 Our next caller is Hailey from London. Hailey, how can we help you? Hey guys, thanks for having me on. So basically, what I want to know is how can I effectively plan my own training programs? So, through lockdown, I've had like programs made for me by my own PT. But when the gyms finally reopen here, I want to be able to go in there. Just having made my own programs to follow. So I have just completed my personal training course, which I just did for my own benefit. So now I just want to put it to really good use. So I suppose how do I factor in workouts that help me reach my goals, which is like overall strength and building those glutes. But then I also don't want to overlook their least favorite training, which is upper body. No, no, really good question. Can't wait to see you try and answer this, consider how nuanced this is. I don't know so much. So here's something that's just an inconvenient truth, I think, around exercise and workout programming. Certifications definitely can help. Unfortunately, workout programming is mainly an experience thing. It really is. There's so many different moving parts into workouts. I'm sure you could put together a general routine that won't hurt you and that'll get you a lot of the way there. But to really take it to the next level, it's going to require a lot of experience. So here's the advice that I'm going to give you, Hailey. I would suggest looking at other well-written programs by coaches and trainers. So for example, the maps programs, great place to look. Maybe your favorite trainers. We created those. Mark Ripitow has got some good workout programs. I would look at strength coaches who train lots of athletes and work with lots of people and see how they're designing the workouts. Start following some of those pre-written workouts and then start listening to your body. Workout programming really is much more complicated, I think, than people can realize. How about this, though? I mean, we could talk about volume. Ideally, what the studies say as far as how much volume per week, so how many sets that you should be doing per exercise. We can talk about the prioritizing, the big movements, like compound lifts. So we could talk about frequency, what's ideal frequency. So there's some things that I feel like we can give her that will help her move in that direction, although it is very easy. Well, so studies will show that right around 12 sets total per body part per week is where people tend to do the best. But again, these are general, right? It's based off of studies. You can be one of those people that does more volume and get better results and you might be someone that needs a little bit less. But 12 is what the studies tend to point to. As far as frequency of training body parts is concerned, anywhere between two to four times a week seems to be ideal for most people. But again, there's that huge individual variance. Now, as far as training body parts and areas that you don't want to train, well, that's just going to be from discipline. That's going to be you making sure that you maintain balance with your workouts. But also be okay with yourself. This is a learning process. It takes a while. The keys really are listening to your body, gauging your progress, maybe even tracking your workouts. This is a good place to start tracking where you actually write down exercises, weight sets, reps, and then maybe give yourself some other scores like I felt really good or I felt like I was grinding through that workout. And then over time, you can start to learn your own body and start to really program best for yourself. And by the way, it's a whole other ballgame to program for other people. But you didn't say you were going to become a trainer. So I wouldn't worry so much about that. Just train yourself. Listen to your body. Look at your objective progress and then use that as a metric to decide or determine what are the best exercises for you. Well, also speaking to training the body parts and the types of exercises you don't typically want to do, I mean, that's where you're going to see the most growth and change in transformation typically. And also to addressing a lot of the imbalances, to make your program more specific to you and more individualized. This is where we kind of steer people a little bit more towards assessments and really understanding where you're at and what your status is currently in terms of your joint health and also which muscles are responding, which ones are not responding. So putting a little more work in that direction is highly beneficial, especially when you're starting to draw things up. Well, I'm going to give you a more specific answer, but it's still generic because of the points the guys are bringing up right now. I would train three days a week. I would do full body. I would train. I would do, like Sal said, 12 sets per muscle group. So every day that you're training every muscle group, I'm only going to do about three sets, three to four sets of each exercise for that muscle group. I'm going to start with all the big compound lifts. So most workouts are going to start with either a squat, a deadlift, a bench, an overhead press. So start with your big motor movements and then work your way to kind of like the auxiliary stuff, like your arms, shoulders, lateral raises, tricep push downs. That'll be later in your workout. And that would be like a three day week program. That's just a good generic place to start. And then you could start teasing out things as you go in. Like, oh, was that, you know, can my body handle more? Was that too much for my body? Should I back off? Is that too much compound lifts? My joints are hurting. Like, you know, there's a lot of variables that are going to come into play. I think that's a really good place to start for most people, which is very similar to the programming in Maps Anabolic. And then you can kind of build off of that. Yeah, Haley, what's your exercise experience? Are you working out a lot right now? Are you pretty experienced? Yeah, so I do. At the moment, strength training wise, I'm doing three times a week and I'm doing two lower body and one upper body. And then I also run quite a lot. So I run three times a week and then try and get my yoga in as well. Okay, Haley, do you have access to Maps Anabolic? No, I did try to buy it, but my car doesn't work on your site. I try to buy anabolic and the glue one. Oh, I see. Okay, well, we'll send you Maps Anabolic. So you're going to get access to that. Follow the program, modify it a little bit if you want, and then see how you feel. It's a very, obviously, we consider it to be a well-written program that'll get you started on, you know, strength training, programming for yourself. So start with that, see how you feel. You'll probably see really good results. Most people do. And then take it from there. Okay, and that's generally, like, focusing on full-body each session. It is, it is. And that's usually how most people will do best. It's some kind of a full-body-based, three-day-a-week-or-so routine. Perfect. All right. Thanks so much for your advice. Yeah, no problem. Thank you for your support. Well, thanks a lot. And have a good day. You too. You too. Yeah, it's one of those things, you know, creating workouts for yourself and other people. We wouldn't have jobs. We wouldn't be doing this if it was easy. Let's be honest. If it was that easy that we could just like, hey, here you go. I wonder if you can call in, you know, to a doctor's show and just, you know, ask, you know, if you could just diagnose yourself. Yeah, I know. I don't know. It's just, of course, that's silly, right? This is something that, like, a lot of people kind of know how to train. And it's, you know, there's a lot of simple programs out there you can kind of pull from. But yeah, I do feel passionate about what we do with programming. It's a lot more sophisticated. Well, that's the, so the idea of the, and we should have asked, we didn't think to ask her, obviously she doesn't own any maps in a blog. I'm guessing she hasn't been a part of the Mind Pump community that long because really the idea was you listen to the show and we give you all these nuance things that we're talking about in this short segment. Then you have the programs to compliment everything that we talk about. But we've since day one encouraged people to modify and change the workout based on all the information that we present on the show. Like, the idea is that you listen to all the episodes where we talk about programming, exercise design, things like that. So you can go, oh, okay, I can relate to that. Maybe I should back off of this or add more of that. Yeah, the big problem, and this has done a huge disservice to people who work out, is the view of workouts in the following way. Does it make me sweat? Does it make me sore? Is it hard? Okay, so if you want to sweat, get sore and have a hard workout, programming doesn't matter. It literally does not matter. You could pick one movement and do it over and over again, and you would hit that criteria. Now, if you're looking at workouts from this perspective, am I going to elicit the favorable adaptations, the responses in my body that I want, then programming gets quite complicated, and there's lots of moving parts, everything from, of course, reps, sets, exercises, tempo, and then that changes the order of the exercises. Of course, the days, how they follow each other, and do I continue this after three weeks or four weeks? Do I change the way I'm approaching my workouts? There's so many different moving parts. If you look at it from an adaptation standpoint, now it starts to look a lot more complete. You just want to get sore and sweat. Well, it doesn't matter. Go to Beachbody. They've got a lot of crappy programs. They'll do that for you. Now, I do think that there are some... Some shade there. Yeah, that was right. I do feel like there are some things, though, that were like major paradigm shattering moments for each of us when it came to writing programs, either for ourselves or for clients. And that's why I brought up the frequency and the volume, the exercise selection. Those were big things. Those are generally true. Exactly. I mean, there's always exceptions to the rule. Yes, we should assess somebody and address any sort of imbalances. Of course, again, that's why there's professionals in this field. But I do think there's some really good nuggets that you can give to somebody that's asking, hey, I'm trying to write my first program. What are some of the dos and don'ts? Well, one of the don'ts is, like, to your point, Sal, don't just throw a bunch of exercises at your workout and gauge it based off how hard it is. That doesn't necessarily mean you had a good workout just because it was difficult. There are specific exercises that are better than most, which are most the compound lifts. You should prioritize those. There is an ideal amount of frequency. So two to three times a week is for what most studies support is the best amount of frequency on the body parts. There is too much volume, meaning you can do too much of those body parts. So going beyond 15, 18, 20 sets per body part per week is probably more or too much for most people unless you're a hyper-responder or you're on anabolic steroids. So there are some, I think, general rules that took me years of coaching to kind of... And there's specificity. There's, like, what's your true goal? Like, are you really just trying to work on strength? Then you've got to adjust your rest periods. You know, is it hypertrophy? Okay, now we've got to completely... Our reps need to change to look like this. So there's just things to consider that I don't think your average person knows. Right, and then to add to that, no matter what you decide, your adaptation is, after about four to six weeks of you following that and targeting that, it's time to move on and change things up or else almost anything is better than what you're currently doing.