Why Your Training Program Sucks

(And How to Make It Better)

By Dan Covert

(Feel free to skip to the bottom for a “TL;DR” summary)

“Are You Talking About My Program?”

Hang around any commercial gym long enough and you’ll see the same familiar faces slaving away day-in and day-out with little-to-no results for their effort. It has always been astounding to me how many people just accept this lack of progress while continuing to dedicate so much of their time and energy to the gym, seemingly never stopping to think, “I don’t think I’m doing this right”. While training is truly one of my favorite things to do, if it didn’t produce any results, I’m not sure how long I’d remain motivated to spend hours of my life each week doing it and planning my life around it.

Whether you know it or not, every time you step into the gym, you’re an athlete playing a sport. If you wanted to get good at any other sport, you’d work with a coach. To learn to throw or hit a baseball well, you’d get a pitching or batting coach; the same principle applies to tennis, football, golf, or any other sport. For some reason, however, when guys walk into a gym, they act as if they know exactly what they’re doing, even when they have no actual clue (and no, doing what your favorite “fitness influencer” or bodybuilder said doesn’t qualify you).

This is just foolish, and it’s costing you not only your time and your gains, but possibly even your long-term joint health. I know from experience, because when I started out, I was that guy, and I wasted several years and beat the hell out of my body before I finally decided to begin educating myself to get results.

If you’re beyond your first 6-12 months in the gym and you’re not slowly and steadily getting stronger, losing fat, building muscle, and feeling better overall, this article is going to be eye-opening for you. Likewise, if you’re dealing with joint pain, I’m here to tell you that this is not simply “the cost of training hard” or “just what happens when you get older”. Instead, it is a direct result of poor programming on multiple levels.

So why exactly does your program suck? Let’s break it down…

Failure to Progressively Overload

No matter what you’re training for or what your program looks like, if you’re not getting progressively and measurably stronger over time, you won’t get results. This is called the principle of progressive overload, and it’s a core principle (perhaps the core principle) of exercise science. While getting long-term gains can be a bit more nuanced than this (especially for advanced lifters), the crux of the truth is that whether you’re training for aesthetic goals, performance, rehab/prehab, or strength itself, you must aim to continually get stronger.

Oftentimes, those training for purely physique-related goals will say, “I don’t care about strength”, while failing to understand that building strength in the appropriate rep range in conjunction with eating a slight caloric excess is physiologically how muscles grow. Even if your goal is simply to “tone up” (a misleading word which just means muscle growth/preservation + fat loss), stimulating muscle growth is the most effective and sustainable long-term stimulus for continued fat loss. And for those who want to get rid of chronic pain, once a joint can express full mobility, building strength is how you bulletproof it.

When you’re a beginner in the gym going from 0 to 1, progressive overload can happen every workout if you’re doing everything right, but once you force enough adaptation to earn your stripes as an intermediate to advanced lifter, it becomes a bit more difficult and a less linear process. This is where protocols such as periodization schemes become important for managing loading, volume, and intensity week-to-week to keep you progressing and remaining healthy.

It’s important to note that progressively overloading doesn’t have to mean always increasing weight, especially if absolute strength isn’t your goal. You can also progressively overload by moving the same weight for more reps/sets, resting for less time between sets, focusing on more exaggerated tempos, etc., so long as you’re gradually introducing a greater stimulus to the body. While there are many roads to Rome, the point is, a plan for progressive overload must be in place to support whatever your goal is.

Using a Suboptimal Training Split

Several decades ago, when bodybuilding and the multi-billion dollar industry built around it successfully captured the narrative on all things related to weight training, your favorite bodybuilder made it fashionable to work each body part by itself once per week. While this may work for him and those who are genetically gifted and anabolically-enhanced (pretty much anything will work for those guys), that doesn’t mean it works for you - and it’s actually most likely hurting your gains.

Modern exercise science studies have repeatedly demonstrated that for the vast majority of natural lifters with average muscle-building genetics, frequency beats volume (and since you’re reading this, the overwhelming odds are that this is you). Put simply, this means that the more often you can train a muscle, the better results you’re going to get. Logically, this makes sense; if you want to get good at anything, doing it more days per week will get you better with faster results than doing it less days per week, even if the duration per exposure is shorter. This is also the case when it comes to strength training, regardless of the goal.

To increase frequency, however, we have to take the recovery ability of muscles, joints, and the nervous system into account. This means that you won’t be able to hit each muscle group from a dozen different angles with a dozen different exercises and a high volume of sets and reps - and the good news is, you don’t have to.

Contrary to popular belief, that amount of volume and level of precision is simply not necessary, and that style of training is reserved for highly competitive physique athletes who are performance-enhanced and have literally reached the pinnacle of their genetics (as well as human genetics, in general), which were already superior to begin with. Professional bodybuilders are akin to professional athletes, dedicating their lives to a sport where every little muscle striation and pose under the stage lights matters in order to be competitive. People seem to intuitively understand that they could never run like their favorite NFL player or dunk like their favorite NBA player, but this same logic is lost when it comes to trying to look like their favorite bodybuilder.

I’ve been training for over a decade and my upper body still doesn’t look as good as Arnold’s did even as a teenager, long before the steroids and 2-hour Mr. Olympia workouts.

(Fun fact: He trained Reg Park’s full body program 3x/week to get the majority of his foundation.)

Most people also aren’t aware that the body adapts and changes after training while recovering, and not actually during training in the gym. The training is simply the stimulus, and the goal is to provide the minimum effective stimulus for change by aiming to progressively overload slightly more than the previous training session, rest, and recover to hit the muscle again as soon as possible. This should be in 2-5 days, depending on various factors such as program design, age/training age, strength levels, and recovery protocols, but if you’re constantly providing more of a training stimulus than your body can handle, you’re never fully recovering, and your body can never optimally adapt and change.

My clients typically strength train 3-4 days per week on a full body and/or upper body/lower body split, and I have personally trained 3 full body days for most of my lifting career with excellent results, including when I was at my biggest, leanest, and strongest. For most guys, if you can’t produce a training effect in 3-4 sessions per week with 1-3 top sets of 1-2 exercises per muscle group, you’re simply not adhering to progressive overload, not training the right exercises, doing a bunch of junk volume and not hitting your work sets hard enough, or not recovering properly.

I’ve coached many guys over the years who have found it difficult initially to believe the fact that training one body part per week with 3-5 sets of 6-8 exercises is not only not necessary, but very often counterproductive. The majority of lifters will find that doing all that volume is eventually going to beat up joints and wear down the nervous system, both of which will make gains literally impossible, while leaving you feeling miserable in the process. Some “hardgainers”, like myself when I started out, simply won’t even grow from this style of training. As I’ve said for many years now, “If you want to build your body, don’t train like a bodybuilder.”

Designing a program to train each body part one day per week is also a bit misleading and has never made sense to me, because every time you train your chest, for example, you’re also training your shoulders and triceps as well. Likewise, when training your back, you’re working biceps and even providing some additional volume for your shoulders. It becomes obvious that there really is no clean way to isolate one particular muscle group, so you just end up doing too much volume for everything and wearing yourself down.

When it comes to reps, generally speaking, working in a 5-12 rep range on most exercises (with up to 15 reps on some smaller isolation movements) is going to produce the best all-around results for most people. While not a hard and fast rule, you should train slightly lower in this range when it comes to heavier, more technical lifts and/or if you’re younger in age/training age, and slightly higher in this range on smaller, lighter exercises and/or if you’re an older lifter in age/training age.

One last point that comes with modifying your training split is to stop spending 2 hours in the gym. Excluding a proper warm-up (more on this to come), you should be lifting weights for 60 minutes max, and always before any cardio or conditioning (NEVER after). Training for any longer than this risks cutting into your recovery time by way of possible overtraining at the level of the nervous system, as well as the endocrine system. Cortisol spikes after training hard for longer than about 45-60 minutes, for example, which is an enemy of muscle gain, fat loss, and overall recovery. This matters especially for those who have to work harder for gains than those who are genetically more fortunate.

Poor Exercise Selection

I like to call this one “majoring in the minors”. So many people waste their time pissing around with too many isolation movements and machines because they believe that feeling a “burn” is what counts, so I’m here to tell you that it doesn’t. The overwhelming majority of guys just need to get stronger at free weight, compound movements, regardless of what they’re training for.

Compound movements are those that involve multiple joints, and thus work multiple muscle groups - think presses, rows, pull-ups/chin-ups, squats, deadlifts, etc. Isolation movements, on the other hand, are those that only involve one joint and one target muscle group, such as bicep curls, lateral raises, calf raises, etc.

Examples of Compound Movements

While isolation movements do have a place in many programs (especially in intermediate to advanced programs), they shouldn’t make up more than around 20-30% of your workout. If you're a beginner just training for a better physique and overall health, you really don’t need many of them, and you’ll get far more mileage out of spending your first 1-2 years mastering and getting stronger at the basic compound lifts.

Although some exercise science nerds will argue in favor of studies that show that programs consisting of all-compound vs. all-isolation movements produce similar results, I can look across virtually every discipline in health and medicine and cite data that demonstrates all kinds of outcomes that don’t produce the same results in practice.

Dig into these exercise science studies and you’ll find that most of the subjects were inexperienced lifters and only studied for 8-12 weeks. A novice lifter can gain muscle his first few months of training from doing just about anything, but anybody who has trained consistently for years and achieved long-term results will tell you (including your favorite bodybuilder) that if you put a gun to their head and told them they could only pick 5 movements to train forever, most or all of them would be the tried-and-true compound lifts like bench presses, rows, squats, and deadlifts. When I was deadlifting 500 lbs as a powerlifter, I was doing zero direct bicep work, yet my biceps were the biggest they’ve ever been.

There is also ample evidence demonstrating that free weight, compound movements that allow for higher loads produce the greatest training effect by way of increasing neuromuscular demand. This essentially means that when the nervous system senses the demand to move a heavy load proportional to its own mass while being forced to stabilize the body in space, it produces the maximum amount of muscle recruitment, imprinting the effort firmly into the recovery process to force adaptation. It’s the body’s way of saying, “This load is heavier than I am and I could fall over while trying to move it, so I’d better make sure I remember how to move it at all costs”, given that the nervous system’s primary goal is survival. All experienced lifters know anecdotally that exercises using barbells, dumbbells, kettlebells, and bodyweight are superior for packing on muscle mass and developing overall strength and performance, and this concept explains why this is the case.

The last important part of exercise selection is to place an emphasis on training functional movements. Although the term “functional” has become somewhat of a misunderstood gimmick in fitness culture these days, its scientific origin refers to movements that express and train joints (and subsequently, muscles) in the way in which they function in real life. Without diverting into an entire advanced kinesiology lesson on why this is the case, just know that it is imperative to emphasize training the types free weight, compound movements I've previously named, such as pushes, pulls, squats, deadlifts, etc., including things like single-leg movements and loaded carries.

These types of movements not only provide the highest return for accumulating strength, muscle mass, and overall performance, but also keep you healthy by training your body in the way life demands it to move. When it comes to the health of joints, there is a “use it or lose it” component that isolation movements and machines simply do not integrate the way free weight, compound movements do. In addition, while bilateral movements (those using 2 arms and/or 2 legs) are undoubtedly useful for building muscle, unilateral (single-limb) exercises provide the highest return when it comes to functional carry-over, because just about every activity in life takes place on one leg and one arm at a time.

To illustrate an example of how valuable unilateral movements are no matter what your goal is, I have gained more muscle mass, strength, athletic ability, and overall joint health from training split squat variations than I ever did from training the back squat. Current exercise science data is corroborating this, with studies demonstrating that athletes who only trained the rear-foot elevated split squat maintained or even increased their max-effort back squat, while those who only trained the back squat did not increase their max-effort split squat.

When taking into consideration that the split squat can produce greater overall and functional strength by way of mimicking stride during walking and running, combined with the fact that it can produce the same or greater training effect as a back squat with only a fraction of the external spinal loading, it becomes easy to see the true power of functional strength training.

Rear-Foot Elevated Split Squat

Training to Failure

While you generally do NOT want to train to failure, it is important to first define the term “failure” in this context. When it comes to strength training, there are two different forms of failure:

• Mechanical failure - the inability to physically complete another rep

• Technical failure - the inability to compete another rep without a breakdown in form and/or rep speed

In this case, we’re referring to avoiding mechanical failure, training right up to the point of technical failure. In other words, once form begins to break down and/or reps start to become slower and more grinding, the set is over. A good way to conceptualize this is to make sure your last rep looks similar to your first, albeit a little slower, and obviously subjectively harder.

The reason for this way of training comes back to the inability of the nervous system in an average, non-enhanced lifter to recover week-in and week-out when constantly training to mechanical failure. We also have to take joints into consideration and the fact that tendons and ligaments simply cannot recover nearly as fast as muscle tissue does. Anyone who has ever dealt with tendonosis or tendonitis knows how long these types of wear-and-tear injuries can take to heal, and if you happen to tear a ligament or labrum from pushing too hard, you’re out for months, returning to an uphill battle to ever get the joint feeling 100% again.

Current exercise science data shows clearly that mechanical failure is not needed to produce muscle growth, and especially when it comes to training for strength and/or performance, missing reps is counterproductive. What is needed is progressive overload over time with optimal intensity and time under tension, which equates to stopping a rep or two shy of mechanical failure, or right at the point of technical failure, in the rep ranges I laid out earlier in the article.

When it comes to smaller isolation movements (bicep curls, lateral raises, calf raises, etc.), training a bit closer to absolute, mechanical failure is fine here and there, but not routinely, and never beyond it. This is because the smaller the exercise and the less load used (especially if the load isn’t loading the spine), the easier it is for the nervous system to recover. On bigger, compound exercises such as presses, pulls, deadlifts, squats, etc., steer clear of mechanical failure - your gains and and your joints will thank you.

Skipping a Proper Warm-Up

Most people, including so many “trainers” out there, think that “warming up” simply means walking on the treadmill or doing some jumping jacks to break a sweat and get the heart rate elevated. While this approach isn’t inherently wrong, it’s largely incomplete and doesn’t account for the need to mobilize and warm-up specific joints. As with most aspects of health and fitness, it also may not be right for you, as it totally ignores those who actually need to downtrain the nervous system before lifting.

While common sense says to fire-up the nervous system to prepare for a hard strength training session, many lifters actually need to first bring their sympathetic (or “fight or flight”) nervous system tone down a notch. This is due to the direct correlation between carrying life stress (especially in conjunction with having a “type A” personality) and existing in extension-based postures that can produce joint dysfunction and ultimately can lead to pain.

For these types of individuals, the most important and almost always-overlooked thing to do before training is positional breathing. While fully explaining positional breathing would steer this article down a rabbit hole of explaining the anatomy and kinesiology of proper core training (something most people have no idea about; hint - it’s not crunches), for now, understand that true “core strength" and the health of every single joint in your body begins with your breath; specifically, your diaphragm.

When we carry prolonged stress, as most of us tend to, our posture reflects it, and you'll almost always see active people with a lower back that arches excessively (an extension-pattern known as hyperlordosis), the bottom ribs flared upwards and outwards, and an overall "military" posture. This causes poor positioning of the diaphragm, compromising its ability to produce fully expansive breathing. Joints “downstream” in the kinetic chain then get “stuck” around the subsequently faulty-positioned spine, ribcage, and pelvis, and strengthening into this type of posture reinforces it, which can ultimately cause joint pain.

The solution to this almost-universal posture is to train the breath in specific positions that help modulate out of these states prior to training. You can find a good starter positional breathing exercise to incorporate before your training here on my YouTube channel. For many people, getting full breath cycles in this position can be deceptively difficult initially, illustrating just how far from optimal most people’s breathing mechanics are.

In addition to positional breathing, soft tissue work via foam and/or lacrosse ball rolling and getting specific joints moving is crucial, especially in joints that don’t move so well, which requires a proper movement screening to determine for you, specifically. When you mobilize joints that are lacking, you “open a window” for about 30 minutes where those joints will express a better range of motion, and you take this into your strength training program. I can’t think of a single case of chronic lower back pain I’ve helped that didn’t involve addressing diaphragm function and hip and/or thoracic spine mobility, nor can I think of a case of elbow or neck pain that didn’t come with a thoracic spine and/or shoulder mobility restriction.

Shout-out to my mentor, Coach Boyle at MBSC,

creator of the Joint-by-Joint Approach

and the OG/GOAT of functional strength training.

While some people are at least aware that training mobility keeps joints healthy and pain-free, very few understand that it can also make you markedly stronger and help grow certain muscles better. This is because a muscle’s ability to lengthen and contract is a function of joint movement, and if a joint motion is restricted, the muscle that corresponds to it cannot lengthen and contract fully to fire optimally.

This is particularly common when it comes to firing and growing the pecs and glutes, for example, as these muscles are often neurally inaccessible as a result of the things I’m discussing in this section. I’ve worked with many clients who couldn't feel or grow either of these muscle groups until we mobilized certain joints and taught them how to execute proper breathing strategies in order to create inside-out, functional core stability and “hold” the proper positioning at the spine, ribcage, and pelvis for the muscles to fire.

I can count on less than one hand the number of people I’ve seen execute a proper warm-up before training in any commercial gym I've ever been to. Those who can stay healthy and continually make gains are fortunate, but I wouldn’t recommend leaving it to chance (and in my experience, most of them will eventually get hurt, even if not until years down the road).

No matter what your goal is, if you’re serious about your training, I cannot stress enough how important it is to properly warm-up for longevity in the gym as well as gains. Spending 15-30 minutes properly preparing your body for training will benefit you for the rest of your life.

Key Takeaways ("TL;DR")

• Above all, you must be progressively overloading in order to get bigger, stronger, leaner, pain-free - whatever your goal is. This is a “101” principle of exercise science that simply isn’t optional.

• Frequency + Intensity > Volume for the average lifter. Not only do you not need a dozen exercises, sets, and reps per body part, but it’s probably hurting your gains, as well as your joints, in the long-run. Stop focusing on one body part per workout and instead train full body and/or an upper body/lower body split 3-4 days per week for no longer than 60 minutes with greater efficiency.

• 70-80% of your exercise selection should be free weight, compound, functional movements, no matter what your goal is. Isolation exercises and certain machines have a place, but they are not the backbone of an effective program.

• Stop training to failure - you’re sacrificing your joints, your nervous system, and your gains.

• A proper warm-up including positional breathing, soft tissue work, and targeted joint mobility for your individual restrictions isn’t optional in order to keep your joints pain-free and your nervous system healthy long-term, and it might even help you “unlock” muscles you struggle to grow.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1TDa1j5kfW4