Part Two

CONSTRUCTING YOUR
ROUTINE
 CHAPTER 7 SUMMARY
CONSTRUCTING A WORKOUT ROUTINE

Knowledge Base
Since frequency is the key to making the fastest progress toward your
chosen goals, it is best to select a routine template that allows for the most
frequency in the shortest time, as long as there are no injury concerns. If you
are a beginner and bodyweight strength is your focus, full-body workouts are
the best template for making progress, but it is important to also make sure to
select a structure that works with your schedule. There are four split workout
routine structure templates in addition to the full-body workout—each with
various advantages and disadvantages. The five templates are as follows:
• Full-Body Routine
• Push/Pull Split Routine
• Upper-Body/Lower-Body Split Routine
• Straight-Arm/Bent-Arm Split Routine
• Push/Pull/Legs Split Routine

Application
It is important to factor in everything in your life when scheduling your
workouts—work, school, family, friends, recreational activities, leisure time,
etc. While this book aims to help you achieve high levels of strength and cool
moves, you should not do this at the expense of the other activities you enjoy.
Create a workout routine that works with your own life.
 CHAPTER 8 SUMMARY
WARM-UP AND SKILL WORK

A proper warm-up should cover three areas:

• Blood Flow
• Mobility
• Positional Drills
Good blood flow exercises include burpees and crawling, but can also
include jumping jacks, jump rope exercises, short jogs, or any other type of
movement that is low-to-moderate intensity, low skill level, and carries a low
risk of injury. Rolling, squatting, and other quadruped movements such as
bear-walks and crab-walks are good, too.
For mobility, choose exercises that warm up every joint. Spend more
time on areas that are stiff or have previously been injured. The main
recommended long term mobility exercises are RTO supports and German
hangs/skin the cats.
The purpose of positional drills is to get your body acclimated to correct
positions and maintaining core tension while performing bodyweight
exercises. Work up to 30-60 seconds. You can eventually eliminate positional
drills as your skills improve. Good position drills are plank, both side planks,
reverse plank, hollow and arch holds.
Skill work should cover two areas:
• Sport-specific Work
• Handstands (and other skills that are limited by balance, not
strength)
Avoid exercises that are extremely fatiguing in the skill work portion of
your routine, as they may decrease your abilities in the latter part of your
workout. Otherwise, feel free to work any type of sport-specific drills and
movements that require mostly balance components, such as handstands.
 CHAPTER 9 SUMMARY
STRENGTH WORK

The process of structuring strength work in a routine requires advance

planning. Here’s a quick recap:
1. There are three types of exercises: concentric, isometric, and
eccentric.
2. Exercise notation: sets × repetitions
3. Concentric repetitions: 15 repetitions or more per exercise, stay 1
repetition short of failure, and aim for a chosen amount of
repetitions for strength or hypertrophy.
4. Use isometric charts to find your sets and hold times. Stay in the
60-70% range for holds and aim for 40-70 seconds overall.
5. Structure eccentric exercises by systematically increasing hold
time and decreasing rest time.
6. 1 Concentric repetition is approximately equivalent to a 2s
isometric hold and a 3s eccentric movement.
7. When planning the order of your routine, place the most
important exercises first.
8. Rest times per set: 30-90 seconds for endurance; 60-240 seconds
for hypertrophy; 120 or 180-300+ seconds for strength.
9. Shorten a workout by pairing exercises that do not use the same
muscle groups.
10. Tempo:10×0 tempo is standard. Changing tempo results in a
different outcome for endurance, isometric work, and other
exercises.
11. In movement vs. isometric work, movement can be superior.
12. Core work (in terms of compression) improves active flexibility.
Good core exercises include ab wheel, hanging leg raises, v-ups,
dragon flags, and weighted decline sit-ups (a good go-to for
hypertrophy). Balance the anterior core and the posterior core.
 Gauge your workout performance and terminate a workout only if
13. necessary. If it is necessary, do not feel guilty; we all have bad
days.
 CHAPTER 10 SUMMARY
METHODS OF PROGRESSION

This is a key chapter to understand. It shows how the method of progressive

overload works and how to get unstuck from plateaus.

Simple Intra-Exercise Progressions

• Linear Progression: Add weight to each workout.
• Linear Repetition Progression: Add repetitions to all sets of the
exercise.
• Repetition Addition: Add repetitions to single or multiple sets of an
exercise.
• Last Set to Failure: Once you can perform the last set of an
exercise to failure with two more repetitions than the prior sets,
add a repetition to all of the sets.
• Additional Set: Add an additional set to the exercise.
• Rest Pause: Go to failure in your last set and do a repetition after a
short rest. Eliminate the rest.
• Density: Decrease the rest times between sets.
• Tempo Change: Change the tempo from 10×0 to longer
concentrics or eccentrics in a movement.
• Frequency Modifications: Grease the groove or increase the
amount of times per week that you perform an exercise.
• Transference: The same information can be applied to isometric
and eccentric exercises. All of your exercises do not have to look
clean in order to progress.

Simple Inter-Exercise Progressions

• Weight Addition: Adding weight to make the previous progression
more difficult.
 • Assistance: Using bands or other methods to make the next
progression easier.
• Eccentrics: A bridge to perform the next progression easier.
• Momentum and Extra Range: Utilizing momentum to perform the
next progression with extra range of motion.
• Exercise Modification: Changing the previous progression to make
it more difficult, usually with different body positions.
• Additional Sets and Decreased Rest Times: Adding more sets and
decreasing the rest times of the previous progression or next
progression.
• Hybrid Sets: Combining the minimal next progression work with
additional volume from the previous progression, much like a drop
set.
• Simple Hybrid Sets: Performing as many repetitions of the next
progression you can, then filling the rest with volume from the
previous progression.

Complex Methods of Progression

• Accumulation and Intensification: Weekly ordering of workouts to
obtain higher amounts of volume with more repetitions, followed
by subsequent workouts where you increase intensity by
decreasing the repetitions and performing more difficult exercises.
• Light/Heavy: Alternating the repetition scheme and intensity of the
workouts on different days within the week.
• DUP: A complex form of light/heavy that uses
light/medium/heavy days to vary workouts to increase strength and
hypertrophy.
• Concurrent and Conjugate Systems: Alternative forms of
periodization schedules in which different attributes are worked
simultaneously. Depending on the system you may just try to
maintain some of the attributes while working on others, or you
may try to improve many at the same time.
 specific biceps work if they hyperextend.
• For your wrists, you want to be mobile in every direction because
you will use them for almost everything.
Specific joints have no ideal number of degrees that mobility or
flexibility should reach. One person is not as flexible as the next. However,
you should be able to move into any of the typical stretching exercises like
splits, German hangs, wrist pushups, overhead straight-arms for handstands.
In an exercise such as the German hang (stretching your shoulders far
behind you), you want to be able to stay comfortably in that position for at
least 20-30 seconds. It doesn’t matter if this is at a 160-degree angle beyond
neutral or 120-angle; both are fine. What matters is that your range of motion
allows you to move in and out of the position comfortably. This means you
are both mobile and stable; therefore, you can effectively develop strength.
If your joints are getting sore, you have trouble moving through the full
range of motion, or you have difficulty applying strength near the end of the
range of motion, you will definitely want to use prehabilitation work to
correct the issue. This should be performed at the end of your routine, when
your tissues are adequately warmed up, so the stretching and mobility work
will be very productive. Do not ignore this, as it is important to stay healthy
and this is one of the long-term factors of making progress. You cannot
expect to become strong if you continually beat up your body through
rigorous exercise without caring for it as well.
 CHAPTER 11 SUMMARY
PREHABILITATION, ISOLATION,
FLEXIBILITY, AND COOL DOWN

Prehabilitation refers to any work that is focused on injury prevention.

Prehabilitation exercises are focused on correcting existing imbalances or
preventing injuries from forming with specific exercises that address various
weak links. Rehabilitation work can be done at this point in a workout, but it
is also viable in separate, stand-alone sessions.
Isolation work is used for multiple purposes: as prehabilitation work to
strengthen connective tissues, specifically to strengthen or hypertrophy
muscles for aesthetics, or it can be used in combination with prehabilitation
and/or strength work to simultaneously strengthen your body and prevent
injury by correcting imbalances and bringing up specific weak links.
Prehabilitation and isolation work will usually have some overlap and can be
used for the same purposes.
Flexibility work and cool down are the last part of the routine. While
flexibility work is recommended, the cool down can have additional light
activity such as jogging, jumping rope, mobility work, or other types of
movement. Additionally, if you have an oddball exercise that does not
naturally fit into a routine, you can place it here.
There are three different methods to improve flexibility:
• Regular Stretching—standard static stretching; 3 sets of 30-60s
holds.
• Proprioceptive Neuromuscular Facilitation—usually
contract/relax, hold/relax, or contract/pull. Improves range by
relaxing the muscle after sustained contraction and reciprocal
inhibition.
 CHAPTER 12 SUMMARY
MESOCYCLE PLANNING

In this chapter, we looked at the different levels of strength programming

both during and after a mesocycle. We noted how the weekly scheduling of
workouts via frequency and overall volume via amounts of exercises,
intensity, repetitions, and sets all affect how progress is made at these
different levels. We observed that beginners tend to progress the fastest and
require less advanced programming, while intermediate and advanced
athletes may require more progressive loading or complexity in programming
We discussed the different factors related to exercise choice and when to
terminate cycles.
We discussed deloading, maximal strength testing, workout restructuring,
elite strength and how to apply these concepts to your rest week and how to
integrate them into the mesocycle that follows. Deloading allows
supercompensations to occur and affords a rest break for additional maximal
strength testing. Workout restructuring can be utilized if you want to focus on
different goals or implement different exercises to work toward the same
goals. Finally, it takes a great deal of time to reach the elite strength ability
level due to various inherent and environmental factors.