MANY TRAINING STYLES CAN BE EQUALLY EFFECTIVE.
Here is why efficiency and safety must be the criteria used to judge the quality of a program.
As long as a training program meets the following criteria, it will produce results:
It must be hard
It must be progressive
It must be consistent
If there are many programs that meet this criteria, how do we distinguish between good and bad programs or styles of training?
I should note that there are several popular training programs that don’t even meet the minimum requirements listed above to be counted as effective exercise.
But for this post I am speaking of ones that do.
Is there a hierarchy of effective exercise?
Is there a gold standard of training?
Yes, there is.
If several training programs can be equally effective at producing results, we need to then examine their efficiency and safety to determine which ones are better and which ones are worse.
Efficiency
All people, but especially men with responsibilities outside of themselves, should be concerned with training efficiently.
If two programs can provide equal results, then 100% of the time we want to choose the one that requires less of our greatest resource - time.
Based on my decades of experience, and also backed by the most credible research, most people can accumulate the maximal amount of stimulus their bodies can possibly recover from and adapt to within 3 to 4 resistance training sessions per week, and for no longer than 40 to 50 minutes per session, if they are following a well designed program.
The key word there is, IF.
Most people don’t know just how much they don’t know about proper training and exercise, and often just join a gym and go at it alone, without any initial guidance or supervision.
They know nothing about proper exercise selection, exercise sequencing, mechanical tension, the sequencing of motor unit recruitment, biomechanics, and how to safely recruit the muscle fibers that have the most potential for growth, or what these muscle fibers are even called.
Without this knowledge or training under the guidance of a coach who has this knowledge, at best the training is going to be extremely inefficient.
Most guys, if they are consistent enough and gifted with the right genetics, will get results over the long term, even if their training is inefficient.
A common objection I’ll hear is something like this -
“Hunter, you say that we shouldn’t train 6x per week but a lot of guys train that much and they are jacked and strong.”
Or,
“I’ve been training 6 days per week and I feel great so far.”
First off, if you can lift weights 6 days per week, then you are lifting like a cream puff.
I can almost guarantee that.
If you are actually training hard, i.e. the right way, then it is only a matter of time before your body fails to keep up with it’s recovery needs.
Second, many guys get results in spite of a lot of the time they waste at the gym, not because of it.
Saying that you know a guy that has built an impressive physique training for multiple hours per day six days per week so therefore that’s the best way to train, is like saying you know a restaurant owner who is a millionaire so therefore owning a restaurant is the best way to become a millionaire.
Or concluding that because many basketball players are tall, playing basketball will make you taller.
This is faulty logic and selection bias.
As men we should be aiming to make our training as efficient as possible so that we can free up more time to be an impactful force on the world around us, rather than serving our own anxious neuroticism by doing more exercise than our bodies can even use to stimulate adaptations.
Safety
The second key component here is safety.
If two ways of training are equally effective, we should 100% of the time choose the one that is safer.
Maximal results, minimal risk.
Efficiency and safety are closely related because doing extra unnecessary mechanical work in the gym isn’t only a drain on your time, it’s a drain on your recovery resources.
And any time you begin to enter into a recovery deficit, you put yourself at greater risk of injury.
The more muscle damage you create in the gym, the more of your recovery resources, like nutrition and rest, get channeled just to repair the unnecessary damage and fatigue you’ve caused, leaving fewer resources to go towards actual positive physiological adaptation.
Doing extra unnecessary reps and sets in the gym beyond the point of creating new adaptive stimulus is like picking your scabs once your wound is beginning to heal.
The other common ways safety is often compromised in training is by jerking, throwing, dropping, and slamming weights around.
There is no need to move weights rapidly when training.
Coaches that spout BS like, “training slow with weights will make you slow in activities outside the gym,” demonstrate that they have zero knowledge of how muscle force is actually developed, or about the law of specificity.
They are just regurgitating disproven fitness folklore.
Lifting weights rapidly provides no additional benefit but only adds risk of injury to your joints and connective tissues.
This doesn’t always create an acute injury and so a lot of men will fail to heed this advice.
But over time, the excessive peak forces experienced by rapid accelerations create microtrauma that often lead to repetitive stress injuries (RSI).
Throwing and dropping weights not only decreases the lifespan of your joints but also the equipment you are using.
The first concept that is important to understand for safe training and the one that is a “light bulb moment” for many lifters is that when exercising, we are not using our muscles for the purpose of moving weights up and down a certain amount of times.
We are instead using the weights as tools to effectively load and inroad the muscles.
The internal load on the targeted muscles is what actually matters, not the load on the bar or machine.
Once you make the load on the bar or machine matter more than the load on your muscles, you are no longer exercising.
At that point you are leaving the realm of health and fitness and entering the realm of competition or sport, which is fine if that is your objective and you are responsible for the assumed risk involved.
Safe training is also actually harder training because you are keeping tension continuously on the targeted muscles, which at some point during the exercise is going to create extreme discomfort.
Lifting a weight is a lot more challenging than throwing a weight.
And lowering a weight is a lot more difficult than dropping a weight.
A strong and impressive physique is one that is useful and fully functional.
If you are always nursing injuries because of a disregard for safety, or you are unavailable for other pursuits as a man because your training is inefficient and a time suck, then your training program sucks.
San Benito Strength is about raising standards and leveling up as a man.
All responsible adult men should be training consistently.
And all men should be following a training program designed to the highest standard.
The SBS Gold Standard.
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