How to Pair Exercise, and Why It isn't as Random as You Think.
/When attempting to create a exercise/ training plan, one factor that must be considered is the method of pairing/grouping exercises. While there is no 1 right answer that will provide ultimate success to your plan, the ever famous answer of “it depends” truly dictates the “why” behind what you’re doing with your plan.
Exercise grouping, in my opinion, really should begin with answering the question of who is this for? If you are a fan of the blog, you should know by now that there is a massive difference between training the experienced athlete and training the novice athlete. The biggest difference is their response to training stimuli.
The experienced athlete has a training background that allows them to train more often, at a higher intensity compared to the novice athlete. This may seem like a simple concept, but far too often I see the novice athlete train like the pro, and to be honest it’ll work for a little bit, but it’s not sustainable. Because of the fact that the experienced athlete can handle more stress compared to the novice, what it takes to fatigue the experienced athlete is much higher compared to the beginner. How does this influence exercise order/ grouping?
I’ll use the example of post activation potentiation (PAPE) to answer the above question. PAPE is defined differently across the realm of strength training, but the goal remains the same, and that is to enhance performance for a brief time period. There have been numerous studies trying to decide what the best way to accomplish this phenomena, but for the purpose of this blog we will use the example of lifting a heavy object followed by matching the movement pattern of the lift with a light/ dynamic movement (i.e a bench press paired with a MB chest past). This would be a strength stimulus paired with a power stimulus.
Research has shown (and anecdotally at our gym) that the experienced athlete will see the increased performance from a grouping like the one mentioned above, as the heavy bench press will fatigue the athlete, but they are better able to recover from the stimulus, and throw the med ball at a higher velocity. The novice athlete will complete the same pair of exercises and actually see a decrease in velocity with their med ball throw because they were excessively fatigued and unable to recover in time.
The long term goal of PAPE training is to get the athlete to consistently preform at the higher level of stimulus to receive a higher level of adaptation in their training cycle with a particular movement compared to traditional training methods blocking similar training stimuli together (i.e speed work followed by power, then strength, concluding with conditioning).
For the novice athlete to experience an increase in MB throwing velocity, they would need to complete their throws towards the beginning of the training day when they are the least fatigued. Speed/ power movements require the high amounts of neuromuscular output, but athletes are able to recover relatively quickly compared to the high demands of heavy strength training and/or conditioning. Placing heavy strength training and/ or conditioning before speed and power will result in decreased adaptation of speed and power qualities. Not to worry, athletes of any training experience can still pair exercises together, and receive a positive adaptation.
When it comes down to it, everything we prescribe an athlete requires the athlete to respond to a given stress. The stress placed on the athlete can be planned in a way that allows the athlete to respond to multiple different types of stress in a given training day. It can be as simple as pairing an upper body movement with a lower body movement so that each extremity can recover while the opposite works.
You could also pair fatiguing and non-fatiguing movements on the same half of the body to get the athlete to feel a particular movement “better,” or act as a corrective to their primary movement. One example would be to pair a anterior trunk exercise like a deadbug with a traditional barbell RDL. The deadbug promotes pelvic stability, which is a required quality of the barbell RDL.
Here are some more examples of a PAPE pairing, a optimized recovery pairing, and a complimentary pairing:
PAPE PAIR
-BB LATE STANCE OVER-COMING ISO
-REST
RECOVERY PAIR
COMPLIMENTARY PAIR
As you can see, it truly depends on your goal. If you can answer the why behind why you are doing it with solid reasoning, then keep on keeping on. If you aren’t seeing the progress you thought you would, you might want to consider mixing things up a bit.
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