If all the workout plans in all the books and all the magazines and online worked, wouldn’t we all soon look like the cast of American Gladitors?
For years I did all the crazy workouts in the magazines and online. A few of them worked for a little while, but most of them did nothing for me. The workouts themselves were fine. They were fundamentally sound and the basic advice was accurate.
The problem was, those workouts were not designed specifically for me. When I realized that, I started tracking my progress with quantifiable measurements and over time found workouts that worked great for me. More importantly, I have been able to keep making adjustments to keep making progress as my body changes over time.
The ‘Fit for Combat’ system is not a “do this, don’t do that” instruction manual like most books or magazine articles. It is the explanation of the system used me, IFBB Professional Fitness Athlete Nita Marquez and countless others to dial in with precision on the workouts and eating plan that work for them.
The key to the system is quantifiable measurements and tracking.
Quick Question: The last four times you trained arms, how many sets and reps did you do and for how much weight?
I’ll be honest, I don’t know the answer myself. But I can look in my training log and give you the exact answer to what exercises I did, for how many sets, reps and weight.
Being able to compare with precision what I did in the gym with how my body responded was how I was able to dial in on exactly what worked for me and how I continue to adapt my workouts.
If you are relying on your memory to make these comparisons they will lack precision because sometimes the difference between building muscle and never making progress can be one exercise or one set. And more is not always better. More often than you would think, less work will build more muscle.
All it takes to stimulate muscle growth and increased muscle tone is to overload the muscle. Overloading the muscle leads to micro-trauma—the itty bitty tears and pulls that result from exercise. If there is too much micro-trauma and your body may not be able to recover before you next workout, hence, no muscle growth. If there is not enough micro-trauma your body will not receive the signal to build more muscle.
So, the goal is find the workout that causes the amount of micro-trauma that stimulates muscle growth that you can recover from before you train the muscle again.
To dial in on that workout you must understand the real components of a workout program—volume, frequency and intensity.
Volume is the total amount of work done or the total amount of sets for a bodypart. Frequency is how often the muscle is worked. And intensity is how hard it is worked, i.e., one failure set per exercise or three.
The volume, frequency and intensity are the variables that can be adjusted to find the workout that works best specifically for you.
Because everyone is a little different in their recovery, durability and hypertrophy abilities, each person needs to do the workout that matches them. Some people need more recovery time and should work each muscle less frequently. Some people’s muscles are very durable and need more intensity and volume.
The only way to find what works specifically for you is track your workouts and the results with quantifiable measurements.
To do this you will need a few tools—the most exotic of which is a pair of $20 spring-loaded body fat calipers. The other tools are a notebook, pen, cloth tape measure and a pocket calculator.
So, what workout are you doing? It doesn’t matter what it is, just start writing down the exercises you and the weight you use for however many sets or reps. At the end of this article are a few sample pages from my training log.
Start writing down what you do in the gym, that way you are no longer guessing.
The next step is to use a quantifiable measurement to track the results of your workout on your physique. A lot of people use the mirror or a digital camera, but I prefer numbers. Preferably a number that can account for body fat and muscle.
Use the cloth tape measure to measure the circumference of your upper arm when flexed in millimeters—you know, measure your bicep. Right now mine is 441mm.
Then take your body fat calipers and measure the thickness of the fat on your unflexed bicep. Right now mine is 1.1mm.
Got your measurements? Now, pull out your calculator because we are going to do a little high school geometry.
Divide the circumference of your upper arm by Pi or 3.14.
441 / 3.14 = 140.44
That is the diameter of my upper arm—bone, muscle and fat.
I then subtract the millimeters of fat thickness.
140.44 – 1.1 = 139.34
Now I have a rough measure of the lean tissue diameter of my upper arm.
This measurement is not perfect, mostly because your arm is not a perfect circle, but over time this measurement will help you determine if you are really building muscle. Instead of guessing, you now have a number to judge the success of your workout program.
Now that you know what your workout is and the starting point of your lean tissue diameter it is time to start dialing in on the workout that will help you build muscle.
So, keep doing exactly what you are doing in the gym.
I bet that threw a lot of you for a loop. You are always expecting someone to tell you to change something, to do this or do that. But stick with what you are doing now and keep tracking your lean muscle diameter—the workout you are doing now may be a good one for you.
The one change I will suggest right off the top is to apply the Rosenfield Principle, named after an old football coach who gave me the best weightlifting advice ever. The Rosenfield Principle is this: Do more this week than you did last week, do more next week than you did this week.
If you keep lifting the same weight for the same sets for the same reps your body will adapt, there will be no overload, no micro-trauma and no muscle growth.
The most straight forward way to apply the Rosenfield Principle is to increase the weight or do more reps every week. If you did bench press with 185 pounds last week for 10 reps on your first set, increase the weight to 190 pounds or try to get more than 10 reps.
When you start applying the Rosenfield Principle the workout log book becomes more than just a collection of data, it becomes a way to hold yourself accountable to overload the muscle over time.
After a few weeks of your current workout, but applying the Rosenfield Principle, has your lean muscle diameter gone up, down or stayed the same?
If it has gone up, then your current workout is obviously pretty good and you should stick with it.
If it has gone down or stayed the same, some changes are in order. How do we decided what changes should be made? Flip a coin.
Seriously. If it is heads, increase the workload, if it is tails, decrease the workload.
Remember, there are three things to adjust in a workout—volume, frequency and intensity. If the workload is to be increased that can mean one more set or one more exercise, one less day of rest or even just one more failure set. If the workload is to be decreased that can be one fewer set, one less exercise per body part or an extra day of rest.
Often people respond to a plateau by doing more when they may actually need to be doing less.
So flip a coin, make an adjustment up or down and continue to track your lean tissue diameter. If the diameter improves, you are moving in the right direction. If it stays the same or decreases, you are moving in the wrong direction and should make another adjustment and keep tracking the result.
This process is not fast, but it is precise and quantifiable. By using it you will be able to find the volume, frequency and intensity that works best for you.
Most workouts do not work, or do not work very well because they were not designed specifically for you. If you are doing a workout you found in a magazine or online you are rolling the dice. If you are not using quantifiable measures like lean tissue diameter or tracking your workouts in a log book you are just guessing. Why guess on a roll of the dice when over the course of a few months, and then for the rest of your life, you can dial in on the workout plan that works specifically for you.
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