Since then, it has become my favorite hobby and changed my life in ways I couldn’t have imagined. This is hardly an exhaustive list, but here are the non-fitness or health-related books that had the greatest impact on my life in no particular order.

How To Win Friends And Influence People by Dale Carnegie

If there is any one book I would recommend to everyone, it is this book. Despite no formal education in psychology, Carnegie understood people better than most academics who spent their careers studying them. Think of this as a book on how to make people feel seen. Some of the concepts seem like common sense, but they’re so seldom applied.

Here are a few of the principles to whet your appetite:

• Don’t criticize, condemn, or complain.

• Give honest and sincere appreciation.

• Become genuinely interested in other people.

• Be a good listener. Encourage others to talk about themselves.

The principles when listed out may not seem that impressive or helpful, but Carnegie draws from a well of anecdotes from his own life and the experiences of his students to make each principle feel real and usable.

Trust me when I say that most of the people you meet in life are in desperate need of this book. Let’s be honest, you probably are too.

The Razor’s Edge by Somerset Maugham

There is a quote about life that goes something like this: “There are two important moments in a person’s life; the day they are born and the day they find out why.”

The reading version of this might be: “the day we started to read and the day we find out why.”

The Razor’s Edge is the book where I discovered why I read. It impacted me so profoundly that it immediately became my favorite book and has remained so ever since. I have never resonated so deeply with a “fictional” character as I did with Laurence “Larry” Darrell. I saw a reflection of myself—or at least the version of myself that I wanted to be. Surrounded by vacuous characters who care only about the opinions of others, Larry stands alone as this enigmatic, disciplined, and deeply introspective nonconformist on a mission to understand what it all means.

This book is partly biographical fiction in that Maugham wrote it about real people, but he uses some artistic license to make it more readable and protect each character’s true identity. Maugham is a phenomenal writer, and his keen observation results in some of the best dialogue I have ever read.

I will close out this summary with my favorite quote about Larry, which comes from the first chapter:

It may be that when his life at last comes to an end he will leave no more trace of his sojourn on earth than a stone thrown into a river leaves on the surface of the water.

There is something oddly beautiful about leaving nothing behind after your death. Going out exactly the way you came in.

In a culture obsessed with legacy and leaving a mark, there is something quietly rebellious about that idea. Larry wouldn't have had it any other way.

Hyperion by Dan Simmons

I’ve heard Hyperion described as The Canterbury Tales in space, and I think that’s appropriate. Seven pilgrims come together on a voyage to the planet Hyperion, where they share stories of their experience with the mysterious Time Tombs and their guardian, The Shrike.

I’ll admit it took me several tries to get into this book, but once I did I was hooked, and it’s now in my re-read rotation. It’s full of crazy scenes, environments, and characters. For instance, there is a woman whose interaction with the Time Tombs causes her to age backwards Benjamin Button style as her father watches helplessly. The most physically imposing of the pilgrims is an Amazonian-like warrior woman who falls in love with a cybrid—which is essentially an AI in a living human body. And perhaps one of the strangest stories is about a priest who encounters a remote tribe full of inbred semi-immortal pygmies.

And let’s not forget the Shrike: a timeless killing machine with glowing red eyes that impales its victims on metal spikes extending from its chrome carapace. I mean, how badass and horrifying is that?

Like Canterbury Tales, each pilgrim's story works on its own. But together they form pieces of a larger puzzle, and the picture that emerges is what makes the book special.

Simmons writes with more ambition and density than most science fiction, but the payoff is a world that feels genuinely lived in. It’s rare to find an author who can weave poetry and intricate technological concepts into the same book. There is a reason Hyperion won the Hugo award. It and the following three books of the tetralogy form what is, in my opinion, one of the best science fiction series of all time.

Stoner by John Williams

There is no reason why a book about a guy who becomes a literature professor instead of following in his father’s footsteps as a farmer in rural Missouri should be this engaging. Williams’s writing is just that good.

To give you an example of what I mean, here is one of my favorite quotes from the book:

In his extreme youth Stoner had thought of love as an absolute state of being to which, if one were lucky, one might find access; in his maturity he had decided it was the heaven of a false religion, toward which one ought to gaze with an amused disbelief, a gently familiar contempt, and an embarrassed nostalgia. Now in his middle age he began to know that it was neither a state of grace nor an illusion; he saw it as a human act of becoming, a condition that was invented and modified moment by moment and day by day, by the will and the intelligence and the heart.

Williams's prose takes the ordinary and makes it profound in a way that few other writers can. The plot, setting, and characters shouldn’t be interesting if you were just looking at them on paper. But they are.

Stoner’s story is one of the most quietly devastating things I’ve ever read. He is a good, hardworking man who seems ultimately unable to attain the things he wants in life. But there is a sort of stoic beauty in his persistence.

The message, to me, is about stubborn refusal to give up. When it seems like everything that you’ve worked for falls apart around you, you still have the choice to persevere. Because that’s life. There isn’t always a happy ending.

Beauty is observed in the small quiet moments, and it is the impermanence of such moments that make them so powerful.

The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand

I was hesitant to include Rand because of how polarizing she is, but to me, the whole point of reading is to challenge the way you view the world. Rand is very good at that. Her political philosophy, Objectivism, places the individual above all else. She rejects altruism and “the collective good,” believing instead that the highest moral pursuit for any person is their own happiness and purpose.

In essence, she advocates for a radical self-reliance. Through this “Rational Egoism,” she argues that the world becomes a better place because it is populated by independent, productive individuals.

Many find her politics detestable, but if you cannot engage with ideas you disagree with, you limit your ability to think critically. I thoroughly enjoyed this book—not because I am a total convert to her philosophy, but because the writing is compelling and Howard Roark is one of my favorite fictional characters. I was inspired by his fierce independence and his unwavering integrity, even when it came at the expense of his livelihood.

People may argue that Rand’s writing is too on the nose and unrealistic, and I’m inclined to agree to an extent. Many of her characters, for instance, are capable of having absurdly high-level and often didactic conversations that can feel out of place or jarring. It’s clear these characters are the vehicle for her philosophy, so as long as you understand that, you can accept them for what they are.

The bottom line is that you don’t have to wholly agree with a writer’s philosophy to find the story engaging. And The Fountainhead, to me, is Rand’s most accessible work and a good place to start for anyone who’s willing to open their mind a bit.

Meditations by Marcus Aurelius

Finally, we have arguably the most important book on this list, Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. I discovered stoicism during a very dark time in my life. I was in my late twenties and working too many hours in a job I hated with micromanaging bosses and almost no autonomy, I was utterly lost on what I wanted to do with my life, and I was in an unfulfilling relationship.

I was slamming too many coffees (at least one of which always had a triple shot of espresso in it), and I think between the caffeine intake and the extreme job and life dissatisfaction, something in my brain…broke.

I had a panic attack at around 1am one night, and I remember walking out on my balcony struggling to breathe hoping the cool air would calm my nerves. It did eventually, but it turns out the panic attack was just the beginning.

It kicked off a month long period of extreme depression. I couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep, couldn’t have sex. All the color had been drained out of my life. I lost probably 10 pounds in a month, and all the activities I could normally rely on to get me out of a mental funk just weren’t working. I rarely employ hyperbole, so trust me when I say that this period gave me new insight into why depression so often leads to suicide. It is an all-encompassing, inescapable misery that I do not wish on my worst enemy.1

I dropped the caffeine, which unfucked my brain chemistry, and slowly started to crawl my way out with what I now realize were cognitive behavioral therapy concepts and techniques, which draw heavily from stoic principles. I discovered the seminal stoic works2 and they not only helped me find my way back to myself, they gave me the tools I needed moving forward to deal with whatever life threw at me.

Anyone who has experienced true depression will understand when I say that Meditations, and more generally stoicism, saved my life.

I recommend anyone seeking stoic wisdom to start with Meditations3, because there is tremendous wisdom to be found in the private thoughts of one of the most powerful men in human history struggling with the same things you are nearly two thousand years later.

Let’s Bring It Home

There are many other books that have had a significant impact on my life, but didn’t quite make the A-list (yet).

Man’s Search For Meaning by Viktor Frankl is a book about human resilience and how humans can find meaning and purpose in even the most dire conditions. This quote embodies that message: “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

As a naturally anxious person, How To Stop Worrying And Start Living by Dale Carnegie has been instrumental in helping me find productive ways to deal with that anxiety. One of my favorite lessons from the book is about living in “day-tight compartments”. In other words, taking it one day at a time.

The Stranger by Albert Camus introduced me to existentialism, which created a seismic shift in how I view existence and death. It played an essential role in my journey to nihilism, which is the belief that life has no inherent meaning. I would call myself a cheerful nihilist though, because I believe meaning can be found in anything that makes us happy or brings us purpose.

James Clear’s book Atomic Habits did what earlier books about habits failed to do—it gave the blueprint for how to change them. And it did so with ruthless efficiency; there are no wasted words. I think about The Four Laws of Behavior Change every time I want to improve my habits.

Thinking I was going to get a book on how to be more productive, Oliver Burkeman’s book Four Thousand Weeks actually brought me face to face with my finitude. I succinctly label it the anti-productivity productivity book. He suggests that instead of trying to get it all done, we should embrace our limitations so that we can focus on the work and life that matters.

And lastly, the most recent addition to the list is Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry. This book may seem out of place, but it made the list for one simple reason: it’s a good fucking book. As much as I appreciate good prose, I loved this book because I didn’t even notice it. The story was so well-crafted that I forgot I was reading entirely. I fell into the story and it never let me go. This is a western done right with one of the most unforgettable ensembles of characters—my favorite being Augustus “Gus” McCrae. I cannot recommend it enough.

Okay, now we’re actually bringing it home

I believe time is the greatest filter for quality. Most of the books on this list are at least 30-40 years old. The best works persist through the years and although new books CAN be great, I tend to pick older books as enough time has elapsed for the time sieve to do its thing.

My reading journey is far from over, and who knows, maybe this list will look very different in 20 years. But every book in this group has a permanent place on my re-read list, so odds are that I will find them even more important to me as time passes.

Hopefully you got a good recommendation or two from here, and if you have any books that profoundly impacted your life, please recommend them in the comments!

Thanks for reading.

I came across this article by James Clear years ago and ever since, the concept of constraints has resurfaced often. The idea is simple: when we have complete freedom of choice, we can get bogged down by detail-overload. Properly placed constraints can act like gutter bumpers in a bowling lane, preventing us from wasting time and allowing only forward motion.

Let's talk about how to do that.

Simplify your workouts

People new to working out often mistakenly believe that complex is better than simple. This is called complexity bias. In truth, complex is rarely better than simple, especially when your primary goal is to build consistency.

Unnecessary complexity not only makes the workout take longer, it creates higher activation energy1. At least in my own experience, staring down a 6-8-exercise workout is much more daunting than a 4-exercise workout.

If you’re the kind of person that doesn’t want to spend any more time than necessary in the gym, this is exactly what you need and one of the reasons short workouts have become a mainstay in my fitness routine, like this 4-exercise simple dumbbell routine I use.

Add as many constraints as you need to

Constraints are arbitrary limitations designed to keep you from getting distracted by details. If you really want to reduce mental load, limit yourself in as many ways as possible to remove decision fatigue.

Here are some ways you could do that:

• Limit the number of exercises

  • Less is definitely more when deciding on how many exercises you want to include in your program as a beginner. 4 is a good sweet spot for me, but if you really want to constrain things, you could go as low as 2 (or even 1, hell) with one upper and one lower.

• Use all the same type of equipment

  • Do your whole workout with machines, dumbbells, kettlebells, barbells, whatever. One type of equipment. If you wanted to narrow that even further, yet sacrifice some effectiveness, you could even do the whole workout with one piece of equipment. Grab a single pair of dumbbells, a single kettlebell, etc. It isn’t perfect but if your choice is nothing or that, I know which one I’d have you pick.

• Give yourself a time constraint

  • Set a hard limit for 15, 30, or 45 minutes for your workout. Not only will this ensure that you don’t dilly dally, it will reinforce the idea that you don’t need to spend any longer than that in the gym. Get in, get out.

• Use the same reps or rep range

  • Rather than picking different rep counts for each movement, you can pick one and stick with it for all your exercises. 8 or 10 reps is an easy pick that covers most goals.

  • Note: This might not work very well when combined with the same piece of equipment constraint above. You don’t necessarily want to doing the same reps with the same weight on a dumbbell overhead press that you’re doing on a dumbbell RDL, for example.

Constraints like this are about spending less time figuring out what to do and more time doing. Action is the only thing that moves the needle forward. And now that you’ve got a solid list of useful constraints, let’s help you figure out what exercises are available to you and which ones to pick.

Luckily, we live in an age where we can leverage technology to take some of the guesswork out of creating programs.

Use AI

This may sound like blasphemy2, but if you want to make a simple program from scratch, you can always use a service like ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini to put together a workout for you with a prompt like:

"I need two total body workouts using {insert available equipment here}".

Add as much context as you need to make it specific to your situation. You could ask it to shorten or lengthen the workouts based on time availability, to make the workouts suitable for a commercial, hotel, or apartment gym, change any exercises that don't work with your setup, etc.. It may not be perfect, but luckily, you don't need perfect right now. You just need somewhere to start.

Ask it to keep it to 4 exercises like my example if you want. Do whatever you need to do to get your workouts to a place where you can commit to doing them consistently.

Repeat your workouts

Once you've put together your workouts, stick to them. Getting stronger is the shortest path to improving your body composition, and that means progressing the weight, reps, range of motion, or perceived effort on the same exercises.

Changing exercises constantly adds too much lateral movement. It's a distraction. If we revisit the bowling lane example, it’s getting lost in the gutter. If there is a legitimate reason to change something—like you don’t have access to the equipment, you don’t feel comfortable performing the movement, etc.—then by all means, go back to the drawing board. But don’t keep swapping stuff around because you have a low threshold for boredom.

Getting stronger is the goal and to do that, you need to repeat the same movements and try to improve your performance on them.

Keep Showing Up

Now that you've put together a simple program, have learned that repeating that program is the best course of action, all you need to do now is keep showing up. A lack of patience and discomfort from doing the same thing prevents trainees from making long-term progress. But you're not like other trainees.

Trust me when I say that the people with the most success in the gym followed this formula on the path to where they are now. It requires patience and discipline and a willingness to forsake the easy path of novelty and distraction.

As always, keep the main thing the main thing. Keep things simple and keep showing up.

But stress is only one side of the equation. It alone won’t tell you whether an injury will occur. We also need to consider capacity1, which is our tissue’s ability to handle that stress. Capacity is best improved through a systematic and incremental increase in stress so that we a) stay within our current capacity while b) driving adaptation to increase that capacity. In other words, we need to do enough to increase tissue resilience without exceeding current limits to cause injury or set back the process.

What makes this relationship difficult to manage?

1. Capacity is specific to a movement, technique, load, AND volume. Adaptation is specific, to a point. Doing back squats for three sets of five at 135 pounds doesn’t then allow us to do front squats for 4 sets of 8 at 140 pounds. We are certainly better off than we would have been had we not done the back squats, but capacity carryover is somewhat specific to each one of these variables. For every variable you change, the relationship between stress and capacity gets looser. This is why programs that involve a high degree of variety can pose a long-term safety risk, especially if the person writing the program is playing fast and loose with heavy loads and high volume.

2. Your capacity is not static. Capacity is affected by many variables, including but not limited to:

   1. Health status (sick or feeling physically unwell)

   2. Sleep

   3. Psychological stress or mood

   4. Focus

   5. Nutrition

   6. Mental or physical fatigue

   7. Workout consistency

   8. Technique consistency

A lifter who wants to get stronger needs enough stress to elicit adaptation without exceeding their capacity, which, as I’ve just explained, can be unpredictable. But a couple of key concepts will help you understand the relationship between stress and capacity.

Increases in capacity are not perfectly linear or predictable

As a lifting beginner, it’s not uncommon to be able to add weight to the bar every workout for a given exercise. Some of these gains are due to structural adaptations in the muscles, but most are due to improved neuromuscular coordination. Basically, communication between your nervous system and your muscles improves, leading to better coordination and strength.

So in the beginning, the relationship may seem “tighter” between stress and adaptation. You lift a given weight, adapt, and can lift more the next time. But there are two caveats here:

• You may be able to increase because you’re drastically undershooting your true strength potential. In other words, your “improvements” are really just you closing the gap between what you’re lifting and what you should be lifting.

• Neurological gains are much faster than structural (muscular) gains

But as you get more advanced—and often even as a beginner—you won’t always see progress as a straight diagonal line. That’s because progress isn’t truly linear. Adaptation to stress can be kinda messy and unpredictable. It’s best to take a somewhat zoomed-out look at progress to determine whether you’re actually getting stronger.

For instance, if you can squat 135 pounds for three sets of 5 in a given week, although you might expect to be able to lift 140 pounds for three sets of 5 the following week, you may not be able to. Hell, you’re not always guaranteed to be able to lift the same weight from workout to workout. But as long as you’re generally improving, the day-to-day performance matters less.

Capacity fluctuates throughout the week

Imagine, as I mentioned before, a broader “true” change in your capacity or strength for an exercise. It is a real number, but you often won’t be able to determine it with complete accuracy. Imagine that number as a jaggedly increasing line like this.

Now, imagine another line underneath that represents what capacity we actually have access to on any given day. We can call this “working capacity” or “working strength”.

It’s difficult enough to determine your capacity on any given day using the first line, so imagine how difficult it is when you add the second. You can now see why hardcoded prescriptions to increase weight on a set schedule may be problematic to implement.

If your “true” capacity starts at 100%, your working capacity may range from 80% to 95%2 of that, depending on the factors at play and their extent. There is no guarantee that the you that shows up on the workout that calls for more weight will be up to the task. If your workout calls for a performance that requires 90% of your capacity for a given exercise, but your working capacity is only 85%, what do you think is going to happen?

Capacity is specific to the activity

Strength (or capacity) is specific to the task's demands. Our bodies are very efficient in that way. Adaptation is physiologically and metabolically expensive, so it doesn’t make sense to improve anything other than what must be improved. To be clear, strength is generally transferable, so some of it absolutely carries over to different tasks. But you cannot expect all of it to.

Which means that the greater variation in how you perform a movement, the more the stress of said movement divorces your capacity for it. In other words, if you want to ensure you have the capacity for something, it needs to look similar enough to equip you to handle it. So while minor technique-related aberrations aren’t typically a problem, large ones absolutely can be. And these get amplified by your working capacity. If your daily working capacity is high, you can handle more deviation. If your daily working capacity is lower relative to your true capacity, you can handle less deviation.

So, how do we manage stress better?

I’ve told you important truths to help you understand how to determine capacity. What are some practical ways we can stay in our “adaptation yet within capacity” window?

Slow down progression

The easiest way to mitigate risk is to slow down your progression. A longer, more gradual progression reduces the risk of exceeding your capacity. Your muscles and connective tissue have more time to adapt, and the only real downside is that progress takes a little longer. Here are a few ways you can slow down progression:

• Incorporate double progression. Rather than increasing weight every session, use a rep range. You stay at the same weight until you reach the top of the range, and once you move up to the next weight, you can drop lower in the range.

• Increase weight at more infrequent intervals. I used to believe staying at the same weight for longer than a week or two meant missing out on my crucial gain window. But even at the same weight, you’re still adapting. There are just diminishing returns. Wait a week or two to move up, after your RPE has dropped for a given weight and rep count.

• Use a variable to measure effort, such as Rate of Perceived Exertion (RPE) or Reps In Reserve (RIR)3. If your only way to determine that you’re getting stronger is to add weight or reps, it may encourage premature or unnecessary increases in load or volume. RPE (or RIR) gives you a way to measure progress without actually changing the external stress. Lifting the same weight and reps at a lower RPE indicates you have gotten stronger without risking forced additional stress.

Stay away from complete muscular failure

Failure sets can help determine your limits, but they can also be more precarious in two ways. True muscular failure generates disproportionately more fatigue than stopping just short of failure, and, in my experience, technique breakdown is far more likely when approaching failure.

Using the RPE system above, keep your sets in the 6-9 range, meaning leaving 1-4 reps in the tank, depending on the exercise. Your reps will be stimulating without an excessive risk of form breakdown.

Learn when to call audibles

Some days, you will feel like things are “off”. A particular muscle or joint may feel tweaky or weak. That doesn’t always mean you can’t perform as expected, but it may be a sign that you need to be extra careful. I’m the last person to recommend throwing in the towel at the slightest provocation—I think that creates a dangerous slippery slope for chronic underperformance—but you will learn throughout your lifting career what you can train through and what’s a showstopper.

You could try using your last warm-up set as a litmus test for the performance to follow. The last set is usually heavy enough to gauge your strength, yet early enough to make useful preemptive adjustments.

The skill of creating ad hoc training modifications is a superpower for injury mitigation, but to become an expert, you must first take your licks. It’s probably the most valuable item in this list, but it’s a painful learning process.

So you got injured, now what?

A full breakdown of what to do when you experience pain or injury is outside the scope of this already very long article, but here’s what you need to understand about both of these things.

• Injuries are temporary. A large majority of weight-training injuries heal on their own over time. Do not catastrophize; do not tell yourself this is the end of your training career. I’ve injured myself countless times in the gym. Those injuries range from small muscle and joint tweaks to debilitating muscle strains and tendinitis that have drastically decreased my quality of life. But none of them have been permanent.

• Do what you can to maintain training momentum. I wrote an article detailing several strategies for modifying training for pain or injury. Continuing to train to the best of your ability is not being obstinate. Our bodies heal best through movement and stimulation, not idleness. Repeatedly overcoming injuries will also boost your self-efficacy.

• Every injury is a learning opportunity. Although injuries are normal and unavoidable, that doesn’t mean we need to keep slowing down progress by making the same mistakes over and over again. Blaming technique is still fashionable, but it does not, in isolation, cause injuries. In my experience, it only presents a problem when it’s sloppy, and your reps look wildly different. I would look at load management before blaming your technique. You did something the tissue couldn’t handle by doing too much too soon.

How you respond to injuries is far more important than the injuries themselves. Can you stay the course when things don’t go as planned and you don’t feel 100%? Find a way imperfectly forward.

Summary

Put simply, injuries result from stress that outstrips capacity. Capacity, unfortunately, has a myriad of inputs that make it difficult to determine precisely on any given day. But if you’re able to tap into strategies that make increases in stress more manageable, you can give yourself a fighting chance.

The harsh reality is that you cannot completely avoid injury if you’re training with great effort. There are too many variables at play, and stress and capacity are too granular and unpredictable to stay on top of with any degree of certainty.

But the broader and infinitely more important message is that injuries and pain are part of physically pushing yourself. There will never exist a utopia where you can perfectly manage stress. Luckily, our bodies are great at repairing themselves.

Now, to close out this already too-long article. Injuries are part of the game. Do what you can to minimize them, but when they do happen, learn from them and move on. Godspeed.

However, some general rules can help ensure that your workouts don’t suck. That’s what we’ll be going over here.

Exercise Ordering

General ordering considering fatigue/risk

The first question I ask when putting together a program is “What exercises absolutely need to go first?” I’m mostly thinking about this in the context of safety and what exercises are the most demanding, either from a technical or metabolic standpoint.

With that in mind, this is my general ranking of importance for each exercise “category”.

1. Olympic or power movements like power cleans, snatches, etc.

   1. These movements often require a high degree of technical precision and explosiveness, both of which wane by the end of a long workout. Due to the high power demands and risk of injury when performing these movements while fatigued, they are typically done first.

2. Big lower body compound movements like squats, deadlifts, and leg press

   1. These exercises use the heaviest loads and create a significant amount of systemic fatigue due to the size of the muscles involved. The earlier you can do them in the workout, the better it is to mitigate the risk of form breakdown.

3. Big upper body compounds like barbell bench press, barbell overhead press, rows/pull-ups

   1. Upper body compound movements tend to use lighter loads than lower compound movements, but they’re still relatively taxing compared to isolation exercises.

4. Compound exercises that use lower loads and aren’t done with barbells, like dumbbell bench, dumbbell walking lunges, dumbbell step-ups, dumbbell overhead press, etc.

   1. This includes various machine compound exercises, such as chest-supported rows, chest presses, shoulder presses, and hip thrusts.

   2. Because these exercises are performed with dumbbells and/or involve movements with more degrees of freedom, they are safer to fail, and the loads used are lower, respectively.

   3. Depending on the movement, these could be interchangeable with exercises from category 3. Some unilateral lower-body exercises are far more taxing than row or pull-up variations, but not as taxing or risky as barbell upper-body compounds.

5. Isolation exercises

   1. These are exercises that train only one muscle or muscle group at a time. Think bicep curls, tricep extensions, lateral raises, calf raises, leg extensions, leg curls, etc.

   2. The absolute loads used are lower for isolation exercises, which means they create less stress and fatigue, making them safer to do when fatigued.

Note: Prioritization and pairing can introduce competing priorities, making ordering more nuanced.

Prioritization

You will improve what you prioritize the most, so focus on the areas you care most about improving and put those exercises early in the workout. I generally like to separate prioritized movements from risky movements (if they’re different) by placing them on a different day. This way, I don’t have to choose priority vs risk.

If you want to improve your bench press while incorporating power cleans into your program, consider placing them on different days. Then you can fill in the rest of the workouts with less technical and/or lower-priority movements.

Pairing

If you use supersets—or any other type of multi-exercise sets—you may need to shuffle ordering around to prevent bad pairings. For example, deadlifts are a relatively taxing exercise. You could choose not to pair them at all, which is totally reasonable. However, suppose you want to pair them with something. In that case, you might consider a relatively low-effort isolation exercise that doesn’t engage the same muscles, such as a lateral raise or tricep exercise.

However, that depends on what other compound movements are performed after the deadlift. Bottom line, pairing can add another variable to the ordering problem—more on this in the section on pairing.

What this looks like in practice

Here’s an example of how I might order a workout that has every element:

A1 Power Cleans 3 x 5

B1 Barbell Front Squat 3 x 6

B2 Chin-ups 4 x 8

C1 Dumbbell Overhead Press 4 x 8

C2 Dumbbell Seated Bent Over Reverse Flys 3 x 12

Note: The power exercise goes first. The rest of the workout employs supersets, with the next series featuring a big lower-body compound exercise paired with an upper-body compound exercise. The last series is another upper-body compound paired with an isolation exercise.

Here is another example of ordering that is typical for my client programs (we don’t typically do Olympic lifts)

A1 Barbell Back Squat 4 x 6

A2 Dumbbell Single Arm Row on Bench 4 x 8e

B1 Dumbbell Bench Press 4 x 8

B2 Landmine Single Leg RDL 4 x 8e

C1 Cable Bicep Curls 4 x 12

C2 Alternating V-Ups 4 x 14e

Exercise Pairing

Although they are technically more efficient, most people who train in a busy commercial gym don’t even bother with pairing exercises. I don’t blame them. So if you only do straight sets—complete all the sets of an exercise before moving onto the next—then you don’t need to worry too much about this section.

However, if you do supersets or circuits, consider the following to enhance the effectiveness of your pairings.

Don’t pair exercises with overlapping muscle groups

Obviously, if you pair two exercises that use all or some of the same muscles, those muscles will be very fatigued. And very fatigued muscles don’t perform well.

If you, for instance, were to pair chin-ups with bicep curls, you would render both exercises significantly less effective—due to the biceps being absolutely fried—than if they were paired with a bench press or a cable overhead tricep extension. No overlapping muscles means you’re using the muscles involved in one exercise while the muscles involved in the other are resting.

Which, in a way, is what makes supersets so effective.

Don’t pair exercises using the same equipment

This one is more of a social limitation than a true logistical one. Commandeering two pieces of the same type of equipment is a dick move, especially if the equipment is in demand.

Using two barbells, both sides of a cable machine, or two popular machines at the same time is uncool, and you deserve to be judged for that. You gotta share the gym, and that means being relatively thrifty with equipment usage.

Try to pair barbells with dumbbells, dumbbells with machines, machines with cables, or anything with bodyweight - you get the idea.

Don’t pair grip-intensive exercises

This is a continuation of the first section, but it warrants its own section because it is often overlooked. There are many reasons an exercise can be taxing on the forearms.

You may be:

• Holding a very heavy weight 👉🏼 deadlifts

• Pulling a weight 👉🏼 rows

• Pulling yourself up over a bar 👉🏼 pull-ups

• Carrying weight as you walk around the gym 👉🏼 farmers carries

• Holding weights while doing a lower body exercise 👉🏼 dumbbell walking lunges

Any exercise that challenges your grip strength or endurance should not be paired with another exercise that does the same, especially if it causes the grip to become the limiting factor in either or both exercises. That is, unless you have a way to remove the grip from the equation, such as with Cobra grips or lifting straps.

Don’t pair exercises that are metabolically taxing and/or technically challenging

Doing exercises while fatigued is inevitable in a well-designed workout. But the easiest way to add some extra slop to a movement is to pair it with a highly fatiguing movement.1

Here are some examples of exercises that probably shouldn’t be paired for this reason:

• Deadlifts and box jumps

• Burpees and bench press

• Squats and jump rope

The risk of performing compound movements like deadlifts and squats is compounded (see what I did there?) by the loads you use and your level of fatigue. You might be able to get away with doing higher-rep, lower-load versions of these compounds, but if you’re training to improve strength with heavy loads, it's best to save your energy for those movements.

Summary

Hopefully, you now have a slightly better understanding of how to order and pair exercises. It’s also important to remember that these heuristics or guidelines are just that. Things are rarely going to be perfect, and you’ll learn what works and doesn’t work over time.

The name of the game is to get as much as you can from each exercise within your constraints. However, doing the work, even when it’s not perfect, is far more important than getting everything exactly right.

Be consistent and keep improving.

So let’s go over what makes an exercise a good pick with a primary, but maybe not sole, goal of hypertrophy:

It targets the correct muscles

This seems like a no-brainer, but it’s the most obvious thing that needs to be addressed. The exercise needs to target the muscle(s) you want to grow. If you're going to grow your legs, for instance, you might choose squats, leg presses, leg extensions, lunges, etc. If you're going to develop the biceps, you might select any one of several bicep curl variants, chin-ups, or any other upper-body pulling exercises.

In a perfect world, the process would be as simple as picking the “best” exercise that targets the muscle you want to grow. But there is no such thing as best—that’s relative and depends on many factors—and there are trade-offs that must be considered. For instance, unless you’ve got hours every day for training, you’re going to have to pick exercises that train multiple muscle groups at once. Which means you may want to do the bulk of your training with compound exercises like squats, leg presses, deadlifts, romanian deadlifts, hip thrusts, bench press, chest press, overhead presses, rows, pull-ups, chin-ups, etc.

To give you more concrete examples, most horizontal pushing exercises, like bench press and push-ups, target the chest, triceps, and front of the shoulders. And most pulling exercises, like rows, target the biceps, back, and back of the shoulders. If you wanted to target each of those muscle groups individually, you would need three isolation exercises for each compound exercise.

In many cases, isolation exercises can be better at targeting a specific muscle group than a compound exercise, which is why I often round out my programs with them. But they can’t, and shouldn’t be, all you use. My rule of thumb is to use predominantly compound exercises and add isolation exercises for body parts that are lagging in size or that you want to give special attention to.

It allows the target muscle to fail first, or at the very least, to get close to failure

If you choose an exercise where a non-target muscle fails relatively quickly, you won’t be able to stimulate the target muscle properly.

Although it seems to run contrary to the advice I gave in the last section, this can make compound exercises somewhat problematic. If you’re trying to maximize the stimulus to a particular muscle, that muscle must be the limiting factor in the exercise. If you’re doing bench press, for instance, unless your chest is what’s causing you to fail the exercise, it’s not going to be an “optimal” choice for targeting the chest. That doesn’t necessarily make it a bad choice—for reasons I already mentioned and more I will add later—it just means that you might want to add something like the pec deck (isolation) to maximally stimulate the chest.

Another great example is when a failing grip lowers the potential benefit of a pulling exercise. It’s hard to light your back up when your grip fails early. You can either stick to picking exercises where the grip doesn’t fail first, modify them to prevent premature grip failure, or you can use grip assistance.

The decision of when to use grip assistance for pulling is tough. On the one hand, if you always use assistance because your grip sucks, it’s going to continue to suck because it doesn’t get stronger. However, avoiding assistance prevents you from receiving a better stimulus for the pulling muscles. I try to avoid using assistance on rows or pulldowns until the weight truly outstrips your ability to do the exercise. I reserve it for heavy deadlifts, RDLs, very heavy pulling exercises, and any time I’m holding weight for a long time during a lower-body exercise (lunges, step-ups, etc.).

It minimizes “other stuff”

So we’ve covered targeting the muscle and targeting it correctly. For even better results, you also want to limit any other elements that neuter the exercise.

For example, if I want to build muscle, adding too much instability will cap the load I can use, and thus make the exercise less effective. This could mean doing exercises on an unstable surface, on one leg, in a stance that is too narrow, etc. This doesn’t mean you can’t build muscle this way; it just may not be optimal.

This also includes adding any elements to a movement that prevent you from getting the most out of the target muscle(s), whether it’s limiting the load you can use, expending unnecessary energy, or simply distracting you. To give you an extreme example, trying to create a “functional” exercise by combining a bunch of different movements into one may be entertaining, but it’s not going to be a great muscle builder. You need to focus on one thing at a time to create more precise tension and fatigue.

For a less extreme example, I like barbell rows and have put them in many programs over the years. However, there are better ways to train the upper back and lats without the lower back fatigue that comes from being bent over. A chest-supported machine row, for example, allows you to directly train horizontal pulling without the extra fatigue.

It can be done over a large range of motion

There is a lot of hullabaloo being made about training muscles at different muscle lengths, specifically how lengthened partials may provide the same or more benefit than full range of motion training. But even as someone who thinks the word functional is overused and has lost all meaning, I don’t think it’s very “functional” to try to manipulate things to this degree. It makes for some unnecessarily complicated and silly training approaches for the average person.

I haven’t seen enough evidence to compel me to train in any other way but through a full range of motion. That means full concentric (shortening) and eccentric (lengthening) cycles through as large a range of motion as your body can muster while still stimulating the right muscles. Here are some examples of a full range of kettlebell squats and dumbbell presses.

Partial range of motion variants can be acceptable in the proper context, but I would default to exercises that can be performed over a full range of motion whenever possible.

It can be done with a load and rep scheme that results in the adaptation you want

New research has emerged demonstrating that the “hypertrophy zone” is much larger than we initially thought (~4-30 reps and maybe even larger), insofar as you can build muscle at the extreme ends of this range. But what’s possible technically is not always advisable practically.

If I were primarily after muscle growth, I would still try to stay in the 6-15 rep range for most exercises for reasons I will let Greg Nuckols explain:

In the 6-15 rep range, the weights are generally manageable enough that you can maintain good technique, not cheat the range of motion, get pretty close to failure safely, not “burn out your CNS” after just a couple of sets, and not be left with creaky joints. On the other hand, the weights are generally heavy enough that you’re still putting a fair amount of tension on the muscle, you’re more likely to be limited in each set by muscular fatigue than systemic anaerobic fatigue, and you’re not doing so many reps that you’re metabolically crushed after your first couple of sets.1

All that to say, if you’re chasing muscle growth, it’s a good idea to pick exercises that can create a near maximal effort around this rep range. If you choose exercises and loads that you can’t do for more than a few reps or aren’t challenging until you reach 30 reps or more, they probably aren’t a great pick.

This is why many bodyweight and banded exercises aren’t a great fit for this type of training. You have to do too many reps to get the desired stimulus. They can be okay in a rehab or beginner setting, but you will quickly outgrow them if your goal is to build muscle.

You can progress it long-term

To build muscle and strength, you need to be able to continue progressing an exercise for months or longer. I call this an exercise’s “runway”. Lateral raises, curls, and several other isolation exercises have shorter runways than compounds, which is yet another reason why compounds make more sense as the backbone of your program.

Typically, the more muscles are involved and the greater the absolute loads lifted, the longer the runway. Deadlifts, squats, leg press, bench press, rows, etc. have lengthy runways for this reason.

As is the case with every one of these variables, it needs to be considered in the context of the whole. An isolation exercise isn’t great for time efficiency or long-term progression, but it can be fantastic at targeting the muscle you want to target. More on this tradeoff in the last section.

It’s nice to you

There are too many exercises targeting each muscle group for you to choose ones that seem to beat your body up more than others. We all have those one or two exercises that seem to cause problems no matter how careful we are, and some that we can go full-tilt on without issues.

Deadlifts are the former for me. From what I can only assume is a remnant of my college kicking days, my hips are a little funky, and they tend to get loaded asymmetrically when I deadlift. I’ve tried various stances, loading schemes, and volume distributions, and I’m almost guaranteed to get a cranky left hip at some point. I could keep trying over and over again—and I’m stubborn enough to try—or I could recognize that I might want to take an alternate route for building my back and posterior chain.

One might argue that someone who repeatedly gets injured doing a lift is either not doing it correctly or is poorly managing load and/or volume. But I might make the counterargument that some lifts for some people require so much meticulous oversight to avoid injuries and body fuckiness that they may be better off in the “not for me” pile. After all, what’s the goal here? Is it the exercise itself that you’re after or the adaptation? Give each exercise a fair shake, but if it repeatedly demonstrates its disdain for you, yeet it out of your program.

Build a program with as many nice exercises and as few asshole exercises as you can, because the best results come from long-term progression and minimal to no setbacks.

It uses equipment that is consistently available

It is challenging to progress an exercise if you don’t consistently have access to the necessary equipment. Take a barbell back squat, for example. If the squat rack is always taken in your busy gym, you’re traveling and training in a hotel gym, or you do your workouts across multiple locations with different setups, a barbell back squat may not be the best option.

No matter how good it is on paper, it isn’t viable if you can’t consistently do it. I often tell my online clients to choose greatest common denominator exercises. What exercise equipment will you always have access to? Build your program from that.

Putting it all together

Although that seemed like a lot, you quickly learn most of these organically through trial and error. To succinctly sum up what makes a good exercise pick for muscle growth:

You need to be able to do it, it needs to be through a full range of motion targeting the correct muscles in the right way for an appropriate number of reps, it needs to minimize other stuff that makes it hard to target the muscle in the way you want, and you need to be able to progress it for long enough to get the adaptation you want without it constantly beating you up.

You probably noticed there was some contradictory advice in this article, and that’s because these variables don’t exist in a vacuum. You’ve got a bunch of stuff all colliding with one another, which forces a sort of triage when picking the “best” exercise for any given goal. You have to figure out what’s important to you on a case-by-case basis.

For instance, you may have to choose an exercise that is slightly worse at targeting a muscle group because it’s nicer to you, or add exercises that are great at targeting a muscle but have a shorter runway. And lastly, if you have limited equipment availability, you’ll have to toss a few of these out the window entirely.

Not every exercise will check every box, and you’ll have to make some compromises, but the more of these each exercise hits, the more effective your program will be at building muscle.

That’s all for this one. Thanks for reading.

These three principles are what I call the holy trinity of lifting. They are not comprehensive in that they don’t get into the details of training like workout frequency, exercise ordering, exercise selection, etc. Those things matter, but they make up maybe 20% of results.

No, what I’m talking about are the variables that are so important that, without them, you might as well not even be working out. Let’s get into them.

Consistency

Consistency forms the bedrock of any routine. If you can’t show up consistently, nothing else matters. Body composition changes are the result of adaptation, and adaptation relies on consistency. When you work out:

• The workout stresses the muscles, tendons, nervous system, etc.

• Recovery ensues, so muscle fiber integrity and energy levels are restored

• Adaptation takes place. The nervous system is more efficient, and muscles and connective tissue are now stronger.

But these adaptations don't last forever, and unless you're consistently taking advantage of the window of improved performance, it can be challenging to make long-term progress. And without progress, it’s nearly impossible to unlock higher levels of strength and muscle growth.

Here are more thoughts on consistency:

• Put your workouts on your calendar. Designate a day, time, and place for each one and do everything in your power to prevent outside forces from interfering. Ambiguity destroys habits.

• Don't miss two workouts in a row. One occasionally missed workout is an anomaly, but two missed workouts are the start of a new trend. It's not the falling off the wagon that's the problem; it's the staying off.

• The problem is not the missed workout. It's permitting yourself to miss future workouts. When you miss a workout, your threshold for missing future workouts decreases. It’s sort of like breaking the seal. When you’ve done something once, you need less justification to do it again. Skipping workouts should be reserved for when you absolutely cannot avoid it.

• Adjust your workouts for the season of life you’re in. Busier periods need shorter, less demanding workouts. A hectic work schedule, children, travel, etc., all have the potential to derail your workout habit. It takes less than you think to maintain strength, so rather than stopping them altogether, do what your schedule allows. No one can ask more of you than that.

• Waiting until the right time to start or build consistency is rarely the answer. Life always gets in the way, and there will rarely be a point in the future where things get easier or less chaotic. Life works that way. If you can learn to be consistent with limited capacity, your workout routine will be more resilient.

I cannot reiterate this enough. You should always be optimizing for consistency. No matter how great your program is, if you cannot consistently do it, it will not work.

Effort

Now that you’ve mastered showing up, training hard-ish is the next pillar. You don’t need eyes-bulging, spittle-flying, white-knuckling effort on every set. In fact, that may be counterproductive. But if you want to improve strength and body composition, your training must create enough stress to stimulate adaptation in your body—little to no effort means no change.

The system for measuring/tracking effort

Effort is subjective, so to create some standardization, I use a system called Reps In Reserve (RIR). RIR refers to how many more reps you could have done before achieving muscular failure.1 If you were doing bench press, for instance, it would be the point at which you could not physically push the bar to lockout after making contact with your chest.

An RIR of 0 means you couldn’t have done another rep. An RIR of 1 means you could have done one more rep, an RIR of 2 means two more reps, and so on. The higher the RIR, the less stimulating the sets are and the less accurate the rating is.

Most of my clients stay within an RIR of 0-5, depending on the exercise, to maximize the stimulus without creating excessive fatigue. As clients advance and improve at estimating proximity to failure, their RIR is consistently in the 1-3 range.

Here are some general tips for giving and gauging effort:

• On exercises that are safe to fail, fail. At least in the beginning. Most people struggle to train with effort because they have no idea where their limit is. For movements like overhead presses, rows, pulldowns, pull-ups/chin-ups, hip thrusts, and most machine and isolation exercises, take at least one of the sets to failure. Once you know where that point is, what it feels like, and consistently get close to it, your sets will be more stimulating. You might want to avoid failure on exercises that are dangerous to “bail out” of, like barbell bench press, barbell squats, and leg press.

• Once you understand where failure is, consistently stay just short of it. Taking a set to complete muscular failure (RIR 0/RPE 10) creates a disproportionate amount of fatigue such that you may see a marked drop in reps from set to set. A loss in reps across your sets means a reduced stimulus for muscle growth. While strength may not be directly affected by proximity to failure, strength does rely on muscle growth beyond a certain point. Once you understand where failure is, try to stay 1-2 reps shy of it to avoid long recovery demands.

• The load should be slowing down significantly by the end of your set. If the bar, dumbbell, machine handle, whatever is still moving at almost the same speed as when you started, you're nowhere near failure. There is an inverse relationship between the velocity of the load and your proximity to failure. No slowdown means the set isn’t hard enough.

Progressive Overload

Let’s say you have a program that calls for squats, and you decided to start with 95 pounds. You’re showing up consistently, you’re training hard for each set, but you notice that after a week or two, 95 pounds is starting to feel light. You are still diligently doing your sets of squats at 95 pounds, but you’re no longer sore, and it doesn’t feel like you’re challenging yourself anymore.

As we adapt to a given stimulus—in this case, squats with 95 pounds—if we want to continue to adapt, we need to chase the same relative effort by slowly increasing the weight we’re lifting over time. This process is called progressive overload, and it is the driving force behind strength gains.2

Progressive overload, in a general sense, means you’re increasing the stimulus to match your improving strength or capacity over time. There are a variety of ways to do this, so I’ll go over the most common ones:

• Increasing the weight (or load). Week-to-week weight increases work well for beginners who have a lot of potential for strength and muscle growth and are quick to adapt, but it is less viable for intermediate to advanced lifters. In what’s called a linear progression program, you increase by the smallest increment available each workout. There is a little more nuance to this, but it’s outside the scope of this post.

• Increasing the reps. Completing more reps at the same weight is also a form of progressive overload as long as your perceived effort is the same. This can work for exercises where weight jumps are larger or when you don’t feel ready to handle more weight.

• Increasing weight and reps. I employ what’s called a double progression system for many personal training clients, because it provides a much smoother and safer progression path. The idea is simple:

  • Set a rep range, say 6-12 reps

  • Start your sets at the bottom of the range

  • Increase the number of reps at that same weight until you can do all the sets for 12 reps

  • The following week, you increase the weight by the smallest increment and drop the reps back down to the bottom of the range.3

  • You don’t need to use double progression. You could choose to alternate between increasing weight and reps. You can also choose whatever range you prefer.

• Increasing number of sets. Increasing the number of sets, especially within the same workout, has diminishing returns. Adding sets should be reserved for when you are completely stuck on the sets, reps, and weight of an exercise, or when you can add another instance of the exercise on a different day.

• Increasing RIR. Although there is no objective way to tell whether you’ve gotten stronger using the same sets, reps, and weight, we can use the RIR scale that I mentioned earlier. A higher RIR with the same weight and reps is still progress!4

Those strategies above should help keep the gains coming for years! I may have given the impression that you must increase something every single workout, but adaptation doesn’t necessarily require it. The same stimulus, provided it was hard at some point, can net strength increases for some time. The returns are just diminishing.

So it’s not so much that there is zero benefit in repeating the same weight and reps. You’ll just want to make sure you’re not camping out anywhere for too long. In my experience, however, giving people a reason not to push themselves is a recipe for little progress. You certainly shouldn’t feel like you must make every workout harder than the last, but you need some system for increasing the difficulty, or, at the very least, be honest with yourself about how hard you’re pushing.

Summary

That’s it. Those are the three pillars of training. If you can manage to show up consistently, train hard, and do more over time, you can make almost any program work. Remember, these variables are intimately connected. Being consistent provides the stimulus and allows you to take advantage of the adaptation from an effortful session. Consistent effortful sessions will enable you to increase the difficulty of your workouts. And progression creates momentum and the motivation to keep showing up.

At the risk of sounding arrogant, I have a great deal of knowledge in my industry. That knowledge came from reading content from people much smarter than me over the years. Although I wouldn’t be where I am in my career without it, consistently immersing yourself in the content of your brilliant peers leaves you wondering where your value add is. Couple this with the ability to get a well-articulated, comprehensive article with a simple query using ChatGPT, and every time I would sit down to write, I would think to myself, “What’s the point?”

Luckily, I came across a couple quotes from the book The Obvious Choice by Jonathan Goodman that helped snap me out of it:

Overinformed pessimism is an inevitable and unfortunate by-product of an information economy. The reasons why somebody else is better suited than you to do the thing. Why it’s hard. A bad idea. Or all the ways it could go wrong. We second-guess ourselves, not because we don’t know enough, but because we know too much.

Knowing too much about a thing is often worse than not knowing enough. All the information we can access in our pockets can be a crutch rather than a support. When we become aware of all the reasons we shouldn’t do something, sadly, we often don’t.

I’ve been a victim of analysis paralysis for most of my adult life, which is a death sentence for creativity. The amount of great stuff you create is proportional to the amount of shit you’re willing to put out. My standards have been too high for too long and they’ve stifled any sort of creative consistency. To finish this unnecessarily long explanation of why I haven’t written, I am going to try to take the advice of Jed McKenna:

I used to try to be smart and now I don’t and everything works a whole lot better. Stopping being smart was one of the smartest things I’ve ever done.

So no more wondering if what I’m saying is worth a shit. I will let you, the reader, decide.

What My Grandfather’s Long Life Taught Me About Lifting

My grandfather died just over a year ago, barely short of his 99th birthday. What a life! Anytime someone lives that long, one of my first thoughts is How? Genetics plays an enormous role in longevity. After all, some people treat their body like a temple and die at 40, and some treat it like an amusement park and live twice that long. But there is still something to find in the lives of people who have optimized their longevity to the fullest extent possible.

In my grandfather’s case, it’s not so much what he did but what he didn’t do that’s interesting to me. In nearly a century, my grandfather never stepped foot in a weight room, nor lifted a single weight. Now, this may be a big blow to anyone who has made the gym their raison d’être, but the message was more liberating for me.

You don’t need to lift weights to live a long, healthy life. That message seems antithetical to my entire business and ethos, but not really.

I’ve spent years grinding to be as strong and muscular as possible, sometimes to the detriment of my physical well-being. I’ve dealt with all manner of aches and pains throughout my 25-year lifting career. As I’ve gotten older, my goal is still to be strong and muscular, but in a way that minimizes pain and injury.

The life that my grandfather was able to live without lifting taught me that there is such a thing as being strong enough, and that point is probably much earlier than most fitness enthusiasts and professionals think. I have nothing more to prove to anyone, and at some point, the continued pursuit of metrics that I no longer care about only serves to boost my ego.

There are many reasons people lift weights. Some do it for mental health, for aesthetics, or because they love the ritual and the satisfying feeling of progress. But for anyone like me who gets caught in the trap of more is always better, it’s nice to be reminded that you don’t need to be the strongest, biggest, most fit person in the gym.

Conclusion

The takeaway isn’t that resistance training is unnecessary. There is a great deal of evidence that it can independently reduce your risk for all-cause mortality, among a host of other benefits. And though we can’t really do A/B testing on someone’s life, my grandfather may have lived even longer or had a better quality of life in his later years if he had participated in resistance training. What his longevity taught me is that sometimes we need to take a step back and remember why we’re doing this. Lifting should support our life, not take away from it.

For most people, simply being able to do the things they want to do and avoid deleterious health conditions is enough. And that’s a perfectly noble aim.

But a day turned into several days, and although the pain wasn't as severe as that first night, it would not go away and was starting to escalate. I was still training clients and had difficulty standing upright for more than 10-15 minutes at a time. I guess I looked miserable enough that my clients started to express their concerns.

Luckily, a client's husband, whom I also knew, was a doctor at a nearby hospital. His wife relayed my condition to him, and he called me. I still remember the conversation we had because it was the moment I realized I had to start taking this seriously. He told me the one thing that I didn't want to hear:

"I think you have appendicitis. You need to go to the ER."

I wanted to go to the ER as much as I wanted bamboo shards under my fingernails, but the shit wasn't getting better. And being stubborn like this is how dudes die. I eventually said, "Fuck it, you gotta take care of this," and drove to Emory. Even though he did what he could to fast-track me, it took over 5 hours to make it through the ER gauntlet. I was still in denial about appendicitis because the pain seemed to be in the wrong place, and I wasn't writhing in agony. I figured the doc would come back and tell me I had a GI disorder like Crohn's or IBS, which are terrible in their own right, but the thought of surgery scared the shit out of me.

The first thing the doctor said when she walked into the room was, "Yeah...you're not going anywhere. You will probably need to be with us for a few days." My heart sank.

In short, my appendix had perforated at some point, and an abscess had formed. It was leaking bacteria into my gut, which explains the GI unpleasantness. Judging by the size of the appendix—the docs specifically used the phrases "huge" and "pissed off"—there is no telling how long this had been going on. The plan was to keep me in the hospital long enough to take care of the infection, potentially have surgery to drain the abscess, and then come back a month later to remove the appendix.

As if my body was holding on for the diagnosis, shit started going downhill pretty quickly. I remember being in a room in the ER and wondering if this was really happening. I don't know if it was the infection or because ER rooms are kept at the temperature of meat lockers, but I was freezing. I had the attending nurse put a pile of warm blankets on me, yet they did little to slow the penetrating cold that was now seeping into my bones.

The first few days of my stay are a little fuzzy, but I remember walking down a hallway toward imaging or something, and I couldn't stand up all the way. I was stooping and shuffling like an old man, and my entire body shook. I felt like I had fast-forwarded 50 years into the throes of senescence. I was frustrated and laughing because I realized how pathetic I probably looked.

As an aside, being in the hospital can feel dehumanizing because all modesty goes out the window. You're being poked and prodded, are often naked or barely covered, and the staff are barging into your room at all hours of the night. You're exhausted because your body is going through it, but also because your sleep is constantly interrupted to check vitals, have blood drawn, or be administered medications. And then they have the gall to ask you how you slept! As the real cherry on top, if you're having surgery or potentially having surgery, you could not eat for a day or days if you have multiple surgeries. It's like the perfect storm to make patients assholes.1 Anywho, back to the story.

My haplessness reached its peak shortly after the docs drained the abscess. I had diffuse but intense pain in my abdomen, and it was excruciating to move. It took everything I had to get out of my hospital bed to go to the bathroom.

I remember thinking that I went from being a healthy and strong 35-year-old dude to barely being able to get up to go to the bathroom in 24 hours. It was the ultimate cure for hubris.

The infection subsided, they monitored me for a couple more days just to be safe, and I was (finally) released on Day 5.

I was able to resume my normal life for the following month before heading back in for surgery to remove the appendix. The surgery was a cakewalk compared to my prior stay. From what I understand, laparoscopic appendectomies are about as routine as they come. They told me not to lift anything over 10 pounds for 8 weeks, a directive I partially ignored for reasons I won't get into here. I lasted about 3 weeks and was back to full strength by the 8-week mark.2

At the time, the ordeal was all-consuming, but I have mostly forgotten it. I think our ability to just forget shit like that is kind of wild. But I will never forget how miserable I was for those few days and how quickly my physical health took a turn for the worse.

The experience humbled me, but it also made me realize something else. Bad things can happen for no reason, and although health is often thought of as being able to do things, it's also being able to withstand things. It's, in essence, being harder to kill. I won’t be so dramatic as to say that being fit and healthy saved my life. I actually have no idea how much risk there was. But I do believe it put me in the best possible position should shit have truly hit the fan. And it certainly allowed me to recover more quickly.

Over two years later, I'm sans appendix and have only three small incision scars to commemorate the ordeal. Although I have never had a shortage of reasons to take care of my body, this gave me something else that was perhaps greater than all the other reasons combined. So now I'm saying to you: do not neglect your health, and don't take it for granted. It can be taken from you instantly, and you never know when it will come in handy.

But while it’s fun to get caught up in what AI can do, its widespread adoption carries costs.

I’m concerned about how the work landscape will change, and I feel for people whose careers will be made redundant. I also worry about AI’s impact on creativity and learning, especially through writing. Most people already avoid writing like the plague, treating it as a clunky communication tool that needs to be dabbled in but never mastered. Now that AI is here, writing feels one step closer to becoming a lost art.

Let me be clear: not all writing needs to come from your own brain. Here are some examples of writing tasks I’m perfectly happy to outsource to AI:

• Product descriptions

• Landing page copy

• Standard operating procedures (SOPs)

• Research summaries

• Idea generation

But for many other writing tasks, the act of writing itself is where the value lies. It’s how we clarify ideas, test our assumptions, and uncover what we actually think. Paul Graham puts it perfectly:

“If writing down your ideas always makes them more precise and more complete, then no one who hasn’t written about a topic has fully formed ideas about it. And someone who never writes has no fully formed ideas about anything nontrivial.”

Writing isn’t the only way to wrestle with complex ideas. An architect may sketch 3D models. A musician might improvise. A craftsman will use their hands. But writing is more accessible than any of those. And, to quote Graham again:

“However much you learn from exploring ideas in other ways, you’ll still learn new things from writing about them.”

Writing forces us to shape thoughts using the inherently limiting tool of language. The better you get at it, the better the alignment between what you know and what you can convey. Your clarity improves. So does your understanding.

I was reminded of this while reading Make It Stick by Roediger, Brown, and McDaniel. The book explores what makes learning effective, and two of its key principles — effort and elaboration — are exactly what writing demands. When you write, you retrieve, rearrange, and expand on ideas in your own words. That takes effort. When you revisit and revise what you wrote, you engage in reflection and spaced repetition, which deepens learning even more.

For people who only care about writing output — whether the final text communicates what they want — AI will be a godsend. But for those of us who write to understand, outsourcing that process is a mistake.

So yes, let AI write when it makes sense. But don’t let it think for you, too.

For a metric to be useful, it needs to positively influence behavior—otherwise, you’re just collecting data for the sake of collecting it. Worse, some metrics don’t just waste time; they can create a nocebo effect—where tracking a number leads to negative effects even when the data itself isn’t inherently harmful.

For example, monitoring cortisol, blood sugar (if you’re not diabetic), or heart rate variability (for the average Joe) can often cause more harm than good because these numbers can be volatile and/or have a tenuous relationship with the actual outcomes people are trying to achieve.

What Makes a Good Fitness or Nutrition Metric?

A good metric should:

• Have a tight relationship with an outcome

• Be something you can directly influence

• Be beneficial to track, without causing unnecessary stress

Measuring behaviors is better than measuring outcomes. A well-chosen behavior, when improved consistently, naturally leads to better results without the psychological downsides of fixating on specific numbers or outcomes.

Some of the best metrics include:

• Step count – Easy to track, influences behavior, and reflects natural human activity

• Calorie & protein tracking – Can influence body composition and performance and simple enough to avoid overwhelm

• Workout adherence – Tracks consistency, which drives results

• Weightlifting numbers – Shows progress in strength and performance

• Running time & duration – Simple and directly tied to endurance improvements

These metrics are actionable, behavior-driven, and low-risk for creating nocebo effects.

The explosion of health tracking has made it easier than ever to collect data, but more data isn’t always better. I wrote about how we’re inundated with health metrics and why too much tracking can actually hurt progress. You can check it out here: Health Data Overload.

Metrics That Might Do More Harm Than Good

On the other hand, some metrics create more stress than results:

• Blood sugar monitoring (for non-diabetics) – Small fluctuations are normal, but tracking them can lead to unnecessary dietary paranoia and pareidolia (what a fun word pairing!).

• Cortisol tracking – Stress levels fluctuate constantly; seeing a “high cortisol” reading can ironically cause more stress.

• Precise body fat percentage – Often inaccurate, hard to influence directly, and can lead to body image issues.

• Movement scores from screenings – May label someone as “dysfunctional” without real-world relevance.

• Heart rate variability (HRV) – Can fluctuate wildly due to sleep, hydration, and stress; fixating on it can limit training efforts.

These metrics either have a weak relationship with real progress, are difficult to control, or increase negative psychological effects without a clear benefit.

The Bottom Line

Tracking data isn’t enough—you need to track the right data. Good metrics should encourage better behaviors, drive progress, and avoid unnecessary stress. Instead of obsessing over numbers that don’t truly impact your goals, focus on the behaviors that actually move the needle.

Thanks for reading. As always, feel free to drop any comments below.

Freedom is a great thing in the right context, but it can be a barrier in the wrong one.1 Sometimes, as is the case with workout beginners, we need to limit our options so that we can focus on moving forward in a single direction.

What Are Constraints And Why Do We Need Them?

Constraints are limitations you place on yourself to limit actions that are not in line with your intended outcome. They act like gutter guards in a bowling lane or blocked off areas of a video game because the developers don’t trust you with that much freedom. The right constraints only allow for “correct” action, thereby preventing you from getting mired in things that don’t matter and don’t bring you closer to your goals.

Let’s get more granular about why constraints are important.

Constraints Reduce The Inertia or Psychological Load of Starting

When faced with the prospect of working out, do you think it would be easier to get motivated to do a workout that was only 2-4 exercises and had a time restriction of 30 minutes, or a workout that had 6-8 exercises and was over an hour long?

Aside from the obvious differences in doing the workout itself, overcoming the inertia of starting is easier when the mountain isn’t so steep. As James Clear says, we need to “master the art of showing up”, and one of the first steps toward doing that is lowering the psychological barrier to starting. Well-placed constraints can remove some of that friction.

Starting Strength is excellent at this. They distilled their workouts to such a degree that it seems manageable for anyone. This, for instance, is an example of their strength program for a complete novice.

Remove Ambiguity and Friction of The Workout Itself

In the case of the example above, not only will you be more inclined to do this workout, completing it will be far easier than a more complex, longer workout. Very few beginners have the tolerance for workouts that drag on for an hour or more and have tons of different exercises, each with their own potential logistical issues in a busy gym. Reducing workouts to 30-45 minutes is an easy way to improve adherence to the entire program.

Simple, repeated workouts also allow us to learn the movement, easily measure progress to determine whether we’re actually getting stronger, and mitigate constant soreness, which can be counterproductive to performance and results over time.

Minimize Distraction and “Shiny Object Syndrome”

If consistency is the biggest predictor of success, discipline and patience are a collective close second and all are inextricably linked to each other. You may be tempted to switch programs when things “aren’t working”, because you believe the outcome you seek is behind the next shiny workout door. It isn’t.

Trust me when I say that to collect meaningful feedback, you need to give a program enough time to bear fruit. That could be weeks if you’re measuring performance, but it could be far longer if you’re looking for drastic strength or aesthetic improvements. But progress will be far slower if you “switch things up” every time you get bored.

And I get it, novelty is exciting, but you’ll require constant acclimation to new exercises, soreness will fetter your performance, and you’ll have a difficult time attaining and measuring progress due to the infrequency with which you return to exercises.

Novelty can be a good thing in the right circumstances, but you’re a beginner that is prone to distraction. We need to pull out all the stops to keep you on course.

How To Create Workout Constraints

Now that we’ve covered why constraints are important for beginners, or anyone for that matter, let’s go over how to implement them.

Use Implementation Intentions

Constraints by their nature are designed to reduce ambiguity. Perhaps one of the best ways to do that is through implementation intentions, which are clearly expressed statements that designate details like when, where, and how we’re going to perform an action.

If you want a quick, easy, and modern way to implement (😉) implementation intentions with regard to your workouts, place them on your calendar. Each calendar event can clarify when, where, and for how long you’ll be working out. Personal training cements this further by adding a second party to ensure your adherence to these intentions.

Taking this even further, a pre-existing structured workout program removes any ambiguity about what you’ll do once in the gym. If you want to remove even MORE ambiguity, have backup exercises ready to go for anything that’s unavailable.

Limit Yourself To Readily Available Equipment

In a perfect world, we would go to a gym and have unrestricted access to all of the equipment all of the time. Unless you’re prepared to go to a 24-hour access gym at 3am, that’s a pipe dream.

A busy gym can throw a wrench into even the best laid workout plans. That’s why I often suggest that people build their workouts using readily available equipment. For most people, that means dumbbells and machines. Racks, barbells, and plates can get expensive for a gym when you need to buy enough to serve everyone that wants to use them. Racks are fought over with the intensity of two stray dogs fighting over a meaty bone after days without food. Because I value program consistency over occasional optimization, I might tell clients to forget the racks altogether.

Dumbbell programs work well because they exist in the middle ground between hardcore lifters that only want racks and barbells and people too afraid to use free weights, which often leaves them underutilized. They’re also easy to share with others, because nothing needs to be switched out. Coupled with a handful of machines, you can get an effective workout with minimal interference.

Minimize The Number of Exercises

No gym newbies need to be doing long workouts. For a three times per week program full of compounds like squats, hinges, presses, and rows, three to four exercises per day is plenty. To take this a step further, I would argue that for anyone that simply wants to get the health benefits of resistance training, wants to be generally strong, and wants to at least look like they spend some time in the gym, a three times a week full body program with a handful of compound exercises is all they would ever need.

Adding exercises to a program unnecessarily creates a greater mental barrier to starting, adds time to the workout that carries diminishing returns the longer the workout drags on, adds more potential logistical issues, adds more things to track, etc. If you’re the kind of person that doesn’t like repeating the same thing for long stretches, however, you can periodically swap out exercises.

Minimize Or Time Rest Periods

Social media has ruined many things for us, but I’m not sure there is a more aggrieved victim of its tantalizing force than rest periods. What was supposed to be two or three minutes of rest—enough to catch your breath—becomes ten minutes of doom scrolling.

Most workout apps and watches have built-in timers. Use them liberally and adhere to them devoutly. When the timer goes off, start the next set. No exceptions. Make adjustments if the rest isn’t long enough, but the timer is your master. You’ll find that your workouts are suddenly shorter and you have more time for everything else in your day.

Most people that don’t love working out adopt a “get in, get out” mentality, yet they fall into the black hole of their phone screen all the same. Speaking of distraction, this is a good segue into the last way to create constraints.

Simplify Workout Tracking

There are a ton of great apps for tracking workouts these days: Hevy, Strong, FitBod, Jefit, StrongLifts, etc. You may also use apps through a coach like Trainerize (my software of choice), TrueCoach, TrainHeroic, etc. These apps can absolutely make tracking your workouts easier, but they aren’t without pitfalls.

Tracking workouts in the same place where you have nearly unlimited potential for distraction works for some and doesn’t for others. If you want to store your workouts digitally but find the prospect of learning an app unpalatable and overwhelming, simply track your workouts in the notes app of your phone.

But if you really want to remove distractions and simplify tracking, get a nice notebook and track your workouts there. Despite the price, I love these. Great quality and lots of fun colors and animals to choose from.2

There are no wrong answers here. For some people, recording your numbers in an app is easier. For others, removing distractions and simply recording your workouts in a paper notebook works best. Do whatever you need to do to make your life easier to keep you showing up and engaged.

Summary

For anyone struggling with consistency, improving that should be your primary goal. Constraints are the restrictions we put in place to ensure proper future action and provide the best possible avenue for success. To engineer a well-constrained environment or approach, you must think about it. It doesn’t happen by accident.

Use the strategies I outlined above, and keep showing up.

This is especially true for things that are qualitative and may be difficult to study. It's difficult, for instance, to study whether or not stretching or mobility reduces "movement stickiness" or aches, pains, and niggles, although there are countless anecdotal accounts of it doing just that. How would you even measure things like this? Most of the research on these topics measures easy to measure outcomes like injury rates, performance, etc. In research, we like quantifiable variables, but sometimes we just don't have appropriate metrics for the outcome we want to look at.

So What Should We Do If Research Isn't There Yet?

Most folks don't rely on research in general, so my thought process works for folks that either don't want to read studies or are trying to fill in gaps where research falls short.

The simple questions I ask when determining whether or not to do something are as follows:

• Is what you're doing achieving the outcome you want?

• Is what you're doing achieving the outcome you want as simply as possible if simplicity/adherence is a consideration?

• Is what you're doing achieving the outcome you want as optimally as possible if you want the best possible results?

• Is what you're doing achieving the outcome you want as cheaply as possible if cost is a consideration?

• Is what you're doing achieving the outcome you want as quickly as possible if time is a consideration?

• Is what you're doing achieving the outcome you want without making you psychologically dependent on the intervention?

That list of questions isn’t exhaustive but should give you a general idea of the type of questions you should be asking.

Many people stop at the point of “this works” and then try to sell it to anyone and everyone regardless of their unique situation. That’s where individual experience can get dicey. The questions above take into account what’s important to you as an individual and then allow you to decide if you need to approach something a different way.

This framework works for so many things: resistance training programs, dietary strategies, injury rehabilitation, performance improvement, general health and wellbeing, etc.

I will use stretching and mobility as an example again, because there is so much grey area regarding their effectiveness for improving different outcomes. If doing mobility exercises or stretching makes you feel better and you're okay with the investment, knock yourself out. If you find that you feel significantly better when you stretch but the research says it's not effective, what are you going to do? Stop?

I always try to view things through a scientific lens, which means I always want to know why something works or doesn't work and what specifically makes it effective or ineffective. But if you're someone that just wants to workout consistently and adding a little stretching or targeted mobility work allows you to do that and live with less pain or stiffness, who the hell am I or anyone else to tell you otherwise?

Defer to the body of evidence when appropriate, but don't completely discount your personal experience if you have nothing or incomplete information to fall back on.

There is no shortage of things for folks in the lifting community to argue about. Two of the biggest areas of contention are training splits and training frequency. As is the case with most topics in most fields, everyone wants to separate into factions and dogmatically defend their preferred form of training, because it makes them feel superior.

I’m here to tell you that it doesn’t matter as much as people think, so it’s really up to you how you want to structure things. Not everyone will have the same preferences, constraints, or capacity, so it’s natural for folks to prefer to train differently.

To reiterate, I’m covering two things in this post: training splits and training frequency. I will explain my choices for both and why when combined they work extremely well for me. This is not prescriptive. Do whatever makes you happy. I’m simply explaining my reasoning for why I’ve chosen to train the way I do as someone who has thought about this way too much.

Training Splits

The topic of training splits, also called workout splits, makes my eyes glaze over for two reasons: I don’t think they’re that important, and people talk about them way too much. For the uninitiated, training splits refer to the way your workouts are structured and how the volume (or overall work) is distributed. Here are some popular ones with links to a Google Doc so you can see what they look like:

• Full Body

  • Works all the major muscle groups every workout

• Upper/Lower

  • Separates training days into upper and lower body workouts

• Push/Pull/Legs

  • Upper is split into pushing and pulling and legs have their own day

• Body Part Split

  • Chest and Triceps, Back and Biceps, etc.

  • These are very popular in the bodybuilding community

• Others

  • There are other types of splits for more advanced lifters, but I won’t get into them here

Before I get into why I think total body workouts are superior for the majority of gym-goers, I will talk about when they might not be as useful.

Why You Might Not Want To Do Total Body Workouts

Combining Cardio and Lifting

The best argument I’ve seen for why not to do total body workouts is if you’re trying to balance a cardiovascular training regimen with lifting. If you’re doing intense cardiovascular training, it might make sense to give those same muscles a break in your lifting session.1 If, for instance, you have a hard run you might have recovery issues if you do a leg workout on the same day. Pairing lower body cardio with upper body training and vice versa can make it easier to manage both activities.

You Want A Break From Legs In General

Some folks don’t want to train their legs every workout. If you’re the type of person that prefers to have one or two shitty leg days and to not think about them the rest of the week, then I get and respect that.

Total Body Workouts Are Too Fatiguing

Total body workouts can be systemically taxing. After all, you’re involving your entire body each workout. But I prefer the feeling of diffuse total body fatigue over the localized fatigue of blitzing one or two muscle groups over and over again. I always feel like I worked out, but I never feel like any part of my body is going to be useless the next day.

You Like The Pump From Smashing The Same Muscles Multiple Times In The Same Workout

For years, the prevailing bro-science theory was that the greater pump you get from an exercise, the more effective it is for muscle growth. If you’re not familiar, the pump is the swelling you get in the target muscle after a particularly difficult set. For example, after a burnout set of bicep curls, your biceps will feel like they’re going to explode. That’s the pump.

It’s possible that the pump may independently increase the size of a muscle on top of simply getting stronger over time. If that’s true, some folks may benefit from targeting a single muscle multiple times—as in a body part split—in the same workout for maximum pump. But I wouldn’t bet the farm on that.

Why I Prefer Total Body Splits

Every type of split can work. No split seems to be unequivocally better than another, as long as you can do the same amount of volume and aren’t constrained in any way by time, frequency, etc. You can build strength and muscle with any of them as long as you’re training hard and doing more over time (progressive overload).

But practically, I think total body splits have an edge for the following reasons:

• People miss workouts and missing a total body session only means lowering the volume (number of sets and reps) for the week rather than omitting an entire part of your body. If you miss a workout with any other type of split, you may be neglecting half your body (upper/lower), pulling exercises (PPL), or body parts like chest (Body part split). Total body workouts ensure your training stays balanced even if you miss workouts. Many people overlook this because no one assumes they’re going to miss a workout. But we must be realistic with our training schedules and accept that the vicissitudes of life will get in the way.

• They’re easier to recover from (in my experience). This one is more anecdotal and seems antithetical to my point about systemic fatigue, but it is much easier for me to recover workout to workout when I’m not focusing solely on 1-2 muscle groups per day. My legs, back, arms, etc. are never completely trashed after a workout, so I never have to worry about whether I’m ready to go for the next workout.

• Lowering the number of exercises per muscle group per day means you can come to each exercise with greater intensity. By the end of upper/lower or PPL workouts, the muscles you’re targeting will be significantly more fatigued than they are for total body workouts. If I’m doing a chest and tricep workout, I’m getting much less out of tricep exercise number 3 than I would if I did that same exercise as the only tricep exercise in a workout. It may only be the difference of a few reps over the course of a workout, but in aggregate over months and years, that could result in a significant loss of reps and stimulus.

• You’re mixing what you want to do with what you need to do. You might be more inclined to skip an entire day devoted to legs, but if legs are mixed in with more enjoyable upper body exercises, you’re more likely to do them. This is an example of temptation bundling, which I first encountered in James Clear’s Atomic Habits.

Training Frequency

The research is pretty clear that when volume, the amount of overall work you do via weight, reps and sets, is equated, the results will be mostly the same. Which means you can get similar results by cramming everything into 2-3 days versus having to train 5-6 days. This is a great thing, because it gives people options. But there is a caveat here.

At a certain point, piling more volume into the same workout becomes untenable, and eventually, counterproductive. So while the results may be the same when volume is equated, volume is easier to increase with higher training frequencies. But again, this may not matter for you if you don’t need more than what you can do in 2-3 days. And to be honest, most people probably don’t need more than that.

Easier to Get Motivated To Workout

It may not matter much on paper, but getting over the psychological barrier to working out matters…a lot. It will make or break consistency. Let’s say you have two workouts: one is forty-five minutes and only consists of four exercises and the other is at least sixty minutes and has six exercises. Which are you going to be more stoked about?

I struggle to get moving just like anyone else, and it’s easier for me to overcome the mental inertia preceding a shorter workout.

Building A Better Workout Habit

Bite-sized workouts are a godsend when you’re trying to build a workout habit. Building a habit is about putting in the reps, and high-frequency training means more reps. It also has the added benefit of reducing the need to decide when you’re going to workout. In my experience, it’s far easier to put workouts off when you’re only working out a couple times a week. So people will keep punting until they run out of days and end up not getting the workout in.

My Body Feels Better With More Frequent Movement

Humans are meant to move. When we don’t, our bodies don’t work as well. More frequent workouts means less days with little to no movement. For the same reason we want to break up long periods of sitting across a day, I think it’s a good idea to break up periods of sedentary behavior across a week.

We are what we repeatedly do.

Summary

There are probably more benefits that I’m forgetting about, but I think I’ve made my case well enough for anyone on the fence. To recap briefly, combining high-frequency and total body training solves almost every major pain point:

• Less volume on any given day and training a movement only once means recovery is less of an issue

• You can bring greater intensity to movements due to less local fatigue in a given session

• Missing workouts is less costly

• More frequent workouts better cement a workout habit

• Greater movement frequency improves physical wellbeing

I’ve been doing high-frequency total body workouts for five or so years, and I can honestly say I won’t work out any other way now.

You may think, “This won’t work for me because I’m too busy” and that’s fair. But for someone that trains people to lift for a living, I hate spending any more time than necessary in the gym. This was my way of addressing that. If I do make any changes to my regimen, it would likely be to cut workout time down but keep the frequency. So maybe 4-6 days of 30 min workouts or so.

It’s not for everyone. Some people prefer not to workout most days a week and that’s completely fine. As long as you’re doing the same stuff, you can break it up in whatever way fits your schedule and preferences.

Thanks for reading. If you have any questions, comments, or want to call me mean names, please do so in the comments.

To immediately address the elephant in the room, some people will already be operating at a disadvantage when attempting to do their first pull-up. Anyone that naturally carries more body fat and has a relatively weak upper body will have an uphill battle. Many women may find pull-ups especially difficult due to carrying extra, but necessary, sex-specific body fat and having less upper body muscle mass than men.

But that doesn’t mean it’s impossible!

So there are two parts here: minimizing weight and maximizing upper body pulling strength. I’ve already covered the first part in a series of articles on fat loss that start here, so we will be focusing on the second part in this article.

Increasing Pulling Strength

Strength is specific, which means you need to train it in the way that you plan to express it as much as possible. Pull-ups are a skill as well as the primary method for building “pull-up muscles”.

Having said that, building a general reservoir of pulling strength and muscle can translate to better pulling capacity. So let’s take a look at what we can do if we’re not quite ready for pull-ups, or maybe even their regressions.

What If I Can’t Do A Pull-Up or Chin-Up Yet?

It’s possible to increase your pulling strength independent of pull-ups and chin-ups with exercises like rows and pulldowns. So adding either of these to your program will increase the strength and size of your back muscles and lats, which can translate to stronger pulling.

Here are some of my favorite non-pull-up exercises you might want to throw into your program:

• Dumbbell Single Arm Bent Over Row on Bench

• Barbell Bent Over Row

• Machine Chest-Supported Row

• DB Incline Row

• Cable Lat Pulldown

• Machine Lat Pulldown (this one is not me, as you may have realized)

Rows are horizontal pulls, meaning the direction of pull is perpendicular to the body. So rows don’t technically mimic the pull-up or chin-up, but they’re still great at increasing overall pulling strength. Cable and machine lat pulldowns have pull directions that directly mimic the pull-up/chin-up, so it’s probably a good idea to get strong on these.

How many sets of these you can handle will be highly individual, but I aim to do 16-20 sets of pulling exercises a week. So this is how that might be broken down based on the number of days you’re working out:

Note: These aren’t the whole workout. I’m just showing how pulling exercises might be distributed.

2 Days of Pulling

Day 1

• Dumbbell Single Arm Row on Bench 4 x 8-10e

• Cable Lat Pulldown 4 x 10-12

Day 2

• Machine Lat Pulldown 4 x 10-12

• Machine Chest-Supported Row 4 x 10-12

3 Days of Pulling

Day 1

• Dumbbell Single Arm Row on Bench 4 x 8-10e

• Cable Lat Pulldown 4 x 10-12

Day 2

• Machine Lat Pulldown 4 x 10-12

• Machine Chest-Supported Row 4 x 10-12

Day 3

• Dumbbell Incline Chest-Supported Row 4 x 10

• If you wanted to add another exercise here you could

Note: You may have noticed that I grouped vertical and horizontal together so there is less overlap. Doing two horizontal or two vertical pulling exercises in the same workout is redundant and the effect of the second exercise will be diminished.

If you train more frequently, you can break these exercises up more. For instance, if you train five days/week, you could do one pulling exercise per day (this is what I currently do).

The goal with these exercises, like any exercise, is to improve some aspect of them over time. Aim to “get stronger for reps”, which means you want a double focus on improving weight and reps. Having two variables to manipulate gives you more flexibility in how you progress. This system is called double progression, and it might look something like this in practice.

Once you feel like you’re ready to move onto pull-ups/chin-ups and their regressions, you’ve got some options. As I mentioned before, pulling strength is specific, so when you’re ready for these, they’ll supplant other pulling exercises in your workouts.

Getting Started With Pull-Up Regressions

If you can’t do an unassisted pull-up or chin-up, you’ve got a handful of options. These are the best, in my opinion:

• Assisted pull-up machine

  • This is the gold standard of pull-up regressions, because the movement is the same and you can incrementally decrease the assistance. Even if you can do pull-ups, these can be a great addition to your pulling routine due to the control they allow you to achieve in the movement.

  • Increase the difficulty by decreasing the weight of the assistance.

• Banded pull-ups

  • Loop one end of a band around the pull-up bar and either loop the other end around your feet or knee (depending on how much help you need), or you can stretch the band flat on hooks in a rack if you’d rather stand on the band instead.

  • Increase the difficulty by using a smaller band or placing the band on the knee rather than the foot.

• Jumping Pull-Ups

  • Jumping pull-ups are essentially pull-ups with the aid of a jump. You jump and pull yourself to the top position of the pull-up, then try to lower yourself under control.

  • These are great because you can do them in rapid succession, but your goal should be to minimize the contribution from the jump.

  • Increase the difficulty by using less of a jump over time, adding reps, or by adding some form of external weight that won’t swing around while you’re jumping.

• Eccentric Pull-Ups

  • The eccentric phase of the pull-up is the part where you’re lowering toward the ground.

  • You can use a step or box to put you at the top position. Then you can either lower completely to the ground or by bending your knees while still on the box.

  • Increase the difficulty by going slower, doing more reps, or combining them with another of the listed regressions.

The rep schemes for each of these will be different but the goal is the same as with the other pulling exercises. Start with a set and rep scheme that’s doable and find ways to make it harder over time.

For example, you might start with one of the exercises listed above for three sets and progress to doing two or three of the exercises at four sets each after a couple months.

Okay we’ve talked about improving our pulling strength and adding in pull-up and chin-up regressions, so now let’s talk about improving once we’re actually able to do a pull-up/chin-up.

Getting Better At Pull-Ups

It’s time to make the distinction between chin-ups and pull-ups.

Everyone has different naming conventions, but I view a pull-up as pulling yourself over a bar using an overhand grip, while a chin-up involves pulling yourself up with an underhand grip. The chin-up also tends to be more bicep and forearm-heavy and the pull-up tends to do a better job targeting the back.

I often switch between pull-ups and chin-ups because:

• The slight differences lower the risk of overuse injuries

• It can make training slightly less boring

• You can target more muscle mass

There is no secret here, if you want to get good at pull-ups (or chin-ups), you have to do them. You may be able to get better at pull-ups only doing them once per week, but that’s not going to cut it for most people. I generally have my clients perform pull-ups (or pull-up regressions) at least twice per week. So it may look like this:

Day 1

Pull-Ups/Pull-Up Regression 3-4 sets x As Many As Possible (AMAP) Unbroken RIR 1

AMAP Unbroken means as many reps as you can do without stopping, and an RIR (Reps in Reserve) of 1 means stopping 1 rep short of muscular failure. So if you could have done 4 reps, you would stop at 3.

Day 2

Chin-Ups/Chin-Up Regression 3-4 sets x AMAP Unbroken RIR 1

Note: You can take your last set of pull-ups or chin-ups to complete failure (RIR O) since fatigue will have little effect at that point.

Once you’re able to do a pull-up or chin-up, progression becomes a little more interesting. We’re still a long way from being able to add external resistance, so how do we increase the difficulty over time?

I like to take what I call the pool approach. Essentially, you combine all the reps across your sets and try to improve that number. So if you get 3 sets of 3 reps, you’d have 9 reps. Your goal would be to increase to 10 or 11 next time.

Being able to get 1 pull-up is a huge milestone, and it will make getting more easier. But it certainly won’t be easy. Because you need a certain number of reps to stimulate growth, doing 3 sets of 1-2 reps won’t spur much change. So while you’re painstakingly trying to increase your reps by 1 or 2, you may want to keep other pull-up regressions in your program to add volume.

Here’s an idea of what progression might look like for pull-ups/chin-ups in a program:

Week 1

• Pull-ups 2,1,1,1

• Chin-ups 2,2,1,1

Week 2

• Pull-ups 2,2,2,1

• Chin-ups 2,2,2,2

Week 10

• Pull-ups 5,5,4,4

• Chin-ups 6,6,5,4

Week 16

• Pull-ups 8,8,8,8

• Chin-ups 9,9,9,8

You get the idea. It may not look exactly like this for you, but as long as you’re diligent, they will improve. And hopefully this gives you an idea of the timeline you’re working with. It often takes at least several months after getting your first pull-up to get to the point where you can crank them out.

Adding External Resistance

There is no hard and fast rule regarding the optimal time for adding external resistance. Some say 10 reps, some say 15 reps, but the answer is always going to be arbitrary.

I personally think waiting until 15 is too long, so 10 works well for most folks, but you could do it before then too if you want to accelerate things. What I can say is that adding external resistance to pull-ups is where the real fun begins for a couple reasons:

• The number of body weight reps you can do will increase significantly with this new stimulus. Simply trying to do more reps is a tough road to progression, so being able to add weight again is a huge boost.

• You can once again go back to increasing the weight incrementally. If you keep the reps stable, you can increase the load by 5 pounds or so depending on what you use to load your pull-ups.

How to Load Pull-Ups

There are different ways to add resistance to pull-ups and each has pros and cons. I won’t go into excruciating detail about this, because quite frankly, it doesn’t matter all that much.

Find a way to add resistance that suits you and make it more difficult over time. Here are the main options:

• Dip belt - This is my preferred method because it’s relatively cheap and flexible. You can thread the chain on the belt through plates and kettlebells or wrap it around dumbbells.

• Weight vest - These are a little pricier, but they tend to be a little more out of the way than the dip belts. Having said that, it’s harder to adjust the resistance, which makes them less useful in my opinion.

• Weighted backpacks and chains - I’m only mentioning these because they’re options, but I generally wouldn’t use them. Both can be found on Rogue’s website and may be slightly different than the two mentioned above, but the downsides far outweigh the benefit or novelty of using them in my experience.

Pull-ups with external resistance can be treated like normal gym exercises in that you can now increase the weight, reps, or both.

A word of caution on pull-ups with external resistance: pull-ups can already be taxing on the joints, but with extra weight added they can be downright brutal, especially to the elbows. So make sure you don’t increase the weight too quickly and/or do too much volume throughout the week as elbow issues can linger for a very long time and seriously disrupt training.

Summary

Pull-ups are a highly sought-after badge of honor for good reason. They are an excellent display of relative strength and fantastic muscle-builders. To truly excel at them, you need excellent pulling strength and relatively low body weight.

Hopefully you’re now armed with the road map to improving them. It’s a long journey, but well worth it. If you have any other questions about pull-ups or any other fitness or nutrition-related topics, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me in the comments here or email me at bo@stansellfit.com.

Although I love to lift and have been a personal trainer for almost 15 years, I hate spending more time than necessary in the gym. I got shit to do. So over the years, I’ve learned the best ways to shorten workouts with as little sacrifice as possible.

These are my top suggestions.

Stop Doing Long Warm-Ups

A warm-up, in my opinion, should accomplish two main things: increase body temperature and prepare you for what you’re about to do. There are few instances where your body is so cold that it inhibits movement, so most of the focus should be on the second aim.

Long, elaborate warm-ups full of “soft-tissue mobilization”, “activation exercises”, and a laundry list of arbitrary movements designed to prepare you for everything under the sun aren’t necessary. If your warm-up is taking you longer than 5 minutes (or maybe 10 if you’re especially “sticky”) or so, it’s probably too long.

The workout is where the benefit lies, so keep the focus on it. I’ve covered how I implement specific warm-ups in a previous article here.

Use Supersets Or Circuits

I almost exclusively use supersets for my own program and for the programs of my clients. Supersets are when you combine two exercises in a series and alternate them. This is opposed to straight sets where you do one exercise, rest, and perform that same exercise again.

Supersets are the best way to shave time off your workout and when programmed correctly, they won’t take anything away from the stimulus.

Circuits are basically large supersets—or are supersets small circuits 🤔? You can reduce your workout time even further by doing all the exercises in succession, but there are a couple caveats:

• Circuits are relatively easy to do with minimal equipment, but if they require a rack, free weights, machines, etc. they may be difficult to do logistically.

• Circuits can be fatiguing. It’s one thing to manage two exercises together, but to manage fatigue when you’re targeting many muscle groups in rapid succession is a big ask.

• Because of point two, you may not be able to get as much out of each exercise as you would if you did them separately or in a superset.

Stick To Compound Exercises

Compound exercises typically cross multiple joints and target several muscles or muscle groups. These are the big exercises like deadlifts, squats, pull-ups/chin-ups, rows, bench press, overhead press, or any machines that mimic these movements. Using compounds, you can target more muscle in less time than if you were to try to use isolation exercises like bicep curls, tricep extensions, lateral raises, pec flys, etc.

When time is of the essence, it doesn’t make sense to target one muscle or muscle group at a time. Keep only the most efficient exercises.

Drop The Number Of Sets

The first set of an exercise carries the bulk of the stimulus. Every subsequent set thereafter provides a diminishing return. This doesn’t necessarily mean that you should only ever do one set, as most folks likely wouldn’t be satisfied with the growth that provided. But it does mean that one set provides a disproportionate return over zero sets.

Doing the exercise at the prescribed weight and reps but dropping a set or two will maintain a large portion of the stimulus and cut the workout time significantly.

I like dropping the sets personally because I still get exposed to the exercise and the same weight. If you drop the weight or nix the exercise entirely, the next time you do the exercise will often feel more difficult.

Take (Some) Sets To Failure

If you’re doing your normal 3-5 sets of an exercise, true failure can be counterproductive. But if you’re only doing 1-2 sets, failure ensures that you’re squeezing as much out of each set as possible.

If you’re only doing one set, going to failure is a no brainer, but if you’re doing multiple sets, you may want to consider only going to failure on your last set.

Shorten Your Rest Periods

This is mostly a reminder to not dick around between sets. This isn’t about going from normal rest with full recovery to short rest with subpar recovery. It’s about not taking any more rest than is absolutely necessary.

Set a timer and stick to it. If you have limited time, prune excessive rest.

Add Drop Sets

I don’t like drop sets as a standard practice because they add a lot of fatigue for almost no extra benefit, but if you’re only doing one set, they’re great.

Drop sets are when you do your first set to complete failure, take weight off, and then do another set to complete failure. You can repeat this as many times as you want for any rep range.

There are no set rules for how to perform these, but here are a few things to keep in mind:

• The jumps shouldn’t be too big or too small. The higher the absolute weight, the larger the jumps will need to be. You want to take off enough to do a similar number of reps for each set. Rep drop off is fine, but if you’re able to do more reps than the previous set, you probably took too much off.

• To add to point one, load the original weight up with smaller plate arrangements so you can easily take them off after each set. If you start with 135 pounds for instance, you may not just want two 45 pound plates but rather some 25s, 10s, 5s, etc.

• Going to failure once can be dangerous, but doing it multiple times can leave you downright helpless. If you’re trying this with something like a bench press, make sure you have a spotter or leave the clips off so you can do the roll of shame if necessary.

Hopefully you found some of those tips useful. If there are any strategies you use or you want to add anything to the conversation, please drop a comment. Thanks for reading!

Technique is the first thing people blame when they get injured while lifting. Deadlifting with a rounded back, knees caving during a squat, or doing "harmful" exercises like upright rows have all been blamed for injuries. And while doing something "wrong" can lead to problems, it doesn't happen for the reason most people think.

Pain is complex and has many inputs, many of which have nothing to do with something being physically "wrong". But for the sake of discussion, let's assume the pain comes from an actual physical problem.

When tissue gets stressed but not excessively damaged, it adapts to handle that stress in the future. As long as your tissue can handle the demands of the task(s), either acutely (short-term) or chronically (long-term), you’ll stay injury-free.

If your tissues cannot handle the stress, injury can occur. But here's the crazy thing. Our bodies can adapt to a wide variety of movement patterns and stressors as long as we don't let those stressors get beyond a certain threshold. This means you can adapt to deadlift with a rounded back, squat with your knees diving in, or do “harmful” exercises without incident as long as you appropriately load the exercise.

I have seen people move insane amounts of weight with what appears to be "terrible technique". They can do that because their bodies have adapted to handle a load that way. They are prepared for it. If any of these people were asked to keep the weight the same and do the movement the "right way", they would likely see a higher risk for injury.

Does this mean we shouldn't coach movements at all and just let people move "incorrectly"? Nope. Because while people can adapt to different techniques, certain techniques are more conducive to load-bearing, are more biomechanically efficient, and many movements need to be done in a specific way to target the muscles we want to target.

The moral of the story is that we should coach movements in a way that allows the person to better handle the load and target the right muscles, but we should not immediately jump to the conclusion that our technique is causing any injuries we get along the way. We need to also take the load, volume (sets and reps), other stressors, and recovery into consideration. Sometimes, we just aren't prepared for what we're asking our bodies to do on that particular day.

I’ve talked about the concept of progressive overload before, but to reiterate, it’s the process of doing more over time so you continue to progress your strength and build muscle. You can’t keep doing the same thing for extended periods and expect to pile on muscle.

Progression is easy with barbells because you can incrementally increase the weight using small weights. Most gyms will have plates as small as 2.5 pounds. With dumbbells, it’s not as straightforward.

Progressing With Dumbbells

Dumbbells typically exist in increments of 5 pounds, which is great when you’re only using one. But many exercises require two, like DB Bench Press, DB Overhead Press, and DB Bicep Curls. So you’ll have to go up by ten pounds each time you want to progress those movements.

That may be fine in the beginning when you have a lot of room for growth, but it will soon become too big of a jump to manage. Here are some strategies for making dumbbell progression more manageable.

Use small weight add-ons like Microgainz

If the jump is too large from one pair of dumbbells to the next, you can try adding small weights to the dumbbells before moving to the next weight. I have these and love them.

These won’t get you to the halfway point between the weights, but they can close the gap enough to make the jump less intimidating. Using two Microgainz on a dumbbell will add 2.5 pounds, so 5 pounds if you’re using two dumbbells.

Double Progression

Rather than simply going up in weight each workout with dumbbells, I recommend what’s called Double Progression. It works like this:

1. Set a rep range. We will use 6-10 reps.

2. Stay at the same weight until you’re able to get to the top of the rep range for all of your sets.

3. Increase the weight by 10 pounds and drop to the bottom of the rep range.

4. Stay at the same weight until you reach the top again.

Note: You don’t need to limit yourself to the bottom of the range when you increase. If you can do more, do more, and it may make more sense to simply set a rep target rather than a rep range. The point is that you can smooth the progression out by dropping the reps to help you get to the next weight.

Progress reps collectively

This strategy is less a specific strategy and more how to think about progress. If you did 4 sets of 8, you might be tempted to aim for 4 sets of 9 next time. If you can do that, great, but progression rarely works that way. It will be more manageable to think about your reps as a pool and try to increase them by 1-2 reps overall. It won’t seem like much, but it adds up and is more manageable than increasing your reps across all of your sets.

When you approach progress this way, you have more flexibility in your approach. Although I recommend changing variables as little as possible, you could play around with sets and reps to get to this number. This also means you can go up in reps on your first set or two, but keep sets three and four the same, for instance.

Note: There may be times where you cannot increase your reps no matter what you do. If that’s the case, and you’re not already at the bottom of the rep range, you may just want to move up in weight anyway and drop the reps back down. When you come back to the lighter weight, it will feel easier and you should be able to increase the reps again.

Go to failure on your last set

I don’t generally recommend folks take every set to failure, because it can create disproportionate fatigue and tank your total rep count. But taking the last set to failure will help you squeeze more out of your sets when you’ve got little to lose. You will also learn whether or not the weight is too light. If you’re getting 50% or more extra reps on the last set, you probably need to move up.

Dumbbell exercises are also generally safe to fail, so leaving nothing in the tank on the last set can be a great strategy to squeeze more out of dumbbell exercises.

You don’t need to progress every workout

This is the last but perhaps most important section regarding progress. You only have so much room for growth, and because I assume you will be doing this lifting thing for a long time, there is no rush to progress.

Using the same weights will still benefit for you some time, and may even help alleviate some aches and pains during your training. The only problem is when you sit at the same weight for weeks and months with no intention of progressing.

In the beginning of training, you can get away with frequent jumps because you’re nowhere close to your potential. But as you get stronger, your progress will slow. I often have clients stay at the same weight for two weeks when using dumbbells because the jump is large and I want them to “own” the weight before they move up.

Knowing when to move up can be tricky, but this decision tree graphic might help you. It’s not perfect, but it should at least get you thinking about how to approach this.

Let’s switch gears now and talk about making light dumbbell workouts harder.

How To Make Workouts With Light Dumbbells More Difficult

At some point, you will be stuck with dumbbells that are too light to get your normal level of stimulation. Maybe you’re traveling and at a hotel gym, you’re stuck at home with your paltry selection of equipment, or you live at an apartment complex that has dumbbells that only go up to a certain weight (typically 50 pounds).

You have a few options to increase the difficulty of your workouts:

1. Make a two-sided exercise one-sided

2. Do more reps

3. Use larger ranges of motion or add a pause, tempo, or half/quarter reps

4. Combine all of these for a level of pain you didn’t know existed

Make a two-sided exercise one-sided

What may not be particularly difficult on two legs, may be very difficult on one (or one and a half). For instance, rather than doing a dumbbell goblet squat, you could try split squats, lunges, or single leg squats to a bench. This only works for lower body exercises as you can’t really hold two dumbbells in one hand.

Do more reps

This seems like a no brainer, but it’s the unfortunate reality of using very light weights. In many cases, you may have to do double the number of reps or more. It likely still won’t be the same because fatigue will get in the way, but it will be significantly better than if you’d made no adjustments at all.

If you normally do DB Single Arm Rows with 75 pounds but only have 50, doubling your usual reps will get more use out of that 50 pounds.

Use larger ranges of motion, pauses, tempo, or additional half reps

It’s easier to control a movement when using lighter weight, so adding additional “work” by increasing the range of motion becomes more viable. Take those squats down as far as you can, lower and raise the dumbbell for rows as far as you can, turn a regular curl into an incline curl with a long stretch at the bottom.

The name of the game with any weight is to get close to muscular failure. By adding pauses and slowing the movement down where there’s tension, you can get to failure quicker. You must add the pause and tempo at the right parts of the movement to get the most benefit. For squats, you can try slowly lowering yourself and pausing at the bottom. When doing dumbbell bench press, you can slower lower the dumbbells and pause at the chest before pushing them back up.

Adding half or quarter reps can also help you build tension, but it needs to be close to the point where you would pause. So using the two examples above, squat down, rise up halfway, then drop back down before coming up all the way. For bench press, push the dumbbells partially off the chest and come back down before finally pushing them all the way up.

Here’s an example of adding a partial to split squats.

Combine all of the above to make using light weights agony

Some combination of the above strategies will put you on the fast track to an effective light dumbbell workout. For example, you could choose split squats over regular DB Goblet Squats and you could increase the range of motion by elevating the feet, slowly lower yourself to the bottom, pause at the bottom, and do a quarter rep before descending and coming back up. Or you could do 15 reps of dumbbell bench press with a pause at the chest for each rep.

You have a lot of options, but some combination of each of these strategies should improve the stimulus quite a bit.

Hopefully you’ve learned something in this post. If you have any other questions about using dumbbells or general fitness, nutrition, or health questions, please drop a comment or shoot me an email at bo@stansellfit.com.

Thanks for reading!

Workout templates are a great strategy for a beginner because:

1. They give you a clear course of action.

2. They are well-established—or the ones I’m giving you are—which means you know they work as long as you follow them.

3. They provide the scaffolding on which you can build a more individualized program.

The best way to start is to find a simple, yet effective, workout template and do it. Don’t spend too much time on this. As a beginner, almost any program will work. Until you take action, you won’t know what you like, don’t like, and what does or doesn’t work.

So without further ado, let’s get to the programs and resources that will get you up and running.

Program Templates/Resources

Full Gym Required

• Reddit fitness wiki workouts for building strength/muscle

  • This is an incredible resource for newbies and this page specifically has many routines to choose from for a variety of settings and equipment limitations. Don’t get overwhelmed here. Pick a program that looks doable based on the equipment you have and start doing it!

  • Here’s the basic beginner routine from there

• 4-Day Beginner Bodybuilding Program from RippedBody.com (Andy Morgan)

• Stronglifts

• Starting Strength Beginner Barbell Program and Starting Strength book (aka The Blue Book)

• Muscle and Strength Pyramid

  • This pair of books provides an outstanding introduction to lifting and nutrition

  • Both books are thorough but are also very accessible for new gym goers.

• Art and Science of Lifting

  • These two works are the brainchild of fitness industry legend Greg Nuckols. Greg has been writing excellent in-depth articles for years at strongerbyscience.com and he packs a ton of useful info into these two lifting books.

  • These are a little denser and may be a good next step after the books mentioned directly above.

Dumbbells Only

• My Simple Workout Template

  • This post shows the compound movements I like to include in all my dumbbell programs with a simplified look at how they’re brought together.

  • You could also do all of these movements one at a time if you wish.

• Muscle and Strength Dumbbell Only Workout

• “Fierce 5” Dumbbell Program

• Frankoman's Dumbbell Only Split

  • I’m not normally a huge fan of body part splits, but if you are, you will probably like this one

Bodyweight Programs

• r/bodyweightfitness recommended routine

• Steven Low’s Overcoming Gravity beginner’s guide

• r/bodyweightfitness minimalist routine

Programs/Resources Geared Toward Women

• Glute Lab Book by Bret Contreras

  • This is honestly the Bible of weightlifting texts for women. This thing is a tome and is packed full of useful information.

• Strong Curves

  • This is another program created by Contreras that spawned an entire subreddit.

• Nia Shanks Dumbbell Strength Training Guide

  • Here is a link to the program section on Nia’s website.

• Stronger By The Day

  • Program and support from Meg Gallagher (aka Megsquats)

• Meghan Callaway Programs

  • Meghan is another fitpro that has been around for a very long time and has put in the work. Her Ultimate Pull-Up Program has gained legendary status in the fitness sphere.

• ESGFitness Commit to 6 Fat Loss Program

  • Although this is technically a fat loss program, Emma Storey Gordon is one of the most knowledgeable, honest, and hard-working people in the industry. I have no doubt that anything she creates will be of the highest quality.

Apps/Software

• Hevy

  • This is the app that I currently use to track my own workouts. There is a social element that I don’t particularly care for, but creating workouts, measuring progress, and hitting PRs has never been easier.

• Strong

  • This is another simple multi-platform app for tracking your workouts. The interface is clean and intuitive, and it does a great job keeping track of your lifts without overwhelming you with data.

• Fitbod

  • Workout app that’s heavy on making program creation easier with automation.

• Boostcamp

  • You can get access to a wide-variety of different programs from lifting experts. A lot of the bigger names in the fitness industry post their programs to this platform.

• Stronglifts

  • This is another fan favorite that has been around for a long time and the website itself is chock-full of useful information and resources.

Notes About These Programs

I’ve personally looked at every one of these programs, and they can all work in their given context. Here are some tips for getting the most out of them:

• Give them time to work. Building strength and muscle takes time. Give it at least a few months before deciding it isn’t for you, and make sure you’re giving it your best effort when you do.

• Don’t program hop. If a lack of consistency is the biggest issue, “switching things up” too frequently is the second biggest. There is an initial acclimation period for each program that you must get through to see the best return. If you’re always changing programs, you’re introducing too many of these acclimation periods into your training. Stick with the same program for long enough to get results.

• Use progressive overload. Most of the programs I outlined above will have a section explaining this process, but your workouts must stay challenging if you want results to continue. This is typically done through increased weight, reps, or changes in exercise variations/leverages in bodyweight training. These programs will stop being effective if you’re unwilling to progress the exercises over time.

Hopefully you can find something in here that works for you. Please feel free to let me know if any of the links don’t work, so I can fix them!

If you still can’t find what you’re looking for, please feel free to drop a comment on this post or shoot me an email at bo@stansellfit.com. If you’re looking for more hands-on guidance, fill out the form here to apply to train with me.

Thanks for reading!

P.S. I have a post with a growing list of resources that’s accessible to paid subscribers. You can find that here.

I work at a gym that offers a variety of group fitness classes—and wrote the programming for our barbell-based class for several years—so members and clients often ask me whether they should take them and/or where they might fit into their fitness routine. So let me lay out the very nuanced answer I give them, so you can decide if they’re a good fit for you.

Who Are Fitness Classes Great For?

People That Don't Want To Think When They Work Out

For the large majority of group fitness classes, you show up, the instructor shows you what to do, and you do it. You don't have to think about your program—whether that be the exercises, sets, reps, etc.—and you never need to worry about the logistical problems associated with navigating a busy gym. It’s pretty straightforward.

A lot of people don't want to think at the gym; they want to turn their brain off and get lost in intense physical exertion with loud-ass music crowding out the intrusive thoughts. If you’re this person, group fitness classes are tailor made for you.

People Who Are Motivated By Working Out With Others

Group fitness is also great for people who like to form trauma bonds with strangers. Suffering with others is way better than suffering alone, and you may may even make friends in the process. That’s also why classes provide a great opportunity for building or finding a community.

If you're trying to adopt a healthier lifestyle, making friends at a gym isn't the worst idea. If you know you're the type of person that feeds off the energy of others and enjoys fitness fellowship, classes are a great option for you.

People Who Want To Get Exposed To Lots Of Different Exercises

Gyms want you to come back so the classes are designed to be highly engaging and fun through the deployment of a shitload of novel exercises. When I designed the classes at The Training Room for several years, members never did the exact same workout twice. If you are the sort of person that wants to be titillated by your workouts, group fitness may be just what you’re looking for.

I want to mention one caveat though: there is a happy medium for variety. Good gyms and class instructors understand this and will throw in enough repetition to allow for progress and enough new stuff to keep you engaged and having fun.

They Can Be A Great Value

Group fitness is similar to meal services in that you're paying for someone that (hopefully) knows what they're doing to take care of most of the work for you. Without context class memberships may seem expensive, but you have lots of time options, the workout is already prepared for you, and you get the attention of a coach. If you make regular use of them, class memberships can provide tremendous value, especially unlimited plans.

But since classes are still significantly more expensive than traditional gym memberships, they may be out of budget for a lot of folks. As with most decisions around services and pricing, it's a question of value. If you frequently use the service and the outcome is significantly better than if you didn't have access to it, it may be worth the higher price.

Who Are Fitness Classes Not Great For

Folks That Want To Optimize Strength Or Muscle Growth

Fitness classes are wonderful at getting people moving and they can raise almost anyone’s “fitness floor”. In other words, they are great at creating fitness generalists. But if you want to excel in some area of fitness, whether that be strength, muscle growth, endurance, etc., you’ll need to move beyond classes. To be clear, that doesn’t mean you need to stop doing classes, but rather that they alone won’t be enough to get you to the next level.

To optimize strength or muscle growth, you need to increase the amount of weight and reps you can use for a particular exercise over time. It's difficult to do that in classes where the rate of exercise turnover is high, the rest times are short, and the rep schemes aren't consistent.

In other words, what you gain in variety and engagement with classes, you lose in specificity and the potential to greatly improve in a single fitness quality, like strength.

You Want More Control In Your Workouts

Not having to think can be great, but you're at the mercy of the instructor and what they decide to do that day. If they pick exercises you hate or that have minimal utility for you, tough shit. That's what's on the menu, take it or leave it. There's that meal service parallel again.

In many cases, fitness classes are where people start when they have no idea where to start. But once their general fitness needs are met, someone may decide they want more autonomy with their own workouts. From that point on, you’ll need to try personal training or customizing your own workouts.

You Need Something That's More Scalable

While a well-designed fitness class will cover the needs of most folks, they are still, in many ways, a one-size-fits-all approach to fitness. There is too wide a fitness level range to cater to everyone. If your fitness level is far below or far above the target participant, you may get little out of your experience.

Good class design accommodates a wide range of fitness levels, but folks exercising for the first time may want to find a lower entry point by engaging in activity on their own or may want to seek out a class that caters to beginners.

It's also common for some folks to take a class long enough to feel like they've maxed out what they get out of it. If that's the case, you may want to try something more specific on your own or find a class that caters to higher fitness levels.

You Want More Hands-On Instruction

Group fitness is designed to get lots of people in a room at the same time to maximize revenue for the gym and lower costs for the members. Instructors are vastly outnumbered and aren't able to watch everyone at all times. That's not their fault of course, but rather the way the model works. If you want more oversight, you need to increase the coach to participant ratio, which can be found in private, semi-private, and small group training.

An Extra Reason You May Not Want To Solely Rely On Classes

I am going to break the record for the number of times group fitness has been compared to meal services in this post, but the comparison is too perfect not to lean on it. Fitness classes have the same major problem as meal services: you don't learn as much. It's convenient as hell to have all the work done for you, but part of doing the work yourself is learning what works and doesn't work.

It's difficult to learn how to create effective workouts if you only take classes in the same way it's difficult to learn how to cook when someone else is always preparing your meals. Both have the potential to make you completely reliant on the service. If you intend to take classes for the rest of your life, by all means do it. But if you'd like to go off on your own at some point, consider trying to also put together your own workouts so you can start the learning process.

Wrapping Up

Fitness needs exist on a continuum. Where you are on that continuum will dictate the type of activities you should be engaging in. Someone that has never worked out before in their life may struggle in a class and some folks will want something more advanced or specific.

Classes can also work as a tool in your fitness tool belt rather than the be-all and end-all solution to your fitness needs. There is a happy medium where you can do your own workouts and fill in the gaps with classes, which is what I recommend for a lot of my clients. Just make sure you're giving yourself enough recovery time.

Finally, fitness classes can be a fantastic way to raise your fitness floor, meet new like-minded (or bodied) people, and remove the ambiguity for someone looking to build a workout habit. Most folks will NEVER need to move beyond the level of fitness classes provide, but as with every activity designed to accommodate a large group of people, anyone on the extreme ends may need to look elsewhere.

Thank for your reading, and as always, drop a comment if you have something you want to say.

Warming up is an essential component of training, but it need not be a tremendously histrionic affair, with lots of arm waving, hopping around the gym, contortions, demonstrations of movement proficiency, and exhaustion.

In short, warming up needs to prepare you for what you’re about to do and not much else. Any seasoned lifter will tell you that coming in cold to a heavy set of squats is a terrible idea, but if it’s longer than 10 minutes or so, you’re probably wasting time that should be spent on the workout itself.

Warming Up For Barbell Lifts

I think some people are horrified when I walk into the gym and immediately get under a bar. I’ve been doing that more or less for the last 15 years and have had minimal downtime due to injury. Same with my clients. I understand my empirical evidence is hardly scientific proof, but at a certain point of a trainer/coach's career and supported by enough "data" through an analytical eye, there is enough to draw solid conclusions.

Doing a 3-5 minute cardio warm-up on a rower, treadmill, or assault bike is probably fine to kick things off and should be enough to increase the temperature of the muscles. More than that and you're creating fatigue that can negatively affect your lifting.

The goal with a barbell warm-up, or any warm-up for that matter, is to practice the movement but not fatigue you so much that it reduces your performance for working sets. Working sets are the heaviest sets of the day and the ones specifically designed to elicit an adaptation (e.g. make you stronger and build muscle). If you're supposed to do 3 sets of 5 at 185 pounds on the squat, those are your working sets. All the lighter sets before that are part of your warm-up.

We want enough warm-up sets to prevent large jumps in weight, and what larger jumps we do have should be further away from the working sets. Here’s what a typical warm-up might look like for working sets with 185 pounds:

Warm-Up Set 1

45 pound bar x 10 reps

You can do an extra set here as a newbie, seasoned lifter, or someone lifting in a cold environment.

Warm-Up Set 2

135 pounds x 5 reps

Warm-Up Set 3

155 pounds x 3 reps

Warm-Up Set 4

175 pounds x 1-2 reps

First Working Set

185 pounds x 5 reps

Let's reiterate a couple things: the reps taper down and the weight jumps get progressively smaller as we approach the first working set. Remember, we want to prepare the neuromuscular system but minimize fatigue, so it doesn't make sense for us to do a ton of reps close to our working weight. We also want to avoid massive jumps in weight, because it increases the likelihood that we won't tolerate the load well.

My warm-up is based largely on the warm-up method for Starting Strength with a couple modifications. If you want a more extensive overview of this process for barbells, I definitely recommend checking out the book. Paid subscribers can also get access to my growing list of fitness and nutrition resources if you want to do a deep dive on this stuff.

Warming Up For Other Exercises

The absolute weight will be lower for most dumbbell, kettlebell, cable, and machine exercises, so you should follow the same principles but won't need as many warm-up sets. The same is true for exercises beyond the first series of your workout. You may still need to warm-up, but you should be able to cut a set or two since you're already primed and ready to go.

Here are some key warm-up tips for different types of equipment:

• When warming up with dumbbells, if you're a beginner and the weight is relatively light, you may not need a warm-up at all. But as the weight gets heavier, you may want to consider adding 1-2 warm-up sets that are around 60% of your working weight. That's generally enough to prepare you to do the exercise without fatiguing you for the main sets.

  • For example, if you're doing Dumbbell Bench Press with 60lb dumbbells, you might want to do a warm-up set with 30-35lb dumbbells first.

• Most commercial gym machines use some type of pin, which makes it easy to get a warm-up set or two. Just move the pin up incrementally after each warm-up set and make sure you limit the number of reps the closer you get to your working weight.

• You might want to extend a machine warm-up if the absolute weight is VERY heavy, like in a leg press. In that case, your warm-up would look similar to the barbell warm-up.

Other Warm-Up Considerations

The previous two sections should cover 90% of your warm-up needs, but you can also use the warm-up to move in new ways or target "sticky" areas. The options are nearly endless and will depend on your limitations and needs, but let me give you some examples of what I call Movement Channel Openers (MCOs):

Alternating Lateral Lunges

Quadruped Reach and Rotation

World's Greatest Stretch

There are no rules for these and there is nothing special about the specific exercises I listed. These are aimed at getting you "unstuck" and moving differently. If you find you have "tight hips", do something that opens them up. If you have "tight shoulders", find an exercise that gets those shoulder blades moving or arms overhead. Don't overcomplicate it. Movement is your oyster; explore it. You don't need more than a couple of these each day, and I would limit them to 5-10 reps and no more than 2-3 sets.

What I Don't Do In My Warm-Ups

"Activation" Exercises

I gotta be honest, I'm still not entirely sure what these are supposed to do. Unless innervation to the target muscle has been severed, you can activate the muscle. I've never once done an exercise correctly with appropriate weight with great effort without activating the shit out of what needed to be activated. If something isn't "turning on", you're likely doing the exercise wrong, aren't picking an exercise that targets the muscle well, or aren't using enough weight or effort. In any case, doing the exercise with slightly less weight should be enough to "activate" what needs to be activated.

Soft-Tissue Mobilization

There are a myriad of health and fitness professionals that swear by using foam rolling, lacrosse balls, etc. as a form of targeted tissue release, but the research doesn't seem clear on what these modalities do or if they're effective. I don't see the value-add when coupled with a traditional dynamic warm-up. They also take a lot of time. If you like doing this stuff, have the time for it, and feel like you benefit from it, knock yourself out. Don't let some random meatsack like me dissuade you. But if you're short on time but still want to warm-up, this is the first thing I would omit.

Intense Cardio

The last thing you want to do before lifting is exhaust yourself with cardio. In my experience, the risk of lifting while fatigued is significantly higher than the risk of running after a lift. So unless you have a valid reason for prioritizing it and placing it right before your lifting session, move it somewhere else. I'm also assuming you have a schedule that allows you to make this choice as well as not having a reason to heavily prioritize endurance training.

Static Stretching

I'm very much a live and let live kinda guy. I think stretching can have its place, especially for folks that are inactive for most of the day. But since it may have the potential to reduce power output and strength if done immediately before training, there are probably better times to do it than right before a lifting session.

Like most things in life, I don't believe in doing things that don't make sense. The warm-up should prepare you for what you're about to do and anything that doesn't directly do that, in my mind, is superfluous and should be omitted. But this is also just my opinion. Do whatever makes you happy.

If you have any questions or topics you'd like me to cover, please drop them in the comments. Thanks for reading.