Tag: pairing exercises

Training Program Design for Small Groups

Tomorrow afternoon, Emily and I will be hopping on a plane to head to San Diego for a few days of R & R. I’ve been in desperate need of a vacation since about September of last year, so this is long overdue. I’m really looking forward to getting away for a few days.

But before I go, I wanted to follow up my post from the other day on 3 Keys to Successfully Pairing Exercises with another post on program design, but this time for athletes training in small groups. In the constant search for the “perfect program” I think people lose sight of the fact that “perfect” is situation-dependent. In other words, what might be ideal for training one individual athlete may not be ideal for a group of athletes, and what may be ideal for a group in one setting may not be ideal for a group in another setting. There is a lot to consider, which is why it’s important for people to not judge the programs of other coaches until they’ve seen the setting that they work in, and the clientele they work with.

One thing we’ve done at Endeavor Sports Performance to accommodate larger groups and ensure a smooth-flowing session is move to quad-sets with two main, non-competing lifts. An example template of this looks like:

A1) Main LB Lift
A2) Non-Competing Core/Mobility
A3) Main UB Lift
A4) Non-Competing Core/Mobility

This allows us to take a group of 6-8 athletes and break them into two smaller groups. One group of 3-4 would start with A1 and cycle through; the other would start at A3 and cycle through. For Group 1, they would progress as A1-A2-A3-A4, etc. Group 2 would progress through as A3-A4-A1-A2, etc. In this way, we’re able to make better use of our equipment and keep a good training flow, but still abide but the fundamental principles we feel are important.

This isn’t a program design strategy that I would give a universal approval, but there are certain situations where it works great. The more “advanced” an athlete becomes, in terms of their training experience, the less effective this strategy is. Simply, as training experience increases, it becomes increasingly difficult to make substantial gains in size and strength and therefore every aspect of the program needs to be more meticulously designed and implemented. Naturally, this includes exercise order, intensity, and rest intervals.

In contrast, athletes new to lifting (or re-integrating back into a lifting program) and younger athletes in general progress more readily and recover quickly from any individual exercise. This means that the residual fatigue from any exercise, and therefore the deleterious effect on any subsequent exercise, will be inconsequential.  I’m not suggesting it’s appropriate to just run young athletes through circuits of exercises haphazardly and without consideration to fatigue accumulation or exercise order; it’s still imperative that athletes are sufficiently recovered, mentally and physically, before starting a new exercise. But given the recovery time these athletes require, altering the starting point of an exercise circuit as described above will not impair their progress in any way.

There are a million ways to skin a cat. The key is to know your athletes, and not lose sight of fundamental training principles.

To your success,

Kevin Neeld

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3 Keys to Successfully Pairing Exercises

Pairing exercises is a popular program design strategy. It builds in rest intervals between main lifts and  allows athletes to make more effective use of their rest intervals (and therefore of their time in the gym). Basically, it’s a strategy to condense more effective training stimuli into the same absolute amount of time.

Conceptually, pairing exercises to get more “bang for your buck” is an inherently good practice. However, as with all things training, there are right and wrong, or should I say better and worse, ways of implementing this practice. When deciding what exercises to pair, keep these three things in mind:

1) Use Non-Competing Grips
Many primary pulling-based exercises, such as deadlift and chin-up variations and most dumbbell exercises, place a high load on the grip musculature. If the program is designed such that the athlete is pairing upper and lower body exercises, it’s important to alter the stress to the grip so that grip strength does not become the limiting factor in the exercise. As an example, a dumbbell reverse lunge and a chin-up would place a similar stress on the grip. It’s likely that the athlete’s performance in the chin-up would be compromised due to grip fatigue. In contrast, pairing a dumbbell reverse lunge with a loaded push-up or a dumbbell chest press would alter the grip stress and therefore be less likely to have grip strength be the limiting factor. In general, an easy way to avoid this problem is to pair lower body pulling exercises (deadlift variations), with upper body pressing variations, and lower body pressing exercises (squat variations) with upper body pulling variations. There are some exceptions to this, but if you stick with this template you’ll be right more often than not.

2) Emphasize different body parts
It’s important to note that “paired exercises” and “supersets” are not the same thing; at least not the way they’re typically used. Supersets usually refer to combining two or more exercises for the same muscle group (or movement pattern). Paired exercises is a more broad phrase that refers to combining two or more exercises. In this sense, there is usually a “primary” exercise that is the main focus of the pair, and a secondary exercise that is used to emphasize a different training quality or body part. Unless hypertrophy or localized work capacity is your primary training aim, it’s ideal not to combine exercises with too much overlap in emphasized musculature. For example, pairing a squat and a reverse lunge or a slideboard hamstring curl would impair the athlete’s ability to perform both exercises optimally. In full-body lifting days, you can use the template described above (LB pull with UB press, and LB press with UB pull). In lower-upper splits, you can pair the primary lift with a complimentary core exercise. For example, pairing a deadlift with a glute bridge would help ensure optimal glute activation during the deadlift, which would ultimately assist the main lift.

Glutes-Optimal activation is key

3) Don’t Pair Unilateral with Unilateral
Coming back to the idea of pairing LB exercises with UB exercises, using exercises in both categories that have a unilateral emphasis can be counterproductive (e.g. reverse lunge and 1-arm row, or back leg raised split squat and alternate db chest press). There are a number of advantages to using unilateral exercises, but the bottom line is that for most people (e.g. NOT elite level powerlifters that move truly heavy loads) they’re more physically and mentally taxing and take more time to perform. Pairing two unilateral exercises can drain the athlete and slow the overall flow of the training program. Instead, consider pairing unilateral exercises with bilateral exercises. As a full-body training example, you might pair:

A1) DB Reverse Lunge (unilateral)
A2) Loaded Push-Up (bilateral)
B1) Slideboard Hamstring Curl (bilateral)
B2) Standing 1-Arm Cable Row (unilateral)

Take Home
These are just a few important considerations when designing training programs using a paired-exercise system. Ultimately, the most important thing is that the exercises don’t compete with one another. The goal of pairing exercises is to cram more “good” into less time. Keeping these things in mind will make sure you don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater (don’t lose sight of what’s important!).

To your success,

Kevin Neeld

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