American Volume Training: Novice Training (#64)

How I train new trainees

“Everything works at first but nothing works forever”. This is a quote i repeat to first time clients usually at their second training session. You can get away with abyssmal training as a novice. It can follow no progressions, the exercise selection can be completely random, the intensity could be too low, and the time under tension can be criminally under dosed.

That being said, just because you can get away with poor training, doesn’t mean you should. If you’re new to training your body is essentially a dry sponge being thrown into a pool. It’s going to soak up every bit of stimulus rapidly. We adapt to training faster than we like to believe, especially as a novice. Eventually, manipulating variables like time under tension, reps, tempos, intensities, exercise selection, and progressions is going to be important for sustained results and preventing injury.

This posts builds ontop of the novice & intermmediate training planning article. Click here to get a more detailed overview of training planning for novices and intermmediates.

Training Progressions

Before I outline the progressions, I wanted to briefly explain the difference between linear and undulating periodization. If you’re just a dude that lifts and thinks this is going to get too technical, just bare with me. Linear periodization essentially means progressing every week over the course of a training plan. This is great for beginners with untapped potential but won’t work over extended time periods for more advanced trainees. Since beginners aren’t acclimated to a training stimulus, they don’t need a complicated undulating periodization plan. Save that for the big boys.

Linear periodization is the way to go for beginners and it works, but as I mentioned before, nothing works forever. If you put 5 lbs on your squat in a week you’d think “no big deal, that isn’t much weight” but if you did that over the course of 4 years every single week you would be squatting over 1000 lbs. Linear progression won’t work forever otherwise we would all be easily squatting 1000 lbs in 4 years.

Just guys being dudes

My Training progression for novices typically begins with what I call American Volume Training (AVT) 🇺🇸. The point of AVT is to build a base. Repetitions are high, rest is short, and intensity is relatively low at first. I like low intensity to start for a couple of reasons:

1. If you’re new to training you can get more practice by doing more reps.

   1. Highly undervalued. More reps allow you to build good technique especially if they’re done at the prescribed tempos in this plan.

2. Novices don’t have finely tuned nervous systems. Having a novice squat 5 sets of 5 doesn’t provide enough stimulus since their technique and nervous system is too under developed to use heavy enough load.

3. Conditioning. You adapt to doing a lot of reps and condition the body to tolerate load. This is important for building a base for future training that will be at lower volumes but at higher intensites. You will also improve your ability to recover between sets.

   1. Training principle: Volume before intensity

“A pyramid is only as tall as its’ base” - Louie Simmons

I typically do full body splits for anybody training 3x a week or less. For the A series (A1,A2,A3) I want sets of 10 and only 30 seconds rest afterward. Next week add weight and increase rest to 45 seconds, the next week add weight again and increase rest to 1 min. As intensity rises, so does your rest.

This allows you to sustain high efforts through the session. Remove the A3 movement if you wish, it’s there in this case for the instance a client needs more active rest or in general just doesn’t get enough upper back work. The interval training can be replaced with isolation exercise if your predominant goal isn’t fat loss. Otherwise I recommend a sled, assault bike, or battle ropes for conditioning. The conditioning progresses as well:

Conditioning: Go HARD on the 15 sec work intervals…

Week 1 6 x 15 with 60 sec rest

Week 2 7 x 15 with 45 sec rest

Week 3 8 x 15 with 45 sec rest

I highly recommend using the sled, it’s the perfect hammer for the 3:1 - 4:1 work to rest ratio used for the conditioning.

If you train 4x a week I would do an upper lower split. On the Upper Day pair a push with a pull (Db Bench and DB row for 5 x 10 for example). For the Lower Day I would pair a squat or deadlift with a kettlebell swing. For the B series, Simply pick 3 antagonistic movements or a back exercise because you probably don’t do enough back work anyway.

Treat the 4x a week split as an A B split. Meaning, if yopu workout Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, then do Day 1 (A) Monday, Day 2 (B) Tuesday, Day A Thursday, Day B Friday. You could also do this for a 3x a week split if you prefer upper lower over a full body split.

Drop any questions you have below. If you want the full 3 week program for free for yourself, a friend, or a homie that needs some meat on his bones, I’d be happy to share it with you. Fill this google form and I’ll fire the program PDF your direction.