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As you move into the intermediate range your needs diversify. Identify your goals-are you training for strength, hypertrophy, or endurance? Training will diversify based on these goals and will become more specific. In most cases, your full-body routine will become less effective. This includes not only the strength, hypertrophy, and endurance portions of your workout but also your skill work, sports specific skills, flexibility, mobility, prehabilitation, and rehabilitation. Here are some examples:
Adapting frequency, volume, and intensity of training to maintain progress must occur in this range. You will need to learn how to use more complex training programming.
Begin to move to the upper range of A-strength movements or isometric holds. Non-athletes will think strength at this level is quite impressive and, perhaps, unattainable. However, with consistent, hard work, most athletes are able to attain this skill level. They can do so within one to three years, depending on the individual. You may attain it sooner due to a sports or strength background-or later due to inconsistent training or miscellaneous factors like poor nutrition, bad sleep quality, busy school schedules, stressful lifestyle, or even genetics.
Repetition ranges for this stage are the 3-8 range if you want to focus mostly on strength. However, if you still need or desire hypertrophy, the 5-15 repetition range will work until you move up to the next progression. Aside from potentially adding another day of exercise, this is the only change in philosophy at this point.
Daily undulated periodization may be required near the middle or end of the intermediate phase, but it is not needed earlier. Other minor forms of periodization like accumulation and intensification may be usefol. Likewise, structuring light and heavy days will be effective as well. Some of the simple intra-exercise and simple inter-exercise progressions will likely still work, depending on your body. However, it is unlikely that a method like linear repetition progression would still be effective.
A full-body routine of static exercises performed 3-5x per week may look something like this:
A dynamic strength routine performed 3-5x per week may look like this:
Other potential exercises depending on your goals:
Note that these routines have three upper-body push and three upper-body pull exercises. This may be too much for those with limited time or who cannot handle that much volume. In the intermediate, it can be more effective to use a split routine like push/pull, upper/lower, or bent-arm/straight-arm over a full-body routine.
A push/pull and bent-arm/straight-arm split will follow a similar variation of exercises. Typically, these are performed four times per week so you hit each split twice. A/B/rest/A/B/rest/rest or A/B/rest/A/rest/B/ rest. You could also do five workouts per week on a AIB/rest/A/B/A/rest schedule with the next week being alternated as B/A/rest/B/A/B/rest to compensate.
In the chapter for trained beginners, push/pull was discussed, so here are some examples of upper/lower and bent-arm/straight-arm with the same volume as the full-body routine. First, the upper/lower split: Upper
Lower+ Core
Next, the bent-arm/straight-arm split:
Bent-Arm+ Legs
Straight-Arm+ Core
Core is grouped with legs in the upper/lower split because with push and pull in the upper body there are generally more upper-body exercises than leg exercises. Adding core to the legs day simply keeps the time even.
In the bent-arm/straight-arm split, bent-arm is paired with legs and straight-arm with core because of the straight-arm and core day. Many of the straight-arm exercises require a solid amount of core work. They have been paired so there would be a strong core stimulus to facilitate both strength and hypertrophy gain. Barbell leg exercises tend to be fairly intense on the nervous system, as are straight-arm isometrics. Those have been separated to promete recovery.
None of this structuring is by mistake or coincidence. If you have questions or concerns about structuring a routine in a particular manner, always refer back to your goals. In this case, separating the intense nervous system exercises from eachother promotes recovery, which will help to prevent potential plateauing via underrecovery. Core work is paired with levers and straight-arm work specifically to improve both attributes at once. If you sodesire, youcan choosea push/pull/legs split. Madeleine Leander (aka Maddelisk) isa woman who has used a push/pull/legs split to great effect at an intermediate to advanced level of abilicy. She competes in street workout competitions. For a montage of some of her training including human flags, front lever, straddle back lever, strict muscle ups, and other feats, check out: www.youtube.com/watch?v=agGluKlYNQ8
Day 1-Push
Day2-Pull
Day3-Legs + Deadlift
Day4-Push
DayS-Pull
Day6-Legs
Day7-Flag Day+ Extra Skill Work
Madeleine is an extremely strong woman who used the previous version of Overcoming Gravity while figuring out what works best for her. Here are her comments:
"My warm-up is almost the same every day. It takes about 4-5minutes and I adjust it depending on how I feel. I have no exact numbers but it includes the following: Highjumps, skin the cat, wrist warm-up, pushups, handstand (on Pull days I do pull-ups instead of handstand). I also end almost every day with flexibility work. If ar example have a splitsgoal I want to reach.
What about rest days? I rest when I need to and don't add rest days to my program. If my body is too sore I rest.During this program it happened about one day every two weeks.
My height is about 5'2"and my weight around 110 pounds. Trainingfar me is basically doing what I think is/un andfar me the problem is that I sometimes want to train a bit too much. In addition to what you can see in the program above I also trained handstand around two out of 3 days. If arced myselfto rest from the additional handstand on pulldaysjust togive my wrists some rest. I do handstands at work, at home, whenever I feel like it.
Structuring my training with your system, I trained a bit less than I did before (when every day was play day) but it turned out to be a really good thing. My forearms used to sujfer a lot because I had pulling exercises spread out over more days. That made it harder for me to improve.
Over the past year I've worked a lot with very specific goals. I prefer to set a long-term goal far example to be able to do L-sit to handstand with straight arms. The time was one year. Andfar each goal Iset up I also set a lot of goals on the way. I adapted the short-term goalsfar my own training. The steps on the way, in this case, includedfrog stand to handstand, tuck planche, straddle press to handstand, pike press to handstand, and bent-arm L-sit to handstand. And for each step I figured out all kinds of exercises that I could use to reach the next level including many exercisesfrom Overcoming Gravity.
One of a few weighted exercises that I still do is deadlift. I find it hard to built that lower back strength with bodyweight exercises only. I also like to do both weighted squats and pistol squats. Note also thatfar this program I removed back lever completely. before I made my program I had some issues with it and it didn'tfeel good so I decided to take afew weeks of break from the back lever. Also, I'm not a big fan of cardio, and since I want my training to be fun I skip it."
Push/pull/legs is a good way to split up volume to get about 72 hours between every muscle group worked out. Even though there are no specific rest days, the athlete is getting a good amount of rest. This shows how an athlete can build up to a large workout capacity as well.
At the mid to upper end of the intermediate range (around Level 7-9), it may be necessary to switch to accumulation and intensification or light/heavy types of routines. The following example is part of a full-body routine, but it can be applied to various splits as well. Let us examine a sample accumulation and intensification routine. The first stage is an accumulation phase:
Accumulation
The accumulation phase focuses on high-volume training, as a hypertrophy microcycle would in a traditional Russian mesocycle. The exercises chosen reflect a progression allowing eight to twelve repetitions in order to accumulate a lot of volume. Additional exercises like an extra push and an extra pull exercise may be added in this cycle for even more volume. Density training, such as decreasing rest times, can also be implemented in accumulation phases.
Intensification
After a week or two of accumulation work you will move to the intensification cycle. Here you will focus on fewer exercises and fewer repetitions but higher intensity. This intensity will be reflected in the repetition range. You can make the exercises more difficult by working the next higher progression or by using weights. Either of these will cause you to perform each exercise to near-failure.
The numbers will certainly not always look neat. For example, in order to obtain extra volume at a lower repetition range, you may be performing 3x6 straddle FL rows while your advanced tuck PL pushups are at 4x4 or 5x3. Likewise, if your one-arm ring rows are too easy at eight repetitions, but you cannot yet advance to the next progression, you may need to make the exercise more difficult by wearing a weighted vest. Alcernatively, you could wear a backpack fllled with books.
You may have to get creative with your training to implement it effectively, due to the strict repetition numbers. This is where eccentrics, bands, weights, and other variations used to make exercises easier or harder will play a role in your training. Building a pulley system-easier than it sounds-can pay big dividends in your training because you can easily modify your exercises to the appropriate difficulty by adding or subtracting weight as needed.
Let's discuss a different split - light/heavy. The easiest way to implement a light/heavy split is to alternare an accumulation workout with an intensification workout. Implementing an extremely basic light/heavy split will look exactly like performing the accumulation phase without the extra push and pull exercise on your first workout day. Your second workout day will consist of the intensification workout. In this type of light/ heavy split, "light" would consist of decreased intensity (higher repetitions with easier exercises) and "heavy" would consist of increased intensity (lower repetitions and more difficult exercises). Stick with a strict repetition range, if possible.
Once you start the second light/accumulation workout, aim to increase the difficulty of the exercise. Your progression of repetitions should look like this:
This is a very basic form of periodization where your progression happens consistently with every other workout: 3x8 ➔ 3x9 ➔ 3x10 and 5x3 ➔ 5x4 ➔ 5x5 in the middle of that. Alternatively, you could stick with the same repetition range and make the exercises more difficult by adding weight.
Eccentrics and Density: At this stage in your training, eccentrics become more useful. One-arm chin-ups (OACs) respond particularly well to eccentrics. Front lever responds well to inverted hang; slow eccentric, to hang. These are facts you can use if you feel that your progress is slowing down or stalled. Another idea that may be useful is some form of density training. Try this: aim to decrease rest times between sets by thirty seconds over your next few workouts and follow that with an increase in repetitions or progressions as you improve.
Moving Beyond Simple Methods of Progression: Accumulation and intensification phases, as well as light/heavy workouts, are extremely effective for progression after simple intra-exercise and inter-exercise progressions fail to work. If you are having difficulty finding an intra-exercise or inter-exercise progression that enables you to progress, you may want to take this opportunity to deload and re-evaluate your training program. If you do this and see that your lack of progress is not due to any miscellaneous factors (nutrition, sleep quality, school schedules, lifestyle, etc.), it is time to begin learning how to implement more complex methods of progression.
Make sure you try light/heavy before you start DUP, as a typical DUP protocol involves forcing adaptations over three workouts before going back and increasing weight on the fourth workout. light/heavy and similar models typically increase weight every other or every three workouts.
Look for opportunities to use small programming adjustments to improve your gains. You do not need a large, overarching change like a transition from a full-body routine to a DUP protocol. The solution can be as simple as using eccentrics, slightly adjusting your rest times from workout to workout, or switching to light/ heavy workouts using high repetitions in one workout and low repetitions in the next. If you have stalled, make simple changes that will help you improve. Reserve drastic changes for when you completely stall on minor modifications.
Goals: At this point, you should begin to obtain some of your goals. Congratulations! Two common examples are back lever and front lever. When you have achieved a goal, add these exercises to the end of your warm-up in order to maintain them. They require only a small amount of volume to maintain, and you can replace them in your routine with other exercises geared toward achieving your remaining goals.
The more specific you are with your goals, the faster you will progress in your training. If you first perform the planche isometric and other horizontal strengthening pushing exercises like planche pushups, pseudo planche pushups, weighted pushups, or exercises with carryover like dips you will make optima! progress toward the planche.
Training at the intermediate level becomes inefficient when you try to improve multiple chings at once. For example, if you seek to improve aerobic endurance, metabolic conditioning, and strength training at the same time, you are less likely to succeed than you would be if you selected only one or two of these qualities.
Athletes who use gymnastics or bodyweight strength training for cross-training purposes or CrossFit may notice this phenomenon. In such cases, it may be beneficial to move toward a modified periodization system where you maintain what you have already obtained while focusing on improving one or two new things at a time. Once you have improved a particular attribute, shift your focus to maintaining it while systematically working to improve the next attribute. You will improve much more quickly overall than if you tried to improve everything all at once.
Repetitions: At this point, repetitions will be categorized according to the attributes that need to be developed. If you are training primarily with strength, you will want to remain in three to eight range. With hypertrophy, you will want to stick with the five to twelve range. Finally, with endurance or connective tissue strengthening, you will want to begin in the fifteen to twenty (or more) range. It is beneficial to use very high repetitions, such as twenty to flfty, for connective tissue strengthening, as strength movements place a large amount of stress on the muscles themselves. You no longer get the same benefit of improvements in recruitment and synchronization that you would as a beginner.
Weak Links: If you notice that your exercises are not progressing as they should, even with enough volume, you may need to look for weak links. For example, you may notice as you are training your one-arm pull-ups progression that your back tends to develop strength and hypertrophy more rapidly than your forearms and biceps. Or maybe it's the complete opposite-your back is developing slower than your biceps and forearms. These should be signals that you may have a weak link in a particular movement or skill. The addition of specific exercises (in our example, forearm training or biceps curls) will improve these weak links, which will therefore improve your capability to successfully attain the one-arm pull-up. Weak links are the biggest reason why people stall out with strength isometrics like front lever and planche.
Common weak links may manifest as soreness or pain. Shoulder aggravation tends to indicate overall weaknesses in scapular strength and stability. Extra scapular work with retraction (squeezing the shoulder blades together), protraction (pushing your hands as far away from you as possible), elevation (raising them up), and depression (moving them down) may be needed depending on the particular movement you are performing. Rotator cuff exercises may be indicated as well. For tendonitis, the pattern is usually weaknesses in the opposing muscle groups and general overuse of the worked muscle groups.
Modify, Modify, Modify: By now you should know your body well enough to modify your routine as needed. Once you obtain good flexibility and mobility (such as the splits or an excellent pike and straddle), you may not need additional flexibility training. Like the goals you obtained through training (such as the back lever), you can put these into your warm-up or mobility routine to maintain them instead of continuing to work them in your primary routine. This will free up space to work on other movements.
Additionally, while you can still adjust your routines to place skill work, prehabilitation, flexibility, mobility, and other work on rest days, one of the benefits of understanding your body better is that you can split your routines further. You may choose to have a morning and an evening workout instead of one big workout mid-day. This is not recommended for beginners due to a beginner tendency to go overboard, but as an intermediate you are experienced enough to know how to modify your routine based upon how your body feels. This is extremely useful for implementing additional skill work if you want to work sport-specific skills or handstands more than seven times per week.
Strength Progression: Strength modiflcations will likely be moving away from the simple intra-exercise and inter-exercise progressions toward more complex programming. Better progress will be made using basic periodization methods like intensification and accumulation and light/heavy routines.
Here is a very important piece of advice: keep things as simple as possible. If you change many facets of your routine at once and fail to progress, you will not know what went wrong, and it will be difficult to fix your routine to get back on track. On the other hand, making one or at maximum two changes at a time is far
simpler and will provide you with much better feedback. If one of the changes does not work, you have a 50% chance of knowing what it is the first time.
It is important to log your training here in particular because small changes are what will cause you to progress. Once you figure out which small changes work best for you, you are set for a while. Generally, exercises that work well in the intermediate phase will only need to be tweaked slightly to work in the advanced phase (addressed in the next chapter). Here is a quick example: If you have determined that light/heavy modifications work well for you, you also know that an alternating two-day split of light/heavy will likewise work well. It follows that a three-day split of light/medium/heavy (such as the DUP method for three workouts) will be your most effective next step.
Another example is frequency vs. an increase in volume. Let us say you first made the change to increase the amount of time in your handstand sessions from five to ten minutes. This had litde effect on increasing your handstand abilities, so you reverted that change and instead increased your frequency with handstands for another two skill work sessions in a week. This time you saw drastic improvement. This gives you an enormously usefol piece of information. For skill work, you now know that additional sessions work much better for you than increasing volume within sessions. This means that you will tend to improve faster when you can implement fresh sessions over increasing volume within a session. For any additional skill work, you now know it is probably better to break it up into additional sessions rather than adding additional volume to your routine.
Overuse Modifications: Overuse modification advice for intermediates is the same as for trained and untrained beginners. However, now that you are working some of the more advanced straight-arm movements and higher intensity progressions, you may experience rapid onset of overuse injury symptoms, such as soreness, discomfort, or pain in your connective tissues and joints. If this happens to you, use an alternative progression method to condition your connective tissues for that particular exercise.
For instance, you are working straddle back lever and the connective tissues in your elbows are holding up well. However, when you progress to the foil back lever your elbows show signs of connective tissue overuse. You know that this may lead to a foll-blown injury, so you drop down to the straddle back lever and implement biceps curls as a connective tissue exercise. After a few weeks, you attempt to train the foil back lever again and feel fine. However, in your third session with the foil back lever you begin to feel the same symptoms. You may need to drop back down to straddle back lever and continue conditioning your connective tissues. You may need to make this adjustment a few times in order to keep from injuring yourself. The vast majority of athletes are too impatient to stick to this adjustment. Keep in mind that being injured will set you back much longer than performing this modification to your routine so you can progress without injury.
Let's repeat our modification standards:
Eliminating, reducing volume, and substituting exercises is a standard way to protect yourself from injury. The process is discussed in detail earlier in this book.
Likewise, add additional prehabilitation, isolation, mobility, or flexibility work for the particular area as needed. Check back to earlier chapters if you need reference or exercise ideas. If you feel confused, consult a medical professional, such as an orthopedic sports doctor or physical therapist. Alternatively, you can ask advice from coaches, other more advanced athletes, or even certain places on the Internet, such as these subreddits: www.reddit.com/r/bodyweightfitness and www.reddit.com/r/overcominggravity.
Avoiding Injuries: In the long run, learning how to modify your routine based on how your body responds-especially in the context of potential overuse injuries-is the most important thing you can learn when it comes to training. The number one predictor of an injury is a previous injury. Knowing when you need to back down and modify your romine will aid you for decades in both coaching and training.
Routines: You can use routines to work on sequences of skills, or you can use them to drastically shorten your workouts by combining many skills you have already been working on. You should try to learn some type of romine because it will challenge your strength and strength/endurance. Athletes often derive great satisfaction from performing a romine that includes goals they have worked hard to obtain. It is one of the more rewarding experiences of bodyweight strength training. Here are some examples of different routines that you can put together as you improve in strength. For the most part, they are easy to construct. Here is a basic routine on rings:
As your strength increases, your routines can be anything you want them to be. If you wanted to work on front and back lever, your routine may look something like this:
Basically, you can make up anything that you want to perform. Momentum-based movements like the kipping and felge skills (forward and backward rolls) are meant to be transitions. It looks cool when you can chain them with strength moves. Be creative with your routines. Share them with others as well.
Typically, you will want to combine a series of skill and strength moves and alternate them if you want to work on transition movements. However, if you are going for pure strength you can work several strength moves in a row, in shorter sequences. If you do this, it helps if you work alternating movements of pull and push. For example:
If you know how to do freestanding rings handstand pushups, you might enjoy this routine: do as many rings handstand pushups as you can. Then, if that arbitrary number is four, perform four of each of the following.
This sequence is good for building strength/endurance in the shoulder girdle. You might have some fon experimenting with it in reverse, but it may become difficult to estimate how many free rings handstand pushups you can perform by the end.
Here's a fun game to play with friends; it's called parallettes add-on. Start with a skill like the L-sit. The next person performs the L-sit, a press handstand, and adds another skill at the end. This continues until someone fails.
Training does not have to be boring. If you are getting tired of doing discrete movements while working toward strength, mix it up! Make it fon to work on these skills and strength movements. After all, that is why you are training-because you enjoy it, not just because you want to perform impressive movements.
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