Building your training program

Starting weight training can be a confusing time. You come into the gym and see a dozen machines you don’t know how to use, an assorted collection of dumbbells, barbells and weight plates, and a few rows of cardio equipment.

Where do I start?

I see it far too often where first-time gym-goers will head straight to the treadmill and stick to only doing cardio for their exercise, mainly because they don’t know how to use any of the machines or weights – and I can definitely understand this. Each movement has specific techniques you need to learn so you can get the most results without hurting yourself, whereas cardio machines are quite simple – get on and go until you’re tired.

Whilst there are certainly a multitude of exercises and pieces of equipment you can use for your fitness program and strength training, when it ultimately comes down to it there’s 8 key movements you’ll want to focus on for the bulk of your training regime over the course of your life – everything else will fall around the sides of these movements:

• Squat (i.e. barbell back squat)

• Hinge (i.e. trap bar deadlift)

• Lunge (i.e. reverse alternating lunge)

• Push out (i.e. chest press)

• Push vertical (i.e. dumbbell shoulder press)

• Pull vertical (i.e. lat pulldown)

• Pull back (i.e. single-arm dumbbell row)

• Carry (i.e. farmer’s walk)

Sounds simple? It is. I see too often that people will focus on the newest fad exercise at the expense of doing one of these key movements that will provide more benefits. One week they’re doing a whole session of glute kickbacks on the smith machine, then it’s super-setting leg raises on the bench press with every exercise the next week, followed by 1000 oblique crunches the week after that.

“Trust me bro, it’s good for your balance and... uhh… core strength”.

I get it; it’s good to have some variety every now and then to keep you mentally engaged with your training. It’s also good to do certain exercises to target specific muscles; no problems there. The main point to keep in mind however is to prioritise the key movements and do them first, with enough warm-ups, working volume and weight to elicit one or more of these responses:

• Strength increase

• Metabolism boost

• Muscle gain

• Skill acquisition (improving technique)

So how do I work these in?

Each training session you’ll pick 2-3 of these key movements (or a variation thereof) and do these first – this will be the bulk of your workout. For example if we’re wanting to do a lower body day, we might structure it like this:

1)     Back squats 4 X 8

2)     Front squats 3 X 10

3)     Barbell Romanian Deadlift 4 X 10

Superset

A)    Walking Bodyweight lunges 3 X 12 (each leg)

B)    Dumbbell Farmer’s walk 3 X 20 steps (each leg)

We started with two squat variations, then moved onto a hinge variation before finishing with a superset of a lunge and a carry. Along the way we worked all the major muscles group of the legs, as well as the core and back (with some shoulders thrown in for good measure).

Performed with enough warm-ups, working volume and weight this session would be ideal for eliciting the responses listed above – much more so than the random assortment of exercises you might have seen from your favourite Instagram fitspo this week.

No hate on this woman, but this exercise is not a thing.

So let’s sum things up:

• There are 8 key movements you want to be doing in your training - everything else will fall around these. They are:

  • Squat

  • Hinge

  • Lunge

  • Push out

  • Push vertical

  • Pull vertical

  • Pull back

  • Carry

• To achieve the best results from your training (based around strength increase, metabolism boost, muscle gain and skill acquisition) pick 1-2 variations of each movement and focus on getting those progressively stronger over time.

• If you want to change your training up, switch to a different variation of each movement but keep these 8 in your program.

This gives you a framework you can use to start building your programs- there is certainly more to go through here as each movement will have certain techniques you’ll need to learn, but now you know what direction to head in with your training. From here you need to learn the techniques for each movement – if you’re in the Sunshine Coast I’d be happy to help, but if not then seek out your local exercise professional and get started!

Talk soon,

Alex