 Hey everybody, I'm Lance Goyke and today we're going to start discussing some of the more, you know, broader view looks at training and writing training programs. So first up today is the microcycle. We're going to define that because I think that's a term that's really helpful if you're describing your programming to someone because people who write programs generally understand this language and they, it's, it's, you know, it means something different kind of to everyone else, but everyone's pretty much on the same page. So with a microcycle, generally that's just a week of training, right? It's the week that your training week looks like. And so with training for a microcycle, I don't think this is a very sexy answer at all. But I think that basics win out all the time. And in this case, the number one thing that determines my microcycles that I write for myself and for other people is simply logistics. Do you have enough time to get to the gym X number of days or Y number of days or Z number of days, whatever. In general, everyone would benefit from going to the gym seven days a week. It just doesn't really work out for that many people's schedules because there's other stuff that people want to do. Now, if you're a professional athlete, I'm probably not going to even give you the option as long as you know, you're not too important. If you are trying to be a professional athlete, I'm probably just going to tell you, you got to do all this. If you're going to make it to the next level, if you're a real pro, I probably can't change your mind on anything there. You got, you got calls to make, I suppose. Anyways, so logistics is the primary determinant. Now I have to look at my training part split and that kind of depends on how many days per week I am exercising. So if I can get in the gym Monday, Wednesday, or Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, five days of the week and get a really good lift in every day, then I'm probably going to break you up by like body section, body part and do it maybe more like a traditional bodybuilding program. At least if your goal is hypertrophy, so I, you know, you have a quad day, you have a chest day, you have a calf day, you have a hamstring day, you have a back day or something like that. Okay. And in that day, in that hour of training, hour, hour and a half, 45 minutes, whatever you can spare in that training, see logistics again always comes into play, whatever you can spare, whatever, you know, training time you have, you're going to kind of push that one muscle group into total fatigue because it's got seven days to recover and that tends to work really well for bodybuilding purposes. Now, it's not the only way to do it. You don't have to like, when you're doing that, not every set has to be to total failure because you're going to have more sets and you need to make sure that not too much fatigue accumulates. You got to kind of plan for the future, I suppose, even though the future is only 45 minutes away. Now, what else might I do? If you got four days, I really like upper lower splits, so you might have a lower body day, upper body day, lower body day on Monday, upper body day on Wednesday, lower body day on Friday, upper body day on Saturday. And that that spacing works really well because it gives you some room to recover for the most part. So the muscle groups don't get quite as hard. Your Saturday day is generally not going to be nearly as hard as your Monday day. If you're looking to build strength, this type of split works really well. I like to put the, if there's a one lift in particular that you really want to get better, I like to put that on Monday after you've had your, you know, Sunday recovery day. But upper lower works really well because you can still use some really compound movements and teach people how to move correctly, but you also get some time for assistance work where things are a little bit more isolated and I can get fatigue into the muscle. Now let's go down. Let's say we've got three days a week to train. Now here you could do an upper lower kind of thing and just say every day you work out, you're going to alternate. I really like this method because generally I only have to write two days for one and two, it still gives you that upper lower split and you can really focus on getting some fatigue into those particular muscle groups without necessarily pushing yourself to the brink of exhaustion right away, which is beneficial for newbies because they don't really know how to do that. They'll recover really quickly because they can't use really heavy weights. And so if I write a lower body day and an upper body day, you might do lower upper lower and then week two, you would do upper lower upper and then we three do lower upper lower again. And you just kind of repeat through that. That's a really good way to do it. Other way you could do it, you could just do three whole body workouts Monday, Wednesday, Friday or Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday or whatever. You know, again, logistics always is what rules this. Two days a week, if somebody only wants to train two days a week, those two days in my mind have to be very challenging. And they need to understand that you're probably not going to see any progress. You're not going to see any regress as long as you're very on with your two days, but you're probably not going to see any progress because those two day a week programs are designed for purely adaptation maintenance, right? And so as long as I expose myself to, you know, heavy weights, I can keep my strength. And as long as I'm pushing my muscles to fatigue, I can keep some of my either endurance or hypertrophy, depending on the rep range that you're in. Yeah, but that's a good, good way to have a conversation with the client and say, Hey, if you're only going to do this, we're probably not going to see that much gain from training. And so if your goal is to build muscle, I just say you can't do that. You have to do at least one other day, but preferably two more days. And if you're going to try to lose weight, I'm going to say, you know, your training is not really going to help you that much. You're going to have to be really on with your diet. And that that can scare some people sometimes. And that's just, I don't know. That's a good way to convey the realities, the harsh realities, if I may. OK, microcycles, we talked about a five day, a four day, a three day, a two day. One day, you know, one session with me, I allow that's totally fine because a lot of times those people are doing a lot of stuff on their own. And they just need my eyes on them one day a week just to make sure they're still doing things correctly, keep their programming up to date or whatever. Now, we've talked about all this purely from a strength training perspective. What if I need to put in some conditioning days as well? So I'm probably not going to lift six days a week. But if you can do six days a week, it's really good to do, you know, four lifting days and two dedicated aerobic cardio days or three and three. Or even two and four, depending on your goals, like if you're training for a marathon, that makes a lot of sense. And maybe you need to bring it up to seven days, depending on how close and how serious you are about the marathon and how well trained you are as well. So that kinds of stuff, it doesn't have to be a I'm hesitant to give you a rule because, again, logistics are more important. It's better to do one day a week than it is to do zero because you're closer to doing two days. And then it's better to do two because you're closer to doing three. And you can actually get some health benefits out of this, even if it's just I'm not backsliding, like I'm not feeling aging quite as hard. So again, I would encourage all the coaches out there to prioritize logistics for this person, help them come up with a training cycle, help them decide how many days per week and how long their sessions should be. And then just say, OK, well, if you can do that, then this is what I would recommend. OK, and I think that's the easiest way to do this. And if you're writing a program for yourself, just do the same thing. How many days per week do you want to work out? And just say, OK, then I'm going to do this type of split on these days. And I'm going to do dedicated cardio on these days. You know, you're optimal if you're looking for muscle gain, your opt or strength gain, either one. You're optimal is probably four days per week of lifting and two days per week of relatively easy cardio because you don't want to take away from the lifting so much. If you're just looking to be really fit, you could do three and three, you could do four and two, you could do four and three. You could even do cardio on days that you lift. We call that two a days and professional athletes do that all the time. But yeah, hopefully those are some like ideal scenario recommended guidelines. Like if you're just looking for the most efficient thing, you're looking for someone to tell you how many days per week to work out. Six, six is six is the number and do either three lifting days and three cardio days or do four lifting days and two cardio days. If you're looking to be more lifting oriented. OK, that is more than you ever wanted to know about micro cycles.