You’re Probably Not As Advanced As You Think

Look around most average gyms and one of the most common problems you will find is people using training programs that are far above and beyond the level they need to progress, or that they are capable of performing properly.

Some prime examples include:

The 45-year-old accountant super-setting depth jumps, kipping pull-ups and burpees because he watched the latest Crossfit Games documentary on Netflix last week

The teenage girl doing a 2.5hour Glute workout she got from her favourite Instababe/IFBB Bikini Pro

Last but certainly not least, we have the classic Gym Bro, who can’t bench press their bodyweight but are on the cable machines doing Rich Piana’s 12 hour arm workout

Listen, I get it. You go on Youtube, Instagram and whatever else on God’s green earth exists now and you see all these kick-ass people doing kick-ass s*** and you think….. “I want a piece of that”. And I know your Nana tells you every time you go around for lunch how big and strong you’re getting but the reality is that you’re probably a couple of rungs further down the ladder than you think you are.

Honestly, it’s admirable BUT the forgotten truth here is:

What elite athletes/lifters are doing right now is not what they did to get to where they are today

What you really want to do is look at what these elite people were doing when they were in the same situation that you are now. In 90%+ of cases I can guarantee the answer is going to be consistently disappointing and boring. Usually they were:

1 – Lifting reasonably heavy on big basic lifts

2 – Focusing on eating well and getting enough protein

3 – Making sure they got enough sleep

4 – Doing the above as consistently as possible for several years

That’s it; more anti-climatic than your high school prom date right? Quite simply you don’t need to complicate things until doing these things consistently stops getting you progress. I bet most people will be shocked how far they get before that ends up being the case too.

Why Complicate Things

Before I address what most beginners/intermediates/advanced lifters SHOULD be doing I just want to address this.

Here’s the thing: advanced training methods suck. They’re hard, often time consuming and involve you being sore in places you didn’t even know you had. I mean yeh, some stuff like, weight releasers for example, look cool. Now, as important as looking cool is (so I hear), anyone who has done heavy weight releaser work will tell you, it does indeed suck.

It should be obvious why really. The more advanced you are the stronger stimulus you require to force your body into an adaptive response. Achieving a stronger stimulus is essentially achieved by making your body endure more pain and misery than it did before (or at least a different variation of pain and misery). So the more advanced you become, the more training takes from you until you are left as an elite athlete with no soul, hope or joy (but hey, at least you’re jacked).

So why do this stuff if you don’t have to? I’m a masochist and a training addict but if the fitness industry equivalent of Yoda crept out of the shadows and promised me I could make progress doing StrongLifts 3 days a week in the gym I’d snap his hand off!

This isn’t going to sound very hardcore I’m sorry but at all points you should be aiming to do the MINIMUM required to achieve the rate of progress you desire. Doing more for the sake of doing more is not hard-core; it’s stupid. Most people have hectic lives with jobs, families and whatever else so piling unnecessary training stress on top of that is a sure fire way to screw yourself over and make no progress.

It’s not how much work you can do, it’s how much work you can recover from

What Should Beginners Be Doing?

In my opinion, you’re classed as a beginner if you haven’t gained a significant amount of muscle since you started lifting (Note – I mean MUSCLE here, not fat, I don’t care if you’ve gone up 2 shirt sizes if you now can’t see your manhood when you look down). In essence, if people don’t assume you go to the gym/lift when they see you, then you’re probably a beginner. If strength is your game then I’d say you’re a beginner until you get to the following standards:

Squat/Deadlift – 1.5 x bodyweight

Bench Press – 1.25/0.75 x bodyweight (male/female)

Overhead Press – 0.75/0.5 x bodyweight (male/female)

At this point you need to be honing your craft and mastering the big compound lifts that are going to be the foundation of your training for years to come. I’d say you need to be technically proficient at one (or more) from each of the following categories:

Squat Pattern – Split Squat/Zercher/Front/Safety Bar/Back

Horizontal Push – 15deg Incline Bench/Flat Bench (Barbell or Dumbbell)/Dips/Floor Press

Horizontal Pull – 45deg Bent-over Row/90deg Bent-over Row/Pendlay Row/Seal Row/T-bar Row

Vertical Push – Landmine Press/Savickas Press/Military Press/Push Press/Seated Military Press

Vertical Pull – Pull-up/Chin-up/Lat Pulldown

Hip-hinge Pattern – Romanian Deadlift/Deadlift/Trap-bar Bar Deadlift/Block Pull/Good-morning/Olympic Lift Variations

These movements should probably make up 70-80% of your training volume and technical efficiency should be at the forefront of your focus.

In terms of programming a simple and progressive system such as the double/triple progression system could honestly keep you progressing for several years if you’re smart about it:

The Triple Progression System: A Simple, Battle-Tested, Time-Proven Approach To Gaining

It’s that simple.

Be patient, be smart and the results will follow.

What Should Intermediates Be Doing?

Now that you’re an intermediate you are now strong (or muscular) enough to have weak points……Congratulations. When you are a beginner EVERYTHING is a weak point, which is why you don’t need to be overly focussed on one single movement pattern or muscle group. Now you are at the point where we need to start paying a little more attention to exercise selection and to how we allocate our training volume.

How do you know you’re an intermediate? Well at this point your Nana shouldn’t be the only one telling you you’re big and strong. MOST people will assume you lift at this point. Likewise, outside of social groups consisting purely of lifters you’ll probably be the most jacked person in the group, most of the time. Again, if strength is your main goal (brownie points for you) then you’re looking at:

Squat/Deadlift – 2 x bodyweight+

Bench Press – 1.5/1 x bodyweight+ (male/female)

Overhead Press – 1/0.66 x bodyweight+ (male/female)

If this is you then well done, you’ve made it further than 90%+ of people who start training. BUT this is also generally the stage where people’s perception of how much they know and how much they ACTUALLY know are the most misaligned. This issue is defined perfectly by the Dunning-Kruger effect:

If you’re an intermediate you’ll often be at the top left spike of this graph (know little and very over-confident). Beginners are often idiots when it comes to fitness, after all they’re beginners. But they recognise that they are and seek help or (usually) don’t step outside of their means, at least consciously. Likewise, truly advanced/experienced individuals (not dudes who got jacked by taking all the PEDs under the sun, this muddies the water here admittedly) know enough to realise that for everything they know there’s another 5 things that they do not; so they keep an open mind and aim to learn where they can.

So as an intermediate you are essentially the most dangerous of all gym-goers, as your confidence likely far exceeds your knowledge.

This is why many intermediates end up scuppering their progress. They’ve made a little progress and now they assume they need all the advanced methods and programs under the sun, when they really don’t.

For the most part here is what you need to do:

1a – Start to vary your main lifts a little (adding pauses/tempos, or swapping back for front squat for example) to work on weak points in your strength/technique/physique

AND/OR

1b – Start to add in assistance work to hit these weak points (i.e. doing front squats AFTER your back squats if your quads are weak or doing rack pulls after deadlifts if you’re lock out is weak)

2 – Keep a good amount of volume – although you will now be lifting more on your compounds, meaning more training stress, your technique SHOULD now be much improved (otherwise you’re still a beginner). Better lifting technique means more efficient and effective loading of the muscles involved and less neurological stress. So to a degree, these two factors even themselves out, meaning you can keep training volume on the big lifts at a good level

3 – Learn the art of periodization – as an intermediate you’ll need to learn it doesn’t pay to try and be at your absolute strongest at all times. Likewise from a hypertrophy perspective you may benefit from varying your rep ranges in a calculated manner a training cycle. I’m not one of those that believe the Accumulation-Intensification-Realization model is the be all and end all of programming BUT learning the principles and framework of it can help you understand what I’m talking about here.

You’ll notice pretty much all of our training plans on Thibarmy.com revolve around a 12-week periodization model as it tends to be a great training window to cycle through these periods. 12 weeks is long enough for an intermediate to see meaningful results by the end of the cycle without being so long that you get disheartened/bored before the end of it.

 

4 – Add in a LITTLE isolation work. Isolation work should be reserved for weak/lagging muscle groups. As I mentioned earlier, when you’re a beginner EVERYTHING is weak/lagging. Now that you’ve built some muscle and strength you can actually tell what is lagging behind. Just remember, you don’t need to go over-board here, I’d pick 2 or 3 muscle groups per training cycle to target with isolation work.

In terms of a training system, you could very easily still use something like the double/triple progression system linked above. You’d simply need to make the small adjustments listed above and be more patient with the rate of progression that you use/expect. For intermediates (and advanced athletes) I do really like the Omni-contraction System (OCTS) that has lifting days focussed on eccentric, isometric and concentric contraction types. Not only does it have benefits for improved strength, hypertrophy and injury prevention but also importantly (for me at least) it allows you to push big lifts pretty damn hard regularly (3 x per week) without burning yourself out or ending up beat up. In fact, since I started using this system with my competitive powerlifters the rate of injury has been essentially zero and even niggles like tendonitis have become rare.

If you want to learn about the OCTS system then we have a full training course available on it.

What Should Advanced Trainees Be Doing?

If you’ve reached this bracket then you’ve probably made 90% (or more) of the progress that you will ever make in the gym; let that sink in for a second.  At this point you are fighting tooth and nail for every lb of muscle or 1lb on the bar. To give you a personal representation of this, it took me over 2 years to take my Bench Press PB from 202.5kg to 205kg… that’s right, I added about 100g/month and I assure you it wasn’t through lack of effort!

To class yourself as advanced I’d say you need to be the most jacked person (or at least one of) in the majority of gyms you step foot in; skinny teenagers should bow down before you in the street praying for you to bestow your wisdom upon them and at restaurants the waiter/waitress should never ask if you want to see the Vegan menu.

If you’re a strength athlete you should be achieving AT LEAST:

Squat/Deadlift – 2.5 x bodyweight+

Bench Press – 2/1.5 x bodyweight+ (male/female)

Overhead Press – 1.25/0.75 x bodyweight+ (male/female)

At this stage progress will likely always be slow and you have to become even smarter about how you spend your time in the gym. So I’d give you the following guidelines:

1 – Learn that less is more – the more advanced you get the stressful your training becomes. Either because the loads you are using are greater or because the intensity of your sets needs to be higher to elicit a response. Either way your volume/frequency, at least on big compounds, will need to be lower to accommodate for the increased stress (especially neural) imposed by this. This is often the reason you see most pro-bodybuilders gravitating towards body part splits and machine/isolation work; it allows them to do the necessary volume and still recover.

Take my wife Naomi for example, who is an elite powerlifter, her lifts are so heavy and taxing that in her current competition prep she is only lifting TWICE PER WEEK. This is the frequency that allows her to push the big lifts hard and still recover (turns out squatting over 3.5 x bodyweight takes it out of you..). To give another extreme example, when Chris Duffin was training to squat 1000lbs x 3 he trained ONCE per week. He squatted on Sunday and that was it.

High-level training takes a lot to recover from. When you’re elite you cannot train with the same frequency/volume as an intermediate or beginner.

2 – Choose your compound lifts carefully – when you are at this level and moving heavy poundages it’s important to use lifts that don’t beat you up. Use lifts that don’t wreck your joints/nervous system and feel “natural”. As mentioned above you’re already going to have to lower your training volume to account for the increased lifting stress caused by heavier loads so it’s even more important than ever to be smart with exercise selection. Remember, lifts that caused niggles before are only going to cause even bigger issues now that you’re stronger.

3 – Adjust your expectations for progress – as I said, you’ve already made the majority of the progress you’re going to make. At this point setting up your training cycles to add 10% to a lift or expecting to gain 10lbs of muscle in your off-season is only setting yourself up for disappointment, or worse

4 – Learn to streamline your goals – as an advanced individual you will find it extremely difficult to make everything progress at once. Quite simply, the amount of stimulus required to make a single muscle group/lift improve makes it almost impossible for you to make them all progress simultaneously, it will exceed your recovery ability. You will fare much better by splitting your training in to phases in which you focus primarily on 1 lift or 1/2 muscle groups and put the rest on maintenance mode (the amount of volume needed to maintain is a fraction needed to improve a muscle/lift at this point).

So what do you do when you’re so advanced that nothing makes you progress anymore? You’ve got the following options:

1 – Sign up to our online coaching and let us worry about all this crap for you. We love inflicting misery upon individuals masochistic enough to reach the advanced stages

2 – Buy Joel Seedman’s lastest book and become permanently afraid of obtuse joint angles for the rest of your life (a.k.a give up)

3 – Follow the handy guidelines below!

First off, EVEN at this stage something as simple as the double/triple progression system will work for you provided you follow the guidelines above. I mean it. You need to be smart with exercise selection and be willing to progress slowly but it will work. Even in his prime J M Blakeley’s (multiple World Record holder in the Bench Press) training consisted of the following:

Week 1 – Ramp to a 6RM

Week 2 – attempt to perform 6 sets of 6 at 6RM (and invariably fail)

Week 3+ – keep attempting to get 6 sets of 6 aiming to at least add ONE TOTAL REP to the workout

Week X – when 6 sets of 6 is achieved add 1LB to the work weight and repeat….

If something this simple is good enough for him, it’s likely good enough for you. If JM failed to add a rep to his workout total rather than change his workout his attitude was to focus on what he needed to do to RECOVER better to be able to do so. As an advanced trainee this is where you need to shift your mind-set towards.

If progressing slowly and being patient doesn’t really fit your mind-set (like me) then you would do well to adopt a periodized “BLITZ” approach to your training. This allows you to go balls to wall at a specific goal for a short time period before swapping focus. This can also great be great for motivation as it allows you to see quick progress in an isolated area.

If you want to learn more about this style of training, don’t worry, we’ll have an article coming your way soon!