Professor Karl breaks down the squat.

Quality of Life

Every element of a lifter’s quality of life is connected. A lifter’s relationships affect their emotional resilience which affects their thinking which affects their strength.

Our skillset- and our privilege-is to improve the lifter’s whole quality of life by designing training programs that:

• Meet the lifter’s goals
• Improve their physical capacity
• Account for their whole-life experience

Model-Informed

Starting from this perspective can be daunting. There are too many variables to consider, so we apply our best understanding of how the human body responds to training, a mental model, to develop a best-starting-point approach that still allows us to be flexible to the lifter’s needs. 

First, a quality physical life includes some nearly-universal elements, things like:

• freedom from debilitating pain
• the strength to confidently move within and manipulate our surroundings
• the endurance to keep going when the situation demands.
• the freedom of movement to express that strength and endurance in the ways we need to in daily life.    

Some lifters may choose to focus exclusively on one aspect of their physical life: competitive powerlifters or triathletes, for instance. We understand that they won’t have ‘balance’ in their training. However, we still program with an eye towards those other elements, knowing that too-deep a sacrifice in pain, strength, endurance, or freedom for a short-term performance will harm even the specialist’s long term goals.

Second, we recognize that there are many traits our lifters rightfully want to improve to see a better physical quality of life, like: 

• Strength
• Endurance
• Mobility
• Power
• Balance
• Body Composition

It’s not important to consider every possible permutation here—’mobility’ might be broken up into coordination, flexibility, and agility, ‘endurance’ might be subdivided into how long you can operate at what % of maximal effort (stamina vs. strength-endurance vs. work capacity). You might also include other useful traits like grit or motivation, which are mental/emotional/spiritual qualities but affect our physical performance.

What’s important is that different programs affect each of these elements as the body adapts to the programmed stress.  They are all important to varying degrees in the lifter’s quality of life based on their goals, VIP, and environment, but they are not equal. 

Why Strength?

Initially, a strength-centric program gets the most effective balance of these demands while improving the secondary traits the most, especially in lifters who are not already strong. To model this, picture three possibilities:  

Strength Exclusive: A strength-exclusive program will improve strength, mobility (if the exercises are chosen correctly), power, balance, and body composition (in greater muscle mass). If the lifter starts very deconditioned, it might improve endurance, but more likely, endurance will be unaffected or, in aerobic athletes, suffer slightly.

Endurance-Exclusive: This program will improve endurance, balance, and body composition (in terms of lower body fat), but it would do so at the expense of strength, sometimes mobility (unless the practice involved a full range of motion), and power.

Mobility-Exclusive: This program will likely not improve strength, endurance, or power unless the lifter was incredibly limited and unable to express those things before mobility training and will not likely affect body composition.

For most clients, then, the balance will favor a strength program, and we mitigate the weaknesses in endurance by using smart conditioning that minimizes the negative impact of endurance training on strength and muscle mass.

How Strength?

To meet the above criteria, with quality of life in mind, we select exercises based on how whether they allow us to: 

1. Use large amounts of muscle mass
2. Over the longest effective range of motion 
3. Deliver a predictable, repeatable movement 
4. Lift safely without excessive skill 
5. Load the axial skeleton 
6. Do so without abnormal pain or injury

We incorporate these exercises into a program that’s:

1. Comprehensive: trains the whole body, in as many common movements as possible 
2. Simple to understand, execute, and see progress. As simple as possible, and no simpler. 
3. Efficient: accomplishes the above with the least exercises and time possible. 
4. Progressively and slowly increases the stress as the lifter gets stronger.

We adjust that program over time by applying the minimum effective dose (MED) of change needed to continue making progress or to adapt to a lifter’s changing needs. This means applying the smallest change needed, in a controlled manner, to allow the coach and lifter to see the effects and make smarter decisions.

To meet these demands, we prefer barbells. As a tool, barbells allow us to deliver a program that easily and sustainably meets the above criteria. They can be progressed precisely, loaded heavily, and used in full-body axial lifts that are simple, hard, and effective. Their symmetry makes the movements predictable and, with some skill and creativity, most people have the requisite ability to complete lifts through all the basic movements.

As skilled coaches, we recognize the benefits and limitations of other tools and use them appropriately just as we would a barbell.

Take a look at the bench videos below. Which one is from the transverse plane? Hint- don’t trust the video labels!

And what about the squat? What can you see from each angle?

We coach barbell lifts in all three planes and we need to consider how each joint moves in relation to other joints.  This course will give you lots of practice at using the proper anatomical lingo!