Weights and Stuff: September 2016

Monday, September 26, 2016

Planning and Tracking Your Training Regimen

Many people go to the gym and either do a random assortment of exercises or perform the same workout every day. Neither of these methods is very effective in the long run. A better approach is to have a plan laid out and to track your training regimen.

It is important to have a laid-out program so you have a general idea and plan when training. The plan can always be adjusted, if needed, and keeps you on track for improving and working towards your goals. This program will add structure to your training regimen, allowing you to track where you’re going and what you’ve previously done. Plans follow a general template that should be tailored to the goal you are trying to accomplish. As you progress, you can input your weights/numbers/times into the template so you have something to look back on. Typically a template is for a given amount of time or number of training sessions. I personally like to keep my training templates and plans between 4-8 weeks. Following the completion of the program, you can look back at the numbers, weights, times, and lifts you performed and reassess how the plan went. Depending on what it looks like, you can see whether you’ve made progress and which lifts seemed to work best, and make any modifications to improve the plan for the next training cycle. Here is an example of how I track my training programs in an Excel file:

Tracking your program doesn’t necessarily need to be this elaborate, and some just use a simple composition notebook. The overlying principle here is to plan and track what you are doing.

Tracking and recording your training program is critical if you are trying to continually make progress. This can hold true for other things in life as well. As the saying goes, “if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” This is just another carryover from training to real life that you can teach yourself through your training. Tracking your training plan will give you this ability and allow you to make some tweaks and changes to the program in order to give you better results.

Ryan Goodell, CSCS

For consultation/personal training/coaching inquiries email: ryangoodell@weightsandstuff.com

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Monday, September 19, 2016

Using Bands for the Bench Press

Elastic banded resistance, aka “accommodating resistance,” is a great variation to incorporate into the bench press. When only using “straight weight” (only the bar and the weight plates), the body will only adapt to the heaviest load it can lift. If you are a raw bench presser, your sticking point will generally be off your chest or a couple inches off it. If you can get through that sticking point you can lift the weight no problem. However, you never feel what a heavier weight feels like in your hands, so when you decide to try and test your max (an extra 5-10 pounds more than what you’d normally lift) your nervous system goes into shock and makes a few extra pounds feel like a million.

Using bands that are attached to the bar can help your body adjust to holding more weight, in addition to overloading the end range of the bench press. Getting this overload at the end range of the bench press is important, since otherwise you would only be lifting straight weight, not giving the end range of motion the stimulus it requires to get stronger. This is because as you get to the top range of motion, you need to begin to decelerate the bar in order to keep tension and control through your upper extremities and upper back. Attaching bands to the bar has been shown to decrease the range of motion required to decelerate the bar.¹ This allows you to try and accelerate the bar through a greater range of motion and help strengthen the end ranges. One of the worst feelings is missing a new personal record on the bench by failing a couple inches from locking it out at the top. Using bands will also help prevent this from happening.

I personally like to cycle bands into my programming for a 4-week cycle and then transition to another variation for a period of time. I find that feeling the extra weight in your hands at the top range of motion helps you get more comfortable with heavier weights and has good carryover into new bench PR’s.