The Problem

Here are some mistakes I often see in the gym that I own; one is from a lifting perspective, the other from an endurance perspective.

Smolov Squat Programme

This involves squatting three times a week. It is one of the most effective ways for increasing the squat, yet if you do not have years of experience squatting at a high intensity, it will almost certainly cause injury. This kind of high-volume squatting will put an enormous amount of strain on the body.

High Volume Running Programming

This is where I see someone copy a marathon or half marathon training programme when they are by no means ready to perform the amount of volume in the training plan, resulting in injury. You have not earned the right to be able to run 50+km a week if you only run 10km. This copying and pasting of training programmes just slows progress at best and creates long-term injuries at worst.

Group Programming

A great deal of coaches provide group training programming, that is effective and well written. This is the most cost-effective way to get high-quality programming for your goals (outside of AI), so it is very understandable that a lot of people do this. You just need to be sure that you are ready to perform the programme you are purchasing. I often see people purchasing programming that they are by no means physically ready to handle, then getting very demotivated or injured. Below I discuss why individual programme design is important.

Why Individual Differences Need To Be Considered

Volume Tolerance

Our bodies are exceptional machines; they can adapt to performing extremely high amounts of training volume. Training volume is the amount of work the body performs, usually measured on a weekly basis. When we look at the training programmes of Olympic weightlifters or marathon runners, the amount that they are able to perform on a weekly basis is incredible. This is because they have built their training volume up over the course of years, slowly but surely increasing on a monthly basis.

The ability to increase your volume tolerance will allow you to perform more training, allowing you to improve performance over time. Your volume tolerance will be specific to you and will be made up of a number of factors including training age, genetics, and recovery.

Training Age

Training age — the amount of time you have been performing a specific activity — will be one of the biggest factors that goes into your volume tolerance. The longer you have been training, the more volume you will likely be able to tolerate. This is only true, however, if you are successfully applying progressive overload to your training.

Imagine that you only train once a week and you have been training like this for five years. You have a relatively high training age in terms of years of training, but this will not be reflected in your volume tolerance as you have not been increasing it over time. Training age is only beneficial to volume tolerance if you have been slowly increasing your volume as the years pass.

Adding volume over time is an art and a science — if you do it too fast you increase the chance of injury; if you do it too slow you rob yourself of potential progression. This kind of progression needs to be done slowly but surely over long periods of time.

Genetics

Genetics play a role in recovery and your ability to tolerate volume. This is a topic that people don’t like to talk about as it is something we cannot alter, but it is important for both athletes and coaches to understand that everyone will respond to volume differently. People are genetically different and are able to deal with higher loads than others.

Recovery

Recovering from training is made up of two key attributes: nutrition and sleep. How you fuel your body will have a huge impact  on  how fast you recover from your training, as will how you sleep. If you have a poor diet and poor sleep and are not taking steps to change this, then your training plan needs to reflect  your  current habits. You cannot write a training programme that matches the idealised version of yourself, but the actual version of yourself.

Life Stress

Diving into a running half marathon preparation phase during a very intense period at work, or exams, or during a divorce probably  isn’t  the best idea. There is a certain time for adding a lot of intensity to your training programme and a certain time to take the more therapeutic option that exercise can provide. Life stress — the stress that you are under outside of training — is a crucial consideration when it comes to programme design.

Personal Timetable

This is something that is rarely discussed when we talk about designing exercise programmes, but personally I have found it to be extremely important. My timetable around work and lifestyle is very different throughout the week; some days are far more difficult than others. This has a huge influence on where I put my tough sessions and where I put my easy sessions in the week. If I were to put my hard sessions on my hard work days, this would create a huge accumulation of fatigue that would be hard to recover from. Professional athletes do not need to take these things into consideration, but if you take your health seriously, you will want to time your very intense training sessions around when you have challenging work / personal days.

Technical Strengths and Weaknesses

Your technical strengths and weaknesses will affect your training programme. When writing in-depth training programmes, technical factors need to be taken into consideration. You may be an excellent deadlifter and therefore can handle a great deal of deadlift volume. However, you may also be a terrible squatter — you find it hard to maintain good positions throughout the squat and it creates high levels of fatigue. If you copy and paste a training programme, these sorts of factors cannot be taken into consideration.

Other Activities

It is essential to take other stresses and activities into account when designing a training programme. If you love tennis and play tennis three times a week, starting a high-volume running training programme is going to be an injury-inducing endeavour. These factors need to be taken into consideration when you are designing your training programme or your clients’. If you are looking to copy and paste a training programme from the internet, you need to make alterations around your current activity.

Be Your Own Coach

This stuff is not rocket science — it is mainly common sense. If you have never done resistance training, maybe start with two sessions a week, not four. If you run once a week, don’t start running four times a week out of the blue. Progress slowly over time. Make reasonable training decisions that will result in your long-term progress.