Workout Programming That Checks All The Boxes

“Education is for improving the lives of others and for leaving your community and world better than you found it.”

We pride ourselves on continually learning and not just training the new trends. Our responsibility as strength and conditioning coaches is to help all our clients reach their fitness goals in a safe, effective, and fun way. Our BIG three rules of training are…

#1 never injure our clients.

#2 prevent injury.

#3 reach the client’s goals.

Our programming is built around the principles of training the body as one piece. We train movements and not muscles. This means we do not program our workouts like we are training Frankenstein’s monster (leg day, arm day, chest day, etc). “What do you mean?” Well, let’s break it down. We train the body by movements, rather than by muscle. Vertical Push: DB shoulder press, overhead stuff. Vertical Pull: pull ups, chin-ups, lat pulldown. Horizontal Pull: DB rows, superband rows. Hip Dominate: anything that is a hip hinge. Hip lifts, deadlifts, KB swings. Knee Dominate: Basically the thousand variations of squatting. Finally you have your Loaded Carry and “Core” training. What is a loaded carry? Is it core? Is it grip strength, is it a corrective? YES,YES,YES. A loaded carry is essentially integrity under load and will change your entire life.

The fun words of “ functional strength training” has been thrown around a ton the last few years. When you mention it lots of things come to your mind. However when we talk about functional training we aren’t talking about balancing on a Bosu Ball juggling a couple dumbbells in one hand while using a shake weight with the other. What functional fitness means to us is that we try to move our bodies in the most natural ways possible, and when we’re moving well, we’ll use external loads to challenge our ability to maintain that quality of movement. This includes exercises like deadlifts, pull-ups, and the bench press.

Why do we focus on this?

For many clients, the extra focus on technique means that they’re more confident when they find themselves at the gym without a trainer. They also move better and feel better in their daily life. Personally, that’s my key idea of success–consistent training regardless of environment. When exercises require patience and long-term practice, they’re far more likely to become a long-lasting habit.

Strength training is the most important activity to include in your fitness program to help reach most clients goals of fat loss, muscle building, health, and overall hotness. Let’s look at the overall structure of a program, then we’ll break down the differences based on goals.

Let’s dive into our programming recipe we use to help reach their goals.

There’s a similar structure for the flow of every workout, with five major sections of each workout. The sections vary in length and intensity. Here’s how we’ll organize an hour of small group training:

Roll/Stretch; 6-8 minutes

Warm-Up: 6-8 minutes

Core / Power Development: 6-8 minutes

Strength Training: 30-35 minutes

Conditioning: Last few minutes “Finish him”-Mortal Combat

Here’s a breakdown of each of these sections of a workout:

Roll/Stretch

This is the time we use to relax the body from daily stress and help start helping the body reset into a somewhat normal state. Foam Rolling is basically giving yourself a massage. You are taking your beef jerky muscles and molding them back into a nice cut of steak. Rolling will help with multiple things. Some of these gifts include prevent injury, help increase range of motion, start increasing your blood flow, and it just feels super good. Stretching helps us take shortened muscles and bring them back or closer to their original length. Again preventing injury, helping you feel better, and after a great warm up lift better.

Warm UP

In its simplest definition, the warm-up is time spent elevating our core body temperature. A warmer body is better prepared for exercise, and instead of just jumping on a treadmill we get there in a few ways. We focus on breathing, because many people don’t breath as efficiently as they could. The simplest way to think of it is that most people don’t exhale completely. We’ll reset our breath by focusing on a full exhale, which can have the added benefit of working your abs harder from the beginning of the workout.

After we reset our breath, the warm-up transitions into some mobility work. Following the framework of the Joint by Joint Approach, the emphasis is on creating mobility at the hip joints, the thoracic spine (or upper back), and the ankles. While we’re creating movement here, we’re focusing on controlling movement through our knees, lower backs, and shoulders.

A lot of our go to exercises for mobility are six point rocks, lying t-spine openers, and a few other Original Strength drills.

Core / Power Development

Now that our bodies are have moved without external load and we reset our breathing and our joints are more fluid. Now we are more prepared for intense movement, we’re in the

Core/Power development section. During this time, we’re working on our ability to resist motion through our mid-section, create motion using our arms and legs, or a combination of the two.

If you have less training experience, this section is better used by resisting motion. The focus here is on keeping your rib cage stacked on top of your pelvis (Box on a bowl -Dan John), and this can be done in all three planes of motion. A deadbug can challenge our ability to resist extension by keeping our ribs down, a suitcase carry can challenge our ability to resist resist lateral flexion, and an Anti-Rotation (Pallof press) can challenge our ability to resist rotation.

When it comes to training power, we’re focused on using our core to transmit force. Take the Turkish Get-Up for example, when we’re driving through one foot and onto the opposite elbow. That coordination takes some power!

More traditionally, we’ll use exercises like a kettlebell swing or box jump to create some power through the lower body, or a medicine ball slam to create some power through the upper body.

Strength Training

This section is the meat between the delicious bread of the workout. We’ll spend at least half of the workout focused on strength training, and we’ve already reviewed why: This is the best activity for promoting muscle mass and elevating metabolism.

When it comes to strength training, we’ll follow two major rules. They are:

Move well, then move often.

The first priority is mastering our ability to repeat quality reps. The quality of movement is essential for maximizing the effectiveness of our training in a given workout. It also assures a lessor chance of injury during the exercise.

If you move well, it becomes far more sustainable to increase the variables of training: increasing the volume by adding sets, repetitions, or external load.

It’s not about training as hard as possible, but about training sustainably. Focusing on movement quality makes that happen. Think about using the quality, not quantity during the workout.

The Bilateral Deficit

What this really means is we want to get the client to the point they use one leg instead of two all the time in their workout. In daily life we run, jump, step, and just tend to lead off of one leg more than using two at the same time. It’s not to say we still won’t two leg squat. We will still goblet squat, front squat, and so on and so forth. However we believe adding one leg exercises (Unilateral) are more beneficial than alway training with two.

We apply this idea of the bilateral deficit to exercises like a squat. Rather than aggressively loading our bilateral squat pattern, we’ll focus on our split squat or lunge. If we layer in the idea of lowest system load, we might start loading our split squat with a kettlebell in the goblet position instead of a barbell on the back. When you move well before you move often, you set technique as the first priority and load appropriately.

Conditioning (Finisher)

This final section is where you’ll see the most variety in our training. For the last about 5-10 minutes of each session, clients are focused on the accessory work for their goals. If you’re interested melting fat off your body, that work will look different than clients who want to pack on slabs of muscle.

One of my favorite finishers for fat loss includes kettlebell swings or battling ropes. If you want to take a shower in your own sweat this will do it!

If you’re interested in building muscle, we spend this finisher time focusing on really isolating the muscles you’re interested in working. The basic premise? A whole lot of reps, little rest, and a whole lot of burning. This can be hip lifts and lunges for your butt, or bicep curls for the gun show, and KB presses for sexy shoulders.

Putting It Together

I’m obsessed with learning and tinkering with the ingredients we use as long as it stays on our path. I have been lucky enough to work closely with the best in the industry. I am literally a phone call away from some strength coaches I idolize! We take our gift of knowledge we receive from these coaches and experiment with ways to improve our fitness results, and have the most fun possible.

Now let’s finish this up! Working on new exercises is often the most appropriate at the beginning of the session when our mind is right and our body isn't fatigued.

On our progression/regression sheets, we have a number of movement patterns we’ll use while lifting, including:

Squat

Hinge

Push

Pull

Core/Corrective/Carries

Each of these categories include bilateral exercises where two limbs work symmetrically or unilateral exercises where they work independently. When it comes to pushing and pulling, we have horizontal movements like a row or barbell bench press, and vertical movements such as a pull-up or kettlebell press.

Most of the time, we’ll pair exercises together that have minimal interference. If exercises look like different movement patterns, they often use different muscles, and while one set works, the other set recovers. When strength is the priority, we’ll often do straight sets of the primary exercise without pairing anything together. This is slower, but ideal for truly getting stronger.

In Closing

Our adaptable Strength and Conditioning coaches are passionate about helping clients reach their fitness goals and an elevated quality of life. The goals are always the same: keep it safe, have a ton of fun, and teach skills that can be used whenever going to the gym or in life.

(Let it be known that almost every concept I hold near and dear to my heart has been stolen from someone smarter than me. That stays true with this as well. Dan John, Mike Boyle, Charlie Weingroff, and Mark Fisher -Nick Remy)