Workout of the Week #5

Welcome to workout of the week number five number five, as a program not number five, as calendar week number five.

Anyway I’m going to get in trouble with some of my strength and conditioning colleagues, because the topic of strength endurance training is always polarizing and discussed. Some people say that doesn’t exist or it’s a pile of nonsense. There is a point of doing strength endurance training and this is what we are going to discuss today.

So the training goal is you want to last longer well not what you think, but you want to last efforts longer and that is also called strength endurance training. So a lot of sports actually have this where you need to last efforts over an extended period of time that doesn’t mean we should only do strength endurance training, but it means there is a place in the program to train strength endurance.Anyway that’s probably a different discussion.

Let’s look at how such a strength endurance training looks.

The training intensity 30 to 60% of the 1 RM, repetitions 15 to 30 it can actually go higher and we’ll look at this right now, when we look at the training exertion, because this is where most people go wrong with strength endurance training.

Strength endurance training is most often done with the medium exertion, so we are not going full out and have this high accumulation of lactic acid, it’s more a metabolic training through using the training mode of free weights or body weight whatever it might be.

So the training effort is a repeated effort it can’t be any different.

And if we look at the exercises in this program, it is based around the fundamental movements, so it’s squatting, hinging, pushing, pulling and lunging. The exercise order is that the exercises are ordered in a way to avoid accumulating fatigue, and this is also what I try to allude to, when I talked about the exertion. We are not in it, to make the athlete as tired as possible by the end of this training, we want to promote and work on the ability to last efforts over a prolonged period of time.

Let’s have a look at the training variables, more training variables.

The training frequency is 2 days a week and now we have the circuit training, so the circuit training we look at that in a second, when we jump into the program. You have one exercise followed by the next exercise followed by the next exercise and so on and so on, until you complete the circuit and then you start the next set.

The training split is a full body. So how does it look?

Here we have our program, and let’s jump into it. Here we are inside our two-day full body strength endurance training program if you download the PDF, you get an overview of the program and it’s done 2 days a week and you can see I made a mistake here in saying it’s a 4 day upper Lower Split forget this one, it’s a two-day full body strength endurance training.

Right after this video I will correct it, and you will be able to download the correct version.

So anyway two workouts a week so that could be Monday and Thursday, or Tuesday and Friday, or  Monday and Friday, you choose.

Workout number one, if we look at the left side, you can see what I was alluding to earlier, we do exercise number one followed by exercise number two, now let’s use the terminological that I’ve used here, and we do 1A, 1B, 1C, 1D, 1E, until 1H. It’s eight exercises and then we go to the second set.

Let’s have a look, how that looks in practice.

So the first exercise is a back squat the tempo specified and after that you have 1 minute of rest before you start exercise number 1B which is a bench row then you get 1 minute of rest before you do the next exercise which is a dumbbell bench press, you get one minute of rest before you go to the trap-bar deadlift, one minute rest before you go to the shoulder press, then you do the forward lunge and return with the right leg, followed by the forward lunge and return with the left leg, then you do lat-pull downs and then you get five minutes of rest and then start your next set.

We can see that here you do 20 reps each exercise at 40% of the 1 RM and then do that for three sets. I quickly wanted to explain what I meant by exercises are ordered in a way to avoid accumulating fatigue. So we have a back squat, obviously it’s a full body exercise, but mainly targeted on the lower body, because that’s where the dynamic movement happens and then you do a bench row, an upper body pull, where the trunk is supported, so the lower back for example is more or less taken out of the equation.

Then we have done an upper body pull, now we go to an upper body push, again so we move from a pulling movement to the opposing movement, a pushing movement. Once that is done we go to the trap-bar deadlift, again in the lower body pull, pull meaning you pull something towards the center of the body, and from there we go back into a pushing movement. We go into a lunging movement one side, then the next side and then we go into an upper body pulling movement. So this this is the idea how the exercises are structured.

And again we follow the 20 repetitions three sets at 40% of the one RM and then we move into program number two.

A very similar setup, we have on the left side the exercise again 1A, 1B, 1C, 1D, eight exercises done in a row one minute of rest between each exercise, and we start with a bulgarian split squat, on one leg followed by push-ups, and there you modify the difficulty depending on the strength of your athlete or the strength of yourself. And you can go incline decline whatever is applicable.

We go back to the Bulgarian split squat on the other side, we do an inverted row or an australian pull-up, then we go into the shoulder press, then we do a dumbbell single arm single legged RDL one leg then we go to the dumbbell pullover and then we finish up with the dumbbell single arm single-legged RDL on the other leg.

These are our exercises and also here we do 20 repetitions at 40% of the 1 RM you can see for example in the push-up there oops in that was already next week’s program um there we can see there is no intensity, so you modulate the intensity based on how strong you are so it can be incline push-up or decline push-up depending on your strength levels.

And then you get the glossary, in case you’re interested and you can read about me if you download that program, you can say what athletes say about me, and you can get the 4-week program, if you join the membership.

Let’s jump back into the presentation.

This concludes our workout of the week number five, the two-day full-body strength endurance training.

What are the next steps you download this program and you can then fill it out and follow it, you join the membership to get the four-week program, which has progressions and which can customized.

And if you like you can like and subscribe.