From the name of the title there are many things that could be discussed on this topic. I’ve chosen some that are initial issues you must deal with when first starting to train correctly.

1. Improve tissue quality: Before every training session you need to perform some soft tissue work on problem areas. Utilizing a foam roller or a tennis ball or field hockey ball on these areas will loosen up the fascial tissue that wraps around your muscles. Think of fascial tissue as saran wrap around your muscles. If the fascial tissue is really tight or you have any knots or adhesions within them, your body won’t move efficiently. Improving your soft tissue will improve how your body moves, which will help you to do exercises with proper mechanics.

2. General Warm Up: After you’ve done #1 now it’s time to warm up your body with stretches, but not the kind you probably are aware of. You will be performing dynamic mobility drills. Think of these as just stretching with movement. Static stretching causes the muscles you’re stretching to relax. We want them to wake up. Having them relax will temporarily weaken them, we want to strengthen them by waking them up and preparing them for movement (that’s what they’ll be doing with exercise…moving).

3. Specific Warm Up: Now you need to do a specific warm up with the exercises you’ll be training. Now you might be saying, “I thought we did just warm up?”. Yeah we did, but that was a general warm up. You’re still not ready to lift any serious weight. You need to do a few warm up sets of the main exercises you’ll be doing. This is a specific warm up. For instance, I have a guy that trains with me that benches around 400 pounds. He can’t just throw on 365 pounds for knock out 5 reps without warming up. He’d get hurt. His warm up would look something like this:

1st set: 95 lb. for 5 reps

2nd set: 135 lb. for 5 reps

3rd set: 185 lb. for 4 reps

4th set: 225 lb. for 3 reps

5th set: 275 lb. for 2 reps

6th set: 315 for for 1 rep

One important detail with warming up is you don’t want to fatigue the muscles involved in the exercise before you get to your actual working sets that count. If you did, you’d probably be lifting less weight than you could actually use. The stronger you are, the more warm up sets you have to do. More times than not, you won’t have to do this before every exercise. With this example for the bench press, you wouldn’t need to warm up any other upper body pushing exercise. If you were performing a lower body exercise or a upper body pulling exercise, you’d have to warm up with those too.

4. Picking the correct poundage: Most people that initially start training at USI don’t know how much weight to use for a given rep range. There are two main things that I use for this, 1. A perceived effort scale of 1 to 5, 2. The speed of the exercise, mostly the concentric. I want to focus solely on #1. I always ask my clients to rate how hard a lift was on a 1 to 5 scale, 1 being the easiest and 5 being the hardest. This lets me know and teaches them how much to go up on a lift for the next set. So if someone said a lift was a 2, you know you can go up more in weight than if it was a 4. Additionally, when we write programs at USI we often prescribe rep ranges, such as 4-6 reps, as opposed to just 6 reps. If you get 6 reps on an exercise you’re at the high end of the rep range (4-6), therefore, you must go up in weight. If you had gotten 5 reps, you’d stay at that weight until you can turn that 5 into a 6. And if you fell out of the rep range and only got 3 reps, then you must reduce the weight to get back into the prescribed range.

5. Timing rest: What gets measured gets improved. Your loading parameters such as weight, reps, sets, and rest are very important to manage. If your goal is to get stronger you need more rest between sets than you would if you were training for improved conditioning. This is because your body needs to replenish the energy substrates it is using up. Anyone who trains at USI learns pretty quickly how different it feels to train for conditioning than for strength.

6. Post Training Nutrition: You are catabolic. Glucose and glycogen are low so your body wants to breakdown amino acids from your muscles and convert them to glucose. Essentially, your body is eating away at your muscles. Training provides the stimulus for things to happen (get stronger, build muscle, get leaner, etc.) but the recovery process is critical. This is a critical time for you eat so you can get out of this catabolic environment and start the recovery process, and there is a critical window of opportunity here. The sooner you have your post training meal, the better off you’ll be. The longer you wait, the more insulin resistant your muscles become. This is the time when a liquid meal is more advantageous than a solid meal because it gets absorbed faster. Without it you’re just spinning your wheels. One step forward, one step backward. At USI, if you’re relatively lean, we use a carb/protein ratio of roughly 3/1 that we formulated with the fastest absorbing carbs and protein there is and used stevia, which is a natural sweetener that isn’t neurotoxic. If you’re fat you don’t want the carbs since your fat cells are more insulin sensitive than your muscles (insulin is not your friend). We use glutamine and glycine instead of the carbs. This replenishes glycogen without an insulin spike.

These are some of the main problems I first see when training people, especially when training multiple people at the same time. Once these are addressed, taught, and implemented,  then that’s one less thing to deal with.