- Bruce Lee

I’m sure this concept can be applied to many things in life, but in my experience regarding training this is an essential key to obtaining results. To do this, you must strip away the non-essentials and do what produces the fastest results possible.  To learn something fast and get the most benefit from your time investment you need to:

A). De-construct,

B). Streamline, and

C). Remap (I stole this concept from life hacker Tim Ferriss, the author of The 4-Hour Work Week).

Allow me to explain.

I train in the martial art Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu at Gracie Barra Chicago and also train quite a few jiu-jitsu practitioners/competitors (often upwards of 9 practitioners a day). You learn a lot about what works and what doesn’t from your time in the gym, staying in academia, and testing and applying what you’ve learned. We treat our training facility like a science lab. Constantly testing and assessing our training methods, keeping what works and removing what doesn’t.

So for all my jiu-jitsu athletes, allow me to strip away the non-essentials. For anyone reading this that is not training for a particular sport, this is still for you. Everything discussed from here should still be applied to your training.

1). Perform a needs analysis: (more simply put, what does your sport require): For jiu-jitsu that’s relative strength (strength respective of your body weight), some hypertrophy in certain areas to protect joints (the more muscle you have around a joint, such as your knee, the more protected it is from an injury), and strength endurance so your muscles and lungs don’t gas out before your opponents.

2).Determine what you need the most at the time: For instance, if you’re not training for a tournament there’s no real need to get super conditioned. Your sport (in this case jiu-jitsu) will provide at the very least a base level of conditioning. So why not train a strength quality your sport might not be getting you, such as relative strength. If you’re a professional badminton player then you don’t need a lot of strength, but with jiu-jitsu you can never be to strong. You don’t want to lose a competition because you were to weak.

Also, increasing your max strength will have a ceiling effect on your strength endurance because you won’t have to use as much strength from a percentage standpoint than you once did (you want proof, read this short research study ).

Now lets say you’re going to compete and you have 6 weeks before the tournament. Your training emphasis should switch to getting as conditioned as possible while maintaining the strength you’ve built up previously.

3). Determine the time needed to improve: Because of step 2 you now know what you need the most. But do you have enough time to improve it. If someone only had 2 weeks to get conditioned before a tournament then they’re not going to see the best results. There’s not enough time. So they need it but there’s not enough time to improve it that much.

For the remainder of this article we’ll say you need to get stronger.

De-constructing where you need to focus your strength training for jiu-jitsu. Here’s the key areas.

1. Grip: The first thing that attaches you to your opponent. A stronger grip will also transfer to stronger lifts else where. ( Read grip article Here)
2. Triceps: This will alway you to keep your distance from your opponent. For instance, if your opponent has you in side control, strong triceps will help you create space and recompose your guard.
3. Erectors: You hear a lot of people talk about the core, often referring to the abdominal muscles. The erectors are a part of the core but don’t get enough attention. These are muscles that run up the sides of your spine and help protect your back from to much flexion (check out the picture on the right). For instance, when you’re in your opponents closed guard and he’s breaking your posture. Strong erectors, triceps, and neck extensors will make it a lot harder for you to be broken down.
4. Lower Body Unilateral Exercises: There’s nothing wrong with bi-lateral exercises such as squats or dead lifts, but unilateral exercises also train your prime movers AND stabilizers. Movement takes place unilaterally, not bilaterally.

Now that we’ve established the main areas to focus on, we must choose which exercises will benefit you the most. I’ve written about this in many previous posts, so I won’t go into detail here. Essentially, here’s what you’d want to do though.

• Best Grip exercises: pick one
• Best Triceps exercises: pick one
• Best Erector exercises: pick one
• Best Glute exercises: pick one

Questions to ask yourself.

1. Is this the best choice of exercises to elicit the desired training effect?
2. Is this exercise needed and why?
3. Will this exercise improve something more than another one or one already performed?

Now, before writing just a workout for the day, you need to write out your plan/program with the end in mind (week 12, 10, 8, 6, 4, 2, example).

Don’t make the mistake of adding more just to add more. Strip away the non-essentials. Everything you do should make sense.

It’s true. In a little over 2 months the daily schedule at the USI has gotten quite full. On any given day we’re training 9 people. These are people from all walks of life; new mothers, business owners, police officers, students and computer geeks turned meathead (myself). They all have found time in their ‘busy’ schedules to invest in their health and train with us.

How did they do it, how on earth did they find the time to work out?

Research shows that it takes 21 days to develop a habit – consider that a normal training split is 3-4 days of training a week and this works to about 6 weeks. If you’re one of the millions of people that have made a new year’s resolution to get in shape, lose weight, etc; plan to invest to 6 solid weeks of time before training becomes a part of your routine.

When we start a new routine, we tend to tell ourselves this is going to be a change for life. This is great but can seem pretty daunting, most folks will give up at this point and relegate themselves back to the couch and American Idol.

Instead of taking such a strong stance from the beginning I urge you to approach a new healthy routine from a different angle. Tell yourself that you’re only going to ‘try’ working out for 21 days. Your conscious mind will be less likely to object to a ‘trial’ period vs. a life sentence.

After 21 training sessions at the USI, you’d definitely notice differences in the way you feel, look and act. You’d be hooked and would have made training a part of your routine.

Beyond the first 6 weeks, the key is to modify your training as you adapt to different exercises, rep ranges, sets, etc (often referred to as loading parameters). This will serve two purposes – it will keep the training fresh and it will help you avoid plateaus. Your training age (amount of time you’ve been training) will dictate the frequency of these changes. If you’ve been slinging the iron since the days of short shorts and knee-high tube socks, you’ll need to switch things up more frequently than someone rather new.

One of the easiest ways to determine when to switch is to refer to your training logs (you are writing down/recording your training, right?) and once you stop making progress for two weeks (increasing the weight or reps per set), it’s time to make a change.

Now you’re thinking, “It’s taken a ton of work to get my ass to the gym for the past 6 weeks, now you’re telling me I have to change things again!”.

Don’t worry, we’ve got a solution for you. We’re working on a new product at the USI that will take the guesswork out of building new training plans – stay tuned, it’s going to be very exciting!

The other day I got a question from a jiu-jitsu practioner/competitor regarding kettle bells. Apparently he had read an article where some guy proclaimed that the best training for an MMA athlete was kettle bells. In all fairness, I don’t know who this person is — I believe he said he was a personal trainer or strength coach.

So, he asked me what my thoughts were…

Anyone that claims that any one thing is the best thing for training is probably one of the biggest indicators that they have no clue. The kettle bell is just a tool. It’s a good one, but there’s no tool that’s best all the time. You have to know which tool to pull out of your so-called tool box. There are not many situations where I’d choose a kettle bell over traditional barbell or dumbbell. Don’t get me wrong – I’m not telling you to toss your kettle bells in the trash there are some situations where kettle bells are excellent (just pointing that out for the slow ones out there).

Some of my long time readers are probably expecting this but the devil is in the details. There are more important criteria to consider in a training session than just the exercises. Consider the following: correct exercise form, rep ranges, sets, rest intervals, exercise order, pairings, progressions and the goal. These are the details. Someone that doesn’t train people for a living probably wouldn’t think to consider this level of detail.

Yesterday I had a few jiu-jitsu students train at the USI and every one of them claimed that the workout below was the hardest training session they’d ever performed. Although I’m flattered that they felt this way and I appreciate the feedback, this doesn’t mean much to me. A monkey could make a hard workout. Again, the devil is in the details. If the training has no specificity or progression it’s just a hard workout. Every training session and every exercise chosen should have a reason behind it.

In my opinion, one reason why people make claims like the kettle bell example, is they get to caught up in whats the current trend. Many try to get to creative, making up exercises simply to be different. Results should be the most important aspect to training people, not entertainment. Unless someone actually trains people for a living and can show me the evidence that their training produces results, their two cents means nothing to me.

There are many things that can only be learned through practical application. Continued education through reading and by attending seminars is a must in my industry, but nothing comes close to real world “in the trenches” time spent in the weight room. To me, this is a science lab and I am a scientist. We have the luxury at USI of testing every training method and every assumption to make sure the training effect actually produces real results, or just pseudo results on paper. That’s something that a book or seminar will never teach you. We also take this same approach with recovery methods and nutrition. We formulated our own post workout shake to produce as close to immediate recovery as we could get. The product worked so good we were actually accused of foul play. We were told by one of our guys that nothing should work that good.

In the last post I mentioned some observations found in the lab and timing sets as opposed to counting reps. Here is an actual workout performed by brazilian Jiu-Jitsu Purple Belt Vince Fosco. Several exercises were timed sets instead of traditional set/rep schemes. This training session was designed to improve work capacity by training the anaerobic power system. Sets lasted roughly 30-seconds and the rest was only 15 seconds between exercises within the circuits. That’s a 2:1 work to rest ratio.

Check out the video below to see what we did.

One additional conclusion was that the faster someone could move the weights (barbells, cables, etc) the more neural efficient they are, especially the transition from the eccentric to the concentric phase. This is great to know because it tells us what needs to be improved.

In future articles to come we will be addressing the best ways to improve relative strength, grip strength, structural balance, as well as strength endurance. Many more videos to come.

Just like most things, this isn’t a solution for everything. Prescribing tempo lifts do change things and often times are very critical. For instance, if someone was performing a barbell bench press with a tempo of 3-seconds to lower the bar (the eccentric portion of the lift), a 2-second hold at the bottom position, and an explosive push to drive the bar back up to the top position (the concentric portion of the lift), and they did that for 10 repetitions, that would put someone under tension for roughly 50 seconds. That would be a lot different than just benching as fast as possible for 50 seconds with no regard for a tempo.

But there are some exercises that can be performed for speed where you can disregard a controlled tempo and just measure the time as opposed to the reps. One observation I’ve recently made when it comes to training grapplers (jiu-jitsu practitioners, mma athletes, wrestlers, etc.) is that when you get them stronger they sometimes will move slower in their sport. I believe they’re not slower from the training, but have more control over their opponent since they’re stronger, and therefore subconsciously slow themselves down because they don’t have to rely on speed as much. Essentially, they’re counting on they’re new and improved strength to compensate what wasn’t there before.

It’s great that they’re stronger, but not really a good thing that they might move slower. Speeding up their game so they’re faster (and of course still stronger) than their opponent is the key.

One obvious yet somewhat ignored training concept is actually having them move fast to get them used to moving fast. I say somewhat ignored because a lot of people are told that it’s the concentric portion of the lift that needs to be explosive, and that it’s the brains intent to move the weight fast that matters. I do see excellent results with this and when training for relative strength it is the brains intent that matters. Meaning, the speed of the lift doesn’t have to be fast based off of your observation (what you actually see), but when training for real speed and attempting to improve reaction, it’s what you actually see that matters. You must actually move fast.

The video below was performed within a conditioning circuit to improve anaerobic power and the guy in the video is Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu Purple Belt Henry Castro. This is just one example of training an exercise with no consideration for the number of reps or the tempo, just moving it fast for a designated time.

Below is a quick video of Jiu-Jitsu Brown Belt Benny Acevedo going through a strength endurance training session to improve his ability to remove waste by-products for increased conditioning on the mat, lower his body fat, and gain some relative strength. These types of workouts are not pleasant.

If you couldn’t read what we did, here is the workout:

1. Walking Dumbbell Lunges: 4 Sets X Distance (There/Back) Rest: 15 secs (Every other set this was replaced with a backward back pedal sled drag w/ belt attached)
2. Swiss Bar Push Press: 4 Sets X 8-10 Rest: 15 secs
3. Kneeling High to Low Cable Wood Chop: 4 X 10-12 Rest: 15 secs
4. Kettle Bell Swings: 4 X 15 Rest: 15 secs
5. Standing Alternating Cable High Row: 4 X 10 (Per Side) Rest: 15 secs
6. Rings Push Up: 4 X AMAP (As Many As Possible) Rest: 15 secs
7. Standing Inline Hammer Curl w/ Fat Gripz: 4 X 8-10 Rest: 15 secs
8. Battling Ropes: 20 secs Alternating/ 20 secs Concurrent Rest: 60-90 secs

All of these were performed as one big circuit.

Fifteen seconds rest between sets is no joke. Every training session at USI is made to be progressive. Once they’ve adapted, the progression happens. If you’d like to read more about this in greater detail, click on this link.

To follow some of our training concepts, athletes, and videos, make sure to subscribe to our facebook page and our Youtube page.

1. Improve tissue quality: Before every training session you need to perform some soft tissue work on problem areas. Utilizing a foam roller or a tennis ball or field hockey ball on these areas will loosen up the fascial tissue that wraps around your muscles. Think of fascial tissue as saran wrap around your muscles. If the fascial tissue is really tight or you have any knots or adhesions within them, your body won’t move efficiently. Improving your soft tissue will improve how your body moves, which will help you to do exercises with proper mechanics.

2. General Warm Up: After you’ve done #1 now it’s time to warm up your body with stretches, but not the kind you probably are aware of. You will be performing dynamic mobility drills. Think of these as just stretching with movement. Static stretching causes the muscles you’re stretching to relax. We want them to wake up. Having them relax will temporarily weaken them, we want to strengthen them by waking them up and preparing them for movement (that’s what they’ll be doing with exercise…moving).

3. Specific Warm Up: Now you need to do a specific warm up with the exercises you’ll be training. Now you might be saying, “I thought we did just warm up?”. Yeah we did, but that was a general warm up. You’re still not ready to lift any serious weight. You need to do a few warm up sets of the main exercises you’ll be doing. This is a specific warm up. For instance, I have a guy that trains with me that benches around 400 pounds. He can’t just throw on 365 pounds for knock out 5 reps without warming up. He’d get hurt. His warm up would look something like this:

1st set: 95 lb. for 5 reps

2nd set: 135 lb. for 5 reps

3rd set: 185 lb. for 4 reps

4th set: 225 lb. for 3 reps

5th set: 275 lb. for 2 reps

6th set: 315 for for 1 rep

One important detail with warming up is you don’t want to fatigue the muscles involved in the exercise before you get to your actual working sets that count. If you did, you’d probably be lifting less weight than you could actually use. The stronger you are, the more warm up sets you have to do. More times than not, you won’t have to do this before every exercise. With this example for the bench press, you wouldn’t need to warm up any other upper body pushing exercise. If you were performing a lower body exercise or a upper body pulling exercise, you’d have to warm up with those too.

4. Picking the correct poundage: Most people that initially start training at USI don’t know how much weight to use for a given rep range. There are two main things that I use for this, 1. A perceived effort scale of 1 to 5, 2. The speed of the exercise, mostly the concentric. I want to focus solely on #1. I always ask my clients to rate how hard a lift was on a 1 to 5 scale, 1 being the easiest and 5 being the hardest. This lets me know and teaches them how much to go up on a lift for the next set. So if someone said a lift was a 2, you know you can go up more in weight than if it was a 4. Additionally, when we write programs at USI we often prescribe rep ranges, such as 4-6 reps, as opposed to just 6 reps. If you get 6 reps on an exercise you’re at the high end of the rep range (4-6), therefore, you must go up in weight. If you had gotten 5 reps, you’d stay at that weight until you can turn that 5 into a 6. And if you fell out of the rep range and only got 3 reps, then you must reduce the weight to get back into the prescribed range.

5. Timing rest: What gets measured gets improved. Your loading parameters such as weight, reps, sets, and rest are very important to manage. If your goal is to get stronger you need more rest between sets than you would if you were training for improved conditioning. This is because your body needs to replenish the energy substrates it is using up. Anyone who trains at USI learns pretty quickly how different it feels to train for conditioning than for strength.

6. Post Training Nutrition: You are catabolic. Glucose and glycogen are low so your body wants to breakdown amino acids from your muscles and convert them to glucose. Essentially, your body is eating away at your muscles. Training provides the stimulus for things to happen (get stronger, build muscle, get leaner, etc.) but the recovery process is critical. This is a critical time for you eat so you can get out of this catabolic environment and start the recovery process, and there is a critical window of opportunity here. The sooner you have your post training meal, the better off you’ll be. The longer you wait, the more insulin resistant your muscles become. This is the time when a liquid meal is more advantageous than a solid meal because it gets absorbed faster. Without it you’re just spinning your wheels. One step forward, one step backward. At USI, if you’re relatively lean, we use a carb/protein ratio of roughly 3/1 that we formulated with the fastest absorbing carbs and protein there is and used stevia, which is a natural sweetener that isn’t neurotoxic. If you’re fat you don’t want the carbs since your fat cells are more insulin sensitive than your muscles (insulin is not your friend). We use glutamine and glycine instead of the carbs. This replenishes glycogen without an insulin spike.

These are some of the main problems I first see when training people, especially when training multiple people at the same time. Once these are addressed, taught, and implemented,  then that’s one less thing to deal with.

If anyone would like a more detailed explanation on anything covered here, just leave a comment.

]]> http://www.urbanstrengthinstitute.com/2009/12/11/6-essentials-to-improved-results/feed/ 2 http://www.urbanstrengthinstitute.com/2009/12/07/specificity-and-roi/ http://www.urbanstrengthinstitute.com/2009/12/07/specificity-and-roi/#comments Tue, 08 Dec 2009 00:11:07 +0000 Chris Grayson http://urbanstrengthinstitute.com/?p=239 What exactly is Specificity, and how do you train it?

Vladimir Zatsiorsky, a former strength and conditioning coach for many olympic teams of the Soviet Union, defines it as an issue of transfer of training results.

So basically, what training would produce the highest carryover to the sport. What I often refer to as the highest ROI, Return On Investment. And that investment is your time.

A few problems that trainers have with specificity has to do with a term called “functional” that’s thrown around a lot. Many trainers a taught that someone functional must be training movements as opposed to training muscles. So any exercise that’s more isolated would be a “non-functional” exercise and wouldn’t transfer over very well. This isn’t absolutely false. Forget about the movements and focus on the muscles that are involved in the movement. If that means training a muscle with a more isolated exercise than so be it. It’s all about ROI.

I train a lot of Jiu-Jitsu competitors, so I’ll use them as an example.

A few of the areas that need to get stronger for Jiu-Jitsu are:

Triceps: Having strong triceps keeps your opponent away from you. Two examples would be you’re in your opponents guard and he’s trying to sit up to break your posture or sweep you. Keeping him flat on his back requires strong triceps. If they’re weak you’re in trouble. Your opponent has you in side mount and is tight. Having strong triceps really helps create some distance between you to allow you to recompose your guard.

Here’s Ryan Burns hitting a Close Grip Fat Bar Press with Chains.

A few high ROI tricep exercises that we do at USI are board presses, push up variations, dips, presses with bands and chains, over head presses, various extension exercises. When they’re strong and you’re lean with high relative strength, try the hand stand push up test. I seen about 1 out of every 10 guys that can do this.

Erectors: If they’re not strong it won’t be hard to break your posture. Also, having strong erectors helps to compensate for all the crunches you have to do while you’re on your back. It’s very important to have structural balance or you’re more prone to injuries. I’ve seen several Jiu-Jitsu athletes hurt their backs and one common denominator is pathetic erector development. The more hypertrophy you have in your erectors, the more protected your back is.

Core: Two main jobs of the core are to brace your spine and prevent or control rotation. These need to be trained specifically. If you’re getting a lot of crunches from your sport, there’s no reason at all to do more. Instead, you need to be focusing on training what you’re not getting in your sport, and training to maintain structural balance. Jiu-Jitsu, just like any sport, will use some muscles more than others, which can and probably will cause some imbalances. Ironing these out is akin to realigning a car. If your car has an alignment problem and shakes once you get up to 60 mph, you’d be a fool to put a bigger engine in it so you could go 90 mph. That would just brake the car down faster. The same goes with training. Fix your structural balance (your alignment) and you will be stronger and perform better because your body will move better. It’s important to have both bracing and rotation/anti-rotational core exercises within your training.

Here’s an example of a abdominal bracing exercise.

Here’s Jiu-Jitsu purple belt Matt Cebulak performing a Low to High Kneeling Long Bar Cable Lift, which trains both abdominal bracing and anti-rotation.

Neck Extensors: Your head is always being pulled down. Again, an attempt to break your posture. Your upper body will go where your head goes. Strengthening the neck extensors will make this much more difficult for your opponent. This also helps increase the strength to your upper body by allowing more room for the nerves the intervate with their motor units because of increased neural efficiency (neural recruitment).

Grip: Your grip is the first thing that attaches you to your opponent. The grip is often a weak link with many. Strengthening this will also increase other lifts due to articulation and increased force development. Here’s a video of a barbell curl with the Fat Bar done as a cluster set.

This is just one of many different exercises that help strengthen the grip. For a more detailed post on this topic, read “The Power Of A Good Grip”.

It’s very common in my industry for people to confuse what’s trendy with what’s cutting edge, and this is definitely true when it comes to specificity. Many have gotten confused with what is or isn’t functional, and what is or isn’t specific, or often termed sport specific for a particular sport. These people never mention squats, olympic lifts, dead lifts, chin and pull up variations, over head presses… Basically all the best exercises to get someone strong, but all require the most hard work. You never hear anything about loading parameters (rep ranges, rest times, sets, volume, frequency). All that’s mentioned is exercises that only a circus clown should be doing.

To summarize, training the muscles involved in performing movements within your sport IS specificity. Training the movements involved in your sport should be done WITHIN your sport itself. The key with training specificity in the weight room is picking the best exercises that give you the biggest ROI and training the proper energy systems that your sport needs.

I realize I didn’t mention any lower body exercises. These are extremely important. I will discuss the lower body as well as some common injuries and exercises to rehab them in a coming post.

If anyone reading this would like to discuss this further, drop me a comment. I don’t have much free time to write lengthy posts. I’m to busy actually training people for a living.

Here’s a few vids.

Ryan Burns training with a fat bar for the floor press. Using a bigger diameter bar increases the demands of your grip, and also recruitments more motor units (the more motor units recruited, the greater potential strength gains). This exercise is very beneficial to the grappler because of specificity. Specificity may be described as an issue of transfer of training results. The highest transfer of training result occurs with the use of sport specific exercises. Triceps strength is extremely important for the grappler, and this exercise can yield a high ROI (Return On Investment). I’ll get into specificity in my next blog post.

Here’s a functional exercise based off of what the abs (and core) are really responsible for. As the band gets more tension the core has to contract harder. You’re stronger eccentrically than concentrically so you’re changing the tension at the top and then slowly controlling the eccentric (negative). In layman’s terms, putting your arms over your head at the top and lowering yourself adds more tension to the core. If you tried to do this while coming up (concentric), you might not have the strength because you’re weaker coming up as opposed to going down (eccentric).

Great exercise for strength endurance for shoulders, grip (if it’s not developed), and core again,both frontal and sigittal. One note about the core. A lot of people don’t realize certain exercises as core exercises (or for the abs) because they don’t look like traditional ab exercises such as sit ups or crunches. I had one athlete ask me why his abs are so sore after training all the time. He didn’t realize that many exercises I had him do trained the core amongst other muscle groups. This is an example of functional integration.

If you want to get some great training logs and get involved with great training discussions, join our USI Group on Facebook.

Any questions, ideas, or suggestions, please drop a comment.

Some of the best training info came from the eastern bloc, such as Russia (back in the day the Soviet Union), Romania, Bulgaria, Germany, etc. It’s said if you walked into one of their weight rooms you wouldn’t find much more than barbells, dumbbells, kettlebells, all of various sizes and shapes.

Weapons of Mass Construction.

You didn’t see them sitting on their butts on machines because that type of training is for lazy people that either don’t know the two most important words to effective training or just flat out don’t know what they’re doing. I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt and give them the later.

Those two most important words are HARD WORK. Using machines that put you in fixed positions that you can’t deviate from not only doesn’t transfer very effectively to any sport, but also can cause injuries down the line because of pattern overload and lack of any proprioceptive awareness and stability required by smaller muscles. Unless you’re a body builder that doesn’t require functional size and strength, don’t train like one.

Here’s a few principles that should be applied to your training, especially if you’re an athlete.

1. Compound exercises that recruit the most muscles: Exercises that use two joints will require significantly more muscles and recruit significantly more motor units than a single joint exercise.
2. Ground-Based Training: Exercises performed while standing trains several more muscles through integration by having to transfer force through your body. For instance, performing an olympic lift such as the power clean, force must be transferred from your feet up the kinetic chain through your hips and core. Whenever training exercises in a seated of lying position, less coordination through your nervous system and muscular system is required. So you’re essentially losing something.
3. Train both sides of the joint for structural balance: How many pushes you do should be balanced with pulls. As an example, if you’re doing 4 sets of 8 repetitions with a barbell bench press, you should be doing at least 4 sets of 8 repetitions with some variation of a horizontal pull. If not, you could develop some structural imbalances, which could lead to shoulder problems from tight muscles. And if you’re using 185 pounds for the bench press for the 8 reps and only 150 for a horizontal pull such as a barbell bent over row, the volume isn’t the same just because the sets and reps are. 185 X 8 reps X 4 sets = 5920 total pounds while 150 X 8reps X 4 sets = 4800 total pounds. That’s a difference of 1120 total pounds. Not exactly balanced is it?
4. Train for explosiveness: Most sports take place explosively. How much force you can apply into an object will determine it’s speed of velocity. This can be characterized as explosive strength, and is a key determinant in sports where the resistance to overcome is relatively great. A practical example would be a wrestler or grappler that has to produce a strong force explosively into his opponent to take him down. The majority of your concentric contractions should be a fast as possible even if the object isn’t moving fast. Sometimes it’s the brains intent and sometimes the object must actually be moving fast, such a speed strength exercises.
5. Train unilaterally and multi-planar: Sports are chaotic in nature and thus take place in all three planes of motion (frontal, saggital, and transverse). Training with unilateral exercises not only works the prime movers associated with the exercise, but also requires more stabilization than a bilateral exercise. With transverse exercises, especially relevant to the core, trains your body to stabilize and brace the spine with decelerative eccentric actions and anti-rotational exercises.
6. Train with variation: If you perform any exercise and more importantly, any rep range to long, performance improvement decreases. This is a manifestation of accommodation. To avoid this, you must utilize the next principle.
7. Track and Measure your training: Repetitions and exercises must be changed once an athlete adapts to them. This is identified by measuring and tracking your training. Without doing this there’s no way of knowing when you’ve adapted. Numbers don’t lie. Programming blind or just plain free-styling with your training is a great ingredient for poor to no results. Every exercise, set, and rep is measured at USI and tracked to avoid plateau’s as much as possible.
8. Train the hierarchy of strength qualities: What this means is if you’re training to improve multiple strength qualities, it’s important to know what order to train them in. For instance, if you’re training for power, hypertrophy, and strength endurance (conditioning), you wouldn’t want to train anything other than power first because you will only have power when you’re fresh. If you trained one of the other two qualities first you would use up the necessary energy substrates that would be needed to produce power. There is a hierarchy with strength qualities, and if you want to maximize your time and results spent training, you must either know this hierarchy or get with someone who does.
9. Don’t mimic skills: Loading a specific movement relevant to a sport movement changes the firing patterns of the movement negatively, and thus affects the mechanics of the movement within the sport itself. For instance, if you’re a jiu-jitsu practitioner and you’re constantly having to sit up while someone’s in your guard to break their posture, don’t waste your time thinking you need to strengthen your “core” with crunches when you’re essentially already doing them within the sport. Instead, you should be focusing on what you’re NOT getting from your sport.
10. Train your weaknesses: The majority of people have no problem training what they’re good at, but show them a lift or muscle group where they’re weak or just suck at and most will avoid it. We all have egos and like to see big lifts, but training your weaknesses will more often than not increase your strengths.

These are just a few principles of many and within these principles are methods. Perhaps you didn’t realize how much science goes into training. Remember this: There’s a big difference between training for general fitness and training for sports science. If you’re an athlete, it is critical that you train like one, and not like it’s just your hobby three times a week once you get off work.