5 TRAINING PRINCIPLES EVERY PROGRAM SHOULD HAVE

At South Landing our ultimate goal is to increase the quality of your life in a way that doesn’t deter you from doing the things you love right now.

In short, we want to help you.

One of the ways we do this is by creating all of our training programs based on the following 5 training principles.

You Must Be Able to Make Progress

Progress may look different for everyone but everyone is capable of progress.

Here are a few examples of progress based off of where you currently are:

• Showing up to the gym 3-5x in a week for the first time in your life
• Increasing a lift by 5%
• An increase in stability or improvement in technique on an exercise
• Getting a few more reps than the last time you did the same thing
• Being able to manage sugar cravings after a hard workout
• Improving the pain free range of motion you have in a movement

Regardless of what progress means to you, the program should allow you to make progress in those areas.

Hits All 6 of the Main Movement Patterns

There are 6 things you can do in the gym.

• Push
• Pull
• Hinge
• Squat
• Core
• Single leg (lunges, step ups, etc.)

A great program gives you an appropriate dose of all 6 of those movement patterns with the goal of improving in each movement pattern.

This helps to make constant progress while avoiding injury or overuse issues in our joints or tendons.

From time to time you may tip the scales in favor of one pattern but you should always include variations of each to maintain longevity, balance, and overall strength.

Focuses On Strength

The base of life long resilience is strength:

A strong joint is resilient.

A strong muscle is resilient.

A strong body is resilient.

A strong mind is resilient.

Strength exists on a continuum that may range from being able to get on and off the floor with no pain to lifting a weight that is double your bodyweight. 

Either way, strength is relative to the individual’s needs and should be addressed.

At South Landing we focus on the following strength elements when designing programs:

• Pain free range of motion and strength of a joint 
• Strength and consistency of technique
• Strength and capacity of muscles and tissues
• Aerobic strength and the ability to do things for long periods of time

Our programs are built around building all of those qualities without compromising any of them in order to get ahead in another area.

Our programs are designed to never compromise the health of a joint or muscle tissue in order to see an increase in maximal strength.

To us, increasing your deadlift max but incurring back pain would be a step backwards, as it wouldn’t allow us to maintain our training habits and may force us to take time off from training to get back to a baseline of health.

Programs that build resilient humans are based on strengthening the body, while allowing the individual to be consistent in the long term.

Measures Stress/Fits Your Lifestyle

Lifestyle is comprised of the following things:

• Your Stress
• Your Environment
• Your Relationships
• Your History

Here is how this may break down:

• You work a very rewarding but high stress job that requires you to work 7 days a week
• Currently you work from home and have to figure out how to balance that with having 2 children at home during the day also
• You have an incredible marriage and a really tight friend group that help you manage the stress of your job
• You grew up playing sports but incurred some relatively serious back injuries that make exercise more stressful for you

In this case a training program that promotes constant high intensity would be a negative, because you don’t need more stress outside of work.

A good training program measures how much stress you have in your day to day life and meets you where you are in a way that doesn’t overwhelm you but instead helps you to leave your sessions feeling like you are more in control than when you came in.

At South Landing we use the RPE scale, which stands for Rate of Perceived Exertion. This scale allows the client to give the effort that they can manage on that specific day.

The RPE scale moves from 1-10 with 1 being inactivity and 10 being maximal effort.

Since the scale is based of your PERCEIVED exertion, we can teach someone how to come in on a day that is 8/10 (high intensity effort) and by communicating with them about their stress or how they are feeling we can help them find what that 8/10 is for them on that day.

8/10 may be a different level of exertion on a day where everything goes your way and the world is your oyster as opposed to a day where nothing seems to be going right and you are just happy to have made it to your session in one piece.

By allowing you to give the necessary effort you have available based on outside lifestyle factors, you begin to understand your own needs and how to adjust your training to improve your own life.

You Should Have Increased Vitality

This may be the most important part of a good program.

Training should improve the following things:

• Energy
• Mood
• Confidence
• Joint/Tissue Health
• Sleep

When we see a decrease of these things due to training we may be poorly managing how much total work we are doing in our program or even how the program is laid out.

Here is a super simple example to help understand this:

If you read 5-10 pages of a book every day you will (most likely) not have a decrease in energy, mood, confidence, health, and sleep quality.

If you were a student with a really heavy class load you may find yourself seeing energy, mood, confidence, health and sleep quality spiraling downward as you try to maintain your daily study habits.

In both scenarios you are reading, but they are very different amounts and the physical, mental, and emotional impact is very different.

A good program doesn’t assume the need to complete the task in a shortened window of time and instead aims to keep you progressing (point #1) for life.

Conclusion 

A good program considers you.

When designing a program we want to see these 5 things at front and center as they allow us to help someone towards their goals without compromising their health in the short term to get there.

We are fortunate to be able to create every one of our training programs in house, which allows us to put names and faces with each of these principles and personalize it to the people we serve each day.

That may not be something you have the capacity for right now but by understanding these 5 principles you can search for a program that fits you best and helps you to avoid any of the common pitfalls that you may have experienced before.

If you aren’t sure where to start and need help finding a program that works best for you, make sure to schedule a consultation with us to explore the options we have available for you at South Landing.

COACH BILLY