March 13, 2025 • 29 mins
(00:00:00) Beginner, Intermediate, or Advanced? How to Assess Your Strength Training Level with Dr. Tony Boutagy
(00:00:40) Where are you - beginner, immediate, or advanced?
(00:11:07) How to ensure your body is moving properly
(00:16:14) What to look for in an intermediate program?
(00:25:26) Performing intervals & how to improve them
In this episode of The Body Pod, we explore the importance of understanding your strength training ability to ensure safe progress and maximize your results. Dr. Tony Boutagy helps us break down how to accurately assess whether you're a novice, intermediate, or advanced athlete and shares tailored fitness strategies to elevate your strength training journey. Whether you're just starting out, looking to level up, or aiming for advanced techniques, this episode provides actionable insights to help you understand your fitness level and take your training to the next level.
(00:00:40) Where are you - beginner, immediate, or advanced?
(00:11:07) How to ensure your body is moving properly
(00:16:14) What to look for in an intermediate program?
(00:25:26) Performing intervals & how to improve them
In this episode of The Body Pod, we explore the importance of understanding your strength training ability to ensure safe progress and maximize your results. Dr. Tony Boutagy helps us break down how to accurately assess whether you're a novice, intermediate, or advanced athlete and shares tailored fitness strategies to elevate your strength training journey. Whether you're just starting out, looking to level up, or aiming for advanced techniques, this episode provides actionable insights to help you understand your fitness level and take your training to the next level.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey everyone, This is Haley and I'm Lara and welcome
to the body Pod. Welcome everyone to the body Pod.
Today we have doctor Tony Bataji back and we are
talking about, uh, what the level for a female? What
(00:23):
level is appropriate for a female in the gym. So,
if they're just coming in new to strength training, or
maybe they are advanced in another method not strength training,
where would they fall in the beginner, intermediate, advanced categories.
I think this is a huge subject that a lot
of women are rushing in too fast, and so I
(00:47):
just thought it would be great to clarify and put
a few parameters around, some you know, must dos and
do not.
Speaker 2 (00:57):
It's a great question because I think most females lifting
in the weights room they're usually new early to the
gym experience. In other words, they're coming from pilates, yoga,
endurance training, spin, you name it, and then have heard
the importance of resistance training and therefore are adopting the
(01:19):
weight training after they've done everything else. So they may
well becoming extremely fit in other modes of exercise, but
in the weights room would be classified as a beginner,
even though they might have done yoga their entire life.
Or can run marathons and so forth. So understanding where
you are categorized beginner, intermediate, advanced in all disciplines is
(01:43):
really important to understand. And I think there's both ends
of the spectrum, and this often, to be honest, is
more of a male thing where you are new to
something but you think you're much better than you are,
so you try and follow programs of people that you
aspire to, or you remember you're a teenager at college
and I could do that, so I'm going to do
the same thing. That's why we see every male tearing
(02:06):
hamstrings and adductors because they go and take back up
sports they played as a kid, thinking they're just as
good as they were, and the same thing happens in
the weights room. But it can also be on the
other end that you might be have more experience than
you think that you do, and you're underpitching your training
programs when you may well be intermediate, but you're still
doing beginner based programs because you just don't know how
(02:28):
to progress. So there actually is a good conversation to
have how do you know where to pitch a program?
And I think broad statements really help here. If you've
been lifting under a year, you're a beginner. In the
weights room, you could have done all the different types
of exercises, running, swimming, cycling, politis, you name it. But
(02:50):
if you're in the weights room, it's a whole new language.
Learning to use muscles in different ways, controlling, shortening and lengthening,
stabilizing here, moving there. There's a lot to learn, and
that doesn't take weeks. It doesn't even take months. It
really is around a year, give or take one's coordination levels.
(03:11):
So as a broad sweeping statement, we can start there.
If you are under a year in the weight room,
you are a.
Speaker 1 (03:17):
Beginner, okay, And so nobody, well, this is what I've
found and I obviously I've only worked with women for
twenty five years and pilates and then you know now
in strength training, and nobody likes being a beginner, no one. Yeah,
And so you know where you could get away. When
I was teaching plates classes, somebody could come into a
(03:38):
pilates two point zero, which is an advanced class, and
you'd be like, okay, well then I'm not going to
do standing on a chair balancing, but this person could
probably find their way through. It's very different than just
showing up and being like, well, you know, I can
probably do a bar bell, how hard is it? Or
drop sets or things that they might not be used to. So,
(04:00):
if we're taking a year in the gym, what movement
patterns should they master before they get to move on
to an intermediate even if they've if they're at their
year mark but they're not quite ready or they don't.
Speaker 2 (04:15):
Know, let me just cover that first point before we
look at those progressions. It takes a really long time
to condition the non muscular structures to regular loading. That's bone,
that's tendon, that's ligament, that's the neuromuscular system. To know
what to turn on and use and what to turn
off or what to stabilize. Those adaptations take a really
(04:39):
long time. That's not done in a few weeks. Muscular
adaptations do after the first twelve or so weeks do
run pretty quickly, so you do improve strength from a
muscle neuromuscular patterning very quickly, but bone, tendon, ligament they
take up a long time. But also correcting inbalances betwe
(05:00):
between limbs, between front and back of muscles, to bringing
up stabilizers. Because most people are very good at using
the prime joint movers rather than the small stabilizers that
hold things in place for long periods. They all take
a really long time. And that's also why even if
you think you can do the Barbel, the drop set,
(05:22):
the advanced methods, it might well be that your stabilizing
systems or your left to right balance is not quite
developed yet. And that's where our job is not to
hold you back. Our job is to make sure you
don't get injured. And I think that's part of the Well,
you are a beginner and the reason why you're doing
this kind of work is to lay down a foundation
so you can do future work better and avoid the
(05:45):
risk of injury. So that's why we have these classifications.
We can make up whatever name we want, we can
get them level one, two, three, ABC, whatever you want,
but it really is your beginner, intermediate, advanced. Now, to
answer your second question, what do we really want you're
doing by the end of a year's training, Well, they're
the primary patterns. And the primary patterns in the lower
(06:07):
body would be a squat pattern bending at the ankle, knee,
and hip while stabilizing the trunk, and it would be
hip hinging like deadlifting that could be Romanians, conventional deadlift,
kettlebell swings, good mornings to know how to move at
the hip alone while stabilizing at the spine and stabilizing
(06:28):
at the ankle and the need now in the lower body.
That's what we'd want you to do with a barbell
in the upper body. It's very simple push pull patterns,
both in a horizontal plane but also a vertical plane.
And you might think that's a whole lot easier, but
we're not just looking at push pull patterns. We're looking
at the coordination of the joints that create that movement.
(06:49):
We're looking at how the shoulder blazer is scalpular, either
pro tracks and retracts when you're pushing and pulling horizontally,
or how they upwardly and downwardly rotate so that you're
can stay properly allotted into the arm socket rather than
popping out. And this is not to be understated. In
almost every female that I see who is performing an
(07:13):
overhead prespect gets pain. It's because the shod of blades
do not coordinate arm pattern well. They lift, they tilt,
they do anything, rather than upward and downward rotation. Because
those patterns weren't solidified really early in their training career.
So this is all part of laying down flawless technique
so that in the future, when you are handling bars,
(07:35):
you're doing multiple sets, you're doing it all under fatigue,
you can do so safely.
Speaker 1 (07:42):
Okay, So before we move on to an intermediate, two things.
Number One, I had this client that I started with
and she's older, she's in her sixties, but she's strong,
like she's just naturally strong, and you know, so we
started moving so weight and it's it was so funny
to me because every time she would get on like
(08:03):
the hack squad, she'd be like, where am I supposed
to be feeling this? And I'm like, when you're under load,
you're automatically going to be filling it in the right places,
like you don't have to. And she was so used
to the pilates mindset of you know, engage here and
don't engage here, and I'm like, well, you're moving, you know,
one hundred pounds. Yeah, you don't have to turn on
(08:26):
and off like right, yeah.
Speaker 2 (08:29):
And there's two extremes, not extremes. There's two ways of
viewing this. If you have come from physical therapy, pilates
very muscle focus precise, and then there's bodybuilding, which wants
to isolate a muscle group and work it thoroughly through
its range of motion. Whether it's for a guy arm
(08:50):
curls or for female glutes and shot, whatever that is,
it's very muscle centric. When we talk about strength training,
if you were to speak to a weightlifter who's squatting,
they might be doing ten sets of two reps, but
they're just focusing on getting stronger. If you say to them,
where do you feel this? Or what you mean, where
do I feel it? I'm just doing a pattern. And
(09:13):
resistance training is performing a pattern that when underload, you
will feel it in multiple spots. And that isn't a
right or wrong. It just means how your brain coordinates
muscle fibers. If you're a little bit weaker, you tend
to feel it there. If you stabilize are a bit weak,
you might feel the prime movers acting as stabilizers. But
(09:34):
if it's multi joints, you will feel it in multiple areas.
But don't get fixated on pushing with the chest or
squeezing the glutes.
Speaker 3 (09:42):
In a squad.
Speaker 2 (09:42):
They will come to play by performing the perfect movement pattern,
so we perfect movement and the correct muscles will follow.
Speaker 4 (09:50):
That actually gives me a peace of mind because sometimes
when I am doing certain squats or whatever exercise, I
do think that, and maybe it is my plate's background.
Speaker 1 (10:02):
But yeah, it's easy. It's easy to kind of get.
Speaker 3 (10:07):
Get analysis by analysis.
Speaker 2 (10:08):
You're too If you are too inwardly focused on clenching
glute or bracing core or feeling the chest or the deltoid,
you will not produce maximum force. So no one sprinting, jumping,
lifting weights at a high level is thinking a muscle group.
They're thinking moving as fast as possible or performing it
(10:31):
well or giving it the best effort, and not use
the quads, use the glue. It's a it's a faulty
way of looking at multi joints.
Speaker 3 (10:40):
Now, if it's a single joint and.
Speaker 2 (10:42):
You are focusing on something by your means, clench the
glute by your means, feel the burn in the deltoids.
But for multi we were talking about squats at deadlifts,
you're not thinking a muscle group when you're doing it.
Speaker 4 (10:55):
Now, I'm wondering if I need to go back and
do a beginner program to ensure that my body is
moving properly.
Speaker 2 (11:06):
It would all be about the limiting factors, and if
you haven't been training as much as you would like,
there's going to be a bit of detraining on that.
In terms of strength, even two sessions a week you
still make gains, and it's just because you need recovery
from resistance training. It's not like say jogging or cycling,
where you're using a lot of slow, rich muscle fibers
(11:29):
and you can accumulate lots of volume and you can
do that. Daily weight training is not that. It is
tapping into your fastest or fast rich muscle fibers, and
that demands multi day recovery. We often get confused because
we see we're bombarded with information on social media, which
is optimizing performance at the highest end, not about where
(11:50):
you get most of the gains, and then it slowly
plateaus off. Social media is all about that slow plattering
off and trying to squeeze the most out of the
muscle to get the optimal games. But the truth be told,
most of the games are made in that two days
per week, in that three to four sets, and then
after that you get marginal games, marginal gains. Nevertheless, but
(12:12):
they're marginal, so two days a week is just fine.
Now to answer your questions specifically, you don't want to
go backwards. So if you have a level of training
and you think, well, I should maybe go and do X,
Y and Z, it's important to not detrain what you
have been training. Include exercises for those. But this is
where and the fun starts of going and plugging in
(12:33):
all the weak links or the energy links that have
been omitted from training. And the purpose of doing these
is when you do move on to higher volume, more frequent,
longer training sessions. You can tolerate that because most people's
plateaus and the gym are purely because they do too
much and the body is never fully recovering before the
(12:56):
next session, and therefore you're in a constant state of breakdown.
Right then, stimulate rest. Stimulate rest because we're trying to
emulate what we see on social media.
Speaker 4 (13:06):
Yeah, that's such a good point.
Speaker 1 (13:09):
Okay, So an article just came out, a study in
the New York Times about body weight and body weight
being effective to just as effective as weights. Now I
haven't I haven't really sought out the study, but a
lot of people have reached out to me about it,
and it's on the questions for tomorrow for you know,
(13:33):
with body weight and bands, and so they were like wait,
I thought, we like, where does progressive overload come in?
And this is the thing that we can get the
same you know from weights. Can you go into that?
Speaker 2 (13:46):
The big picture message to take home from this type
of research which really became very popular around COVID and
then with the aging population who wouldn't get to the
gym and are looking at housebound training, so very very
very practical, useful research. It highlights what has added to
the growing understanding about muscle adaptation to exercise and that
(14:11):
iss not so much about the repetition range. It matters
about the effort that you apply. And this has overturned
a big thinking and exercise physiology that your loading and
your reps were really the drivers of creating change in muscle.
And then stew Phillips, who is the driver behind this
(14:31):
change from Canada, has said, well, when you work with
effort and you approach failure at any rep range ten
fifteen thirty at that last few reps, because the effort
is high, your body recruits fastwitch fibers. You don't have
to do them at ten reps, which was what everyone
thought up until his work. This is really good news
(14:54):
because at home you can do body weight, you can
do single leg, you can do bandwork. And if it
takes thirty reps to get to the point where you
think that hurts, I want to stop. Now you create
change in muscle. Now, That to me is the big message.
Full stop. Now we can nitpick and say, well do
(15:18):
I need to even go to the gym, And the
answer is you get benefit from exposure to variety, from
different ways of progressively overloading. Because at home you have
to do more reps, you have to maybe add more
sets because we're limited in variety.
Speaker 3 (15:33):
But that's great.
Speaker 2 (15:34):
You can still train at home and get benefit. But
that shouldn't take away from progressive overload. Other ways of
progressively overloading that you can do in the gym. Going
up a pound on a dumb beelp very useful. It's
just a good message for those people who don't like
or don't want to go h okay.
Speaker 1 (15:51):
So moving on from the beginner now and going to
the intermedia. So we're assuming this person can hip hinge,
they can squat, they can move a little bit of
load with Dumbell's goalblet squad, whatever, and we're assuming that
they probably have around a year in the gym. So
then what do we look for in an intermediate program?
(16:15):
And then how long does that take before someone's like, well,
I did an intermediate program, so now I'm advanced.
Speaker 3 (16:22):
Right.
Speaker 2 (16:22):
It has to do with where you have been and
where you want to go after the first year, which
we call foundational training. In historical literature, it's called general preparation.
That's where we are trying to raise general capacities that
you need to train successfully for your goal. We want
you to have left to right strength and flexibility, balance
(16:44):
front and back, quad to hamstring, ches to rhomboids, shoulders
to lats, abs to low back. We want that to
be in balance, and we want you stabilizers to come up.
All the time that we're raising your fitness levels, we're
doing more and more and more. The end of twelve months,
you can now perform bar bell advanced complex movement patterns
(17:06):
squat hinge push pull really well, and intermediate takes that
and runs with it. It adds volume, it adds overload techniques,
it adds more training frequency. So the capacities that we
developed by the end of twelve months, so you're now intermediate.
We add more volume and overload techniques. Now overload techniques are,
(17:28):
of course just a way of adding more volume. We
just use advancity term overload technique. But an overload technique
is applying volume to each exercise by adding more sets,
changing the range of motion, putting a pause in there,
adding another exercise straight afterwards for the same muscle, so
you do more, but volume is the keyword there. I
would say that for most people who are intermediates, by
(17:50):
another twelve months, you're going to be advanced. If you
have really taken what you learnt and developed in a
beginner twelve months program, by the end of two months,
you will be considered advanced, in other words, able to
do advanced movements with advanced techniques and recover well from it.
Speaker 1 (18:10):
Okay, So if somebody goes and there, they've finished the
intermediate and they're ready for the advanced. This is the
question that always gets asked to what now. I know
that this is not a I'm looking for a ballpark
of how much weight, like should I be able to
move a bar bell overhead?
Speaker 2 (18:33):
These norms have been around for at least forty to
fifty years. The reason why I don't like norms. In
other words, if you're a female and you can squat
one and a half times your body weight, then you're
considered X. And there are classifications from elite international Elite
to advanced to all the way down to novice. They
(18:54):
are well published and thrown around the issue with them.
And it's not just in strength training. It's the same
for endurance training. If you can do x watts, then
your international league and so these come from well trained individuals,
they're not the general public, and the general public, by
definition is typically not genetically gifted, otherwise we would have
(19:15):
been athletes growing up in stage. So I have reticence
with looking at those well accepted norms deadlift, bench press, squat,
overhead press, chin up, and then applying that to the
general public for fitness, because you will most of the
time have inadequacy syndromes. You think, oh, well, I can't
(19:38):
do that, and that's just because you don't have the
genetic gifting that those tables are based on. I prefer
what can you tolerate, well, how long have you been training,
or what can you tolerate in the weight room Okay,
you might not squat double your body weight through full
range of motion, but you can do six sets of
squats eight repetitions, recover from it, and do it again
later in the week, like call that best.
Speaker 1 (20:01):
Okay, that's good to know, because you know, I've often
thought over the last year, especially to take off how
many pounds somebody lifts off of my app because people
will post it and then other women, like in the
same group, are like, well, but I'm not lifting anywhere
near that, Like should I be worried? And it really
(20:23):
is so individual, and it depends on whether they're working
out at home with limited equipment versus somebody that's on
a lake press. Of course they're going to move.
Speaker 2 (20:32):
Right, and your range of motion and what else you've
done in that training session and what have you else
done in the week. There's too many variables when it
comes to load lifted. That's why I really like this
push that the New York Times was getting at. It's
about your effort. And yes, when I coach in the gym,
I'm aware of what the weight my clients are doing,
(20:55):
but I don't really care about it other than pitching
what their next session will be be because by the
time I see them in a week, a whole week
of life has happened. They've played golf, they've gone for
a run, they had a fight with their husband, their
kids are playing up with them. They turn up and
they actually lift less load, but their effort is just
as high, and muscle and bone and metabolism are all
(21:19):
challenged on a per effort basis, not compared to what
you lifted the previous week. So I do think we
need to not disregard completely how much are you lifting,
but just remember it is an up and down, very
forgiving construct that we're not Olympians. It's not about how
much you can lift. It's about how much does it hurt? Essentially,
(21:42):
how much effort are you putting in, and if that
effort is high, great, I'm happy.
Speaker 1 (21:47):
Okay, final question before we wrap this up. Do you
think though, that there's some individuals that have a lower
pain tolerance and they think they're at effort, but they
might not be at efforts.
Speaker 2 (22:04):
That is absolutely true, from the pain adversive syndromes to those.
Speaker 3 (22:09):
People who are psychopaths.
Speaker 2 (22:11):
Right there's you know, there's sweat coming out the frothing
at the mouth that they're using everything to finish the
wrap and go No, no, I can still keep going.
You should have stoped ten w reps ago. It is
very individual and I do think all things being equal,
having a trainer take you to the point of where
(22:33):
form breaks down. That means by definition, you've reached failure
because you're trying to use something else to complete the reps.
At that point, then we can do this concept called
reps in reserve. For most individuals training in the gym,
there is no point in muscular failure unless it's an
isolated movement pattern. It's a calf, it's a forearm, it's
(22:54):
something small, no big deal. But on multi joint structural
movements there is, and the data on this it's really
abundantly clear that working close to failure is as good
as failure, but without causing a really long time course recovery,
also increasing the risk of injury and your adversion to
(23:15):
exercising because it hurts so much. It's this whole idea
of you have to fail. The literature doesn't support that
at all, and I can't believe this isn't a more
publicly known message. When it starts to hurt, then it's
time stop now. For those clients who are pain adverse
and actually at six reps away from failure, and I
think that's good. That's where a trainer can say, let's
(23:38):
see if we can do a few more repetitions. Now
it's meant to hurt a little bit, but you're not
doing anything structurally, you're not You've got to disassociate I've
torn a muscle, that's bad, versus the metabolites that are
accumulating and the acidic changes and muscle that are going
on in those instances.
Speaker 3 (23:57):
That's good.
Speaker 2 (23:58):
We seek that and it only lasts a few seconds.
So let's see if we can squeeze out a few
more reps. And I think working with a trainer who
can safely say that's failure, we're going to stop too
short of that is a really helpful thing to do.
Speaker 1 (24:11):
And do you feel like it's a skill as well
for someone like I noticed when somebody starts doing HIT,
they have no idea the ability that they have to
push themselves, and so as soon as the burn starts
to come in, it's like this sucks.
Speaker 2 (24:28):
If you have never been a regular exerciser, then you
will associate pain, which is normal, desirable in the exercise room,
whether it's interval training or weight training, with pain that
is pathological. I've hurt my back, I've got a muscle spasm,
I'm cramping, whatever, and they associate the same because it
(24:50):
feels the same at least in that moment. And I
think education is very important to you. If you're exercise
naive and you've never trained, this is what you're going
to experience and it's okay, and we have a rest
and then we'll do it again.
Speaker 4 (25:08):
Yeah, okay.
Speaker 1 (25:09):
So for somebody starting out now we talked all about
strength training and just to finish up here really quick.
If you had someone genpot that was just coming back
into this type, maybe again, maybe they were doing other
forms of movement, but they were new to like interval training.
What is a rough time frame that you would not
(25:31):
even have them do hit intervals before, like you would
have them start in zone two, I would imagine, right.
Speaker 2 (25:39):
And this is a contentious area because a lot of
our understanding has been driven from athletic populations, where it's
abundantly clear, there's very little debate about this. The more volume,
lower intensities you perform to build quote unquote a bay,
(26:00):
the better you can perform intervals, recover between the intervals,
and recover between training sessions. There's very little debate about this.
The greater you can have a capacity for lack date clearance,
more mitochondrial density, and the higher your aerobic base, you
can do intervals better. Now that paradigm has been taken
into the fitness industry as if you want best practice,
(26:22):
then you should do based training and then sprinkling the intervals.
Health researchers, not performance researchers. Health researchers have said, we
don't worry about that. You can just start with interval
training and you'll see enormous benefit. Now that is true,
but it's in true as the study went for eight
weeks and didn't view the big lifetime picture. So as
(26:45):
much as I read and appreciate health research, I think
it's nice. There's mechanisms. If you are time crunched, you
can just go straight to that. If you hate SETI
state whatever, you can do interval training. But for those
who are interested in a more long term progression, the
big picture, where do I go after I do that?
(27:06):
Because most indeaval training, if you just start, you'll plateau
very quickly and then you'll just be stuck. And that's
why I think the athlete model is modified but still
the best model to follow. So it's a long way
of answering to say, if you have been out and
you come back, then yes, you should do a block
of training under that first ventil tree threshold, which we
(27:27):
call zone two, about seventy ish percent of your maximal
heart rate and build frequency, build duration, and then once
you are at the maximum number that you can do
in the session and within the week, that's when we
start revving the engine.
Speaker 1 (27:43):
Okay, so maybe I mean I'm thinking of like my mom.
I would never make her go out and be like, well,
get on a bike and go as hard as you can.
I would start her and maybe work up to ninety
minutes or sixty to ninety minutes as small.
Speaker 2 (27:58):
So the health research really is very interesting and it
is doing good for those people who time crunch don't
like all of that, and there's no question there is benefit.
I just think what it is missing is context. We
don't take an eight week study and just apply that
straight into the fitness industry.
Speaker 3 (28:17):
That is bad practice.
Speaker 2 (28:18):
We need to look at more of a context, and
it is there's no downside to spending six to eight
weeks building exercise tolerance and then starting that there's no
downside at all. So I think that should be our
default position, unless strongly argued against.
Speaker 1 (28:36):
I love it all. Right, Well, we are going to
wrap it up. Thank you Tony for another fabulous fast
session and we will see you on again really soon.
Speaker 3 (28:45):
Great. Thanks guys, thanks for listening.
Speaker 4 (28:50):
If you enjoyed this episode, please consider giving us a
five star review and sharing the body Pod with your friends.
Speaker 1 (28:57):
Until next time,
Hey everyone, This is Haley and I'm Lara and welcome
to the body Pod. Welcome everyone to the body Pod.
Today we have doctor Tony Bataji back and we are
talking about, uh, what the level for a female? What
(00:23):
level is appropriate for a female in the gym. So,
if they're just coming in new to strength training, or
maybe they are advanced in another method not strength training,
where would they fall in the beginner, intermediate, advanced categories.
I think this is a huge subject that a lot
of women are rushing in too fast, and so I
(00:47):
just thought it would be great to clarify and put
a few parameters around, some you know, must dos and
do not.
Speaker 2 (00:57):
It's a great question because I think most females lifting
in the weights room they're usually new early to the
gym experience. In other words, they're coming from pilates, yoga,
endurance training, spin, you name it, and then have heard
the importance of resistance training and therefore are adopting the
(01:19):
weight training after they've done everything else. So they may
well becoming extremely fit in other modes of exercise, but
in the weights room would be classified as a beginner,
even though they might have done yoga their entire life.
Or can run marathons and so forth. So understanding where
you are categorized beginner, intermediate, advanced in all disciplines is
(01:43):
really important to understand. And I think there's both ends
of the spectrum, and this often, to be honest, is
more of a male thing where you are new to
something but you think you're much better than you are,
so you try and follow programs of people that you
aspire to, or you remember you're a teenager at college
and I could do that, so I'm going to do
the same thing. That's why we see every male tearing
(02:06):
hamstrings and adductors because they go and take back up
sports they played as a kid, thinking they're just as
good as they were, and the same thing happens in
the weights room. But it can also be on the
other end that you might be have more experience than
you think that you do, and you're underpitching your training
programs when you may well be intermediate, but you're still
doing beginner based programs because you just don't know how
(02:28):
to progress. So there actually is a good conversation to
have how do you know where to pitch a program?
And I think broad statements really help here. If you've
been lifting under a year, you're a beginner. In the
weights room, you could have done all the different types
of exercises, running, swimming, cycling, politis, you name it. But
(02:50):
if you're in the weights room, it's a whole new language.
Learning to use muscles in different ways, controlling, shortening and lengthening,
stabilizing here, moving there. There's a lot to learn, and
that doesn't take weeks. It doesn't even take months. It
really is around a year, give or take one's coordination levels.
(03:11):
So as a broad sweeping statement, we can start there.
If you are under a year in the weight room,
you are a.
Speaker 1 (03:17):
Beginner, okay, And so nobody, well, this is what I've
found and I obviously I've only worked with women for
twenty five years and pilates and then you know now
in strength training, and nobody likes being a beginner, no one. Yeah,
And so you know where you could get away. When
I was teaching plates classes, somebody could come into a
(03:38):
pilates two point zero, which is an advanced class, and
you'd be like, okay, well then I'm not going to
do standing on a chair balancing, but this person could
probably find their way through. It's very different than just
showing up and being like, well, you know, I can
probably do a bar bell, how hard is it? Or
drop sets or things that they might not be used to. So,
(04:00):
if we're taking a year in the gym, what movement
patterns should they master before they get to move on
to an intermediate even if they've if they're at their
year mark but they're not quite ready or they don't.
Speaker 2 (04:15):
Know, let me just cover that first point before we
look at those progressions. It takes a really long time
to condition the non muscular structures to regular loading. That's bone,
that's tendon, that's ligament, that's the neuromuscular system. To know
what to turn on and use and what to turn
off or what to stabilize. Those adaptations take a really
(04:39):
long time. That's not done in a few weeks. Muscular
adaptations do after the first twelve or so weeks do
run pretty quickly, so you do improve strength from a
muscle neuromuscular patterning very quickly, but bone, tendon, ligament they
take up a long time. But also correcting inbalances betwe
(05:00):
between limbs, between front and back of muscles, to bringing
up stabilizers. Because most people are very good at using
the prime joint movers rather than the small stabilizers that
hold things in place for long periods. They all take
a really long time. And that's also why even if
you think you can do the Barbel, the drop set,
(05:22):
the advanced methods, it might well be that your stabilizing
systems or your left to right balance is not quite
developed yet. And that's where our job is not to
hold you back. Our job is to make sure you
don't get injured. And I think that's part of the Well,
you are a beginner and the reason why you're doing
this kind of work is to lay down a foundation
so you can do future work better and avoid the
(05:45):
risk of injury. So that's why we have these classifications.
We can make up whatever name we want, we can
get them level one, two, three, ABC, whatever you want,
but it really is your beginner, intermediate, advanced. Now, to
answer your second question, what do we really want you're
doing by the end of a year's training, Well, they're
the primary patterns. And the primary patterns in the lower
(06:07):
body would be a squat pattern bending at the ankle, knee,
and hip while stabilizing the trunk, and it would be
hip hinging like deadlifting that could be Romanians, conventional deadlift,
kettlebell swings, good mornings to know how to move at
the hip alone while stabilizing at the spine and stabilizing
(06:28):
at the ankle and the need now in the lower body.
That's what we'd want you to do with a barbell
in the upper body. It's very simple push pull patterns,
both in a horizontal plane but also a vertical plane.
And you might think that's a whole lot easier, but
we're not just looking at push pull patterns. We're looking
at the coordination of the joints that create that movement.
(06:49):
We're looking at how the shoulder blazer is scalpular, either
pro tracks and retracts when you're pushing and pulling horizontally,
or how they upwardly and downwardly rotate so that you're
can stay properly allotted into the arm socket rather than
popping out. And this is not to be understated. In
almost every female that I see who is performing an
(07:13):
overhead prespect gets pain. It's because the shod of blades
do not coordinate arm pattern well. They lift, they tilt,
they do anything, rather than upward and downward rotation. Because
those patterns weren't solidified really early in their training career.
So this is all part of laying down flawless technique
so that in the future, when you are handling bars,
(07:35):
you're doing multiple sets, you're doing it all under fatigue,
you can do so safely.
Speaker 1 (07:42):
Okay, So before we move on to an intermediate, two things.
Number One, I had this client that I started with
and she's older, she's in her sixties, but she's strong,
like she's just naturally strong, and you know, so we
started moving so weight and it's it was so funny
to me because every time she would get on like
(08:03):
the hack squad, she'd be like, where am I supposed
to be feeling this? And I'm like, when you're under load,
you're automatically going to be filling it in the right places,
like you don't have to. And she was so used
to the pilates mindset of you know, engage here and
don't engage here, and I'm like, well, you're moving, you know,
one hundred pounds. Yeah, you don't have to turn on
(08:26):
and off like right, yeah.
Speaker 2 (08:29):
And there's two extremes, not extremes. There's two ways of
viewing this. If you have come from physical therapy, pilates
very muscle focus precise, and then there's bodybuilding, which wants
to isolate a muscle group and work it thoroughly through
its range of motion. Whether it's for a guy arm
(08:50):
curls or for female glutes and shot, whatever that is,
it's very muscle centric. When we talk about strength training,
if you were to speak to a weightlifter who's squatting,
they might be doing ten sets of two reps, but
they're just focusing on getting stronger. If you say to them,
where do you feel this? Or what you mean, where
do I feel it? I'm just doing a pattern. And
(09:13):
resistance training is performing a pattern that when underload, you
will feel it in multiple spots. And that isn't a
right or wrong. It just means how your brain coordinates
muscle fibers. If you're a little bit weaker, you tend
to feel it there. If you stabilize are a bit weak,
you might feel the prime movers acting as stabilizers. But
(09:34):
if it's multi joints, you will feel it in multiple areas.
But don't get fixated on pushing with the chest or
squeezing the glutes.
Speaker 3 (09:42):
In a squad.
Speaker 2 (09:42):
They will come to play by performing the perfect movement pattern,
so we perfect movement and the correct muscles will follow.
Speaker 4 (09:50):
That actually gives me a peace of mind because sometimes
when I am doing certain squats or whatever exercise, I
do think that, and maybe it is my plate's background.
Speaker 1 (10:02):
But yeah, it's easy. It's easy to kind of get.
Speaker 3 (10:07):
Get analysis by analysis.
Speaker 2 (10:08):
You're too If you are too inwardly focused on clenching
glute or bracing core or feeling the chest or the deltoid,
you will not produce maximum force. So no one sprinting, jumping,
lifting weights at a high level is thinking a muscle group.
They're thinking moving as fast as possible or performing it
(10:31):
well or giving it the best effort, and not use
the quads, use the glue. It's a it's a faulty
way of looking at multi joints.
Speaker 3 (10:40):
Now, if it's a single joint and.
Speaker 2 (10:42):
You are focusing on something by your means, clench the
glute by your means, feel the burn in the deltoids.
But for multi we were talking about squats at deadlifts,
you're not thinking a muscle group when you're doing it.
Speaker 4 (10:55):
Now, I'm wondering if I need to go back and
do a beginner program to ensure that my body is
moving properly.
Speaker 2 (11:06):
It would all be about the limiting factors, and if
you haven't been training as much as you would like,
there's going to be a bit of detraining on that.
In terms of strength, even two sessions a week you
still make gains, and it's just because you need recovery
from resistance training. It's not like say jogging or cycling,
where you're using a lot of slow, rich muscle fibers
(11:29):
and you can accumulate lots of volume and you can
do that. Daily weight training is not that. It is
tapping into your fastest or fast rich muscle fibers, and
that demands multi day recovery. We often get confused because
we see we're bombarded with information on social media, which
is optimizing performance at the highest end, not about where
(11:50):
you get most of the gains, and then it slowly
plateaus off. Social media is all about that slow plattering
off and trying to squeeze the most out of the
muscle to get the optimal games. But the truth be told,
most of the games are made in that two days
per week, in that three to four sets, and then
after that you get marginal games, marginal gains. Nevertheless, but
(12:12):
they're marginal, so two days a week is just fine.
Now to answer your questions specifically, you don't want to
go backwards. So if you have a level of training
and you think, well, I should maybe go and do X,
Y and Z, it's important to not detrain what you
have been training. Include exercises for those. But this is
where and the fun starts of going and plugging in
(12:33):
all the weak links or the energy links that have
been omitted from training. And the purpose of doing these
is when you do move on to higher volume, more frequent,
longer training sessions. You can tolerate that because most people's
plateaus and the gym are purely because they do too
much and the body is never fully recovering before the
(12:56):
next session, and therefore you're in a constant state of breakdown.
Right then, stimulate rest. Stimulate rest because we're trying to
emulate what we see on social media.
Speaker 4 (13:06):
Yeah, that's such a good point.
Speaker 1 (13:09):
Okay, So an article just came out, a study in
the New York Times about body weight and body weight
being effective to just as effective as weights. Now I
haven't I haven't really sought out the study, but a
lot of people have reached out to me about it,
and it's on the questions for tomorrow for you know,
(13:33):
with body weight and bands, and so they were like wait,
I thought, we like, where does progressive overload come in?
And this is the thing that we can get the
same you know from weights. Can you go into that?
Speaker 2 (13:46):
The big picture message to take home from this type
of research which really became very popular around COVID and
then with the aging population who wouldn't get to the
gym and are looking at housebound training, so very very
very practical, useful research. It highlights what has added to
the growing understanding about muscle adaptation to exercise and that
(14:11):
iss not so much about the repetition range. It matters
about the effort that you apply. And this has overturned
a big thinking and exercise physiology that your loading and
your reps were really the drivers of creating change in muscle.
And then stew Phillips, who is the driver behind this
(14:31):
change from Canada, has said, well, when you work with
effort and you approach failure at any rep range ten
fifteen thirty at that last few reps, because the effort
is high, your body recruits fastwitch fibers. You don't have
to do them at ten reps, which was what everyone
thought up until his work. This is really good news
(14:54):
because at home you can do body weight, you can
do single leg, you can do bandwork. And if it
takes thirty reps to get to the point where you
think that hurts, I want to stop. Now you create
change in muscle. Now, That to me is the big message.
Full stop. Now we can nitpick and say, well do
(15:18):
I need to even go to the gym, And the
answer is you get benefit from exposure to variety, from
different ways of progressively overloading. Because at home you have
to do more reps, you have to maybe add more
sets because we're limited in variety.
Speaker 3 (15:33):
But that's great.
Speaker 2 (15:34):
You can still train at home and get benefit. But
that shouldn't take away from progressive overload. Other ways of
progressively overloading that you can do in the gym. Going
up a pound on a dumb beelp very useful. It's
just a good message for those people who don't like
or don't want to go h okay.
Speaker 1 (15:51):
So moving on from the beginner now and going to
the intermedia. So we're assuming this person can hip hinge,
they can squat, they can move a little bit of
load with Dumbell's goalblet squad, whatever, and we're assuming that
they probably have around a year in the gym. So
then what do we look for in an intermediate program?
(16:15):
And then how long does that take before someone's like, well,
I did an intermediate program, so now I'm advanced.
Speaker 3 (16:22):
Right.
Speaker 2 (16:22):
It has to do with where you have been and
where you want to go after the first year, which
we call foundational training. In historical literature, it's called general preparation.
That's where we are trying to raise general capacities that
you need to train successfully for your goal. We want
you to have left to right strength and flexibility, balance
(16:44):
front and back, quad to hamstring, ches to rhomboids, shoulders
to lats, abs to low back. We want that to
be in balance, and we want you stabilizers to come up.
All the time that we're raising your fitness levels, we're
doing more and more and more. The end of twelve months,
you can now perform bar bell advanced complex movement patterns
(17:06):
squat hinge push pull really well, and intermediate takes that
and runs with it. It adds volume, it adds overload techniques,
it adds more training frequency. So the capacities that we
developed by the end of twelve months, so you're now intermediate.
We add more volume and overload techniques. Now overload techniques are,
(17:28):
of course just a way of adding more volume. We
just use advancity term overload technique. But an overload technique
is applying volume to each exercise by adding more sets,
changing the range of motion, putting a pause in there,
adding another exercise straight afterwards for the same muscle, so
you do more, but volume is the keyword there. I
would say that for most people who are intermediates, by
(17:50):
another twelve months, you're going to be advanced. If you
have really taken what you learnt and developed in a
beginner twelve months program, by the end of two months,
you will be considered advanced, in other words, able to
do advanced movements with advanced techniques and recover well from it.
Speaker 1 (18:10):
Okay, So if somebody goes and there, they've finished the
intermediate and they're ready for the advanced. This is the
question that always gets asked to what now. I know
that this is not a I'm looking for a ballpark
of how much weight, like should I be able to
move a bar bell overhead?
Speaker 2 (18:33):
These norms have been around for at least forty to
fifty years. The reason why I don't like norms. In
other words, if you're a female and you can squat
one and a half times your body weight, then you're
considered X. And there are classifications from elite international Elite
to advanced to all the way down to novice. They
(18:54):
are well published and thrown around the issue with them.
And it's not just in strength training. It's the same
for endurance training. If you can do x watts, then
your international league and so these come from well trained individuals,
they're not the general public, and the general public, by
definition is typically not genetically gifted, otherwise we would have
(19:15):
been athletes growing up in stage. So I have reticence
with looking at those well accepted norms deadlift, bench press, squat,
overhead press, chin up, and then applying that to the
general public for fitness, because you will most of the
time have inadequacy syndromes. You think, oh, well, I can't
(19:38):
do that, and that's just because you don't have the
genetic gifting that those tables are based on. I prefer
what can you tolerate, well, how long have you been training,
or what can you tolerate in the weight room Okay,
you might not squat double your body weight through full
range of motion, but you can do six sets of
squats eight repetitions, recover from it, and do it again
later in the week, like call that best.
Speaker 1 (20:01):
Okay, that's good to know, because you know, I've often
thought over the last year, especially to take off how
many pounds somebody lifts off of my app because people
will post it and then other women, like in the
same group, are like, well, but I'm not lifting anywhere
near that, Like should I be worried? And it really
(20:23):
is so individual, and it depends on whether they're working
out at home with limited equipment versus somebody that's on
a lake press. Of course they're going to move.
Speaker 2 (20:32):
Right, and your range of motion and what else you've
done in that training session and what have you else
done in the week. There's too many variables when it
comes to load lifted. That's why I really like this
push that the New York Times was getting at. It's
about your effort. And yes, when I coach in the gym,
I'm aware of what the weight my clients are doing,
(20:55):
but I don't really care about it other than pitching
what their next session will be be because by the
time I see them in a week, a whole week
of life has happened. They've played golf, they've gone for
a run, they had a fight with their husband, their
kids are playing up with them. They turn up and
they actually lift less load, but their effort is just
as high, and muscle and bone and metabolism are all
(21:19):
challenged on a per effort basis, not compared to what
you lifted the previous week. So I do think we
need to not disregard completely how much are you lifting,
but just remember it is an up and down, very
forgiving construct that we're not Olympians. It's not about how
much you can lift. It's about how much does it hurt? Essentially,
(21:42):
how much effort are you putting in, and if that
effort is high, great, I'm happy.
Speaker 1 (21:47):
Okay, final question before we wrap this up. Do you
think though, that there's some individuals that have a lower
pain tolerance and they think they're at effort, but they
might not be at efforts.
Speaker 2 (22:04):
That is absolutely true, from the pain adversive syndromes to those.
Speaker 3 (22:09):
People who are psychopaths.
Speaker 2 (22:11):
Right there's you know, there's sweat coming out the frothing
at the mouth that they're using everything to finish the
wrap and go No, no, I can still keep going.
You should have stoped ten w reps ago. It is
very individual and I do think all things being equal,
having a trainer take you to the point of where
(22:33):
form breaks down. That means by definition, you've reached failure
because you're trying to use something else to complete the reps.
At that point, then we can do this concept called
reps in reserve. For most individuals training in the gym,
there is no point in muscular failure unless it's an
isolated movement pattern. It's a calf, it's a forearm, it's
(22:54):
something small, no big deal. But on multi joint structural
movements there is, and the data on this it's really
abundantly clear that working close to failure is as good
as failure, but without causing a really long time course recovery,
also increasing the risk of injury and your adversion to
(23:15):
exercising because it hurts so much. It's this whole idea
of you have to fail. The literature doesn't support that
at all, and I can't believe this isn't a more
publicly known message. When it starts to hurt, then it's
time stop now. For those clients who are pain adverse
and actually at six reps away from failure, and I
think that's good. That's where a trainer can say, let's
(23:38):
see if we can do a few more repetitions. Now
it's meant to hurt a little bit, but you're not
doing anything structurally, you're not You've got to disassociate I've
torn a muscle, that's bad, versus the metabolites that are
accumulating and the acidic changes and muscle that are going
on in those instances.
Speaker 3 (23:57):
That's good.
Speaker 2 (23:58):
We seek that and it only lasts a few seconds.
So let's see if we can squeeze out a few
more reps. And I think working with a trainer who
can safely say that's failure, we're going to stop too
short of that is a really helpful thing to do.
Speaker 1 (24:11):
And do you feel like it's a skill as well
for someone like I noticed when somebody starts doing HIT,
they have no idea the ability that they have to
push themselves, and so as soon as the burn starts
to come in, it's like this sucks.
Speaker 2 (24:28):
If you have never been a regular exerciser, then you
will associate pain, which is normal, desirable in the exercise room,
whether it's interval training or weight training, with pain that
is pathological. I've hurt my back, I've got a muscle spasm,
I'm cramping, whatever, and they associate the same because it
(24:50):
feels the same at least in that moment. And I
think education is very important to you. If you're exercise
naive and you've never trained, this is what you're going
to experience and it's okay, and we have a rest
and then we'll do it again.
Speaker 4 (25:08):
Yeah, okay.
Speaker 1 (25:09):
So for somebody starting out now we talked all about
strength training and just to finish up here really quick.
If you had someone genpot that was just coming back
into this type, maybe again, maybe they were doing other
forms of movement, but they were new to like interval training.
What is a rough time frame that you would not
(25:31):
even have them do hit intervals before, like you would
have them start in zone two, I would imagine, right.
Speaker 2 (25:39):
And this is a contentious area because a lot of
our understanding has been driven from athletic populations, where it's
abundantly clear, there's very little debate about this. The more volume,
lower intensities you perform to build quote unquote a bay,
(26:00):
the better you can perform intervals, recover between the intervals,
and recover between training sessions. There's very little debate about this.
The greater you can have a capacity for lack date clearance,
more mitochondrial density, and the higher your aerobic base, you
can do intervals better. Now that paradigm has been taken
into the fitness industry as if you want best practice,
(26:22):
then you should do based training and then sprinkling the intervals.
Health researchers, not performance researchers. Health researchers have said, we
don't worry about that. You can just start with interval
training and you'll see enormous benefit. Now that is true,
but it's in true as the study went for eight
weeks and didn't view the big lifetime picture. So as
(26:45):
much as I read and appreciate health research, I think
it's nice. There's mechanisms. If you are time crunched, you
can just go straight to that. If you hate SETI
state whatever, you can do interval training. But for those
who are interested in a more long term progression, the
big picture, where do I go after I do that?
(27:06):
Because most indeaval training, if you just start, you'll plateau
very quickly and then you'll just be stuck. And that's
why I think the athlete model is modified but still
the best model to follow. So it's a long way
of answering to say, if you have been out and
you come back, then yes, you should do a block
of training under that first ventil tree threshold, which we
(27:27):
call zone two, about seventy ish percent of your maximal
heart rate and build frequency, build duration, and then once
you are at the maximum number that you can do
in the session and within the week, that's when we
start revving the engine.
Speaker 1 (27:43):
Okay, so maybe I mean I'm thinking of like my mom.
I would never make her go out and be like, well,
get on a bike and go as hard as you can.
I would start her and maybe work up to ninety
minutes or sixty to ninety minutes as small.
Speaker 2 (27:58):
So the health research really is very interesting and it
is doing good for those people who time crunch don't
like all of that, and there's no question there is benefit.
I just think what it is missing is context. We
don't take an eight week study and just apply that
straight into the fitness industry.
Speaker 3 (28:17):
That is bad practice.
Speaker 2 (28:18):
We need to look at more of a context, and
it is there's no downside to spending six to eight
weeks building exercise tolerance and then starting that there's no
downside at all. So I think that should be our
default position, unless strongly argued against.
Speaker 1 (28:36):
I love it all. Right, Well, we are going to
wrap it up. Thank you Tony for another fabulous fast
session and we will see you on again really soon.
Speaker 3 (28:45):
Great. Thanks guys, thanks for listening.
Speaker 4 (28:50):
If you enjoyed this episode, please consider giving us a
five star review and sharing the body Pod with your friends.
Speaker 1 (28:57):
Until next time,
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