Overcoming Gravity by Steven Low

• In the body, the SAID principle rules all. The SAID principle is simple: Specific Adaptation to Imposed Demands.
• Generally speaking, you must progressively add more weight to the barbell in order to increase strength and hypertrophy.
• Likewise, with bodyweight exercises you must find a way to make the exercises more difficult in order to progressively overload the body and gain strength and hypertrophy.
• In bodyweight exercises this is executed through manipulating leverage.
• Decreasing leverage in progressive bodyweight exercises is primarily employed through two different methods: changing the body position and changing the muscle length.
• The repetition continuum has strength at one end and endurance at the other. The strength side is attained through low repetitions and heavier weight or higher intensity where a 1 reputation maximum elicits the most strength. Endurance occurs with less weight or less intensity and more repetitions.
• Strength and endurance cannot be optimally developed at the same time, since they are at opposite ends of the spectrum.
• In general, if you are going to cross-train strength and endurance, but have a focus on one portion over another, an 80/20 split tends to work very well. This means that 80% of your training should be dedicated toward the particular area that you want to develop the most, and 20% of your training can be devoted to the other parts
• The SAID principle--specific adaptation to imposed demands--governs all of the changes that occur within the body in training.
• Progressive overload is the way to apply the SAID principle to training in order to constantly progress.
• Overall, strength is predicated on a simple equation: strength = neural adaptations * muscle cross sectional area.
• The force output of a muscle is based on the cross-sectional area of the muscle, angle of attack on the joint, individual limb length, and, most importantly, neural factors.
• Neural adaptations are what the majority of strength training is about.
• Excessive muscle mass tends to have a net negative effect only when you start to become extremely large; bodybuilder size.
• When training for strength and hypertrophy, you generally want to use weights that are heavy or bodyweight exercises that are intense and difficult.
• There is some new evidence coming out that training with high repetition may also confer solid strength gains as long as you train with high intensity every other week.
• The nervous system has limiters on the amount of force we can produce. Specific structures called Golgi tendon organs in our musculotendinous junctions provide feedback to the brain, which decreases muscle forces to prevent injury in untrained people.
• Ultimately, if your goal is massive amounts of hypertrophy you may need to alternate your repetition range, rest times, and other factors if one style of training does not seem to be working effectively.
• Simply put, if we want to get really good at something we have to do it a lot. This will be an important thing to remember when we start to construct routines.
• Motor learning occurs automatically in the brain and is mostly active for movements that are practiced repeatedly. [...] This is a primary adaption of skill work, but it is arguably impossible for one to consciously train it, ,as the body automatically performs in adaption to your conscious training.
• What is important to know, to obtain the benefits of this process, is that you should concentrate 100 while practicing your movements. This will ensure that you are performing them correctly, thus teaching your body the correct movement patterns.
• Generally, as you become more experienced, your exercises become more intense.
• Isometrics are particularly interesting because they branch over multiple pathways toward hypertrophy.
• While it is important to know that certain adaptations and differences in hypertrophy mechanisms may occur, there is really no such thing as unwanted hypertrophy--unless it makes one too heavy for their sport or weight class.
• Overall volume in the context of frequency means the most in regard to hypertrophy.
• The volume of the exercise on particular muscles must exceed a certain threshold for hypertrophy, which in effect will increase as your muscles get bigger.
• If your ultimate goal is purely hypertrophy, it is generally a good idea to perform primarily barbell-type exercise. This is not to say you cannot gain an impressive physique with bodyweight exercises, it will just take longer.
• Practice does not make perfect; perfect practice makes perfect.
• Work capacity is naturally increased as you train.
• Hypertrophy tends to occur through three mechanisms: mechanical tension, eccentric damage and microtrauma, and local metabolic and hypoxic factors.
• There is no such thing as myofibrillar or sarcoplasmic hypertrophy, just hypertrophy.
• It is more beneficial to focus on weaknesses and bringing deficient skills and strength progressions up to the level of your more advanced abilities.
• Shoring up your weaknesses will keep you healthier than if you solely pursue one set of strength or skill progressions.
• The programming needs for the beginner are different than those with intermediate, advanced, or elite strength. The level of programming will vary between the levels of strength, because you cannot expect to train similarly to someone who is stronger or weaker than you.
• The vast majority of beginner programs focus on full-body workouts performed three times per week.
• As you move into the intermediate range, your training needs will begin to diversify based on your goals. Because your needs will become more specific, a full-body routine will be less effective. Training will need to become more specific in nearly every area, including skill work, sport-specific skills, flexibility, mobility, prehabilitation, and rehabilitation.
• When training, it is easy to get sidetracked into minutia, and the experience of a veteran coach can help cut through the things that matter less in the big picture of training.
• Your emphasis should be on the things that will maximize your improvement, while staying injury-free and on track to reach your goals.
• It is not recommended that you train for both strength and endurance simultaneously.
• A lack of strength will always limit you in other domains--technique, endurance, skill, balance, flexibility--both active and passive--agility, coordination, etc. You must be strong in order to excel in all of these other domains. The converse is typically not true. It is important to keep this in mind as you set your goals.
• While it is better to have goals than not have any at all, you will be infinitely more successful if you write these goals down. Once written down, look at them regularly and work toward them. Checking things off of a physical list is a powerful positive reinforcement that will give your training drive.
• It cannot be emphasized enough: keep your goals written in a training journal.
• Goals should follow a progression. You want your goals to be both quantitative and qualitative. They should focus on your overarching aim: development of strength.
• Keeping the shoulders and shoulder blades operating optimally is the key to bodyweight strength success.
• The shoulder is the lynchpin of the upper body, just as the hip is for the lower body.
• The simplest method to maintain shoulder structural balance involves utilizing pull and push exercises, which will offset one another. This will allow you to maintain a healthy balance of strength and hypertrophy at the shoulder.
• Fundamentally, dips are one of the best upper-body pushing exercises for brute strength, and an excellent comparison would be that they are similar to an upper-body squat.
• Dips will help to build primary pushing strength and overall muscle volume, which ensures a good base for further exercises.
• In bodyweight and barbell training, most routines lack a proper amount of pulling exercises.
• Development of strength in active flexibility positions is the key to dominating bodyweight movements. These will drastically increase your body awareness and ability to control your muscles through all ranges of motion.
• It is important to keep structural balance consideration in mind, in order to keep your shoulders healthy. The shoulders are the lynchpin for the upper body in terms of strength development. Therefore, it is of utmost important to construct your entire routine around maintaining healthy shoulders.
• I prefer the push pull system for classifying different types of body weight exercises, as it is simple and effective.
• The key of any single workout is to have a high enough intensity and enough volume to stress the body so it will adapt to increase strength and hypertrophy. This is especially true if you are a beginner.
• Linear progression increases the intensity of the exercises relative to the number of repetitions by adding weight. This process of adding weight to the lifts with each new workout forces constant adaptations with every workout, so that both strength and muscle mass can be drastically increased.
• Once you stop progressing from workout to workout, consider more advanced concepts if you want to increase your capacity to grow stronger.
• Supercompensation is the concept that the combination of a few workouts that depress abilities more than normal will result in a rebound effect, which results in implements that might not be seen from a single workout.
• The training stimulus must pass a certain threshold to force good adaptations. This means you do enough to avoid undertraining, but not too much, which can actually cause so much damage that you do not gain any super compensatory effect at all. Again, less is often more.
• At the highest levels, the frequency of workouts will matter the most in gaining strength.
• You may have heard it said that strength is a skill.
• Repeating a certain movement over and over with progressive overload will lead to strength gains, which is why doing too many different exercises should be avoided if you want to gain strength.
• Programming is the concept of changing workout routines via intensity, volume, and frequency, which results in progressive overload.
• The previously athletic sedentary population is the most at-risk for tendonitis and other connective tissue injuries because their strength and muscle mass will come back rapidly. This will lead to quick progress, but connective tissue strength and integrity will lag.
• For those who are rehabilitated from an injury, a generally good rule of thumb is to continue to do rehabilitation exercises at the end of a routine. This ensures continued activity to the body part in question, which will help build resilience against further or additional injury.
• It is important to realize where you are and adapt your workouts accordingly, in order to prevent potential overuse injuries.
• There are three general types of routine structures used when training: full-body routines, splits, and body part splits.
• If your goal is hypertrophy, then full-body and split routines provide essentially the same result if the overall volume of muscle groups is similar.
• It is a simple truth that the more often you work the movements you want to master, the faster you will improve.
• Full-body routines add up over the course of a year and are therefore more effective compared to splits for beginner and intermediate level athletes.
• It is beneficial to give the muscles a rest between workouts.
• Isolation work is best utilized at opposite ends of the fitness spectrum: for injured or for elite athletes.
• If you are a beginner or intermediate athlete--as indicated by the strength progression charts--you should utilize a full-body routine with few exceptions.
• Since frequency is the key to making the faster progress toward your chosen goals, it is best to select a routine template that allows for the most frequency in the shortest time, as long as there are no injury concerns.
• The goal of a warm-up is to prime the body into an optimal state for your workout and address any deficiencies in movement.
• Burpees are an excellent choice [of warmup] because they are a full-body exercise that rapidly increases your heart rate. Additionally, they are easy to perform and carry a low risk of injury.
• The second critical component of a warmup is mobility work. A quick, short circuit of movements that focus on full range of movement to warm up the joints and surrounding tissues is the most useful.
• The main thing is that not just the muscles are prepared for exercise but also that the tendons, ligaments, cartilage, and joints are as well. This may require more repetitions and/or sets for some people than others.
• Never stretch statically for more than fifteen seconds. Stretching for longer than this may decrease your strength output during your workout. Three to four short stretches should take you about a minute.
• Skill and technique work should always take place after your warm-up. This is the optimal time for your body to learn new skills or new movement patterns.
• Good skill and technique practice should always be emphasized.
• With skill work, err on the side of caution: start with what feels like “too little” and add more if you need it.
• Those who start with too much skill work will have a difficult time identifying what is wrong if they are not progressing.
• Put in quality work, but don’t be afraid to quit if you are feeling fatigued or having an off day.
• A proper warm-up should cover three areas: blood flow, mobility, positional drills.
• The general template for an effective full-body strength routine includes two pushing exercises, two pulling exercises, and two legs.
• When aiming to build strength, there are two basic rules of thumb to follow when determining the number of repetitions per set for concentric exercises, with an additional rule for those seeking hypertrophy.
• The first is: perform your maximum repetitions, minus one. Three sets minimum.
• Studies suggest that if your primary goal is hypertrophy rather than strength you can perform your sets to failure.
• The second rule of thumb is called the rule of fifteen: Aim for a minimum of fifteen total repetitions per exercise.
• The optional rule of thumb (for hypertrophy); Beginners should aim for tens sets of exercise per muscle group.
• You should prioritize the exercises you perform to align with your goals.
• One last note is that paired sets should not be confused with supersets or drop sets.
• Hypertrophy is relatively similar for all tempos if the total time under tension or volume is the same. Whether you go slowly or fast with a weight, your muscles fibers are going to be fatigued at the end of the set if you perform it to failure.
• Be sure to work your core on both sides.
• Last set to failure is an interesting method of progression because it stays short of failure on all of the sets except the last one. This may be one of the more effective ways to progress with strength, as strength can be built effectively by staying short of failure.
• Periodization refers to any method used to vary the volume, intensity, and frequency of a workout to produce constant gains and avoid plateaus.
• It is vital to keep your joints, tendons, and muscles moving well. Good quality body tissues should not hurt or feel sore or painful when you apply pressure or message them.
• Your joints should feel good when you use them.
• Prehabilitation work refers to the part of your workout that is focused on injury prevention. Prehabilitation exercises are focused on correcting imbalances and preventing injuries from occurring by performing specific exercise on your weak links.
• The shoulder is a common joint where prehabilitation work may be needed.
• If your shoulders need additional stabilization exercise, perform exercises for your rotator cuffs or stability exercises such as Turkish get-ups for the glenohumeral joint.
• The main reason to place specific rehabilitation work at the end of the workouts is that performing these exercises before a workout will fatigue you.
• Connective tissues such as tendons, ligaments, and cartilage tend to respond better to higher repetition because of the increase in blood flow that assists with healing.
• For extremity joints such as the wrists, elbows, and knees, it is likely that wherever your discomfort or soreness is present, that is where the prehabilitation and isolation work need to be focused.
• The three most common causes of tightness in the back are pain, instability, or weakness.
• High-repetition kettlebell swings are known to help significantly with back tightness and pain. Why? Because kettlebell swings with light weights force your core muscles to stabilize your spine while simultaneously providing a stimulus for the back to become stronger under load. This corrects both instability and weaknesses at the same time.
• Stretching too much is akin to programming too  many exercises or putting too much volume in a work out. You become sore and may potentially lose any gains you have made. More is not always better. Focus on making small, incremental amounts of progress and maintaining the gains you have made.
• Higher repetitions are initially good for untrained beginners.
• You should focus your mobility and strength work on a few key areas: your shoulders, elbows, wrists, and thoracic spine.
• As a beginner, the most important key is consistency. A lack of consistency would be defined as performance workouts only once or twice a week, or skipping weeks entirely. If you are sporadic in your training, you will likely not progress.
• Deloading is an art. The goal is to supercompensation without losing the adaptations you have gained from the previous mesocycle by increasing the amount of rest you are allowing yourself.
• Keep whatever you do as simple as possible. Follow the KISS model--keep it simple, stupid. Make very few changes to your overall programming from cycle to cycle so you can see what affects your progress. This allows you to become a better programmer much faster, and it will also help you fall in making faster progress.
• Both ladders and pyramids are ways to drastically increase the volume of the number of repetitions of an exercise in a single session.
• High-intensity interval training (HITT) and similar techniques, like fartlek, are good ways to work all of the energy systems in your body because it depletes them very fast.
• Despite the fact that low-intensity steady state (LISS) endurance training is demonized by many, it remains the most effective way to increase aerobic capacity. There is a reason why every intermediate and long distance runner uses LISS training.
• The Pareto Principle (or 80/20 rule) tends to be a good rule of thumb for maintaining a balance between power, strength, and endurance in your workouts.
• If you are a strength and power athlete, 80% of your training should be devoted toward that, with 20% of your training devoted to walking or LISS cardio to promote recovery--and vice versa for endurance athletes.
• Be smart. You cannot do too many things at once. You have to prioritize what you want most out of life; otherwise, you will not be good at anything.
• When in doubt, seek advice from those more experienced than you. Do not be afraid to be humble. Accept that you do not know everything and can always learn more.
• Strength work is the foundation of athletic development. If you develop strength first, many other attributes and sport-specific skills will develop optimally [...]. Because everything builds on strength, it is the most important attribute for beginner and intermediate athletes to develop.
• Here is the “beginner routine” used as a standard by Gymkana, an exhibitional gymnastics group, for decades:
• Begin from hang
• Muscle-up to support
• L-sit
• Shoulder stand
• Come down to support
• Immediately roll back into inverted hang
• Back lever
• German hang pullout
• Swing to flyaway dismount
• Strength and conditioning are a fundamental aspect of various sports. Specifically, strength and conditioning are important for improving effectively and to prevent injury.
• The biggest gains that beginners should be concerned about is not overtraining, but performing too much volume in a single workout. This high volume is not necessarily more than a beginner can handle, but it can cause overuse injuries or inhibit optimal progression. Remember, more is not always better.
• The two most obvious symptoms of overtraining are a decrease in appetite and sleep quality.
• Removing aggravating exercises is more important than trying to use pain as a guide.
• Your body is trained by the things you do continually. If you teach your body to do negative things, it will learn these things and adjust accordingly--leading to injuries, poor posture, and poor movements.
• Movement is a critical factor right after an injury has occurred, even over rest.
• The RICE approach is the traditional model for injury treatment. The MEAT approach is an alternative model that is basically physical therapy rehabilitation in disguise. It is important to note that in the MEAT approach, physical therapy is indicated from day one or even day zero.
• You want as much early movement as you can get within your pain tolerance level.
• Mobilizing the area leads to much longer recovery times because your muscles begin to stiffen up and motor control quality decreases.
• MEAT: movement, exercise, analgesia, treatment
• The number one reason your muscles begin to atrophy (the opposite of hypertrophy) is immobility and disuse. Atrophy caused by immobility occurs very rapidly, often as soon as a week or two after restricting a joint due to injury.
• Always perform rehabilitation work for your injuries instead of avoiding them by programming other types of exercise to compensate.
• Skimping on sleep is a surefire way to decrease progress with both strength and hypertrophy. Sleep is vital for recovery.
• Sleep is the most anabolic time during the day.
• Tracking calories solves many weight loss issues, as most people routinely underestimate how many calories they actually consume each day, especially through liquids [...].
• Supplements should be just that--supplements to a good diet.
• The primary supplements that have been proven to work effectively are whey, creatine, casein, and BCAAs.
• Sleep quality and nutrition have a big influence on the body, so you should do everything you can to ensure you get enough sleep and sufficient nutrients from your food.
• In general, diet modulates weigh. Exercise modulates body composition. Nutrition quality is related to health and partly to weight. Exercise intensity improves speed of body composition changes.
• Weight gain and loss is a product of calories in and out.
• Get moving now and make adjustments as you go.
• Part of learning how to properly construct a solid routine is figuring out how your body responds to different exercises, and you cannot learn this from the advice of others.
• The number one predictor of an injury is a previous injury.
• Eliminating, reducing volume, and substituting exercises is a standard way to protect yourself from injury.
• Tendinitis is an overuse injury where the ability of the tendon to sustain a workload is insufficient.
• Tendinitis typically develops because connective tissues adapt slower than muscles.
• Avoiding injury-aggravating exercises will solve 95% of potential overuse injuries with no further steps needed.
• Reverse hyperextensions are particularly good for rebuilding strength, stability, and hypertrophy in the lower back. These can be used for prehabilitation prior to returning to classic compound exercises like squats and deadlifts. This exercise has a very high success rate. Light kettlebell swings can also be used effectively.
• Most exercises for improving posture/alignment focus on pulling the shoulders back and the neck in. These exercises are good, but they will not do much to improve alignment unless everything else in your body is also positioned properly.
• Hip mobility and flexibility is critical for bodyweight training.
• Hanging out in the bottom of the squat position can be effective for increasing bent leg flexibility in your hips and thighs, as well as your legs.
• Side-to-side squats can be particularly effective. Going back and forth between each leg works multiple muscles and can help stretch them if you steal into the squat.
• The spiderman stretch is another useful exercise for overall hip mobility.
• The movement that hits all of your thoracic and lumbar vertebrae is called the bridge. This is a staple in gymnastics.
• Performing thoracic extension mobility work should restore your ability to obtain full overhead flexion in your shoulder girdle.
• Mobilizing your lats with a foam roller is particularly good for opening up your shoulders and releasing tensions.
• The shoulder is the lynchpin of the upper body and its most mobile area. This means that there is a greater intentional injury at your shoulder joints than any other place in your upper body.
• Scapular wall slides are an excellent tool for mobilizing your tissues in retraction combined with elevation and depression.
• Band dislocates are another good choice for shoulder mobility. This exercise stretches all of your anterior shoulder muscles and your shoulder capsule.
• The chin-up position provides good conditioning for the elbows, a necessity for many straight-arm isometric exercises.
• Another good exercise to loosen up your shoulders is to change from the bar.
• Your elbows are relatively simple joints that do not need much as far as mobility and flexibility are concerned. However, it is important to perform proper rehabilitation work, as your elbows are particularly vulnerable to injuries.
• Wrist push ups are certainly a good exercise in terms of mobility and prehabilitation; however, they are not an “end-all, be-all” for wrist mobility.
• Any type of mobility/flexibility work that stretches your wrists is good, as is any work that strengthens your wrists.
• Five key areas: the hips, back, shoulders, elbows, and wrists.
• Proper handstand technique stacks all of your joints in alignment and reduces the mount of muscular effort required to perform the movement. This makes the handstand significantly easier, and also improves body awareness and positioning for other skills you will learn in bodyweight training.
• In the same way that the squat is foundational to human movement, handstands are one of the fundamental positions in body weight training.
• The handstand is the one skill that should be trained almost every day if you desire to become proficient in bodyweight training.
• Constant practice and refinement of handstand technique will yield consistent rewards in the future.
• Handstands are one of the most fundamental movements in gymnastics and bodyweight training as well.
• The most important factor in how skilled you can become at an exercise is how much you practice it. In this respect, you will be better at what you do more often.
• In gymnastics-based strength training, the back level is one of the first static strength-based movements you will learn. Working toward a solid back lever will prepare your body for many of the higher-level strength progressions, such as the iron cross.
• The German hang is one of the fundamental positions in gymnastics. It is primarily used to extensively stretch out your shoulders for more advanced skills like the manna. It is one of the primary starting positions used to condition elbow and shoulder connective tissues for more advanced rings and bar skills.
• [The German hang] is also a good stretch if your shoulders are inflexible.
• Skin the Cat is a colloquial term used in gymnastics for moving in and out of the German hang. It builds flexibility and strength in your shoulders for the back lever and other upper-level movements.
• [Skin the Cat] will enable you to build flexibility and strength in your shoulders and elbows and will condition your connective tissues as you build up to the back lever and more advanced movements.
• Rope climbs are a very good exercise for building grip strength and facilitating the development of overall pulling strength.
• Eccentrics are extremely effective with bodyweight exercises, especially pulling movements.
• The muscle-up is a fundamental movement that is very important for beginners to learn. Not only does the muscle-up get you above the rings, it also develops strength in your full range of motion through the pullup and dip positions.
• The ab wheel is not a lower back exercise. You should not be feeling it in your back. If you do, it is an indicator that your hip flexors-particularly your psoas major--are firing too much.
• Barbell exercises are superior to bodyweight exercises for both strength and hypertrophy for the legs.
• The two primary leg exercises recommended for bodyweight exercises are the pistol progression as well as the plunge into deep step up progression.
• The asian squat trains your body to get used to the bottom position of a squat again. [...] This position can be used to assess mobility and overall flexibility. Learning to move into and out of this position comfortably is not just good for maintaining flexibility and mobility but also for re-learning the foundations of human movement, which is helpful if you have been inactive for some time.
• [Cossack squats] are useful for lunges, deep step-ups, and pistols as it biases your weight onto either leg as you move from side to side. The goal is to eventually go down to the thigh-to-calf or butt-to-calf range for this exercise.
• Pistols or single-leg squats are the single-leg movement that many bodyweight practitioners use to improve their strength and hypertrophy.
• Once you have mastered bodyweight pistols, you can add weight to this progression to increase the difficulty level.