squats

Understanding the basics of how to design a program is crucial to continue your progress in the gym and to prevent future plateaus in your lifts. I think the vast majority of people just put a bunch of exercises they like to do in some orderly fashion and just do the exercises with no real progression in mind or how much volume they are doing or how many times they do that exercise a week. Really setting up a program can be broken down into 4 main categories:

• Volume/Intensity Ratio
• Frequency
• Exercise Selection
• Program Goals

I will go into greater detail on what each of these may entail and how to manipulate them to fit your needs based on where you are in your training (offseason vs. peaking/meet prep). As this is also crucial to how you approach your training to peak for the platform or build the solid foundation to get stronger in the offseason.

Volume and Intensity Ratio:

Volume is simply defined as the product of reps, sets, and load (Load x Reps x Sets = Volume). Intensity is just a percentage of your one (two or three depending on your preference) rep max (%1RM). Volume and intensity work in an inverse relationship meaning that if volume increases, intensity will decrease and vice versa. Makes sense right? You are not going to be to do sets of ten with 95% of your 1RM. If you want to work under some heavier loads then you may have to drop off your volume a bit to be able to recover from the increased intensity. Now one could argue that we could do a very large amount of sets at very low reps at high load but that will be discussed further when we talk about goals of the program.

Frequency: 

Frequency is defined as how many times a week is the exercise being performed. In my opinion, frequency is probably the biggest downfall of most lifters in the gym when they set up their own programming. We know in exercise science that in order to keep protein synthesis evaluated in a muscle we need to continually keep the muscle stimulated. Also, I would like to note that you if you wanted to become really good at basketball you wouldn’t go to open gym to shoot hoops once a week would you? So if you want to be a great lifter why would you train your lifts only once a week, makes no sense to me. There are many ways to split up your training frequency; I personally like full body only because that is how I would perform the lifts in a meet. But push-pull or upper-lower are both respectable ways of splitting things up.

Exercise Selection:

Exercise selection is just what exercises will you being using on your program. Obviously for powerlifting the squat, bench press and deadlift will have to be included because as a powerlifter, getting stronger at those lifts will result in a better total on the platform. Here is where there is room for variation. As previously stated, the 3 main lifts should be the focal point of your training but outside of those your individual weak points should the next priority in your program. This is where accessory lifts and any variations of your competition lifts should come in.

 Program Goals:

I think this is probably the most important part of designing a program. All good programs have one thing in common; they make you do more work! Any combination of the above characteristics can allow you to increase the amount of work you do in the gym. But, understanding what your goals are for that training block is crucial to how you apply those characteristics. You have to ask yourself the question, what am I trying to accomplish with this? Do I want to focus on hypertrophy, strength, or power? Am I peaking for a meet or am I off-season working on weak points and building a foundation? All these questions are things to consider when writing your program.

 Off-season Training:

I want to start of this section with saying VOLUME is the most important aspect to building muscle mass. Accumulating volume should be the main focus of your training in your off-season. Although size does not equate strength, a bigger always has the potential to be a stronger muscle. Putting on quality mass is important for any powerlifter/athlete who wants to improve their performance. Frequency in my opinion for the three lifts in order of most frequent to least frequent goes; bench press, squat then, deadlift. Most people take a bit longer to recover from deadlifts than the other two lifts. Most Russian and Bulgarian lifting programs have a very high frequency and they’ve been pretty damn strong throughout history so it must be doing something right. Exercise selection goes as follows; the further you are away from competition the more variety you can have in your training. Offseason work should be focused on weaknesses and bringing up weak points but also keeping your strong points strong. Don’t be afraid to try new movements, variations of lifts, accommodating resistance etc. If it’s within reason and it has carry over to your competition lifts you will get stronger. Program goals should be less focused on higher intensity and more about accumulating volume (mainly focusing on hypertrophy work) and building quality muscle mass to get you bigger and stronger for peaking time.

 Peaking/Meet Prep:

Peaking for a meet is pretty much the exact opposite of your offseason work. The volume will decrease and intensity will increase in order for your body to prepare itself for maximal loading. Exercise selection specificity will be more focused on your competition style lifts. The programs goals will be focused on a higher intensity to peak your offseason strength to be ready to perform on the platform.