Hello to all my strong friends,

It's that time again — to employ a different training regimen, work on new training techniques, and continue to build toward becoming the swolest, strongest, and best community gym in Chicago! In this email, I will discuss our training concepts for the next eight weeks. Providing you with a detailed breakdown of our main movements and plenty of inspiration to accelerate your progress.

MAY IS UPON US! Get ready for Garage-door-open season, outdoor sofa hangs, and our community events with some immaculate vibes. We can’t wait for the sun, the competitions, the sweaty park/block runs. TGC truly thrives in the summer!

Let's talk HAF:

For those who might not be familiar, our HEAVY AF Class follows a principle in resistance training called Progressive Overload. This principle relies on consistently progressing “something” week-by-week to increase neuromuscular demand, facilitate gainzzzz, and ensure that each session challenges you to work a little bit harder than last time.

Since mid-March, our focus has been on muscle hypertrophy. The progressive “something” was volume; each week, I added a handful of reps to our main lifts. We steadily increased the demand we placed on our muscles. We got some crazy pumps and built a massive amount of resilience. I know how hard the 5x10 was. Kudos to powering through those high-volume sets! You guys f*cking crushed it!

In our next HAF program, we will not add reps each week; we will add load—HEAVY LIFTING BABBYYY. For the first four weeks, we will use Pause Reps to strengthen some of our weak areas, and then, for the following four weeks, we are bringing back Contrast Training. In addition to this, we will be switching to a Full-Body Training approach. This will give us eight weeks of Strength and Power development, eventually leading us to a test week where we will test a 3RM in all of our main lifts and some max power movements.

Key Concepts | What ya need to know:

PAUSE REPS

When adding more load to an exercise, you’re only as strong as your weakest point in that movement. We all know that some parts of any given exercise are more difficult than others. This is called a strength curve. The bottom of a bench press or squat, the top position of a row, the middle of a biceps curl—every movement has a struggle zone. The most successful lifters don’t just recognize this; they use it to their advantage to maximize their gains and strengthen their lifts. We will spend the first four weeks using pause reps to strengthen our struggle zones. The pause portion of the lift, the isometric hold, is the mitigation of the stretch reflex. This means we want to pause just long enough to remove momentum from the movement—a second or two is enough—increasing the time under tension in the position and, therefore, strengthening it.

CONTRAST TRAINING

Contrast training is back. Some of you will remember that we used Contrast Training in our program through December. I received a ton of great feedback our last time running this; lots of athletes responded well with some PRs. Don’t fix what ain't broke! We runnin’ it back. To jog your memory, contrast training is a hybrid strength-power modality. It involves pairing a heavy resistance exercise with a high-velocity movement of the same biomechanical pattern (e.g., squats and vertical jumps).

We will be Jumping, Throwing, and Sprinting. ATHLETES DO ATHLETIC SHIT. (professional and non-professional athletes, IYKYK). Now, we’re not all Ryan Johnson. Athletic movements don’t come naturally to all of us. Some of us are dealing with injuries, and some athletes don’t like jumping or power-type movements.

This time, I have programmed specific movements for us to work on. Some movements you might be a little nervous to perform or might not feel ready.

No worries!

All movements can be scaled to meet you where you’re at. If you don’t feel confident in any exercises, talk to your coach, and we’ll find you an alternative movement. Every movement can be modifiable to lead to a similar outcome, but what is most appropriate for you is always the goal.

Is the athletic stuff optional? Well kinda… really everything is optional. If you want to work on your athleticism, we can 100% make it happen in a safe and uplifting way. However, if you’re thinking, “Ash, right now I just wanna be a low jumping, slow running, HEAVY ASS WEIGHT LIFTING muscle mommy/daddy.” I’ll support that, too. It’s your training! I’ll get you on the boxes in the next program cycle.

FULL BODY TRAINING SPLITS

What’s your training split bruh?

The phrase training split refers to splitting up your training program so that different muscles or movement patterns are trained on different days. A classic example is the “Bro Split”: chest, back, legs, shoulders. There are a bunch of different ways to split and organize your training. No training approach is optimal for everyone, and no single training split is superior to another outright; it depends on context.

In fact, the training split we choose to use is one of the variables that matters the least when optimizing training. In our previous cycle, we split our HAF days into Lower body, Upper body, and Full body. This time around, all three days will be full-body.

In my opinion, full-body training is an underrated methodology. Our next focus is going to be strength and power, not hypertrophy. If we split the same amount of exercises across three workouts, we could perform a higher proportion of that work in a fresher state. At least from a local fatigue standpoint.

For example, instead of doing squats, sleds, and RDLs all on the same day three lower body movements we could split them up and do squats on Monday, sleds on Wednesday, and RDLs on Friday— This could mean that a higher proportion of that work is performed at a higher quality and/or effort level, which would be great for a strength and power focus.

Additionally, a full-body training split gives athletes and coaches the opportunity to experience different movements on different days!