One of the hardest things for a coach can be which exercises to put into their program and which to leave out.\u00a0 These days this problem seems to be even more challenging because there appear to be so many options with regard to various training tools and people trying to invent \u201cnew\u201d exercises:<\/p>\n
On and on the list goes and in the end I think people can get paralyzed with all the options that they end up doing EVERYTHING!<\/p>\n
It is easy to get enamored with certain exercises and feel that your program is inferior without them \u2013\u00a0\u201cIf I don\u2019t do Turkish get ups my athletes will never improve.\u201d Less Is More<\/strong><\/p>\n A few weeks ago, on his Facebook page, my friend\u00a0Charlie Weingroff<\/a>\u00a0posted\u00a0THIS<\/a>\u00a0link to the old Bill Starr 5\u00d75 program and asked\u00a0\u201cDoes it need to be more complicated than this?\u201d\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n I really don\u2019t think it does!!<\/p>\n In reality, I\u00a0believe that you can actually do a ton with only a hand full of exercises if you can do them well and know how to manipulate other training variables in order to get what you want out of them in terms of the specific stresses you are looking to impose on the individual.<\/p>\n Talking with my friend\u00a0Joel Jamieson<\/a>\u00a0the other night he echoed these sentiments stating that,\u00a0\u201cThere are really only about\u00a07 or 8\u00a0exercises I use any more. I may throw something in that is \u201cdifferent\u201d every once in a while\u00a0just to keep people from getting bored, but I always come back to my main exercises.\u00a0It isn\u2019t like the squat just stops working! Look at Bondarchuk\u2019s program. His throwers do the same five exercises year round!\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n What I love about the Bill Starr program, linked to above,\u00a0is that it uses only a small group of exercises \u2013 you\u00a0can squat, press, and power clean or you can\u00a0squat, press, and row \u2013 and you get good at doing the basics!<\/p>\n Nothing fancy, no crazy bells and whistles, just basic exercises and you do them three days a week so that you get really, really good at doing them.<\/p>\n This simple view of training is something that I appreciate most from guys like Dan John (his Intervention DVD was excellent<\/a>) and Dr. Ken Leistner (one of these days in the near future\u00a0I am going to buy this collection of all of his old\u00a0Steel Tip articles<\/a>).<\/p>\n I know it is easy to get enamored with exercises and believe that one exercise may have some sort of\u00a0magical\u00a0<\/em>power. We have all been there before! However, I urge you to step back and remember that not only are the basics key\u2026they also work! Pick 3-5 exercises that you feel are cornerstones of your\u00a0training program and hammer them out. Instead of constantly rotating the exercises around change the rep ranges, sets, rest interval, and rep tempo to impart a different type of stress on the body and to get something different from the same lift.<\/p>\n The longer I work with people the more I find that my list of exercises begins to shrink.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" One of the hardest things for a coach can be which exercises to put into their program and which to leave out.\u00a0 These days this problem seems to be even more challenging because there appear to be so many options with regard to various training tools and people trying to invent \u201cnew\u201d exercises: \u201cWhen do […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-778","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-strength-and-conditioning"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/optimumsportsperformance.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/778","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/optimumsportsperformance.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/optimumsportsperformance.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/optimumsportsperformance.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/optimumsportsperformance.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=778"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/optimumsportsperformance.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/778\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":781,"href":"https:\/\/optimumsportsperformance.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/778\/revisions\/781"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/optimumsportsperformance.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=778"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/optimumsportsperformance.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=778"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/optimumsportsperformance.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=778"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n<\/em>
\nThe fact of the matter is, there is nothing wrong with any of the exercises above.\u00a0 What is more important is how you use them. As I stated, people end up getting so hung up on certain exercises and training tools that they don\u2019t know how to write a program without them.\u00a0 This leads to programs that are incredibly long in duration and sometimes a bit muddy in terms of their focus and direction.<\/p>\n