Pick 1 or 2 Things to Focus On At a Time
• You can’t improve everything. You’ll get your best results by focusing on 1 thing. Focusing on too much will only result in a little benefit for each but nothing noticeable. So instead of trying to get bigger and leaner while increasing your bench press, choose 1 to 2 things with 1 objective working best for 95%

Maintain Everything Else
• Once you’ve chosen your main goal then you’ve got to go into maintenance mode for everything else. So if your goal is to increase your squat then those 3 bench press sessions will have to go because if you’re focusing on something then you need to train it heavy and you need to train it frequently. Plus you want all of your energy and recovery to go into what you’re actually trying to improve

You Can’t Keep Adding
• Piggy backing off the first point you can’t keep adding on to your program without taking something out but if you’re abiding by the first point then this shouldn’t be a problem. A program i read on here recently added in Fadi’s Fat Loss workout but he was also doing a bodybuilding split. Didn’t really have his diet in order and was riding 50+kms per week. In the end you exceed your recovery abilities and then you get no result at all, except a negative one.

Everything Can’t Be 3 x 12
• This pops up very often. There’s more to life and especially training then 3 x 12. Think about it. Why 3 sets? Why 12 reps? You’re muscles generally require varied stimulus (rep ranges) to fully optimise it’s strength and size potential so the more limited the training stimulus the more limited the response.

Scheduling
• I am not a fan of body part splits. I train for performance myself but body part splits don’t make any sense to me, especially training 1 muscle, 1 day a week on the same day of the week every week. I think someone mentioned it recently that an 8 day cycle will fit most people better than 7 days. We all know that you can’t isolate a muscle totally but you still want to train a muscle/s indirectly every day. Taking triceps for example if you did chest Monday, shoulders Tuesday and arms Wednesday then say chest again Friday, then you’re tri’s will never recover and you’ll also be wondering why your bench press hasn’t increased for a month. I like to use a concentrated loading approach in most cases and stack direct and indirect training in a row so i might do military press and bench press Monday with some tricep accessory work also on monday and then maybe some extra bench or military work later in the week if it my main focus.

Exercise Selection
• A training program is not a bunch of exercises. Many times i see a chest day that which includes flat bench press, incline bench press, decline press, flyes and crossovers and then push ups during the week somewhere. Yes they are all chest exercises and they all can benefit you if done properly but you don’t need to do them all at once, and shouldn’t. I never see a leg day with deadlifts, squats, walking lunges and glute ham raises in the 2 day. Why? Because it’s fuckin hard!!

Leave Yourself Room to Progress
• Leading off from the last point, if you use all of those chest exercises then when you’re looking to mix things up what do you do? There’s no other exercises you can do as you’ve just done them all!!

Steps to Follow (reps, sets, total volume, goal etc)
• When designing a program for yourself i suggest using this step by step method
1 – Choose a main goal
2 – Choose what volume best fits that goal
3 – Now you can break up your sets and reps to fit your goal
4 – Now you can choose your exercises
Most people choose the exercises first which I think is a big mistake.

A Program is Only as Good as it’s Progression
• Another big mistake is that people design a program and think that is the only program they’ll need to get to their goal. In some cases this is true but mostly it isn’t. You need to have built in progressions in your programs which need to be specific to your goal as increasing strength will have different progressions then fat loss. Pre planning these progressions ensure that you will get the maximum benefit from a training plan. A training isn’t a month and then you move on, it’s a long term project and needs to be looked at like one.

Goal Setting
• At my studio i would say that 90% of clients when they first come in say that their training goal is to “get fit and tone up”. Goals are what make us go but they need to be specific. Get fit for what? What is tone? For goal setting you should set a long term goal and then break that into smaller progressive goals as looking at the big picture can have you feeling like you’ll never get there. Breaking them down gives you a boost from achieving a lot of small goals that all will all add up to the big goal over the long haul.

Choose a Program that Fits Your Training / Nutrition Level
• The first thing beginners do is look at the latest Jay Cutler program and think that will work for them. High volume, high intensity training programs are great but if you’re eating Macca’s 4 times a week and sleeping 5hrs a night then you will simply not recover from any of your sessions optimally thus you’ll forever be training in the “negative.” As a beginner or if you’re coming back from a lay off, stick the basics. 5 – 6 exercises per session, 3 – 4 sessions a week and low to moderate volume. Stick with this until your nutrition and / or lifestyle catches up your training and can support it like it should.

Learn Exercise Anatomy
• This refers to what muscles exercises train directly and indirectly as well as the joint angles they train. If you take upright rows and lateral raises for example they both star with the elbow down at your sides then raise them out to the side so it makes sense that you don’t need to train both of them on the same day. Another one is preacher and bb curls which gets a lot of work in programs that I see.