I love designing conditioning programs. It gets me off. Some people like gambling, or chugging down chicken wings and beer, but me; I’ll take a few hours of program design to center my chi…whatever that is.

I like giving programs to beginners, mainly because I get a kick out of their overly skeptical bitching:

Client: “There’s no tricep pressdowns in here, what about my triceps?”
Marc: “They’re fat, follow your diet. And dips don’t involve Ruffles.”

Client: “Why would I do deadlifts, I don’t wanna be a powerlifter.”
Marc: “Because your glutes look like a couple of folded frisbees, and trust me, you’ll never be a powerlifter”

Client: “Where’s my weight belt, I can’t do squats without that”
Marc: “You won’t be needing a weight belt here, friend, just these knee pads…”

I like giving programs to intermediate trainees, because they are the only group that still seems overly eager to listen and learn. They make the most progress, ask intelligent questions, and are highly appreciative of advice. They are also appreciative of losing the nicknames they receive during their beginner phase, like scooter, or turbo, or dumbs#%t.

Advanced trainees are especially fun to design programs for, because they think they know everything. They usually have catastrophic static and dynamic postural deviances, and one or two grossly underdeveloped muscle groups, and/or muscular imbalances. They’ve experimented with every supplement out there; and usually a few illegal anabolics or lipolytics. This opens the door for program design, and allows me to get into some fun/humbling exercises.

My program database has hundreds of programs for different goals, phases, and experience levels, all very effective. Sometimes, however, I put together a program that just kicks so much a$$, I want to keep it to myself. I want to throw it in the triple password protected vault, and hire an IT nerd to firewall it and protect it with a cyberspace version of the bird flu. But I know it will do no good all locked away, so I break it out and run my clients through it…but I keep an eye on it, like a man standing guard by his girlfriend doing straight leg deadlifts in the gym.

This is one of those programs, I love it. I’ve never loved a woman (OR a man…easy now), but every time I do this workout I think I get closer to understanding what that might be about.

Generally speaking, this program is targeted towards intermediate-advanced trainees. However, some adjustments can be made to allow beginners to play too, mainly exercise selection and total volume.

First, let’s look at what you can expect from this program:

1. Significant body fat loss
2. Increase in Work Capacity (more work in less time)
3. Increase in Cardiorespiratory Capacity
4. Sarcoplasmic Hypertrophy (growth and accumulation of fluid around muscle fibers)
5. Increase in Metabolic Byproduct Clearance Rate (all of the byproducts of muscular contraction clear quicker, allowing you to repeat the same force and length of contraction with a shorter refractory period)
6. Increase of Mitochondrial Density (force muscle cells to adapt by increasing your intracellular energical machinery)
7. Force everyone else in the gym to feel like complete candy-asses after watching you train