The Muscle and Strength Training Pyramid by Eric Helms

• The problematic issues that are prevalent in the fitness industry are not isolated to the topic of nutrition.
• WIthout fail, something that I have learned from consulting with people in these one-on-one discussions is that typically, the reason they aren’t getting to where they want to be is because they don’t have a system. THey don’t have an understanding or prioritization, and they can’t differentiate between big rocks and pebbles.
• While all elements of the pyramid are important, it’s critical that we discuss the most important things before we discuss the least important things.
• There are two key components of successful programming--putting first that which is most important, and learning how to adjust easy training variable while maintaining the order of things.
• When you see seemingly conflicting advice, you need to decide how important these factors are, and how they will affect other aspects of your training.
• Levels of the pyramid:
• Adherence
• Volume, intensity, frequency
• Progression
• Exercise selection
• Rest periods
• Temp
• Simply put, periodization is the concept or organizing your training and setting specific goals for a given time period, so it’s easier to make progress on those goals than if training without a specific aim.
• Periodization is essentially how you organize and manipulate all of the variables that are represented in each level of the pyramid over time.
• Strength training is a journey which must be continued for a long time to produce meaningful results.
• It doesn’t matter how good your programming is if you cannot stick to it.
• Volume, intensity, and frequency are what actually form the foundation of programs.
• In order to keep getting bigger and stronger you need to gradually increase the training stimulus. This is called the principle of progressive overload.
• Exercise selection for strength athletes is critical because their sport performance is actually the expression of strength via specific movements.
• For hypertrophy, a wide variety of exercises can be used to stimulate growth.
• Training needs to be: realistic, enjoyable, and flexible.
• We all want fast progress, but until you commit to the long haul you will never realize your full potential.
• The first thing that needs to be considered when planning training is our schedule and time frame.
• You have to start with what you can do, before you decide what you should do.
• Remember that optimal is not necessarily the same thing as realistic.
• Remember, consistency is what makes progress rather than perfection.
• Seeing progress will make training more enjoyable and easier to continue with.
• Optimal does not equal sustainable--don’t set yourself up for failure.
• Flexibility is in large part a state of mind.
• Training volume can be calculated as follows: load X sets X reps
• Strength is about skill acquisition, neurological adaptation, and hypertrophy.
• Volume is very important because it is not just the amount of work that we do, but also the amount of practice we get.
• Volume is key to hypertrophy.
• Volume, as a general rule, will need to increase over a training career, however, it should only increase when and as needed to progress.
• Fatigue dissipates at a faster rate than fitness, which is why deloads can be such valuable tools.
• So, too much volume is counterproductive as it accumulates too much fatigue. But it is also true that for the most part, strength and hypertrophy gains increase in proportion to volume.
• A good way to think about volume over your career is to do enough volume to progress, and only to increase it when progress has plateaued.
• Do enough to progress, not as much as possible. Increase when plateaued if you are recovering well.
• Too much volume can have negative impacts on both hypertrophy and strength.
• A large part of what dictates what load we decide to use depends on whether our goal is strength or hypertrophy.
• There are three major factors that optimize strength: muscle mass (and other structural adaptations), neuromuscular adaptations, and motor patterns/skill.
• A larger cross-sectional area [of muscle] and more mass means we have more muscle fibers to contract and we can move heavier loads.
• Neuromuscular adaptations to heavier loading allows contractions to be more forceful and efficient.
• Strength is not just a quality of the body but also a skill, meaning that you need to get better at the movement that you want to be stronger at.
• Muscle can grow quite well with both moderate and heavy loading.
• If you want to get good at lifting heavy things you have to lift heavy things.
• Remember, the purpose of the human body is survival, so the adaptations it makes in response to stress are always related back to being able to better handle that stress.
• Hypertrophy is an effect of training with adequate volume at a heavy enough load.
• High intensity approaches necessitate lower volumes per session due to the time and energy cost of using such a high intensity.
• For hypertrophy we need to load the muscle in a progressive way and to keep increasing training stimulus gradually. Volume is the key to hypertrophy but intensity is still relevant.
• A very common way to measure intensity of load is percentage of one rep max (1RM).
• In general, we don’t want to perform the big, multi-join compound lifts to mechanical failure as the risk of injury when form breaks down is too high.
• The point is that there needs to be a logical reason behind the use of taking sets to failure in your training, and it needs to fit in with your training progression.
• Failure needs to be used with a purpose, if used at all.
• Intensity is specific to your goal. Lift heavy for strength, and use loads that let you efficiently accumulate volume for size. Remember progressive overload.
• If hypertrophy is the goal, the weight just needs to be heavy enough. It is often said that the 8-12 rep range is the ideal rep range for hypertrophy but in fact there’s nothing magical about this range. It’s just a convenient range to accumulate volume.
• It’s important to not forget the usefulness of high intensity (1-6 rep range) strength work even if the main goal is hypertrophy. Getting stronger is important for progressive overload. When you’re stronger, you can use heavier weights which allows you to do more volume more easily, so it’s a good idea to include some heavy work as well.
• Here are practical recommendations for intensity for hypertrophy: Perform ⅔ - ¾ of your volume in the 6-12 RM range, and the other ¼-⅓ in the lower rep higher intensity (1-6 RM) and higher rep lower intensity (12-15 RM) ranges.
• If strength is the goal, specificity is needed so a considerably higher amount of volume needs to be performed in the lower rep ranges.
• Here are practical recommendations for intensity for strength: Perform ⅔-¾ of your volume in the 1-6 RM range, and the other ¼-⅓ in the higher rep moderate intensity ranges (6-12 RM).
• All work in one session is not equal to all work split across six sessions.
• Recall: strength is a skill and requires practice; and progressive overload drives hypertrophy.
• Organization matters. It is possible to do too much in a single session. Spread the work over the amount of sessions required to accomodate volume.
• Frequency is about how you spread your overall volume, so there’s no one perfect frequency.
• Volume: 40-70 reps per muscle group or movement per session
• Intensity: 1-15 rep max should be the range that you train in most of the time
• Frequency: Train each muscle group or movement pattern 2-3 times per week
• Just do enough volume to progress and only increase when you need, not want, to do more.
• The further away someone is from their genetic limit; the more easily they will be able to gain strength.
• The key to progressing from novice to intermediate to advanced is providing overload.
• In Rippetoe & Kilgore’s Practical Programing for Strength Training they suggested that novices should be able to increase their performance workout to workout, intermediates from week to week, and advanced trainees from month to month. 
• Deloads can prove beneficial because they help to reduce fatigue and thereby allow the expression of improved performance.
• Accumulated fatigue is a common cause of training plateaus, but with a deload we can expect to reduce fatigue, which then allows you to train harder, and start making progress again as a result, in the time after the deload.
• When we accumulate fatigue, we have greater risks of experiencing pains and injuries. The deload helps to prevent injury by allowing the connective tissues of the body to recover.
• Periods of low-stress training should be incorporated into all training plans, but how they are incorporated differs based on training age.
• Novices can improve their lifting stats quickly because they have a lot of room for progress.
• If your progress starts to stall after implementing deloads as described above without a return to progress after words, it is time to consider changing your progression pattern to that of an intermediate training.
• Not everyone can be a world class performer, but everyone can push themselves to the limits of their own talents.
• The more advanced you are the more clearly defined your goal will need to be and you will need to train accordingly.
• When performing an AMRAP with the purpose of estimating a 1RM it’s best to use a 3-6 rep range. Any higher than that and we start to get out of the range of being able to accurately estimate a 1RM, and thus training based on percentages are not going to be as accurate.
• If you’re not feeling recovered than it may just be that you need to insert a light week (deload) into your training, but if that does not work then you probably need to cut back on volume systematically to see if you are over fatigued or overreaching in a non-functional manner.
• If you’re plateaued on a lift that you specifically wish to improve then you should probably consider doing more sets of that lift.
• Add the volume in an intelligent place.
• “Periodization” is simply the process of organizing training into periods.
• Daily Undulating Periodization vs DUP is a form of periodization that changes training variables each training session within a week.
• Almost every program follows a linear progression to some degree.
• On days where you are supposed to do the deadlift with a hypertrophy focus, perform the Romanian Deadlift (RDL) instead of the deadlift. This is a more appropriate movement for hypertrophy, as in the deadlift the eccentric portion is normally rushed and uncontrolled.
• When training a lift for hypertrophy, use moderate intensity and high volume. The key here is to let the necessary volume in.
• When training a lift for power, perform semi-heavy singles, doubles, and triples. This is our technique day where we practice heavy lifting.
• When training a lift for strength, use high intensity and moderate volume.
• Tapering means to reduce training volume in order to let fatigue go down and express your full potential in the form of performance.
• The purpose of the deload is usually to reduce fatigue so that progress can continue.
• The purpose of tapering is to allow us to be at our best condition for competition day, a process known as ‘peking’.
• For competitive bodybuilders, peaking for competition is about appearance and is therefore related more to nutrition than training.
• Make sure to only use as complicated an approach as is appropriate for your training age, and once you get to the intermediate and eventually advanced stage, be sure to avoid black and white thinking.
• Exercise selection for strength athletes is critical because their sport performance is actually the expression of strength via specific movements.
• For hypertrophy, a wide variety of exercises can be used to stimulate growth.
• The most efficient route to getting stronger in a specific movement is to train that specific movement.
• Specificity also applies to intensity.
• Your primary approaches to training for strength should be the movements that you want to get stronger in.
• Unfamiliar movements are less effective for inducing hypertrophy.
• Only once you become proficient with a movement are you able to effectively overload the movement and to cause muscle growth.
• Initial strength gains on new exercises, especially complex ones, are primarily due to neuromuscular adaptations.
• Even if your goal is purely hypertrophy, you want to become an expert in the movements that you use to drive muscle growth.
• With exercises that involve multiple joints you can train more muscles at the same time, accumulating volume for multiple muscle groups simultaneously. Thus, it is efficient to include compound exercises at the core of our programs.
• When training for strength:
• Use the compound exercises that you want to be stronger on at the core of your program, e.g. the big 3 in the case of the powerlifter.
• You should decide your accessory work based on how the accessory exercises might contribute to improving your main compound exercises.
• Novices will achieve global hypertrophy without much emphasis on isolation exercises and their time is better spent learning the basic skills of lifting.
• Often, a weak point [from a hypertrophy perspective] simply stems from the way you are built genetically.
• The take home is that on compound movements that involve multiple muscles groups that all work together to perform the same join actions, it is not uncommon to struggle with uniform activation and to have one muscle group unevenly perform and to subsequently get unbalanced muscular development.
• It is important to note that you will be able to perform more volume with the exercises performed first in a session, when you are fresh. Logically, this means that the compound barbell exercises should be performed first in most cases. This exercises are the most complex, the most fatiguing, having the highest injury risk, and also stimulate the most hypertrophy with each repetition performed as they train many muscle groups at once.
• The movements you want to get stronger in should dominate your program.
• If your goal is hypertrophy, it’s still a good idea to include compound barbell movements. These lifts give you the biggest bang for your buck, but you want to make sure that you have proportional development everywhere and that you’re not neglecting anything.
• If you are a powerlifter or a strength athlete, you need to be a specialist.
• Hammer the compound movements primarily for uniform, muscular development in a time efficient manner. However, include isolation exercises as needed to ensure no weak points develop and that every muscle group is effectively trained.
• Weak points can develop for structural reasons that may require more focus on specific muscle groups if your goal is bodybuilding.
• Proper form is vital to ensure you are effectively engaging all the target muscle groups in a balanced manner.
• In most cases, perform compound barbell exercises first when you are fresh to optimize your performance.
• Simply put, an antagonist paired set (APS), is performing one set on an exercise, and then instead of performing a second set on that exercise after resting, you perform a set on an exercise that is the “antagonist” of the muscle group trained on the first set.
• Supersets are often performed with an exercise that trains the same muscle group, while with APS the opposite muscle groups are used in the second exercise.
• Truly, a squat is a full body movement.
• Rest until you feel ready to perform at your best on the next set.
• Focusing on training minutia over the foundation, without understanding the context, has sent many a trainee down the wrong path.
• Typically, the reason tempo is emphasized is because of the belief that “time under tension” is a critical variable to maximizing muscle growth.
• In powerlifting, the best lifts, the lifts that increase a lifters total the most, are the slowest. This is because they are closest to the heaviest load the person can lift.
• The amount of load you can lift in the gym with a machine or a free weight is limited by your concentric strength, the weakest link in the chain.
• It’s critical that you remember not to over focus on minor things that you think might help you grow to the point where you sacrifice the big ticket items like volume and intensity.
• Just lift the weights. Don’t try to intentionally slow down the tempo of lifting, just use good form, and lift them.
• Individuality is key to long-term success.
• It is preferable to miss reps than to train to failure or to ingrain poor form, especially as a novice.
• If you get hip pain, a front squat is a better choice. Likewise if you have knee pain, the opposite back squat would be a better choice to shift more load to the hips.
• Leg press variants are placed in the bodybuilding programs strategically to reduce lower-back and hip fatigue and stress while allowing a squat-like movement to be performed to train the legs.