B Exercise Order

The speaker discusses the impact of Bill Starr, a strength coach, on the fitness industry. They mention Starr's book and his influence on exercise order. They also talk about the three-day total body templates that Starr and others have developed and the importance of considering exercise order in programming. The speaker discusses the limitations and gaps in different approaches to exercise order, including Starr's heavy, moderate, light method, Joe Ken's total body approach, and Mike Boyle's antagonist pairing sequencing. They emphasize the need for individualization and adaptation in programming and the importance of addressing structural balance. The speaker concludes by highlighting the importance of testing and objectively evaluating exercise order and the need for ongoing evolution and improvement in programming. They encourage trying different programs to gain a better understanding of their pros and cons. We talked about this with the principals, but Bill Starr had a pretty profound impact on the industry. If you're not familiar with Bill Starr, he authored the book, Stronger Shall Survive, signed Gravity, he was a strength coach for the University of Hawaii, Baltimore, Colts at the time, and finished off at Johns Hopkins. So, I actually got to start at York Barbell. Great research done by Bill, amazing insights, amazing innovation, but honestly, when we look at Starr, I think we got to really look at the circle that he created for exercise order. And I don't want to go too down the rabbit hole on Bill Starr, per se, but I think it's important that we see a lot of the origin story for a lot of these three-day total body templates that dictate a lot of how we structure exercise order. We can look at NSEA and their exercise order as well, which is gonna be more from Boyd Epley type of tree, but still, I think there's a dynamic at play where we look at, can we improve the quality of our programming through simply going back through the backlog of where a three-day total body program came from? So, if you recall, Starr's program was a heavy-moderate light of squat, bench, and deadlift. So, the heavy version of squat would be like a back squat, a moderate version would be a front squat, and the light version like a split squat. And then we can look at the deadlift, that would be a chop bar deadlift, a maybe traditional deadlift, or snap strip deadlift, or then an RDL, and then, or we could go a single-leg RDL and keep with the theme of that. So, maybe we would go deadlift, RDL, single-leg RDL in terms of heavy, moderate, and light, and then bench would be flat bench, inclined bench, overhead press, right? Let's make this point really clear that there was a lot of gaps in this programming, right? And there's a lot of things that we need to unpack here, because one of the areas we talked about was it's total body, that upper body is just upper body pressing, and pulling wasn't necessarily as well thought of, right? And there's an element of, since you're deadlifting, you're engaging the lats, you're engaging the retractors, so there's an element that you really don't need to worry about doing too much upper back work, which, you know, I think we've kind of stand corrected at this point in history, but that was a big thought. As it progressed through, you can kind of look at this exercise order following this heavy, moderate, light of each one of those versions, and then finishing off maybe a little bit of shoulder or hamstring corrector for extra work, as we might here phrase it, and you're done. You can see how that impacted someone like Joe Kan and pure system in the actual breakdown, right? You look at Joe Kan, it's like, if you always start with a heavy version of a movement, so total body, upper body push, lower body push, and then it goes into the more moderate version, and then it goes into the lighter version, right? You can see how that really made a big difference in Joe Kan's programming, it's really similar. It's good, and it was taking this next level of saying, instead of focusing on a heavy, moderate, light, it's saying it's prioritizing this dynamic of each one of these big core movement patterns used to be focused on the beginning of a workout, and then we need to have stamina for our body parts, or we need to have performance for our body parts, quote, unquote, later in the game. And that's a good approach as well, because it makes you think about what we talked about in principles of exercise order isn't a foregone conclusion of the most power oriented thing has to go first, right? Or the rapid onset movement pattern that we need to create with like head ball tosses, or throws, or plyos. You know, there is a case to be made about, okay, well, there's a potentiating effect, there's a, what is our performance level midway through the workout, or towards the end of the workout? You know, it goes into a lot of dynamics that Joe kind of talked a lot about in peer system was this notion that we have to do certain exercises first is not absolute law, right? And that's why we don't consider it a principle that we will use plyos after squat movement. We will use things in certain orders to create a different effect. Like we talked about John Meadows' program, we talked about with Bill Starr's program, that there's a dynamic at play that not everything has to be etched into, we need to do our Olympic lift first, we need to do our lower body pushing movement second, we need to do this movement third, and then boom, we're done with the workout. It's just not that foregone, you know? And, you know, I think one of the issues that you look at a lot of the pedagogy processes, like polyquin system, or something else out there like that, it creates a little bit of a dogmatic effect of everyone is hanging in the balance of something that someone says, and then they go, well, it kind of, there's a little nuance to that, it depends, and it's just the whole world collapses underneath them. You know, and that's tough. It's tough for a lot of people. And then it goes into this last one of Mike Boyle's three-day program. So if you ever read Advances in Functional Training for Sport or Functional Training for Sport, he has his traditional three-day program, which is always the same, essentially, like order, but instead of looking at it from heavy, moderate, or light, or total body, lower body, upper body, what Mike would look at it in terms of prioritizing antagonist pairing. And he would give a lot of credit to Charles Poliquin, where he got this idea from, but so you're gonna do a lower body push with an upper body vertical pull. You're gonna do a lower body pull, and if it's knee dominant or hip dominant with an upper body vertical push. You know, and you kind of look at that through this. Mike was one of the first ones to really categorize movements into horizontal and vertical vectors, or hip and knee dominant. And obviously, taking it a little step further, looking at it from, can we look at unilateral, can we look at posterior chain of like this hip and knee dominant, can we look at single leg unsupported, and looking at it less about what is the capacity to load, more about what is their capacity to benefit, and having structural balance built in, baked into your program by having these antagonist pairs, upper and lower, having this approach of saying it's equally important as we load up the distal fibers of the hamstring by doing knee dominant posterior chain work as opposed to hip dominant all the time. He really created a platform that I think really shook the foundation of programming, and I think really put us in a much better spot to understand how to implement this in a group setting. And I think that's a problem most people really barely always forget, is Mike works with hundreds and hundreds of athletes every single year, thousands of athletes, and the folks out there working at one-on-one or have 10 clients, your problems are just simply not at scale as what Boyle would deal with. So when he comes up with a three-day total body program, you've vetted in this process of working with thousands of people that need to get a workout in a very efficient and safe manner, as well as on top of it, you need to perform. And I think that's the process too as we start to break down training programs and looking at what we do. This is back and forth. We're constantly teasing in and out of how can I squeeze as much from this program as possible from performance standpoint and injury reduction standpoint, as well as what can I do efficiently and at scale, right? Like if I work in a team setting and I have, let's say, 10 teams, and they're all coming in all the time because they love what they're doing with me, you're gonna have to figure out how to scale your systems. It's just a simple fact of the matter is if you have 10 teams, it's probably gonna be either overlapping than working at the same time, or your day's really long. And if you have a double team working at the same time, and you have a very nuanced and very, very complicated program, then there's gonna be a lot of missing or a lot of gaps of what you do on a daily basis. And I think there's an element that when you find a quote-unquote system let's say that you are a firm advocate of doing Boyle's three-day total body program, and everyone kind of settles into this routine, right? They start to flow from one thing to the next. They might actually be better from the training monotony of that system. And then you just fill it down and simplify it into a certain set rep tempo or intensity scheme, progressive overload scheme. And your athletes kind of get into this, okay, we're training three days a week. They have a good grasp of where we need to be, what we need to do when we're there. And then on top of it, we can go into the dynamics of we can train consistently and effectively the way we want and get what we want from that training so we can best prepare our athletes over time. And I think there's an element that we need to really appreciate when we look at that type of workload where we have so many people that we have to accommodate at any given time that we have to really think that maybe we need to figure out the best way to train them is to find a very scalable and repeatable system. And when we look at exercise order, and this is the whole point of this, is we have a couple different models that we can kind of wean in on. All right, we have Bill Starr's heavy, moderate, light. We have Joe Ken's total body, and then total body, lower body, upper body focus. And then we can have Mike Boyles of this antagonist pulse sequencing, antagonist pairing, sequencing throughout the three-day total body program of vertical, horizontal, or knee-dominant, hip-dominant, or bilateral, unilateral. And you kind of figure out which one you resonate with the most and which one makes the most sense for you. And we can break down, too, of like, hey, there's gonna be gaps with something like only focusing on the heavy, moderate, and light version of lower body push, upper body push, and lower body hip-dominant pull, right? We're gonna see some training deficiencies in the hamstrings of the knee-dominant pull area, like the distal fibers. We're gonna see upper back weakness. Same thing with Joe Ken's tier system is you're always prioritizing total body, lower body, upper body. So you're either gonna make more of a gap of this hamstring-quad type of structural balance or anterior-posterior chain. We might see a anterior-posterior chain imbalance of upper body pull versus lower body, upper body push. So we can see some structural balance there issues. But then we can also see the limitations of Mike Boyle, where maybe you can't squeeze out as much from those individual exercises, right? So it's the less prioritization of three exercises and more equally split stress and focus. But there might be some gaps in terms of absolute ability from those three exercises. And that's, I think that's the rub here. I think that's what you gotta figure out. And I think that's the thing about exercise order that you have to figure out. Like we talked about with principles. Sometimes there's a motor learning capacity that we need to focus on the things we need to improve most early. Sometimes there's a performance capacity where we need to focus on developing the things that aren't as obvious, but are really necessary. Exercise order is one that as we break down, hey, I'm a system person. I'm a three-day total body guy. I do this every single day. My athletes need to know where they're at. And we have a certain comfort and flow that really makes this thing operate and work. It's great. It's awesome. And I think that's really valuable. But what are you leaving on the table if you want to utilize a strategy of post-activation potentiation or this strategy of a pre-fatigue or post-fatigue or the strategy of maybe developing movement patterns in a certain order to prioritize motor learning or structural balance or working a higher priority thing? And I think as we start to look at just the nature of the beast of working in a team setting or the one-on-one setting or the dialed-in screening going into this general blueprint and we adapt the program to meet the needs of the athlete, but not necessarily adapting the program to meet the individual needs, there's an element that we always need to say that nothing's ever gonna be a perfect solution to a very complex problem. And we just figure out the best thing we can do in that situation. And we work like hell to make it effective for that athlete. And we revisit and we try to appreciate that. No system is perfect and all systems need some sort of evolution and embedment. But on the other end, that's kind of the fun part, that there's really smart folks like Star, Ken, Boyle that came to this conclusion of, this is the style of programming I like to use and that's great, but we know that there's gaps, we know there's limitations. We also know that in your setting that there's areas that you can improve upon and we know that there's gonna be gaps and limitations in your program just as well as there is mine. What the question would be is not whether we have gaps or limitations. The question is, do we realize that and are we doing things to address it in a systematic way or in a very deliberate and focused way? I can tell you my program of focusing on push, pull, hinge, and squat, broken up into a three-day total body split, has some limitations. And that might mean certain equipment, right? So for instance, we do Nordic hamstring curl assessments on everyone and we found that posterior chain strength is weak, especially in the dominant hamstring focus type of dynamic. So as I start to break down what do I need to do for my athletes, okay, well I need to directly address that and then you can get a pro leg curl. Maybe I need to find better progressions for people to be able to do a Nordic or a closed ham. And as I start to look at that, okay, like that makes me a better coach. As I start to look at things like people being able to do a pull-up or an up-standing pull-up, I've written articles about this, but I don't believe we should be doing band-assisted vertical pulling. It doesn't match the strength curve. It doesn't really help people the way we think it does. It's more of an enabler, people taking the path of least resistance. And then the final part, it's honestly like, I don't think as safe and as innocuous as people may think of this. I don't think people, I think people take for granted how unsafe that activity really is. On the other end though, I focus on eccentric and isometric. Is that moving the needle as much as humanly possible to getting someone to be able to do a pull-up? And I could argue, well, I have a lot of inverted rows, a lot of horizontal rowing movements. I have a lot of vertical pulls of the cable. I have a lot of isometrically eccentric load. I test twice a year and we can see every year, every six months, we're making tremendous progress, so the program works. But that always comes into the question of like, all right, for vertical pulling, do we have enough options? Can we progressively overload this effectively? Can we externally load this effectively? Can we progress this? As effectively as we want. And I don't go into the notion of like, there's no such thing as a bad exercise, but I also don't fully believe that all exercises are attainable and capable by everyone. I think that's a farce. I think that's something that's not realistic because if you work with anyone, you realize that there are exercises that are not really beneficial. And if I can externally load them faster with a movement that it can be successful more immediately, I should do that. And the way I teach certain squatting patterns is gonna be more anterior chain. You know, I genuinely believe that we need to create, focus on structural balance first and foremost. So the notion of like a mark, rip a toe, saying I'll push your butt back and connect it with the hamstrings and then before you don't need to do any direct hamstring work is kind of a farce. It's kind of a missing a big point. That biomechanically, when you start to axial load something and you're fixing the torso and you start to push your torso back and knee down, knee flex position, now it's neurologically confusing and it's honestly not creating enough tension in certain muscle groups. And it's where you see people get really bad outcomes from tendinopathies, stress related things like low back pain and taking an exercise that in theory should have good practical application and making it less than is, is limiting to a program and what it should be. You know, and I look at the future of my programming and it's gonna be predicated off of testing objectively and saying, is my exercise order effective? Is what I'm doing from an order perspective getting the most from every single exercise, yes or no? And if it's not, then I need to revisit the order or the way I prioritize certain things over others. That's the inconvenient truth there. That if I see changes in cross-sectional area, if I see, if I see development in certain movement patterns that are hopefully gonna be more global and more representative of good programming, if I see, if I see just overused things or structural imbalance problems, people start to break down certain things like elbow tendinopathies and knee tendinopathies, if I just see shoulder and hip issues, if I start to see low back issues, these are all physical manifestations of poorly structured exercise order and prioritization of something and deprioritization of something else. And when I'm thinking about exercise order, I go all the way back to Bill Starr, there's like, are we developing these movement patterns equally and systemically over time, right? The heavy, moderate, light version of a lower body push, upper body push and lower body pull is predicated off, that was in mind, those three exercises that were complete and whole, which is, I think it's fine to think that, like I think it's okay to say that these are exercises that are very systemically valuable. I disagree with the notion that that's total body, but the truth is, is that if you're equally allocating stress based off the thing that you think is holistic and total, you have figured out exercise order and structural balance and created a program that creates long-term systemic benefit. That is programming. That is focusing on developing systems and evolving your program to meet the needs of the ever-changing athlete. That is what we're trying to accomplish here when we look at creating a order of exercises that we know will make someone better every single time. We'll stop there. Let's check out the case study next week and dive into some of Bill's stuff, dive into some of Boyle's stuff, dive into some of Joe Kent's stuff. There's amazing resources out there and if you can kind of look at these guys or women and say, there's the element that I can learn a ton from this, you're gonna really benefit a lot. And I always say, too, you don't know a program is bad until you try it. I know that things are really sacrilegious and you can't start to eat those, but I really believe that the best way to understand something is to go through it yourself. Try out Boyle's program, try out Kent's program, try out Starr's program, and say, okay, what are the pros and cons here? And then ask yourself, can I implement this with one person? Can I implement this with 100 people? And if it makes sense, if it's intuitive, if you're working with a one-on-one and they're like, why are we doing this order? Why are we doing this? Maybe just an inquisitive person or maybe it just doesn't make sense and you're not explaining it well enough. And I think that's where exercise order is something you should really consider as well is if you're gonna take that one conversation with that one person who doesn't understand why you're doing it and you're the ambassador of that program, it's probably not gonna fractal out to 100 people, at least not the way you want. All right, stop there. Let's take a look at the module. Make sure that you're diving into all the resources that are supporting this and yeah, let's keep cranking.