The beginning of 2023 has been BUSY! I have had nearly zero free time or brain capacity to sit down and write this newsletter. At the tail end of the month or the beginning of March, I fully intend to get back to some consistency.
Today I wanted to discuss what my current training looks like in The Strong Human program and why I think it *might* be the perfect training program for maintaining and improving:
Strength
Muscle
Athleticism
Injury Prevention
Okay maybe it’s not perfect, but I’ve realllllly been enjoying it so far and I think if those four aspects are of interest to you, you’d probably like this program too. If you sign up for The Strong Human Program going forward, this is the program you’d start on! I call it “Building Beasts” because of the wide variety of training that we do.
Anyways let’s get to the details behind the program.
When creating this program, I wanted to have something that got as close as possible to hitting all types of stimuli without having a “robbing Peter to pay Paul” effect on my training.
So, I broke each workout of this program into 8 Phases. There are four strength workouts per week.
Week 1 & 3 the splits are:
Upper Strength
Lower Power
Upper Hypertrophy
Lower Strength
For weeks 2 & 4 the splits are:
Upper Hypertrophy
Lower Strength
Upper Strength
Lower Power
Before I explain the 8 phases of the workouts, check out this video to see an example of what a full day looks like. The workout shown here is my Upper Strength day from week 1 & 3.
8 Phase Training System
Phase 1: Mobility & Flexibility
Of course, mobility and flexibility are the first thing we do in the program. There are typically 2 movements targeting the muscles and body parts that will be most utilized each day. Usually, these movements are focused on more common problem areas such as ankle mobility, hip mobility, tight hamstrings/hip flexors, T-spine mobility, or shoulder mobility. That being said I do encourage people to adjust these movements to other problem areas if that is the case.
Phase 2: Athleticism
Right after the mobility we quite literally jump into some athletic movements. Depending on the day you might be doing some short sprints, change of direction drills, or plyometrics. Some days it is a combination of both, but the goal remains the same. Wake up the body with some speed & power and expose your body to different types of athletic movements.
Phase 3: Core
Following the athletic movements, we aim to strengthen the core. Mostly by way of different variations of loaded carries and medicine ball throws. To a degree these are sometimes an extension of our athletic movements. The goal is to gain strength and produce power that comes from a strong core.
Phase 4: Prime
In phase 4 we prep and prime the muscles to perform. The first 3 phases typically take 10-15 minutes depending on the day. By the time you get to your “prime” phase you’ll have an elevated heart rate and be mentally locked in! To prime the body, we typically do some body weight or banded exercises to get some blood flow to the muscles that will be involved in the primary lift of the day. An example of a primer can be seen here.
Phase 5: Strength
Now we start our resistance training portion of the workout. Starting with either a max strength movement such as a heavy bench press, hex bar deadlift, Bulgarian Split Squat, or barbell overhead press. On non-strength days (upper hypertrophy or lower power) the movement pattern will be the same, but the movement and goal of the exercise will be different.
Phase 6: Muscle
After our primary strength exercise, we follow this up with a superset with the goal of building muscle. Typically done in 3 sets of 6-8 reps with a heavy to moderate load. Here is an example of what that looks like on a lower body day.
Phase 7: Support
In phase 7 we want to target supporting or accessory movements in order to build up resilience and target weaknesses. This might include strengthening exercise for the lower back such as back extensions or a close grip bench press depending on the day. Supersets, lighter weights and shorter rest periods are used in this phase.
Phase 8: Challenge
Each workout ends with a challenge or “finisher” of sorts. For the lower body this comes in the way of different isometric holds for time such as this Straight Leg Iso Hold. For the upper body where the goal is primarily hypertrophy, we’re blasting our muscles using either body weight exercises to failure or one exercise with the goal of doing 100 reps in as few sets as possible.
Each workout has been taking between 40-50 minutes depending on the day and how focused I stay during the workout. I’ve been feeling great and even hit some pretty high number that I haven’t hit in a while or ever such as:
Bench Press: 275 for a single
Hex Bar Deadlift: 365 for a double
Safety Bar Bulgarian Split Squat: 250 for 4 reps
If you’re interested in giving this program I try, sign up through this link & get started on Monday!
Talk soon,
Tyler