Mastering Fitness: Simplifying Workouts for Lasting Results

Cutting Through Complexity, Maximizing Muscle Growth, and Building Sustainable Habits

In today's world of social media, where fitness influencers show off needlessly complicated exercises, it's easy to think you need to do the same to succeed. But the truth is much simpler. Effective exercise isn't about doing complicated moves; it's about understanding and applying the basics every time you work out. Forget the idea that you need to know everything about exercise right away. What matters are the important things that help you improve. Instead of getting caught up in fancy exercises, focus on simple stuff like training at a proper intensity, controlling your movements, and gradually making things tougher. With so many exercise options, feeling overwhelmed and stuck is easy. But remember, starting small and sticking to what you enjoy is the key to making lasting and meaningful change.

Simplifying Fitness: Cutting Through the Noise of Complex Exercises:

 I want to start by making sure that we are all on the same page, there is no magic movement itself that will get you the body that you want. There is no new revolutionary movement that has never been done before that is going to unlock growing massive muscle or get you suddenly bulky. This is what I have seen has taken over too much nowadays. When we dial in on the basics and master those, you will get a ton of incredible results and you can take those movements on in perpetuity. When you see somebody say they have found the secret for growth and unlocking your body, they are either selling you lies or they have recently discovered steroids. I have noticed that there have been some who question when the complexity of the movements is going to evolve, but if there is no sport-related reason for the movement complexity to match then we are often lacking some area when we introduce unneeded complexity. When we are assessing the two most common goals for a large majority of the population, those being muscle gain and weight loss, we want to promote as much muscle growth as possible. To promote muscle growth, we need to make sure that we are taking advantage of what stimulates our body to grow muscle. Just like with everything, whatever stimulus you impose on your body it will have a response that will adapt to that stimulus to make the next time it encounters it ever so slightly easier. With that in mind, we just need to make sure that we are generating a lot of force in the target muscle, feeling it in the muscle, and working close to failure. When you see a lot of these complex movements involving instability, several segmented movements, combine two movements together. Often we are sacrificing greatly in the ability to generate force or the target muscle won’t be the limiting factor for the end of the set. When you introduce instability within a movement, your body inherently limits the amount of force that it can produce, thus overall limiting the amount of total force produced and muscle growth stimulus for the target muscle.

Dispelling Myths: Understanding the Truth Behind Effective Exercise: 

With the idea of why some of these movements are incorrect, let’s dive a bit deeper into what we want to accomplish with our movements and what is truly important. When we are looking to increase muscle which is also useful for weight loss, it is going to be important to focus on the same principles that we had outlined above. We need to make sure that we are imposing the specific demands on the body that are going to elicit the response that we are looking for. To grow muscle we need to make sure that we are getting a large amount of force generated through the target muscle and pushing to near muscular failure each set. If you are operating within your comfort zone and moving through the motions that is all well and good, that would be training for maintenance. If you want to be growing, we need to push that comfort zone a little further and a little further each time, this is why we train near failure. When you impose the demand of pushing outside of your comfort zone it forces your body to respond to get ready to prepare for that new level again. Then it is just a repeating source of that effort.

Another area that people get caught up in is rep ranges and rest times. The more that we are learning about both of those, for muscle growth as long as you’re doing more than 6 reps and less than 50 reps, you will be growing the same amount of muscle as long as the intensity that you are using is standardized. The amount of rest is in a similar situation, there used to be the classical thinking that 30-90 seconds or 60-120 seconds was the optimal amount of rest for muscle growth, but the more that we have learned what is optimal to keep the amount of time in the gym down, but if you are not highly cardio trained then it is more likely that your cardio is going to be what is limiting you as opposed to the target muscle. Thus we are imposing the demand on the wrong system for the goal that we are looking to achieve. With that in mind, it is proper to take as much rest as you need to be able to produce enough force and make sure the local muscular fatigue is going to be what is limiting you at the end of the set as opposed to your cardio. These are the big core ideas that need to be understood, it doesn’t matter as much as the movement itself as it does pushing yourself hard and giving yourself the proper amount of rest to be sure that the limiting factor is going to be the target muscle as opposed to another system. 

Photo by Daniel Monteiro on Unsplash

Advanced Strategies: Maximizing Results with Stretch Mediated Hypertrophy and Eccentric Emphasis:
Now there are further considerations that we can take into account with these ideas based on the current body of literature that is coming out. The biggest craze that is taking over the fitness world after understanding force generated, proximity to failure, and ensuring you’re not being limited in other aspects is going to be taking advantage of “stretch-mediated hypertrophy.” This is simply stating that there is something that generates additional muscle-growing stimulus for taking advantage of putting your body into a loaded deep stretch and generating force from that position. With the basics that we have accounted for before, generating that force and proximity to failure, it is easy to just add in a focus on these deep stretched positions to get a little bit more of an optimal stimulus from all the movements that you are already doing. The mechanism at play isn’t entirely clear just yet but it has shown that loading the stretched position deeply causes a significant amount of hypertrophy and for not modifying much of your training itself it will be beneficial to take advantage of it. There are some ideas with increasing the range, which puts you working through a greater range of motion thus moving the weight a greater total distance, but also making sure that we are forcing your body to get out of its comfort zone even further with that huge amount of stretch then causes it to have more to recover from, thus more muscle growth will be promoted. Just an additional step you can take to enhance the muscle gains, not required but will help take your training to the next level and it can be implemented on every movement that we are performing.

The other special consideration that I want to chat about since I believe there is a very large benefit to emphasizing the eccentric phase of the movement. Just to explain that quickly, using the bench press as an example, the eccentric phase would be when you are lowering the bar down to your chest, this causes your muscles to contract while getting lengthened. The concentric phase on the other hand is when you are pressing the bar back up, or contracting while your muscles are shortening. The one that is all too commonly seen is a big emphasis on the concentric phase of the movement. This is because it is for sure the most fun part of the movement and nobody can argue that. The eccentric, however, is arguably more important to emphasize for a large majority of the population as not only does it help us get that big force generated while getting into that deep stretch, but if we don’t train that specific mechanism within our body, our body will be weak in that movement even if you’re strong and confident in the concentric phase. When we are looking at injury prevention, we notice especially as we age and falls become a real concern, a large amount of those falls occur as we aren’t strong enough to control a rapid eccentric contraction causing us to fall over and leading to potential injuries. This can be very scary, so it is a double bonus to put a big emphasis on your eccentrics, controlling them for 3-5 seconds will go a great distance in taking advantage of the stretch-mediated hypertrophy as well as making your body significantly stronger and more resilient to injury an event presents itself. 

Strategic Exercise Selection: Simplifying Choices for Effective Training:

 Another area that we tend to get far too caught up in is the exercise selection piece of what we should be doing. To have effective training we need to be sure that week to week we are pushing outside of our comfort zone and making the most of what we are looking to do. The exercises don’t need to be changing it is often counterproductive to be changing up exercises too often as you’re not giving your body enough time to adapt to the movements, get stronger in those movements, and get as much as you can before you stop responding. Choosing these movements doesn’t need to be complicated, first look at what your overall goal is, if you have specific sports needs, let’s implement some movements that directly translate to the sport, if not, let’s focus on normal movement patterns and get strong and confident in those. Do that for 6-8 weeks, until you can’t push further than you did previously, then we will deload to clear fatigue, reset the process changing out 1-2 movements per workout that you weren’t feeling or think the new movements will cause a better stimulus, then repeat the process. It doesn’t need to be complicated! If you only have 3 days a week to exercise, a great one that I love is the “7 Pillars of Movement” breakdown for each lift. If you focus on getting a squat, hinge, push, pull, rotation, counter rotation, then something including movement, this will make sure that we are getting strong and confident in the most common movement patterns that we use every day. Repeat those movements a little bit heavier each week and push yourself close to failure anywhere between 6-50 reps and you’ll make incredible progress! 

Practical Application: Implementing Key Concepts for Sustainable Progress:

 As we always do I want to make sure that I not only tell you my thoughts on something but also give you something applicable to bring into your own training to make changes if needed! Hopefully, it has been clear already how we can implement a lot of these thought changes, but either way, I want to make sure that you have an understanding of the important parts of training and where a majority of the focus should be placed. The movements that you are doing, don’t matter nearly as much as pushing yourself hard and getting out of your comfort zone. There is no shortcut past hard work, it is one of the things that keeps us the most honest, so if you haven’t made progress recently in the gym or have seen these posts that try to contradict what you already know to be true to sign onto their way of thinking. There is no way around working hard to make the progress that you want, nobody magically gets strong and muscular by doing some strange lunge variation with light dumbbells and their legs aren’t what fatigues out first. Putting your focus on getting the most out of each set, pushing it hard toward failure, when you’re noticing your rep speed decreasing, will be the easiest way to know for certain that your training isn’t going to be what is lacking at the end of the day. Throwing in some optimization techniques will just help make sure that you remain under control, your training stays sustainable for a long time to come, and you don’t hit any unexpected walls. Not getting lost in the weeds of extraneous things that don’t matter is the point that I am trying to hit home. If you understand the basics, doing them hard, giving yourself enough rest time to do it hard again, working through your full range of motion, and going a bit heavier, then you’re going to be in a great spot!

In conclusion, I want to double down on the importance of simplicity and consistency in exercise routines over the allure of complex movements pushed by fitness influencers. The incorrect notion of seeking magical movements for desired body transformations is not where our focus should be placed, it should be redirected to mastering basic exercises for enduring results. Understanding the principles of muscle growth, such as generating force, working close to failure, and controlling movement intensity, is pivotal. Additionally, regarding misconceptions regarding rep ranges and rest times, we want to stress the importance of pushing beyond comfort zones and tailoring rest periods to ensure muscular fatigue. Further considerations introduce concepts like "stretch-mediated hypertrophy" and the significance of emphasizing the eccentric phase of movements for enhanced muscle growth and injury prevention. Not getting lost in the weeds and keeping everything as simple as possible will help keep you focused and on track with your goals. Ultimately, prioritizing effort, consistency, and adherence to foundational principles for sustainable progress and long-term success in fitness endeavors.

I am looking to begin building my community soon which hopefully can help connect people of similar interests and make the journey easier for everybody. If this is something you’re interested in, have any questions, or need personalized guidance, don't hesitate to reach out at sidneyabartlett@gmail.com 

I encourage you to share this message with someone who might find it valuable. Together, we can expand our community and empower more individuals to achieve their fitness goals. Until next time, let's keep pushing toward our goals together!"

Until next time,

Sidney Bartlett, CSCS