hey guys my name is Steven Low and I am the author of overcoming gravity so today we'll be going through overcoming gravity online part five which is still the fundamental knowledge base and chapter five which is basically the introvert programming and this covers a whole ton of stuff so it's a very long chapter so this video is probably going to be pretty long it's going to be intro to programming and linear progression stress adaptation super compensation and the fitness and fatigue model and then basic periodization and Inter workout structure attributes in regard to training and
then basic hierarchy of a routine so let's get started from this long and we need to go fast so intra workout programming so you can basically think of programming it as it's not something that's very complicated but basically it refers to purposely scheduling workouts in order to make specific gains and so the ways you can do this is mainly to change the various variables of a routine we're talking intro workouts so it's within the workout so in this case it's changing the intensity and the volume the rep sets and exercises to progress obviously you can
also change the frequency of your workouts so that would Encompass everything at once but mainly we're going to talk about intensity and volume in this so one of the basic progressions that one can use that is popularized by Mark ripito and starting strength is the linear progression and that's basically increasing the weight every workout and so the example that is used in the book is say you're doing three sets of five reps of squats you can start with the bar at 45 pounds and then next workouts you could start with 50 or work up to
sets of 55 pounds then 65 pounds and 75 pounds and so on so that is a basic linear progression and what linear progression means is basically that from each of those workouts to work after trying to increase the weight it doesn't necessarily need to be the same increases it could be five pounds or three pounds but your goal is to increase the load every time and that additional stimulus on the muscles is going to produce strength and Hyper hypertrophy adaptations so the general rep ranges that are tend to be most useful for beginners are the
5 to 15 range and that is tends to be the most effective for strength and hypertrophy for beginners generally with the progressions that you're working through in body weight training you start with around three to five reps once you're moving to a new progression and you want to build up those reps over time unless you're using like weighted vests or something you want to build them up five six seven eight nine ten once they're in the 10 to 15 range you can usually sometimes go to the next progression but building up has a good amount
of practice with that specific exercise regression which is helpful for increasing strength and then obviously the rep ranges are still good for strength and hypertrophy as well so you can also manipulate the amount of exercises and sets to progress from workout to workout so for beginners for example they don't require much to progress you can even get somebody doing say one to two sets of push-ups and they'll be able to increase on that if they're previously sedentary and not doing much thing they can progress with even just as few as one to two sets whereas
somebody who is more intermediate or Advanced one to two sets won't help them progress much if at all and so the amount of volume needed to progress generally increases since the homeostasis of her muscles the amount of stress that they can tolerate or your work capacity quote unquote increases over time as you get stronger and bigger so it takes a bigger and bigger stimulus usually to adapt to make and elicit strength and hypertrophy or endurance gains and so this is why I see professional athletes training with usually very heavy weights and doing very frequent workouts
they are adapted to that high amount of intensity and volume and they're not necessarily doing high intensity all the time it's usually wave loaded in some respect but overall they're they're used to working out and usually happen for decades and so what they're doing is not something that a beginner should be doing and so you see this type of thing over time so usually beginners start with less and add more over time and if you need to add a little bit more but as you progress that range in which you need to add more usually
tends to go up over time and we'll discuss that more in some upcoming chapters so stress adaptation and super compensation as you can see in the bottom left image basically that covers how a workout adaptation works and but before we get there I want to look at the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems the sympathetic is your fight or flight system and basically this is the one that is getting worked during workouts as you're using your ability to exert strength whereas your parasympathetic is usually called the rest and digest system and that is the one that
helps mostly with recovery so you have to have a balance between these in order to work out hard and then also recover hard so that your body is able to adapt get the muscles stronger and bigger get your nervous system more adapted to the strength training and dissipate any potential fatigue and so there is an interplay between these things and it's usually called the fitness fatigue model and yeah basically what that means is when you workouts you're listening Fitness adaptations so as we covered in some previous videos I'm your getting neurological gains you're getting muscle
gains but usually these things take a little bit while to recover if you train strength your strength will start to go down during the session because you become fatigued sleeping will help you start to recover that similarly when you work out your muscles your muscles break down and they have to be repaired over time with protein synthesis so you have to eat enough and sleep enough to recover so in general for us the basic main thing to understand is that beginners tend to be able to recover effectively from workouts in about two to three days
and so that's why the common three times a week full body routine is tends to be best for beginners because it allows the two to three rest days between each workout so as you can see in the images once you work out your ability is depressed for the first probably about 24 to 48 hours and then after you rest digest and let your body recover usually you'll come back stronger and the goal for all of our workouts is to be able to Loop those workouts together in a pattern where over time you get a positive
training effect and so as you can see in the bottom right as long as the workouts are grouped together correctly you should be able to have progress that goes up over time and it should be fairly smooth at least in the beginning for beginners so covering basic periodization and inter-workout structure periodization has basically conceptualized by the Russians in 1950s and 1970s not necessarily named that back then but the formula of what they came up with then was similar to what it's called now and basically you're changing the intensity volume and frequency over time and so
obviously when we worked at the intra we just looked at the volume and intensity but we're adding in the frequency and the goal of the programming or structured workouts is to aim for progress in the long run so there's mainly three different components of periodization which is your microcycle so generally it's about a week-long standardized to what we do with training nowadays basic usually based on a weekly cycle the Mesa Cycles are several weeks to months long and they Encompass I'm basically trying to get those string together those positive training effects so you get progress
throughout the mesocycle and then macro Cycles I'm usually looking at several months to years and for specifically in training for Olympics Olympic athletes can have their workouts set to basically Peak at the Olympics and so you plan the workouts for those next four years basically structuring them so that you can peek at the Olympic Games and so there is a lot that goes in programming behind the scenes especially for like Elite athletes but not something that we need to worry about right now so your basic Mesa cycle structure is basically put on different modes of
training and this is a term sequential periodization there's many different types of periodization but we'll get into that a little bit later in subsequent videos but basically in the structure they came up with there is a preparatory phase which is getting the body ready for exercise usually by doing some conditioning more High rep workout type stuff maybe in like 10 15 range and then in the second week of the microcycle or third week maybe you do a week or two of Preparatory in the second week you'd aim for hypertrophy phase generally in the about five
to ten rep range so you're moving heavier weights than in the Preparatory phase so you're starting to ramp up your strength as well the hypertrophy phase was aiming to put muscle mass on the muscles to get the muscles bigger as that is a component of strength as we learned with the strength equation and then with the next week after that would be a strength so you'd aim in the about three to five maybe six rep range aiming to increase the neural adaptations and your nervous system for strength like recruitment synchronization so on and then the
last phase would be a power or like maxing phase where you tend to work with your max weights such as one to three or at Max or doing power work which would be lighter weights in the three to six rep range and focusing on generating as much speed with the movement as possible and so this basic structure allowed an athlete to work with higher rep ranges and then working down to lower rep ranges and basically stimulates the a constant amount of adaptation converting hypertrophy strength and then subsequently the last one on power into peaking for
a competition such as Olympic weightlifting and then this structure is also used for to great success with power lifting as well so a pretty good structure for strength Sports there are some cons to it but I'm not going to cover that right now it's too long basically the key for the Mesa cycle is to yeah basically do what I said before and convert all the gains you have into a Max lift at the end but for our purposes most of our microcycle and Mesa cycle so up to about a couple months is aimed at increasing
strength and hypertrophy most of us aren't going to be competing competitions so we don't have to worry about maxing but we do want to structure our workout routines to the appropriate rep ranges in order to work strength and hypertrophy to get the skills that and goals that most people are working course okay so attribute training this is one of the most important things for people to learn and often can be one of the most confusing so one of the common questions is can you do lots of things like every day and what can you do
on off days you know can you split apart your workouts and so on and so to get into that we need to go into a little bit of background so probably in Evans of Dynamax basically came up with a list of 10 attributes cardiovascular endurance stamina strength flexibility power speed coordination agility bounce and accuracy in I believe in late 1990s or early 2000s article on their website and Dynamax was making like medicine balls and other fitness equipment at that time this got picked up by CrossFit and incorporated into a lot of their movement types so
they wanted to work on all these various factors at once and obviously you can tell Joshua workouts tend to work a lot of them but these are basically all different types of Fitness attributes and they all require some amount of frequency to work and some can be worked more often than others and so I like to classify that most things into three different categories based on intensity so low intensity or more recovery based and that's where you're typically going very light and you typically feel better than when you started with this type of training there
is moderate where you're doing modern intensity exercises that can be fatiguing in the moment but sometimes is okay on consecutive days and then there's high intensity or workout type intensity where you're going pretty hard and focusing mainly on attributes like strength hypertrophy endurance like the main big three there and usually you can't necessarily do those types of things multiple days in a room and the reason for that is high intensity Works a sympathetic nervous system very hard as we learned and so you generally need more parasympathetic rest and digest recovery for that to dissipate the
fatigue to allow you to effectively train the next workout so most of the big attributes that most people want to train your strength your hypertrophy your endurance are generally based on high intensity workouts whereas things that are lower lower and moderate intensity can do more often so like if you're stretching very heavy at high intensity and you're getting like sore after that that tends to mean you're not going to want to stretch many days in a row but if you're stretching very lightly you can even do that like six seven times a week so something
low intensity like walking you can pretty much do every day and recover from effectively but if you're doing a lot of jogging you'll probably need to throw in some rest days here and there even with like list cardio low intensity steady state we're staying under your anaerobic threshold you generally need to have some rest days here and there with that type of training but if you're sprinting which is high intensity you generally need rest days between each of those so as you can see with the running example basically if you're going low intensity it's something
you could do more everyday type of stuff and not affect your recovery whereas moderate you may require some rest days and then high intensity you definitely require rest days so things like flexibility mobility and skill work at low to moderate intensity you can generally do more often whereas things at high intensity which is training for specific attributes generally you need the extra rest days so it can be good to think of all these types of things so like your cardiovascular endurance stamina strength flexibility in terms of intensity relative to frequency and volume and it can
allow you to train some things every day but some things you need more rest for and when in doubt more rest days are usually helpful because most people generally don't know how much fatigue they're accumulating in workouts unless they're very experienced and know how much the body can tolerate and so if you're a beginner more rest is generally better and you can always add more if you need to add more but if you're doing too much it's hard to tell if you need to do less or more if you're not progressing so the basic hierarchy
of routine is I that I like to use is warm-up and Mobility then skill and technique work then after that come the strength portion of the workout with your power your isometrics your eccentrics and regular dynamic or concentric strength training after that usually you can do some type of endurance metabolic conditioning intervals or specific exercises like isolation if you need it and then after that usually is your prehab rehab flexibility and cooldown so generally sports science now has shown that if you are doing some type of like endurance training such as like cardiovascular stuff you
generally want to split it apart from strength training by six hours but for those who can't having them in the same workout is okay but usually something like am endurance and then PM strength or vice versa tends to work out and get the most gains because of the interference effect of the two Pathways strength and hypertrophy are more mTOR and endurance is more AMPK and so there is some interference effect if you try to do both at once so splitting them apart is superior but if you only have one workout session a day it's okay
to do both of them you'll get some gains of both but usually not optimal games so going into the basic hierarchy of routine a general sample routine tends to have the different components so such as the warm-up with burpees crawling or like jogging anything to put the body and blood flow going going and then specific Mobility drills for the specific joints being worked so for example with upper body exercises your wrists your elbows and your shoulders ankles knees hips back and then also doing some specific light connective tissue conditioning and control so for body weight
strength training that's often going to be something like support holds and especially on rings and working up the Rings over time and skin the cats and then still work basically for gymnastics mostly that is like five to ten minutes of handstand training for strength that's going to be what we covered such as your pull-ups dips rows push-ups squats these step UPS hitting your legs as well and then hitting your anterior and posterior core such as like l-sits and verse hyper extensions and then endurance if needed or any isolation exercises if needed if somebody wants you
know specific hyper tree work such as bicep curls and then prehab flexibility and cooldown at the end so specific things to do injury prevention such as face pulls potentially bicep curls here as well if you didn't include it in the other specific exercises things like gymnastics Bridges and deep breathing to cool down so that is a basic routine the next few videos are going to go through each section of the routine and elucidate actually not the next one but several down the line after the next video we're going to go over the specific parts of
the routine and how to set that up for a good workout routine that hits your specific goals
