on being solely responsible for your results. Coach, who is the professional, has shared the program that he uses to take ordinary children and turn them into the best athletes in his state and often the country. He has shared this program for a very reasonable rate: FREE. It is not horribly time consuming, and it is quite a lot of fun, and it produces very fast results in the short term while guaranteeing long term progress.

It will take you a long, long time to gather the knowledge it will take to duplicate the process, and by the time you do you will basically be replicating the WODs. In the process you will have wasted a number of years training sub-optimally.

EDIT:

Imbalances pretty much fix themselves when doing compound movements. You're not bodybuilding, i.e. isolating muscles. Things may start out stronger, but over time when worked concurrently with other compounds, everything will even out.

WOW. This, my friend, is completely untrue. You are not alone in this mistaken belief, but that does not change the fact that it is false. Nearly everything that we do involves internal rotation. Without specific attention to chest and shoulder stretching, scapular strengthening in all directions, and external rotation (more or less in that order, too) strengthening you are just about guaranteed to run into shoulder problems.

You appear to be a very, very motivated individual with regard to your physical regimen and as it stands right now this motivation will lead you to injury. I hope you take what I have written before this edit and after to heart and use it to keep yourself healthy and maximize your progress. Again, I have no personal stake in this. I do not get paid for spending my time here or sharing my knowledge and experience. I do this solely to try and help.

END EDIT

I can tell you right now, just looking at your proposed program, that you are way, way out of balance. I have to be very honest and tell you that your program is a destiny for shoulder problems. I will suggest to you that you watch my videos on shoulder issues and also Ido's shoulder videos (he has two on his youtube channel, scapular mobilization and shoulder stability are the subjects I believe) and like everyone else, I will suggest that you follow the WODs AT LEAST as a general template through which to base your own program.

You NEED a lot of that stuff in there. You NEED to fix the very large orientation your program has towards internal rotation. You NEED to ensure you are doing a lot of scapular retraction, and that your front lever work is all done with fully retracted scapula. It is nearly impossible to perform the harder variations of FL rows with full retraction at the top of the movement, so you will NEED to put in foot supported rows in order to get some volume work on the retractors and to make sure your body does not slowly adopt dysfunctional compensation patterns during FL rows. Bulgarian rows are also a necessity. They are really much more about the rear delts and the retractors than they are about the lats.

You will see that as we break things down, your upper body work will slowly morph into the WODs as we start to address the issues that are present in your workouts as proposed in your initial post. Lower body work is really up to you, but I would do explosive work when coach has explosive work in the leg WOD, and strength work when coach has strength work in there, and "metcon" when things are clearly meant to burn a ton of energy unless you have the knowledge to write a program that specifically addresses whatever your lower body performance goals are. A gymnast pretty much just needs to be able to absorb the impact of tumbling passes and dismounts, and that does not require the muscle mass that many other sport performances will. If you want to lift heavy or do the O-lifts or whatever, or if you want to be easily dunking a basketball or long jumping super far you will need to orient your lower body program towards these goals.

If I have offended you with this post, I apologize for the hurt feelings, but this is the truth.

Nick, you are a bit wrong about the loading. Most of the time lack of progress is due to too MUCH work, not too little, especially when dealing with a SSC. It does not take very much to make progress, and it is easy to step over the line. You will also find that injuries build up for a period of many months, and just because you do not get injured this month does not mean you are not slowly building up imbalances that will lead to AC impingement, pain, tendon degradation and for the very stubborn few who train through all that, serious tears that will require surgery to fix. It also does not mean that you are not building compensation patterns that expose you to a dramatically higher risk of knee and/or ankle injuries, or slowly building up elbow tendonitis/osis. Without a good understanding of how to do things right OR a supervisor who has that understanding and designs your program with that in mind, nearly every trainee ends up in one or more of these situations at least once and usually repeatedly.

I sometimes hate writing this much, since I have the strong feeling that this post will be largely disregarded, but perhaps it will be of use to others. At any rate this is the essence of an excellent article I will write over the break, so it won't be a total wash no matter what.

[Zac Rhyne]

Vary.

[Asclepius]

slizzardman, thanks for the reply.

I don't understand several things about what you posted.

1) You claim that my program will not reap as many benefits, nay, will be detrimental, to my progress as opposed to doing the WODs due to, what I essentially took to be dreaded adaptation. That's fine, which is completely true with any workout program; if you allow your body to adapt, it will no longer make progress. Answer me this though: in what way does the program I made up allow adaptation? Every day, yes, it follows the same pattern in areas worked. However, each day, a new exercise is used. Due to it being steady state and linear progression as well, there will be more stress (in the form of harder exercises) after 2-4 weeks (possibly longer, depending on the exercise). The way that one overcomes adaptation is to stress the body. This, to me at least, appears to be would be achieved with the program I outlined, and therefore I don't understand where you're coming from in saying that it is only setting one up for adaptation. Also, adaptation is a good thing as well, but not too much. Without ANY adaptation, the body has nothing to get better at, as it will just be continually stressed again and again. Now, I haven't looked thoroughly at the WODs, but it appears that what I just mentioned is exactly what they achieve: continual stress. Not too sure personally if that is good or not, but I will let you decide.

2) I honestly don't care who's program I follow, whether it be mine, coach's, or someone entirely different, as long as it is a good program.

3) I am also confused as to how my program is set up for shoulder injury, as well as being imbalanced. If this is so, then what is the point of the exercises in the book BtGB?

4) I keep asking for a specific outline of a prehab program, but no one is willing to give me one (or they just get caught up in writing about other things).

5) Something else to keep in mind is that I lack a lot of equipment. I exclusively go to a college gym on my campus, and it has a very minimum amount of equipment. It has a pull-up bar cage-type setup with plyo boxes nearby, and that is pretty much it as far as the gymnastic equipment readily available to me. Another reason why I am shying away from the WOD.

Apparently the WODs are important, but I am still skeptical as to how much structure they could possibly have. If you want to shed any light on this, please do so. I only want a program that will benefit me the most and prevent injury as best as possible.

Thanks again (by the way, I did read all of your post, so it wasn't for naught.

[Mats Trane]

Slizz, I couldn´t agree more!

After I went to the seminar i Mallorca I changed from the integrated training (which was great) but the Wods realy takes care of everything especially when I included the warmup and prehab I learned from the Seimnar!

[Philip Chubb]

Your program lacks scapular retraction and focuses on internal rotation. This was mentioned by slizzardman. He also wrote about prehab. The routines by Ido and Slizzardman's own videos are both prehab.

[Nicholas Sortino]

As i said earlier, the WODs are on a 28day schedule and include max upper body (ring strength), basic upper body, max legs, Hand stand focus, and dynamic pushing, pulling, and legs. They cycle in an order coach has found to be the most effective, and if you follow through the individual WODs you can find the pattern. What is done on these days is structured as well, although that may be harder for you see without the insight to the programming learned at the seminar. But it is certainly there, and not random like the crossfit method. As the new books are published, coach will include updated insight to the programming in them, as well WODs that contain movements from them as well (more pre-hab for example with Liquid Steel™).

Specific pre-hab series from coach will be in the book Liquid Steel™, or taught at the seminars, but if you take a little time to look through the forum, especially the injury one, you will find many useful pre-hab programs outlined, especially for the shoulders.

The rings are fairly cheap and you can hang them from a pull up bar in your gym. They take less than a minute to set up and take down. If your gym doesn't have a dip station, then rings would be even more helpful for that. Sure more equipment is better, but you can do most of this with fairly minimal equipment. In my garage I have a squat rack w/ bar and weights, rings and pull up bar and that is it for gymnastics equipment. I have a jump rope, rower, bench and some KBs but they don't help much for these WODs.

[Patrick Angelo Sardilli]

I do the WODs and I've progressed very good.

Can't wait to go to the seminar to learn more.

[Joshua Naterman]

As far as prehab goes, we can not freely share what coach teaches us at the seminars. There is a reason why a price is attached, and that reason is that most of the material we learn will be released in the later GB volumes.

However, Ido's shoulder videos are very similar to one of the things we are shown and that is available on youtube for free on the youtube channel "portaldo".

Just doing prehab routines is not enough, because large muscle groups will always overpower small muscle groups and the largest muscles of the shoulder girdle all happen to be internal rotators. Pecs and lats. Both internal rotators. Any time you do a pull that involves the lats, there is going to be an element of internal rotation, just as when you press in front of you. If this is all you have done for a while your body will pick up internal rotation as a compensation pattern for ALL shoulder movement as well as general posture. This reduces sub-acromial space, which increases friction on supraspinatus and other small muscles/tendons/ligaments that run through that gap. This eventually leads to inflammation in everyone, which ends up leading to tissue degradation over extended periods of time, which finally leads to a tear.

You have to stretch the front and strengthen the back. I explain this in detail in my shoulder video, which I believe is my latest upload on youtube.

That is the single MOST important prehab to do, because if your shoulder isn't in a correct position and capable of performing correct retraction then you are incapable of avoiding injury down the line. There is no fixed time line for this, but it hits everyone eventually. For me, it took over 7 years to catch up to me, but now I have a lot of re-training to do and a lot of wasted time that could have been spent on strength development instead of recovery.

Prehab for other joints is important as well, and the most important parts of Coach's wrist series are available on this site somewhere. Wrist push ups are the single most important part, and coach has a video describing them as well as a forum thread dedicated to them. However, upper body strength is 100% dependent on shoulder girdle strength and health.

I don't blame you for not seeing the gaps in your program, because I wouldn't have seen them in mine (and didn't) when I first started here. Bulgarian rows are extremely important because when done right they force external rotation as well as being nearly 100% dependent on the traps and rear deltoids for the rowing motion. You will also need to use the stretches that I show in my shoulder video. That is VERY important. Part 2 will be done after my finals and will cover how to incorporate proper retraction into workouts. That too will be absolutely vital to long term progress for a variety of reasons, but the most important one is injury prevention.

The only reason your program will lead to a dead end eventually is that it is not designed for building and maintaining a healthy shoulder girdle, for the reasons I just listed. Don't worry, I WILL get into that on part 2 or 3, because it is very important. For now, keep in mind that proper retraction must be done on a 1:1 TUT(Time under Tension) basis with horizontal pressing at a minimum. As long as this is taken care of rowing with internal rotation on heavy sets is not going to contribute to a long-term risk for injury.

As for having sub-optimal progress, your program focuses too much on the same thing every time. Muscle ups and straight body work are there on all 4 days, and HLL and v ups are somewhat similar, neurologically. What you are missing is the neurology. There are multiple types of adaptation that occur simultaneously. The body does not like stress, so it acts to reduce stress. This is largely done by becoming more efficient. Efficiency means using the least possible amount of body mass to do a particular task, no matter how hard. From workout to workout your body will try to reduce the stress by synchronizing motor unit recruitment, increasing antagonistic inhibition, and sending more action potentials down the necessary nerves. This all allows your body to recruit as few muscle fibers as possible. That means you are training less of your muscle tissue, which is not optimal for muscular development. This is a very good thing for a competitive gymnast who wants no more than the absolute minimum amount of muscle on their body that is necessary to perform and win, and they have the time to allow for the slower rate of muscular development. They are on a 15 year or longer training program! Who cares if they could get stronger faster? There is more to gymnastic performance than raw strength, like technical perfection and the acquisition of new skills. All of this takes time and eats up recovery, which leads to slower accrual of new muscle mass than if they were JUST on a pure gymnastics strength and conditioning program. This is, in some cases a very GOOD thing for a competitive gymnast, as getting too strong too fast can lead to an athlete attempting skills that his connective tissue or perhaps even the skeletal system has not yet grown strong enough to handle on a regular basis without building up injuries.

As adults, our skeletal system is somewhat less of a concern than our connective tissue as far as injury goes, but that is a separate issue. My point in the previous paragraph is that you are activating the same neural pathways for a fairly large portion of each workout, and doing so every workout. This will lead to two places : CNS fatigue and CNS adaptation. For lb per lb strength, the second one is ideal, but your BEST bet is to build muscle mass FIRST and THEN train it to do what you want. That is the most time-efficient way to do things.

That is also why, even with HS training, you will notice that each HS WOD focuses on a different stimulus for the handstand. HS press work, XR HS, HS wall runs, and HS ladders are all very different. Try each one when you get your rings eventually and you will see for yourself just HOW different they all are. PRess work is in each one because HS presses are much more of a skill than a strength move even though they DO require a lot of strength. Repetition is the only way to ingrain the neural patterns you need to succeed at something like that. For the most part, there is not a lot of repetition and there is a fairly large gap between repetition of the same stimulus.

Detraining is what allows the body to react to an old stimulus as if it was new. Your body can become adapted to a very, very large number of things with enough regular exposure. LACK of exposure is what allows you to get the most out of each exercise. At the most, you will do the same thing once every 14 days or so in the WODs. With your program you will be doing the same thing 2-4 times per week. This creates a lack of so-called "muscle confusion" and will limit your ability to progress. I am very sorry, I am out of time today. I am sure we will pick this back up soon.

[Asclepius]

slizzardman, thank you, I see your point.

I was hesitant about doing the WOD because I was afraid that they were too much of a hodge-podge, thrown-together thing such as CrossFit (which, hopefully you can see, is not a very good training style). However, now that I know that the WODs actually are well thought out and indeed follow a pattern (albeit over a longer cycle), it makes a lot of sense.

I suppose that my last question that I have for you is that I have seen people mention incorporating additional work while doing the WODs. Would it be wise for me to start doing this too, and if so, what?

Also, I saw your shoulder injury prevention video. Great stuff, really; I have been exercising for a long time and like to soak up information, but I never heard of anything about it. Where do you learn your information? Also, are you a physiology/kinesiology major?

[Blairbob]

1d/week of working the FBE won't get you very far, not as much as 2-4 days.

We can't give you the prehab we know from the GB seminar Liquid Steel™ material. Ido's and Slizzard's shoulder videos are a good start.

This is some of the wrist and ankle series, done not as well as Coach would prefer:

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You can do the Lsit, StraddleL, Manna, Planche, Front/Back Lever every day. Actually there a bunch of warmup drills for the manna, planche and levers that should be done as well. Some of them have been talked about as a FSP warmup.

Were you to do combined pull/press, I prefer to do them before focusing on any movement that is just pushing or pulling.

When I was playing around with my own version of the Killroy70 workout, I had day1 as a combined pressing/pulling (typically muscle-ups) and then rotated 1 press and pull movement based on horizontal, vertical, and inversion.

I rotated core work as HLL, Vup, Rotational core, and lower back core (RLL and HeSLL). I played around with alternating rotational and lower back work day1/day2 and different exercises on the 1st 2 days than the 2nd 2. Probably a bit too much, but it was dizzying to figure out and include body lever assistance work, which just became too much.

For lower body, I generally rotated jumping and weighted SLS 1 out of 2 days, then worked glute ham on another. I didn't bother with deck or weighted deck squats but did want to include some maintenance squatting and DL work. So I generally just did some barbell squatting on the weekend and DL as an assistance instead of glute-ham. Somewhere in there was some sprinting under 25m on a sprung floor. Speed work.

Really, all in all it was just an endeavor showing my OCD. I ended up still wondering where to put in stuff like rope climbs.

Much of the time L and straddle-L and MSH were finishers and early in my WU was HS, press HS, and HS walkovers. A few bridge wall walks to warmup, sometimes as the very first thing in my WU or 2nd to just hanging on a bar and rings and swinging around. Yes, there was prehab movement in there as well, before and after.

1. It took a long time.

2. Too much of the time, I was already tired or didn't have enough to eat during the day or would simply run out of time that I had available.

3. Possible burnout though I still think it wasn't helped by not enough food, water, and sleep.

4. the problem with many simple, basic linear programs is that eventually you crash and burn(out) and have to do something else. that is one of the shared principles between Louie Simmons WestsideBarbell Conjugate system, RippeToe's Texas Method, and Wendler's 5-3-1. They undulate their volume to stretch things out and allow for rest.

5. their is so much that needs to be done in the gym that you will literally run out of time and energy. when do I get in some apparatus work when I'm doing 2-3 hours of just physical prep. All I wanted was maybe 2-3 events per day. Pain in the ass to figure out.

[Joshua Naterman]

slizzardman, thank you, I see your point.

I was hesitant about doing the WOD because I was afraid that they were too much of a hodge-podge, thrown-together thing such as CrossFit (which, hopefully you can see, is not a very good training style). However, now that I know that the WODs actually are well thought out and indeed follow a pattern (albeit over a longer cycle), it makes a lot of sense.

I suppose that my last question that I have for you is that I have seen people mention incorporating additional work while doing the WODs. Would it be wise for me to start doing this too, and if so, what?

Also, I saw your shoulder injury prevention video. Great stuff, really; I have been exercising for a long time and like to soak up information, but I never heard of anything about it. Where do you learn your information? Also, are you a physiology/kinesiology major?

I am a kinesiology/physiology major, and while I am not quite sure what masters program I will enter yet I am definitely going to get the kinesiology Ph.D. with the concentration in athletic performance. I am considering physical therapy school and exercise science masters with a concentration in exercise program development, but I am thinking I will probably go through PT school as I can take the important parts of the ES masters program as electives anyways. I will be meeting with the program heads over the next semester to decide which program is best suited to my end goals.

I thought the same thing about the WODs, quite honestly, for a long time. I didn't ever really take a good look at them so I didn't see the patterns, but at the May seminar when coach laid out the whole schedule I was like "... oh. I should have been doing that. :oops: "They are actually massively intelligent. Definitely not somewhat random at all, they follow a very strict schedule. They are actually the exact program that Coach's athletes use for conditioning! That's pretty sweet to me. So I started, and as well as I was doing before I got hurt, I'm doing better now and not getting hurt.

There's plenty of room for extra work, I mean Coach's guys are doing several hours of drills after they are done with the WOD. When it comes to programming that in, it helps to take a look at the WOD schedule and know what is coming up if you want it to be perfect, but whether you know the schedule or not you'll want to consider what YOUR goals are. That will determine everything from what exercises you choose to scale down to to what kind of extra work you do and how much to do. Everything you do consumes some recovery capacity, so it is important to always err on the side of doing less rather than more. There are only a few things that can really be concentrated on at one time, so you are always best off focusing on one or two things that really matter to you outside of the WODs and hitting that consistently until you are happy with where you are at. Then you will just do maintenance work, which isn't much at all, and shift your focus to one or two other aspects of physical training that are important.

As an example, you will have a very hard time doing all the WODs as well as a full powerlifting schedule, even if you are just doing 531. However, you should have absolutely no problem working on bench and squat in addition to the GB work if that sort of thing is a goal of yours. You would probably have to pick one of those two as a secondary focus that you always leave a little in the tank on, just so that you don't burn out. The leg training for the WODs is very discretionary, I mean like I said it is geared towards what a male gymnast needs his legs to be capable of. For a lot of athletes, weight lifting for the legs is a very good thing to have in the program, and that's perfectly fine to substitute in for leg training if you want to! That takes a lot of stress off the body as opposed to lifting AND doing the full leg WOD, though I would never completely sub out the dynamic work like senders and jumping deck squats unless you are doing a really good vertical leap development program that will develop pretty much all of the same abilities. Personally, right now I am doing some standing military press work and I am doing a vertical leap program that I have put together after purchasing the best programs on the market and analyzing them to see what their strengths and weaknesses are. Based on my knowledge and understanding of human performance I have substantially altered them, but the program with the most influence on what I am doing is Luke Lowrey's "Double your Vertical" program. He's just starting to go through a new marketing phase and is offering "project 40" now, and I simply don't have the money to buy that one and see what nonsense he's added, but from the marketing he has added hip stability work which should have been in there from the beginning. Regardless, of all the "as is" programs on the market his is by far the best for performance improvement. Kelly Baggett's will teach you the most about what is going on and the science behind developing your vert, but his program is much more flawed. Luke primarily does not take advantage of CNS potentiation, but his principles are solid. They should be fairly obvious to anyone who has a very, very deep knowledge of human performance but that's a very small population and even then there are things we all miss. The one thing that I learned from his program was the value of water training. I used to do drills in the pool for punching but reading what he wrote about this really got me to thinking about so much more that can be done. He still has gaps in his program too, for example he does not take advantage of heavy partials. Of course, no one else does either. Go figure. He also does not teach jumping drills for actually learning to jump properly, which happens to be the ONLY thing that the "Become a Freak" program has going for it and those can be found for free. Regardless, after reading everything I can see why his customers seem to have the best results. They have the best of the current programs. I absolutely hate the way he does business, but he does have a good product.

[Blairbob]

Hmm, Ideally I would like to be doing some Oly and a supplemental simple 531? Why 531? Because I like it. However, I really question whether I would need or could keep up with doing the bench or shoulder press. It's something I have yet to figure out but I will do it eventually when my life has settled down a bit and I can find a gym or have access to a bar and some bumpers and plates (without having to spend 3 digits a month for it). More than likely, I will split the workout load through the day.

[Joshua Naterman]

For some reason I have no problem with the shoulder pressing and HS work in the GB wods, and for me they are very additive in nature. I get more out of both together than either one on its own, because it is much easier to load up and do heavy negatives with a bar than it is with my body weight and a vest. It seems that the strength gained from that then gets incorporated into the HS movements, as that is the vast bulk of my overhead work.

I like the O-lifts + squatting too, though I always do the jumping deck squats when they come up and I use the sled sprints pretty regularly as well. I am ok having bigger legs, I don't need to swing around a P horse!

[Tarun Suri]

I don't need to swing around a P horse!

Yet.

After a couple of more seminars, we'll see where you stand

[Philip Chubb]

Slizzardman, your in depth talk of the WOD has convinced me to add them as well. I knew they were great but didn't know they went into THAT kind of depth. I think I will do them as one of my workouts throughout the day.

RandomHavoc has a point. When the dynamic physique comes out, we had better hope circles aren't one of the workouts Lol.

[Asclepius]

slizzardman, fyi, I am a nutritional sciences major (a.k.a. dietetics, same thing basically).

How would I be able to learn some more, much more in-depth, information about kinesiology/physiology, besides taking a college course (which I am praying that I will have room to do before undergrad is over)? Your posts make me feel like reading "Starting Strength" is to your knowledge as "My ABCs" is to "Moby Dick."

[Tarun Suri]

slizzardman, fyi, I am a nutritional sciences major (a.k.a. dietetics, same thing basically).

How would I be able to learn some more, much more in-depth, information about kinesiology/physiology, besides taking a college course (which I am praying that I will have room to do before undergrad is over)? Your posts make me feel like reading "Starting Strength" is to your knowledge as "My ABCs" is to "Moby Dick."

Hah! It's not far from it. It's all about reading from various sources, not just textbooks. Understand fundamental concepts like Polinquin Principles and then supplement with Whys and Hows. If the motivation is there, your curiosity will lead you the rest of the way really.

[Joshua Naterman]

slizzardman, fyi, I am a nutritional sciences major (a.k.a. dietetics, same thing basically).

How would I be able to learn some more, much more in-depth, information about kinesiology/physiology, besides taking a college course (which I am praying that I will have room to do before undergrad is over)? Your posts make me feel like reading "Starting Strength" is to your knowledge as "My ABCs" is to "Moby Dick."

Nice! When I actually figure out what the smallest list is, I will post up a list of what to read and in what order, because the base for what I know can probably be found in 10 books or less. Keep in mind I am ALWAYS re-searching for things because I just can not remember THAT much stuff on my own. I have to have the references. I remember a lot, but it is extremely important to have references on hand if you want to be an expert in any given field.

I highly recommend that everyone start off with "Pain Free" for the simple reason that we will all develop musculoskeletal dysfunctions as we live our lives to some degree or another, and knowing how they build up and how one leads to another and finally leads to an injury in some body part that sometimes isn't anywhere close to the original dysfunction. Understanding the basic life cycle of a chronic injury, which is what this book will teach you, is the key to avoiding them. It's an easy read, too.

The one exercise book that keeps popping up into my head is Chad Waterbury's Muscle Revolution. He does a good job of explaining an awful lot of the basic physiology and neurology behind lifting, and that knowledge carries over to all other areas of fitness. Power Factor Training is a book that discusses the bodybuilding application of heavy end-range partials and that is necessary knowledge because you should look at the NUMBERS these guys build up. I did this for a while(4 months I think) as an additional training component and ended up doing 725 lbs (7 45 lb plates on each side) for 30 reps on the smith machine bench press. That's only a 3" movement or so, but this was pretty explosive. I could hit hard enough to break just about anyone at that point in my life, and it was directly due to that training. I didn't gain a ton of size, but the performance difference was just unreal. This kind of thing really has its place in strength/power sport training during off-season and pre-season training.

Stretching is a tough one, I would have to recommend Stretching Scientifically along with Pavel's Relax into Stretch. They both overlap a bit, but they are complementary.

I am not quite sure about anything else, that is a very small base, but I would include the Poliquin Principles as well. Charles is a smart man. Vince Gironda also knows a lot and is worth reading, as is Mauro Di Pasquale. That's an awful lot to read for one month, so don't try to do that! Just put them in order and read as you feel like it.

That knowledge will help you understand how to modify and analyze your own performance and how to really be successful here and elsewhere in your physical career. You won't get it all straight from the books, they are mostly geared towards bodybuilding, but if you can take what they are saying about using the knowledge to build SIZE and re-apply that to STRENGTH you will be golden.

[Tarun Suri]

I'd also subscribe to the email list of fitness blogs like ericcressey.com, robertsontrainingsystems.com, and boddickerperformance.com. This will give you frequent exposure to things you may or may not have known, and give you better understanding.

The more I read, the more it felt like I was finding dots. Slowly with exposure, the dots started connecting.