When someone asks me what exercises they should do, it’s impossible for me to answer that question without much more information. Other than physical and equipment limitations, the most important question I need answered is what adaptations they are seeking. Good coaches don’t build programs around their favorite exercises. They analyze the physical needs and limitations of their athlete, determine the adaptations that need to occur to meet those needs, and then create stimuli that will drive those adaptations without causing injury or dysfunction.

Nutrition should be approached in a similar manner. The food is like the exercise. That’s not where the planning starts. It begins with determining the energy demands of the athlete and then ensuring that energy is available to that athlete when they need it. It doesn’t matter what goes in the mouth. What ultimately matters is what’s available to the tissues when they need it. The goal is to provide enough energy at the right time to maximize performance and recovery without adding adipose tissue in the process.

Nutrition needs will vary from athlete to athlete, but the need for energy availability and balance to meet those needs won’t. If we approach the question from this viewpoint the answer is fairly simple, and it doesn’t have to be quite as precise as we are made to believe.

It All Starts With Glycogen

That’s always going to be the first problem I solve, making sure they have the glycogen they need when they need it.

We love to focus on protein. After all, that’s the building material we use to ultimately pack on muscle, right? But being obsessed with protein is like hiring a bunch of mechanics for your racing team but forgetting to pay the driver. Glycogen is that driver.

If we got paid in sugar, glycogen would be our money in the bank. To better understand this, I want you to imagine that you’re an entrepreneur who owns hundreds of businesses, large and small. Each has a different role, and they are busy at different times. These businesses are your muscles.

Your revenue is the food you eat. That revenue gets divided up by type and need. Protein is the most flexible form of revenue. Its main job, after it’s broken down into amino acids, is to serve as the building blocks for our tissues. Its emergency role is to serve as energy. (We can get into that later.)

The carbohydrates we eat serve as the currency we use to pay the workers, our muscles and organs, and the front office, the brain. And like most businesses, the front office is overpaid. It consumes an inordinate amount of fuel for something that just sits there and tells other body parts what to do. Fats can serve as currency also, but only certain businesses and activities accept that form of payment. The front office only takes that sweet glycogen, and something called ketones that we will ignore for now. (Sorry paleo peeps.)

The carbohydrates are the stars of the show for pre and post workout nutrition. They get broken down and sent into the bloodstream as glucose. But they can’t stay there. In fact, in a healthy adult, only about a single teaspoon of sugar is circulating through our blood at any one time. That’s about sixteen calories worth of energy. This level must be precisely controlled. Think of this as the money that’s in transit, on its way to one of two places, with just a tiny amount left on the road to cruise around and ensure no place is ever short on money if possible.

A relatively small amount of this glucose cash is deposited in the central bank, the liver. This glycogen can easily be sent on the road to wherever it’s needed once the call comes in. The average person stores about seventy to one hundred and twenty grams of this liquid gold in case of emergency. That comes out to only about two hundred and fifty to five hundred calories.

The lion’s share of our glycogen money gets sent to our businesses, the muscles. Each business then divides its share into three parts. One part gets used for intense, short muscle contractions, another gets used for longer but still intense contractions, and a third gets sent to the storefront (sarcolemma) to assist with the energy costs of doing business.

Two Problems With Cash Flow

Every entrepreneur faces challenges and restrictions in cash flow. Here are two major challenges our body faces. The first challenge is that the liver can only hold so much glycogen money, and it can’t be increased with training. Its limit is set. You can’t do much business with only five hundred calories worth of money, best case scenario. The second challenge is that the money sent to our muscle businesses is on a one-way highway. Once that cash arrives it’s stuck there. In fact, it can’t even be moved around inside the muscle cell.

More Bad News: Glycogen Depletion Hurts Performance Early

We don’t need to run dry on glycogen for the business to grind to a halt. When our liver uses around 70% of its glycogen, performance suffers, in addition to a lot of other warning signals that cause mood and behavioral changes. When our muscles use more than 40% of their glycogen stores, the speed at which they can do their business slows way down also. So, even though our liver can store as much as five hundred calories worth of glycogen cash, after it burns through just three hundred and fifty of those calories, bad things start to happen to the business.

The Good News: Fat and Lactate Spare Your Glycogen

Now, here’s the good news. Fat, praise the Lord. Fat does the heavy lifting on a daily basis. During most activities only about 10 to 20% of our energy needs come from stored muscle glycogen. And we can train in a way that creates adaptations that reduce this percentage even further. That’s the main benefit of lower intensity training. It’s not the fat burning, but rather the glycogen sparing that results from the adaptation.

We can also use something long considered a waste product of intense muscular contraction to create more glycogen: lactate, often erroneously referred to as lactic acid. Lactate can either be used as fuel by the muscle it was made in, or, if the pace of production exceeds the tissue’s ability to use it, it gets sent on its way to the other muscles, the heart, the brain, and the liver. Once in the liver it can get turned back into glycogen in something called the Cori Cycle.

What Does This Mean for Our Nutrition?

This depends on the type of training you’re planning on doing that day. If your training is not going to be very intense then this glycogen cash flow stuff isn’t an issue. In fact, training with lower glycogen levels may even offer a slight advantage because it forces the muscles to get used to doing business with fat money instead of glycogen money.

If your training is going to be more intense then that begs more questions.

The first question is what is considered intense? That’s a fairly straightforward answer in this context: anything that exceeds our aerobic threshold. If we can’t use oxygen to meet all our energy needs, then you can bet your assets you’ll be using your glycogen. How do you know you’re at that point? If you can’t talk while you sweat, you are using glycogen. Pretty simple.

The other question is what type of intense is it? Is it systemically intense or locally intense? Are you going to be doing a CrossFit style workout, four-hundred-meter sprints, or a Hyrox competition? Then it’s systemically intense. If you’re planning on crushing your quads or delts that day, then it’s locally intense.

If the Training Is Systemically Intense

If your training is going to be systemically intense you might want to make sure both your liver and muscle glycogen are topped off. Even if we eat a carb heavy meal the night before, the liver will still be running somewhat low the next day. This is because of that damned front office, the brain. The brain loves glycogen. There’s some kiss ass up there working away all night long, making weird dreams about you in your underwear in a public place, and getting paid for it in our liquid gold. When we wake up in the morning, we can be fairly certain that our liver glycogen levels have been depleted by at least 30%.

Let’s do some quick math here. If the liver can only store five hundred calories worth of glycogen, at most, and we start the day with that depleted by 30%, at least, then that means we wake up with only three hundred and fifty calories of fuel left in our liver. If our performance declines once that level gets down below 30% (one hundred and fifty calories worth of glycogen remaining), then that only leaves a two hundred calorie margin.

Does this mean we absolutely need to refuel in the morning before an intense workout? No, not necessarily. First of all, even during our most intense training, a large percentage of our energy can still come from that underappreciated workhorse, fat. The next thing to consider is the duration of the workout. If it’s a fairly brief session, let’s say forty-five minutes or less, you still may be ok. Remember, lactate can plus up our liver glycogen stores a little during that time as well, and a lot of energy will come from our muscle glycogen. During longer workouts some muscle tissue will also be broken down and the amino acids will be turned into glucose through gluconeogenesis, and some of that can then be stored as glycogen through glycogenesis. (Don’t worry, this won’t kill your gains. It’s a negligible amount that is quickly replaced.)

If the Training Is Locally Intense

If we are planning to do a locally intense training session, then having full liver glycogen stores isn’t that important. While the muscles being trained will tear through their glycogen deposits, the rest of the system can still run primarily on fat stores. In this case a pre-workout meal may not be needed. While we sleep, the brain draws energy from our liver. But remember, the muscles don’t share. As long as we replenished our muscle glycogen stores after our training session the day before, they will still be pretty full the next day.

Yet another question is the type of localized intense exercise you are planning to do. Is it higher rep, like multiple sets of eight to twelve reps, similar to how bodybuilders train? If so, then full muscle glycogen stores are important. If it’s lower rep, heavier load strength training, then it’s not quite as important. And lower glycogen levels do not have an effect on one rep strength. While the contractions for that type of training are very intense, there simply aren’t a lot of them. If it’s the former type of training then it’s important you at least eat some quality carbohydrates the night before.

The final consideration is performance. Sometimes you don’t need to, or don’t care to, perform at your absolute best. In fact, a lot of people purposely train intensely in a semi-fasted state on occasion to train their bodies to be able to do that better if needed. But usually, your performance during the session is very important. Running fast, jumping high, and moving more weight is what drives performance adaptations, and we often rightly prioritize those over metabolic adaptations.

What to Eat Before You Train

Assuming we are doing a systemically intense workout and need full liver glycogen stores, what is the best thing to eat before we train to ensure this?

Well, the worst thing that can happen is we take in a bunch of revenue and it gets stuck in escrow (the stomach) before it can be distributed. What might cause this? Four culprits are to blame if this happens.

The first bandit is time. No matter how perfect the food is, if we aren’t shooting it straight into our veins, we will need time to get it into circulation before it can then be delivered. Even the simplest form of sugar needs several minutes before it enters our bloodstream, and even longer before it begins to be stored by the liver and the muscles. Complex carbohydrates can take as long as an hour and a half to reach their destination as glycogen. So, if you’re driving to the gym, late for your cardio boot camp class, and you’re chugging a smoothie, the vast majority of that will still be sitting in your stomach or small intestine when the burpees start. That’s even worse than training on an empty stomach. Blood will be redirected to your digestive tract, and insulin will be high when you start training, which means cortisol will be low, and cortisol is a performance enhancer.

The second villain is protein. Yep, I said the P word. Protein is simply not needed pre-training, and it slows digestion. A little bit of protein is fine with your pre-workout meal though, especially if it’s eaten more than an hour before training. Ideally this would be an easily digested form of protein, like a whey powder or Greek yogurt, as meat takes much longer to break down. But that being said, a turkey sandwich eaten an hour and a half before you train won’t negatively impact your training much, even with the tryptophan in the turkey. The other thing to consider is the need to simply meet your daily protein requirements. If you are purposefully avoiding protein in your pre-workout meal then you’ll need to plus that up during another meal. With these considerations, as a general rule of thumb, if you are forced to eat within an hour of the start of your training, keep the protein content of that meal to under ten grams.

Next on the list is fiber. Fiber is fantastic, but it has no place in your pre-workout meal. Nearly every starch will include a little bit of fiber, and that’s ok, but some sources contain far more than others. White rice, potatoes, and white or regular whole grain bread are all fine options, even though they have some fiber in them. Carbohydrate sources like quinoa, lentils, beans, barley, etc. are not so good.

Finally, we have fat. Fat also slows digestion, and it takes a long time to get from the blood into our tissues. Large amounts of fat have no place in either our pre or post-workout meals.

A good strategy is to combine an easily digested complex carbohydrate with a sugar that is equal parts glucose and fructose. An example of this would be a slice of toast with some banana slices and a drizzle of honey. If you eat this more than an hour before your training starts, feel free to add a cup of Greek yogurt or a small whey protein shake. Another great option is some white rice with some egg whites and a piece of fruit.

How Much Should You Eat Before Training?

As far as the size of the meal goes, think small. You don’t need much to fuel a hard training session start to finish. Half a gram per pound of bodyweight is really all most people need. If you are doing an intense session that will last over an hour and a half, then consider upping that to one gram per pound of bodyweight. Quick math will tell you that for a one hundred and fifty pound person this means that three hundred calories in carbohydrates within a couple hours of training should be more than enough to optimize performance.

Post-Workout Nutrition: What to Eat After Training

This is the time most people would emphasize protein, but that too may be a mistake. While the anabolic window is considered a myth now, I do believe there are some special benefits to getting in a moderate amount of protein and carbs within an hour of hard training. But don’t feel the need to chug a protein shake before you leave the parking lot. In fact, it’s probably best not to do that.

Our biggest macronutrient need immediately after training is glycogen replenishment. Carbohydrate intake post-workout serves an important anti-catabolic function. It stops lean tissue breakdown and spikes insulin, an important anabolic hormone. Protein can spike insulin as well, but it doesn’t replenish glycogen stores nearly as easily. Carbohydrate intake will start the recovery process sooner and give you energy for the rest of the day. Much like your pre-workout meal however, you don’t need much. Half a gram of carbohydrates per pound of bodyweight post training is plenty.

Unlike with the pre-workout meal however, protein isn’t useless here. The leucine in protein triggers the mTOR pathway, which helps to initiate muscle building and repair. Studies comparing protein intake timing show little to no difference in results between groups that got protein in immediately after training compared to hours later, as long as the total amount was the same. So, there goes science again, getting in the way of bro science. For what it’s worth though, I still like getting in my easily digested protein source within about an hour of training, despite what the science says. Much like protein in the pre-workout meal, total daily consumption is a factor. So, at the very least, I’m helping to ensure I meet my daily requirements this way. If you do choose to ingest protein post-workout you don’t need much. Half of the grams of carbs you ingest is a good rule of thumb.

You only need about three grams of leucine to maximize the mTOR response, and this can be obtained through the ingestion of about thirty grams of whey protein. As such, a meal containing twenty to thirty grams of easily digested protein and forty to sixty grams of a combination of fructose and glucose is an ideal post-workout meal. That being said, it’s not as crucial as people make it out to be. By far the most important factors are being fueled for hard training, training hard, and getting enough total macronutrients in during the course of the day.

Hydration and Electrolytes: The Two That Never Get Their Due

After all those words, there are two nutrients that trump everything else discussed, but somehow only ever get the obligatory nod instead of the prostrate bow they deserve. Water and electrolytes.

The single most important thing you need to do first thing in the morning, after checking my Instagram feed of course, is to drink a big glass of water. Hydration is king, and the biggest piece to staying hydrated is fluid intake.

The other piece to hydration is electrolytes. Think of these as the currency the electric company accepts. (I know this is a stretch, but bear with me.) Our business runs on electricity. If we can’t keep the lights on, no work gets done. But that electrical current has these gatekeepers that only accept particular forms of currency. (Currency comes from the Latin word currens, which means to run or flow, so it’s especially fitting here.) This currency comes in four forms: calcium, potassium, sodium, and magnesium. Calcium is never an acute issue, we have large reserves we can call upon. But the other three must be continuously resupplied. Most people who eat a healthy balanced diet don’t really have much to worry about here, but better safe than sorry, especially with sodium. If you don’t eat a lot of processed foods and you work out intensely, especially in the heat, you might not be getting enough sodium in your diet, and you likely need far more than the normal daily recommendation of two grams per day. Hard training athletes normally need in excess of three to four grams daily.

What I Actually Do

With all of this in mind, I normally don’t worry an awful lot about either my pre or post-workout meal, to be honest. I normally eat a fairly low carb meal in the morning. If I’m planning to do a systemically intense workout that day I may add a piece of sourdough bread. But then again, I’m not grinding out two hours of road work at my lactate threshold or training for the Olympic bobsled team. As for my post-workout meal, I’ll drink a shake with forty grams of whey protein, some cherries and blueberries, a little honey, sweetened kefir, and some creatine. (Creatine does not need to be ingested post-workout, it’s just how I roll.) What I am far more concerned with however is my pre and post-workout hydration. Every morning, I will drink at least twenty ounces of water before I leave the house, with 500 to 1,000 milligrams of sodium. After my workout the very first thing I do is rehydrate with another twenty ounces of water and another 500 milligrams of sodium and some potassium. Because my employees can wait a couple hours to get paid if need be, but the electric company will shut your damn lights off.

There it is, a very wordy way to say don’t worry too much about it, and don’t believe that you need a very precise amount to optimize your performance. It’s one more thing we stress about that we probably shouldn’t be.

Today I will take a look at both the good and the bad of this craze, as well as where I see things going from here, and maybe where I wish they’d go instead.

Back When Nobody Asked for Glutes

I grew up in commercial gyms. I was a gym rat from high school on, and then I spent years working in them as a trainer before transitioning into private speed coaching. During my years in that setting, hundreds of people sat down at my desk for their fitness consult. Fitness consults were an extremely prevalent piece of the commercial gym business. Gyms would offer every new member a free fitness consult and it served as the primary mechanism to drive personal training sales. Of course I wanted to grow my clientele, in more ways than one, but I also genuinely wanted to help people reach their fitness goals, whether they paid me or not.

So I’d start each consult simply by asking them what their goals were. Women were much more likely to accept the free consult than men were. Maybe dudes tend to assume they know what they are doing at a higher rate. Women tend to ask questions more, while dudes seem to like to tell me what they know. (Maybe I’m guilty of that as well.) As such, the vast majority of my fitness consults, and the majority of my clients, were female. During those years, mostly in the early 2000s, few women stated their goal was to grow a bigger booty. Most wanted to “lose ten pounds,” achieve a slimmer waist, and have more shapely arms. I would have to sell heavy weight training during that consult pretty hard. Most women were terrified of growing larger muscles anywhere, especially their quads. Few mentioned a desire to have larger glutes, or their frustration from a lack of glute size. If glutes were mentioned at all, it was likely the side butt or their “hip dip” that they wanted “fixed.”

As for guys, obviously, glutes were never mentioned. For that matter, legs were rarely mentioned. Occasionally they mentioned their frustration over their small calves, to which we’d respond, “it’s mostly genetics,” to let us both off the hook from feeling obligated to train them.

The Era of “A” Leg Day

I know this is hard for us to wrap our heads around now, but during that time and before, glute isolation work wasn’t really a thing. It was known that the glutes got plenty of work with squatting, lunging, and hinging. The glute isolation work was considered a waste of time. And to reflect this feeling, there were few, if any, glute machines in the gym, other than the yes/no machine. The typical leg workout consisted of a squat, a leg press, a leg extension, and a leg curl. Maybe a stiff legged deadlift would be thrown in there if we had just seen a photo of Tom Platz’s hamstring in a muscle magazine, but that’s about it.

If a woman told a trainer she didn’t want to grow her quads, we considered that misguided, and tough, she’d just have to get over it. If they grew, they grew. For some people, this worked out well. Depending on someone’s genetics, the traditional lifts, done once a week (which was the standard), resulted in some solid glute growth. But for most people, especially women, this wasn’t nearly enough. And for many, if they squatted heavy their quads would grow, big surprise. Working a muscle more than once a week wasn’t all that common then, unless it was chest or biceps, because bro splits still reigned supreme. Everyone had a leg day, emphasis on “a,” and whether they found an excuse to skip it or not that week was a coin flip.

The Army, Then the Speed World

In 2006 I joined the Army and was out of the commercial gym scene for a few years altogether. When I got out, I became a private speed coach. And in that world, glutes are all the rage for different reasons. For sprinting, and athletics in general, the glutes are the preeminent muscle group. Athletic performance hinges on powerful hip extension, no pun intended, and that’s the main role of the glutes. They were so important in fact that my business partner and mentor named his two dogs Medius and Maximus in their honor.

The Craze Hits the Commercial Gym

During the mid 2010s, glute training slowly started to become all the rage for women. So much so, in fact, that it’s not uncommon to walk into a commercial gym nowadays and see every adjustable bench taken up, not from the bros training their pecs, but rather from the ladies using them as a stand for their Bulgarian split squats and for their hip thrusts. If you move on to the Smith machines, there’s a very good chance they will also be employed by ladies doing split squats and hip thrusts. Then there’s the glute machine section, which is becoming more and more prevalent in gyms.

Generally, this is a good thing, and I’m sure the guys appreciate it, even if it means we are stuck waiting for a bench sometimes. Women hitting the weights more in general is a very good thing. But the best thing is that lately, on occasion, I’ll see a brother giving the glutes some love.

Men, Manliness, and the Lagging Glute

Men do manly things. We bench press, we squat, and we deadlift. We only cry tears from the joy of seeing our enemy driven before us, and we don’t do girl things, like match our socks or hip thrusts. For years it was accepted as gospel that if you did squats and deadlifts your butt would be plenty big and strong for all that manhood required, and if it wasn’t, then you must not be squatting or deadlifting hard enough.

To be sure, those two lifts have the potential to be great glute builders, and a program for glutes that doesn’t include some form of squatting or hinging is suspect at best. But for those of us who were paying attention, the dudes’ glutes were lagging, even if they were strong in those lifts. About fifteen years ago, one of my clients who was squatting and deadlifting more than five hundred pounds came in with tight hip flexors. I started him on the ground doing glute bridges in an attempt to get them to relax through reciprocal inhibition before we started to mobilize them. Almost immediately his hamstrings started cramping up and fatiguing. With his knees being bent, this should not have happened. It was his glutes, not his hamstrings, that were in the best position to extend his hips. Why?

Herein lies the problem. Our bodies have built in redundancies. The body doesn’t rely entirely on one muscle to do a movement, but rather our bodies can use different strategies to get the same job done. Squatting can be done with weak glutes if we get the quads and the adductors strong enough. And deadlifts can be accomplished with weak glutes if we get the lower back and hamstrings strong enough.

Around this time, I started to notice another trend. Men in particular were lacking strength near full hip extension. Anything that required their glutes to finish the job was hard for them. The reason was simple, they never trained that capability. Squats, deadlifts, and even lunges don’t fully train the glutes near full contraction.

What’s the Cost?

The glutes have a few very crucial roles in the body. The gluteus maximus, the big butt muscle we smack every time the wifey is foolish enough to bend over in front of our adolescent brains, holds the pelvis down in back, helping to prevent something called anterior pelvic tilt. Excessive anterior pelvic tilt can lead to a series of downstream negative repercussions. It causes excessive extension of the lower back, which affects our gait, breathing, and posture. But in order to have a positive effect on pelvic alignment, the glutes must be strong and active near full hip extension.

Doing exercises that require full hip extension (which often means the knee is behind the hip) encourages the hip flexors to relax. Tight hip flexors pull the pelvis down in front. So the combination of inactive glutes and tight hip flexors exacerbates the anterior pelvic tilt. To see how things get worse from here, let’s remember that the body will figure out a way to get the job done. Hips need to be fully extended occasionally; there’s no way around it. To do this with tight hip flexors and weak glutes, the body uses the other two major hip extensors, the hamstrings and the lower back. The hamstrings are in a poor position to pull the pelvis posteriorly, and the lower back actively pulls it into anterior pelvic tilt when it contracts. Big, strong dudes often just assume their glutes are really strong because their squats and deadlifts are strong, but that isn’t a sure thing. This relative glute weakness sets them up for spine and hip problems.

The Side of the Hip Nobody Trains Correctly

The other cost of having weak glutes comes from a weakness in the gluteus medius and minimus. These two muscles are located on the side of the hips. They both play a crucial role in stabilizing the femur and the pelvis, preventing the thigh from collapsing inward, something called valgus collapse. This inward collapse often isn’t obvious. It’s just a subtle, constant pressure that over time erodes the inside of the knee joint, causes lateral hip and knee pain, and collapses the arch of the foot. The medial glutes don’t get trained all that well during conventional squats and deadlifts. They require single leg work and some active abduction, such as the “yes machine” or banded lateral walks. Thankfully, single leg work is becoming far more prevalent amongst the brothers, but direct lateral hip work is still a rarity.

For women, training the medial glutes is even more important because they tend to have wider hips, and thus something called their “Q angle” is also larger. This is the angle formed between the knee joint and the hip joint when standing, running, walking, or jumping. But women also tend to train these muscles far more, falsely believing it will fix their hip dips.

The Tall Guy in the Jean Shorts

Starting in the early 2000s, a tall, hairy dude who didn’t really have great bodybuilding genetics and liked to wear jean shorts, named Bret Contreras, started talking about glute training, and people started listening because he backed it up with sound reasoning and science. Turns out he wasn’t just a gym bro but an actual researcher, which was quite the rarity back then. Even more astonishing, he had somehow convinced a bunch of women to listen to him, and more astonishing still, they had glutes. He advocated for this weird exercise called a hip thrust that looked like you were humping a bar. Ain’t no way a self-respecting straight dude in 2006 was going to do that shit.

At first he was ignored by the bodybuilding establishment, then he was mocked, and finally they attacked him. Pretty standard sequence of events. The thing was, he was never against squats or deadlifts. In fact, he advocated for them. He just recognized that for many people, those two lifts weren’t enough. He also started to advocate for training legs more than once a week, gasp, burn him at the stake. It turned out, though, that over time it became apparent the science was agreeing with him.

He never set out to be a trainer of women, but for the first decade that’s pretty much the only people that cared what he had to say. That’s slowly changing, however. I’m not suggesting that Bret alone was responsible for the great glute awakening. It was multifaceted and driven largely by culture and the sports science community, who had long advocated for more glute focused training, gaining more access to the general public. But he is largely responsible for bringing the quintessential glute exercise, the hip thrust, to the public forum, amongst other things, so love him or hate him, a lot of the glute development you see today is thanks to him.

What I’m Not Seeing

Going into your average gym and seeing far more people of both sexes training glutes is a good thing, don’t get me wrong. But it’s what I’m not seeing that is starting to concern me. It reminds me a little bit of what happened in the strength and conditioning and the personal training field about twenty years ago, when hamstrings became all the rage. Physical therapists and researchers began to make a connection with knee injuries and a muscular imbalance between the quads and the hamstrings. So, of course, the natural thing to do was demonize quad training. As a general rule of thumb, making muscle groups weaker is never a good thing. While getting your hamstrings stronger is always a good idea, trying to balance out the strength ratio between the quads and hamstrings by avoiding the strengthening of the quadriceps turned out to be misguided, to put it mildly.

The same thing is going on today with this glute craze. I’m seeing Bulgarian split squats and hip thrusts being done all day every day, but I rarely see direct abdominal work being done anymore, and I never see hip flexor work being done. We seem to have become aware that we have a posterior chain, while at the same time forgetting that we also have an anterior chain.

A Lot of Partying in the Back, No Business in the Front

The “abs are made in the kitchen” sentiment has really caught on. While it’s true that for abs to be seen there needs to be a very low level of body fat, we forget that visible abs aren’t automatically strong abs. Then there’s the red headed stepchildren more commonly called the hip flexors. Nobody’s ever been on a boat and someone said, “would you look at the hip flexors on that one.” And that’s the problem. If you build your glutes, you can get both the health benefits and the occasional well-earned ogle. But not so with the poor hip flexors.

Extending the femur with strong glutes often means little if you can’t also quickly and easily recover that femur from behind the body. And that brings up another major blind spot in our training, hip hyperextension. For years, when glute training was the domain of sports performance coaches, their ability not just to extend the hip but to pull the femur past the hip was paramount. They naturally understood the need to train the muscles that did the opposite. As such, there was balance. Now there’s a great imbalance developing between glute strength and hip flexor and ab strength. There’s a lot of partying going on in the back, but no business happening in the front. We build them but then never use them for what they are best at, helping us sprint.

Everything Starts at the Feet

When I was a kid, it wasn’t like people didn’t have glutes, some did. But it was athletes mostly, the people that sprinted and jumped often. Back then, if you had glutes, you automatically had something else, other than attention from the opposite sex, well developed lower legs. I say lower legs because it wasn’t just their calves. In fact, oftentimes they had defined but relatively small calves, because, you know, genetics. But we forget that there is a lot more to the lower leg than the calves. The lower leg has three main compartments, the anterior, the lateral, and the posterior. In the gym we only ever train the posterior compartment, and even that is a rarity.

So now I’m starting to see something I never saw as a kid, people with big, well developed butts, and weak lower legs. Everything starts from the feet. It’s the first link in almost every kinetic chain. The glutes will struggle to do their job if the anchor isn’t firmly set to begin with.

I understand that aesthetics is driving the butt boom, and that’s fine, it’s human nature. But we must remember form follows function. The best way to look good is to move well. The glutes are far from the only piece to that puzzle. And while it’s great that we are finally taking our glute training seriously, we must not forget the other pieces, especially the anterior chain and the lower legs.

How to Fix It Without Giving Up Your Glute Day

We don’t have to let go of our new found love of glute training to fix this. One great approach is to use antagonistic supersets. Once a week at least, in between sets of hip extensions, whether that be deadlifts or something done on a machine, do an exercise that trains the anterior chain. Good examples of this are ab wheel rollouts, hanging leg raises, and dragon flags.

Another great option is to incorporate sprinting. I understand this is a risky proposition for most people. But sprinting doesn’t need to be all out to be effective. One trick is to start high-kneeing in place and then start moving forward. Keep adding speed until you find it difficult to maintain that high-knee form and posture. Another option is to sprint up hills, stairs, or while pulling or pushing a light sled. This greatly reduces injury risk. Sprinting trains everything discussed: the glutes, hamstrings, anterior chain, and the lower leg.

Finally, consider incorporating some weighted walking or agility work. Both of these are great ways to get those little muscles, along with the hip flexors and the lower legs, that the gym isn’t great at training.

Always strive to create balance.

Always be an Athlete.

Judd Lienhard

See my weekly programming

The Ground That Proves It

North Africa isn’t a place most of us think about often, but it’s been the scene of warfare that has impacted the course of civilization for thousands of years. North Africa is a massive land, longer than the continental United States is from coast to coast, brutally hot in the summer, frigid in the winter, and unforgiving to those invaders not accustomed to that landscape.

Its geography made it a perfect place for something called maneuver warfare. Sparsely populated by hardy, often nomadic tribesmen, bordered on the north by the Mediterranean Sea, on the south by the seemingly endless Sahara Desert, and on the west by the rugged Atlas Mountains, it is a strategically vital strip of land that armies have crisscrossed and bled over repeatedly throughout history, leaving many who underestimated it buried beneath its rocky dirt. Controlling this region gave whoever had it access to the Red Sea, and thus the oil riches of Arabia, and before that, the Indian Ocean and the riches of the east. It also gave them a perfect area to strike at what Winston Churchill called the soft underbelly of Europe. It was the ancient home of the Carthaginian Empire, Rome’s archenemy for almost a hundred years, the empire that produced Hamilcar and his famous son Hannibal, that conquered Spain and nearly brought Rome to her knees.

Why Cavalry Was Never the Answer

To be fair, the super weapon of the ancient world was cavalry, and it played a large role in determining who controlled this region. This is where the famous Numidian cavalry came from. The horse and camel were also how the Muslims swept through these lands in the seventh century. But cavalry has some major flaws. The land required to keep and maintain vast herds of horses in arid regions prevents the growth of dense populations with cohesive societies. The Romans controlled the nomads by playing the tribes, accustomed to near constant warfare amongst themselves, off against one another. This was the same way empires controlled the tribes of the steppe in Asia, that is until Genghis Khan came along and united them, turning the world on its head for two centuries, until they too broke apart. Cavalry, and later mechanized units, were great at lightning raids and instilling fear amongst the people they fought, but they had an Achilles heel. Sustainability. Horses eat, and tanks drink copious amounts of fuel. Humans, not horses, are the ultimate endurance athletes. If properly trained and hardened, we can walk farther on less food, across rougher terrain, and in greater numbers than any other animal on earth. Humans can also carry a much larger percentage of our body weight than horses or camels. Humans can cross terrain that heavily burdened animals struggle with. We are the ultimate beasts of burden.

Two Men, Twenty-One Centuries Apart

It was here in North Africa where two men, separated by twenty-one centuries, recognized that building a fighting force that could travel farther and faster on foot was the key to victory, not the horse or the tank.

Marius and His Mules

Most of us are unaware of the Jugurthine War in the first century BC, named after the genius king of the Numidians who used guile, diplomacy, and his Numidian cavalry to embarrass Rome for a decade. The problem was the Roman army had the slows. It was bogged down by long and vulnerable baggage trains that were often raided and limited the legion’s ability to move through mountainous terrain away from good roads. Marius, a Roman commander during this war, took the burden off the beasts and put it on the backs of the animal best suited to carry a large load a long way, the human. They became known as Marius’ Mules. At first it was a derogatory term his legionaries referred to themselves by, but as the legionaries began to outmaneuver the Numidians and accumulate one victory after another it began to be embraced by his men.

(Scipio Africanus is also known to have done this a century earlier to defeat Carthage in the Second Punic War, and Marius may have drawn inspiration from his example. Marius is also credited with other reforms, such as drawing the soldiers from the poor and making them professional soldiers, equipped uniformly by the state. He also is credited with the invention of the pilum, a spear designed to bend after piercing a shield, preventing it from being pulled out, forcing the enemy to discard their shields.)

The Truscott Trot

Two thousand years later, in this very land, American boys were fighting a Nazi war machine, commanded by another genius general, Erwin Rommel, using another devastating war implement, the tank.

Americans were not ready for this juggernaut, and we suffered a series of embarrassing defeats, capped off by the Battle of Kasserine Pass in February 1943, where we were forced to retreat even farther than we did two years later during the Battle of the Bulge. General Patton is rightly credited with instituting a number of reforms that transformed our infant army into an effective fighting force in an amazingly brief amount of time after that debacle. But it was one of his subordinate commanders, not nearly as famous, but perhaps an even better general, named Lucian Truscott, who took a page from history and turned one of the units in our army, the 3rd Infantry Division, into an elite fighting force.

General Truscott was a former cavalry officer, an avid history buff, and aware of Marius and his mules. He knew they were fighting on the same ground and saw the parallels between speed and victory in this region. Truscott famously introduced the marching standard that became known as the Truscott Trot. He required everyone in his division to be able to move at five miles an hour for the first mile and four miles per hour for every hour after that, while carrying a full combat load of sixty pounds or more. Even in an age where mechanized warfare was beginning to play an ever-larger role in victory, Truscott recognized that it was often the army that could quickly move on foot over rough terrain with the equipment they’d need to fight, and who arrived fresh enough to finish that fight, that would win. America had the most mechanized army in the world, even at that early stage of the war, and ideally, as many soldiers would ride on the trucks as possible. But trucks are limited in where they can go and easily slowed by blown bridges and soggy roads. They also need to be used to haul the artillery, the ammunition, and the other supplies needed to sustain a modern army. A fast-moving infantry that could cover rough ground in all weather, carrying what they needed to fight with for a few days, was still the difference maker. His 3rd Infantry Division was often used as a spearhead for the remainder of the campaign, assigned to the toughest tasks, getting places at a speed and across terrain the Nazis thought to be impossible. This division was home of the famous Audie Murphy, the most decorated soldier in American history. Before Audie became famous for his bravery and skill, he toughened his feet and strengthened his legs on dozens of grueling foot marches at blistering paces.

The 3rd landed in Sicily, the site of fierce fighting between the Romans and Carthage in the First Punic War, where Hannibal’s dad became famous. They moved so quickly up the west coast of the island that they outflanked the Germans and Italians, forcing them into a headlong retreat and subsequent evacuation to the Italian mainland. During the march up Sicily the 3rd Infantry Division became famous for moving ninety miles across rugged mountainous terrain in just three days. One battalion in that division famously covered fifty-four miles in just thirty-three hours.

Armies That Outwalked Their Enemies

Soldiers moving fast on foot has been the hallmark of great armies for centuries.

Alexander

Alexander the Great’s army was primarily a foot army, and they conquered lands from the Levant to the Indus River, a distance of over 2,500 miles, through some of the harshest terrain in the world, on foot and against great odds. They were required to be able to march over twenty miles a day while carrying sixty pounds of equipment, day in and day out, for months on end. In thirteen years of campaigning his army marched an estimated twenty-two thousand miles. In March of 335 BC his army marched 240 miles in just fourteen days, catching a rebellious army off guard by how quickly they arrived. He had specialized units that once averaged forty-two miles a day over mountain passes to get behind an enemy force in Uzbekistan.

Napoleon

Napoleon’s legendary career began in northern Italy, where he took an outnumbered, starving, and demoralized French army and quickly won a series of astounding battles against enormous odds by marching his army distances his enemies thought to be impossible, showing up where they were least expected, ready to fight. A few years later one of his divisions marched seventy miles in just thirty-six hours to surprise the Austrians at the Battle of Austerlitz, proving decisive in one of Europe’s most famous and impactful battles.

The Tenderfooted Union Army

At the beginning of the Civil War the Union army was literally tenderfooted. It was a large factor in their defeat at the First Battle of Bull Run. During the sixteen-mile march south to the small creek whose name would soon become infamous, large numbers of soldiers became exhausted, abandoned equipment, and fell out.

Stonewall’s Foot Cavalry

As both armies hardened, sixteen miles became a distance easily covered in all weather, for days on end, often with an empty belly. A year after Bull Run, soldiers of a famous Confederate general named Stonewall Jackson earned the moniker foot cavalry because of their extraordinary feats in the Shenandoah Valley during the campaign of 1862. The Shenandoah was of vital importance to both sides during that conflict. In addition to being the breadbasket of the South, it served as a natural highway that allowed for maneuver, screened by the mountains, and it connected the eastern Confederacy to the vital border states of Kentucky and Tennessee.

Stonewall Jackson’s men first used this term, foot cavalry, derisively, much like the Roman legionaries had under Marius, when they referred to themselves as his mules. By all accounts Stonewall was a strange man, with odd habits, like riding into battle with a hand raised above his head to “balance his blood.” As a professor at West Point years prior he was mocked for his weird mannerisms. His first battle against the Union army was nearly a disaster, and his men couldn’t see the genius behind all this fast walking. But also, much like the legionaries under Marius, the Confederates soon learned to take pride in their title. Using the mountains as a screen, his men would often cover over thirty miles in a day, many of them barefoot and living largely off the green corn they’d pluck from the cornfields they marched past. Doing this allowed them to pop out unexpectedly through mountain passes, inflict great damage on the Union army, and then disappear just as quickly back through the mountains. These marches resulted in Lincoln withholding troops from another general fighting towards Richmond in the east. It was this, in combination with savage attacks by a new Confederate general named Lee and Jackson’s sudden appearance in front of his army, that caused McClellan to retreat down the peninsula, extending the brutal war for years.

The March That Saved the Union

But the Confederates didn’t have the market cornered on fast marching and hard fighting soldiers. One little known march probably saved the Union. Gettysburg was the largest battle ever fought on our soil, and the first day didn’t look good for the boys in blue. They were outnumbered and hard pressed on all sides by Lee’s vaunted Army of Northern Virginia. A general named John Sedgwick drove his hardened corps of infantry on a nineteen-hour, thirty-seven-mile forced march through the summer heat, arriving just in time on the afternoon of July 2. It was this corps that was used to plug vital gaps in the Union line, and it was they who fought at famous parts of the battle, such as Culp’s Hill, the Wheatfield, and Little Round Top, over the next two days that turned the tide of the battle.

Still True Today

Even today, with all our modern technology, it’s often the soldier on foot, who often got there on foot, who wins the day. The army that walks the best, wins the most.

The “long walk” is a crucial part of the brutal selection course into America’s elite 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment-Delta, also known as Delta Force. Forty miles through the rugged mountains of West Virginia is enough to break even the hardest modern warrior seeking membership in this most elite of groups. During Ranger School, known as the hardest school in the Army, Ranger candidates start the selection with a twelve-mile ruck march for time, and they go on to walk over two hundred and fifty miles during the next sixty-five days.

Walking is still central to our modern warfare. In Afghanistan most of our missions started on board a helicopter. But to avoid detection we’d often land “outside audible range.” That means an hours-long patrol through rugged terrain just to get to the objective. This was often followed by a long foot movement off target to get to a place that was safe for the helicopters to come get us. The enemy will always fight where he has a defensive advantage, and this usually means up high. Nothing can get to those places better than a soldier or marine on foot, carrying what he needs to fight once he gets there.

The Ultimate Human Flex

Walking, especially walking with a load, is the ultimate human flex. It’s something we are uniquely good at among the animal kingdom. But it’s also an ability that we are increasingly losing. For all the tough guy antics you see nowadays, from the Punisher tattoos to the posts of them grappling and hitting the gym, throughout history it was the humble peasant and immigrant on foot, enduring the suck, that proved to be the true ultimate warrior. The ones whose feet, legs, and back could take the burden that highborn soldiers of the other armies couldn’t were the ones that changed history.

Warriors walk, they always have, and they always will.

Share

The Death of a Diet

The people of Pike County, Missouri, located adjacent to the Mississippi River in the northeastern part of the state, aren’t exactly the picture of health and wellness. Like most rural communities in America today, the people in the place I was raised are struggling with metabolic disease, cancer, and obesity at rates far exceeding those of most urban areas.

On the surface this would seem to indicate that the country boy diet is about the worst thing for you. But a deeper look reveals that it wasn’t the diet we grew up on, but rather the death of that diet, that has caused this. In addition to being a community that largely scoffs at cardiovascular exercise, weight training, and mental and emotional wellness strategies, it also smokes and drinks at far higher rates than the rest of the country. The activity level has steadily declined, and crucially, these nine foods have been taking up an ever-shrinking portion of their ever-increasing calorie intake.

Some people may picture an idyllic small Midwestern town square, filled with quaint cafes and a farmer’s market. But what usually exists in these areas, where the median family income often sits below the $50K mark, are a string of fast-food restaurants along whatever state highway has been keeping it alive. If your town has over five thousand residents, then there’s a good chance it will have the usual suspects: McDonald’s, Taco Bell, Burger King, and maybe an Arby’s if it’s near an off-ramp of a four-lane highway. If you’re one of those snooty “small towns” of over ten thousand people with a regional state university, you’ll have a Starbucks in the back of the convenience store. The people who live in the country surrounding those towns often grab their breakfast or lunch in one of their drive-throughs on the way to their shift work on an assembly line or in a chemical plant. But it wasn’t always this way.

There’s Gold Hidden in Them Hills

Underneath this slow death of culture is a hidden legacy of eating that resulted in long and healthy lives for generations despite the area’s relative poverty, lack of structured physical activity, and lack of access to many of the foods more traditionally seen as “superfoods.”

Honorable Mentions

If these nine foods were all about to receive their superfood trophy, I’d start that awards banquet with an honorable mention list that those gathered should stand and applaud. These foods include real butter, whole milk, eggs that could sit on a counter and had dark orange yolks, and seasonal fruits such as peaches, brought from the farmer’s cart that grew them on the side of a dusty back road.

It’s also important to acknowledge the long and healthy lives many of us were able to lead without the benefit of certain wonderful foods more commonly called “super.” This isn’t meant to insinuate that these foods aren’t as healthy as we may believe, but rather that the foods we did eat were so beneficial that we were able to stay healthy despite not having access to them.

Subscribe now

What We Didn’t Have

The people in that part of the country eat very little fresh produce. I know that sounds insane coming from someone who grew up in the Midwest, but our crops were not of that kind. By my youth, virtually every crop in a thousand-mile radius was what they call a feed crop. We grew mostly corn and soy. Corn comes in two main forms, sweet and feed corn. Our corn was used to make animal feed and ethanol for fuel. As for the soy, I’ll put it this way: the word edamame was about as well known as polyphenol. Almost all our soy was used for animal feed, vegetable oil, and industrial products. Lots of people like to think they live in “the country,” but unless the median income is less than the cost of an average new car and houses on blocks outnumber homes with more than one story, you don’t live in the real country. Most of the fresh produce in this country is grown in California, in a relatively small area. The farther you live from urban areas, the less fresh produce is available, even if you happen to live in the middle of farm country. We had plenty of land to grow our own, and some of us did, but it was rarely eaten fresh. We will cover that in a bit.

We also ate very little, if any, cold-water fish. There was the obvious drawback of being a long flight away from any cold water. But in addition to that, there really wasn’t the awareness of the benefits then that exists now of eating fatty fish. Besides, we already ate plenty of catfish, and to us, same difference.

So, What Did We Eat?

My hometown got a McDonald’s across the street from my high school during my freshman year. That was a big deal, and the glory we bathed in lasted for about two years before they took the golden arches down. There was a rumor that we had the first McDonald’s that ever went out of business, not because we were extraordinarily health conscious, but rather because of an impoverished local economy, as well as some suspected financial improprieties. So, in my town, at that time, fast food wasn’t a major source of our calories.

More often than not, when I got home at night the house was filled with the smells emanating from a large cast iron pot on top of the stove, called a Dutch oven, and almost everything on this list was thrown into that pot at one time or another. Why? Because they were cheap, filling, and easily preserved. Here’s what we ate the most of, and it’s about time these things are given their due.

Potatoes

Growing up I ate enough potatoes to make an Irishman gag. They were filling, versatile, and cheap. We ate them in the morning, we baked them for lunch, and they served as the base for almost half of our Dutch oven meals.

What They Did for Us

Carbs are carbs. At least that’s the line we often say. But there were four main factors that separated potatoes from other carb sources. In an area where fresh fruits were nowhere to be found for eight months out of the year, they offered a very important source of vitamin C. They were also an important source of potassium, containing far more than bananas. The massive importance of adequate potassium intake on muscle and heart health is just now coming into the public awareness, along with the fact that while most people aren’t clinically deficient, they often get much less than the optimal amount. Growing up, we ate all kinds of potatoes: russet, red, purple, and sweet. But we almost always ate them with the skin. The sweet and the colored potatoes especially provided valuable antioxidants we otherwise wouldn’t have had access to. Finally, we also got a very large portion of our fiber from them. They supported our gut health without our realizing it needed to be supported, and most importantly, they provided a crucial source of sustained energy that kept us full for hours.

Game Meat

There was a call we always looked forward to around the house in early December. That was when the local deer processor from up the road in Bowling Green, Missouri, would let us know our meat was ready. Of course, we were the most excited about the jerky and the summer sausage, but it was the less glamorous cuts that kept the household fed: the cuts called the backstrap, the shoulder, and the rump. Until our deep freeze ran low in late spring, about half of the meat in those Dutch oven dinners was venison.

What It Did for Us

Game meat has several advantages over commercial beef. It’s much leaner, has far higher levels of omega-3 fatty acids, it has more micronutrients, and it’s filled with antioxidants.

Pike County, Missouri, was famous for its white-tailed deer, and the weekends were few and far between when we weren’t out helping a neighbor quarter a deer or one wasn’t bringing by a bag of jerky as thanks for the help.

Pickled Foods

I said we didn’t eat much fresh produce; I didn’t say we didn’t eat those things from a jar that had been sitting in a cellar for months.

What They Did for Us

In the 1980s and 90s, the health benefits of pickled foods weren’t fully understood. In fact, many people erroneously believed that pickling a food destroyed the health benefits. And while it’s true that it does reduce the water-soluble vitamin content somewhat, it also results in lots of probiotics being developed.

My family is of German heritage, and we ate sauerkraut about once a week. In an area that didn’t have access to, or understand the value of, kefir and Greek yogurt, these pickled foods were an important piece of our gut health.

Bones

If we had a pot simmering on the stove, you could bet your bottom dollar there’d be a bone in it. We kept the bones in for flavor, not knowing they added immense nutritional value to our meals. My great-grandma lived to be a hundred years old, and she survived mainly on five things: coffee, hamburger patties, avocados, bone marrow, and bourbon that she’d sip from a tumbler as she pieced together massive jigsaw puzzles on her dining room table at night. She was from a bygone era, and watching her spoon the marrow from the bones we’d bring her grossed even us out, but you couldn’t argue with the results.

What They Did for Us

The bone broth this created provided us with valuable calcium, phosphorus, and magnesium. The collagen and gelatin supported our digestive tract and gut health. And the glycine- and arginine-rich amino acids served as a natural anti-inflammatory and promoted better sleep. If you’ve ever sipped on bone broth before bed and wondered why you had a great night’s sleep, it was because of this magnesium and glycine.

Pork

Pork never gets listed as a superfood, and that’s a shame. If there was one animal we had in abundance in Pike County other than white-tailed deer, it was pigs. And that was a good thing, because one thing that definitely wasn’t in abundance was money. Huge pork roasts filled our crock pots and real ham sandwiches were packed for our lunches. The meat that came out of those pots fell off the bone, and it kept the meat on our bones.

What It Did for Us

It didn’t do much for us that high-quality beef wouldn’t have done, except it was available. Pork, both then and now, costs a fraction of what beef does. And here’s the thing, most cuts of pork are very lean, and for the same level of leanness they taste way better than their beef counterparts. Pork offered us an affordable source of tasty, highly available amino acids and micronutrients. People complain about the cost of meat these days while strolling right past the lean and delicious pork chops in the meat aisle.

Beans

Ham had a partner named beans, and boy were they a team. We ate beans because they were cheap, delicious, and filling, just like we ate most of the other things on this list.

What They Did for Us

If I hear one more pencil-necked internet talking head diss beans, I’m going to lose it. It’s true, beans have lectins. But when we cook them, only trace amounts of this toxin remain. Beans are an absolute superfood. They were yet another source of magnesium and potassium for us. They controlled our blood sugar, and they provided crucial fiber to our diets. If you get gas when you eat beans, it just means your digestive enzymes haven’t developed yet. We didn’t get bloated or gassy, and we never fell ill from the dreaded lectins. We slept like babies, worked like dogs, and stayed strong and energetic. The fact that so many people have issues with beans these days is an indictment of our weak gut health rather than the beans themselves.

Mushrooms

Save your truffles; give me a morel mushroom any day of the week instead. You truly haven’t lived if you haven’t tasted a wild morel mushroom. In northern Missouri the rains would come in early March. The forests would turn dark shades of green and steam in the humid air. Every year, starting around mid-April, we’d pull on our rubber boots and go hunting. The most fertile grounds were under rotten logs near the swollen creeks, in the crevices of the rocks in the limestone hills, and under the dense undergrowth of the forest floor. Our prize was the morel. Where city boys were taking their Pokémon cards to school for show and tell, we were as likely to strut in carrying a Kroger bag filled to the brim with our ‘shrooms.

What They Did for Us

These low-calorie mushrooms were loaded with iron, vitamin D, copper, and powerful antioxidants. Plates filled with venison, cabbage, and mushrooms weren’t the result of an internet fad diet promoted by some Instagram guru, they were just delicious.

Onions

My grandpa loved liver and onions. He also carried a bazooka during the Battle of the Bulge, so let’s not pretend me and him are the same. Both onions and the lack of respect they get as a health superfood make me tear up. They are a favorite addition to many not-so-healthy foods, and as a result they often get lumped in with those villains, guilty by association, I guess.

Growing up we always had an onion sitting on the counter, and it was the first thing that got chopped up when that Dutch oven needed filling. We never gave a second thought to their health benefits, they just made everything else taste way better. But it turns out they were some of the healthiest things we ate.

What They Did for Us

The health benefits of onions have many layers. (Okay, I’ll stop.) Their consumption has been linked to stronger bones, lower risk of heart disease, and lower rates of cancer and Alzheimer’s.

Besides being rich in vitamin C and potassium, onions contain a large amount of quercetin, a powerful flavonoid that fights inflammation and has been shown to improve heart and brain health and aid in exercise performance.

Onions also contain sulfur. That doesn’t sound healthy, but it is. Sulfur compounds like those found in onions lower blood pressure, serve as powerful antioxidants that protect your DNA, and slow abnormal cell growth. They also help control your blood sugar, and they significantly improve our ability to use zinc.

Finally, I’m going to need you to memorize this next word: fructooligosaccharides. Just kidding. Call it FOS for short, and just know that this, along with something called inulin, feeds good gut bacteria, which reduces inflammation, strengthens the gut lining, and aids in digestion.

Berries

We didn’t eat a lot of fruit growing up, especially tropical fruit, for obvious reasons. We had lots of apples and tomatoes, which carried their own health benefits, but the superfood we had was berries. They grew wild everywhere, especially blackberries. Every spring we’d pick batches, and what we couldn’t stuff in our face then we’d freeze for later. Another thing about my part of the country was we liked our wine. But we didn’t have easy access to the grapes people in fancier parts of the country used, so we used other fruits, especially berries. One of these was the strawberry. And as a side effect of their use in making our basement wine, we had a lot of fresh strawberries to go around.

What They Did for Us

In addition to being a good source of vitamin C, berries have an antioxidant called anthocyanin. This powerful nutrient improved our blood sugar, reduced inflammation, and helped protect our brains against age-related decline. And we had no idea, we just thought they were delicious.

Before the Word Superfood Existed

In an era where the health-conscious yuppies were paying a pretty penny to suck down smoothies, devour granola, and eat low-fat everything, we were bigger, stronger, and healthier, while barely scraping by financially. I attribute a lot of this discrepancy to these nine superfoods that we lived on before the word superfood was even in our vocabulary. I encourage you to give another look to these mighty humble foods.

Some of us may have gone through that phase during our younger years, when we first fell in love with the iron and the challenge of a physical lifestyle caused us to push too hard. There may have been a time when we failed to find balance between the weights and life, and things outside of the gym suffered as a result. Maybe it wasn’t that big of a deal in your twenties and early thirties. After all, if there’s a time to let your passions lead you by the nose it’s during those years.

But if you’re past the age of thirty-five there’s a very good chance things have shifted. Instead of fitness being your life, you now want it to support your life. It’s also likely that pushing past the edge has a larger impact on you now than it did a few years ago. Gym injuries don’t heal as fast as they did a decade ago. Soreness has drifted from the muscle bellies into the joints, and crushing yourself in the gym increasingly leaves you crushed outside of it too.

Why Less Works Better After Thirty-Five

A simple fact about getting older that we don’t like to admit is that we simply have less. Less time, less energy, less recovery ability, and maybe less hair in some places and more in others. At this stage of life, finding balance isn’t so much about no longer being passionate but recognizing that our passions have expanded far beyond the gym.

If we are to be there for our family, for our business, and for the other things in life that get us out of bed in the morning, we can’t afford to get injured in the gym, or so sore and drained we can’t get out of that bed without a walker.

So the question is how. How do we continue to get what we need from the gym without it consuming us in the process?

We need to be willing to let go of some notions we thought to be gospel and held dear to our hearts. We can’t handle as much as we used to, that’s the bad news. The good news is that we don’t need as much either.

There’s a good chance you fall into one of two main camps. You are either a total body guy or a body split guy. That means you either believe you must hit every body part directly each session, or that you must trash the handful of body parts you do hit. The truth is that neither is needed.

The Four Movement Patterns

Let’s forget what we know about anatomy for a minute: what each muscle does and all the movements you need to do to fully tax it. Let’s think about the body as a whole. Namely, what major movements does it do?

This can be boiled down to just four major patterns: hinge, squat/lunge, push, and pull. I know, I’m leaving some out, and those are important. But be honest, if someone were to pick just one movement from each of those four patterns and do them progressively for their entire life, how strong and functional would they be compared to everyone else? If someone wasn’t really into “the gym” but they did back squats, weighted dips, chin ups, and deadlifts, heavy, consistently, and safely, would they be healthy and “functional”? Yes, they would.

We have to boil things down to their essentials before we add back in the things that are simply nice to have and enhance the foundation of what we must have.

When you picture those four patterns you likely picture one or two muscles that they work. But the truth is that the large compound lifts that fit into those patterns work far more than that. If someone only does deadlifts and bench press, they will work nearly every muscle in their body. They may not work all those muscles “optimally,” but we must let go of that mental obstacle that we picked up by watching far too many influencers with far more time to train every day than you. Plus, there are things we can add to this protocol that largely address that.

For this protocol you will simply pick two of the four movements per workout. It doesn’t matter how you pair them. If you do two on one day, then simply do the other two the next day. We will get into more detail later.

Now that we’ve covered the basic patterns, let’s get into the other things we need: volume, frequency, and intensity.

Volume

Volume first. We need about five working sets a week to stay strong. That’s it. More is better, especially for size, but it’s not that much better. After the first five sets of the week, each additional set offers a diminishing return on your energy investment, with a non-diminishing return on your recovery requirements. Should we just do the minimum? Probably not. But we don’t need much more than that. If we are older and an advanced lifter, then we don’t need much more than that at all.

But this program doesn’t go by the week, because the body has no idea what a week is. When the ancient Babylonians invented the seven-day week based on the seven observable celestial bodies, they didn’t have your chest and quads in mind. To keep the math simple, we are going to aim for ten sets per pattern every ten days as a minimum target for volume. You will do each pattern every other workout, so that comes out to a minimum of just two working sets per pattern, with three being about the sweet spot, and four being good but on the high end.

Frequency

There are two ways we must look at frequency, but most people only consider one, that being how often you hit a body part. The other consideration is how often you stress the system with heavy resistance training.

Strength is a skill. Skills begin with the nervous system. Each time we stress that system it accumulates fatigue systemically. If we bench one day and squat another, that is one stress for each body part but two stresses on our system. As we become more advanced in the weight room, we are able to impart far more stress on that system with every rep and with every set. Five sets of five hundred pounds is far harder on a system than five sets at one hundred pounds, even if it’s the same level of relative difficulty. This means we need and can handle far less volume than a novice. This factor gets compounded as we age, because the speed at which we recover slows down considerably.

To keep things very simple in this department, we are going to use a simple rule. For every day we lift, we get a day to recover. This means we lift every other day, or five days out of every ten.

Intensity

Intensity comes in two forms as well, how close we are lifting to our maximal strength, and how close we are taking each set to muscular failure.

While you can get bigger using a wide range of weights, to get stronger past a very basic level we need to lift above 80% of our one rep max, at least occasionally. Most people can lift that percentage about eight times, so that will form our upper boundary for repetitions. Unless you are a competitive powerlifter, there’s never really a need to lift much over 90% of your one rep max. Most people can lift this much weight between three to five times. So to simplify things, we will set the minimum number of reps at four. And if we split the difference between three and eight reps we come to five to six. That’s about the perfect number of reps for most of your sets. This will result in the safest and best strength gains, and it will be equally effective at adding muscle size as the higher rep sets with far less fatigue. If you have joint issues, then staying closer to the eight to ten rep range is totally fine.

As far as how close you should get to failure, don’t overthink it. If you know you can get another rep with good form, then go for it. If you think the form will break down, then don’t.

Alternating Vertical and Horizontal

Now let’s dive into some details. Pushing and pulling come in two main varieties, horizontal and vertical. Ideally, you will alternate these. So if you do rows one day, the next time you pull, aim for chin ups, pull ups, or some form of pulldown. The same goes for pushing. If one day is bench press, for example, the next time you do a push should be some sort of overhead press if your shoulders can take that, or maybe an incline press if that’s not an ideal movement for you.

The squat/lunge pattern is the same. Alternate each time.

Finally, you should aim to make about 25%, or one in four, of your movements unilateral. This takes care of itself with the squat/lunge, but at least once a month for the hinge, push, and pull, you should opt for a unilateral option.

The Nice to Have Pieces

If this is all you did, you’d be in a good place. But here’s where we get to the not essential but nice to have parts. There are basically five of these: rotation, carries, power, anterior chain (abs and hip flexors), and isolation movements. Let’s address these in order.

Rotation and Carries

I like to do a rotational movement every other session, and the same goes for carries, so I suggest alternating these. Do a rotational movement one workout and a carry the next. The best place to put these is at the beginning for rotational movements, because they serve as a good warmup, and at the end for the carries, because they serve as a good finisher. Two to three sets of each are perfect. Don’t overthink these.

Power

This protocol covers strength, and strength is an important part of power, but it’s only a part. Ideally, we’d add a power movement in at least every other workout. You can train power for all four movement patterns, but the two that really matter are the squat/lunge and the hinge.

The best way to incorporate these is to either do two to three sets of the power movement just prior to the strength portion of that same movement pattern, or to superset them contrast style. An example of the former would be to do two sets of hang high pulls followed by two sets of deadlifts. Another example would be to do two sets of broad or box jumps followed by two to three sets of squats.

Contrast style would be slightly different. You’d do one set of the strength movement, followed immediately by the power movement. An example here would be a set of five back squats followed immediately by five broad jumps. Either format works and there’s not a clear advantage to doing one over the other.

For sets and reps, keep your power movements the same as your strength: two to four sets of four to eight reps.

Isolation Exercises

There is an important reason to include some isolation work in your program. Many muscle groups cross more than one joint. These are called biarticulate muscles. For these muscles, compound exercises may not fully work them, because they must either act across both joints simultaneously or they must partly relax in order to allow the movement to occur. You can Google Lombard’s paradox to get a better idea of what I’m talking about, but just know that isolation movements have a place, even in a “functional” program.

The good news is these types of exercises don’t take up as much of your recovery room and they don’t require as much rest between sets. You can also safely take them all the way to failure and use slightly higher repetitions to get that pump that we all love. You can do two to four isolation movements per session and two to four sets of each. It doesn’t matter what day you program them on, but put them after your compound lifts. There are times when you can put an isolation movement first, such as something called pre-fatigue, but that’s not something we need to worry about right now.

You can pair these with the main muscles being worked on that day, or you can put them on days where those muscles aren’t being worked on the major compound movements to get some more frequency in. For example, you can pair leg extensions with a lunge day and tricep pushdowns with a bench press day, or you can put leg extensions with a hinge day. It doesn’t matter.

Anterior Chain

This one is simple. Consider adding one “ab exercise” such as ab wheel rollouts or hanging leg raises once every other workout. Two to three sets taken within a rep of failure will suffice.

How to Structure the Days

If you’re a guy who prefers a body split type of program, then you can pair your hinge and squat/lunge together and your push and pull together. Then you can put your isolation movements with those body parts. Here is an example of that type of split.

Body Split Example

Day 1

• Deadlifts 3 x 5

• Walking Lunges 2 x 8

• Leg Extensions 3 x 12

• Leg Curls 3 x 10

(You can superset the two isolation movements.)

Day 3

• Bench Press 3 x 5

• Weighted Chin Ups 3 x 5

• Curls 3 x 8

• DB Overhead Extensions 3 x 8

Day 5

• Back Squats 4 x 4

• Single Leg RDLs 3 x 6

• Hip Thrusts 3 x 10

• Glute Ham Raises 3 x 7

Day 7

• Bent Rows 3 x 6

• DB Incline Bench Press 3 x 6

• DB Lateral Raises 3 x 10

• Tricep Pushdowns 3 x 10

Total Body Example

If you’re a total body type of guy, then you can pair an upper movement with a lower movement. Here is an example of that type of split, using rotation, power, anterior chain, and carries as the supplemental movements.

Day 1

• Cable Chops 3 x 8

• Box Jumps 3 x 6

• Zercher Squats 3 x 5

• Weighted Dips 3 x 6

• Ab Wheel Rollouts 3 x 10

Day 3

• Hang High Pulls 3 x 4

• Trap Bar Deadlifts 2 x 4

• Chin Ups 3 x 5

• DB Overhead Carries 3 x 30 yards

Day 5

• Split Jumps 3 x 6

• Step Ups 3 x 6

• Close Grip Bench Press 4 x 4

• Hanging Tuck Ups 3 x 10

Day 7

• Wall Slams 3 x 6 (power and rotation in one)

• Bent Rows 3 x 6

• 45 Degree Barbell Snatch Grip Hip Extensions 3 x 6

• Trap Bar Carries 3 x 30 yards

What to Do on the Other Days

This is pretty obvious: cardio or sprints. Your cardio should be one of four forms, and ideally you’ll rotate through these: zone 2, VO2 max, HIIT, or SIT (sprint interval training). You only need one or two cardio sessions per week to stay healthy, and I wouldn’t do more than three.

If you do the math there, you’ll be working out about four times a week on the low end and six times a week on the high end, but no workout will be over an hour, and no workout should leave you trashed. Another option is to double up occasionally and do your weight session early in the day and a short cardio session later in the day.

For sprinting, the only thing that comes close to being a rule is to not sprint after a hinge day. Ideally you don’t want your hamstrings fatigued going into a sprint session.

Try Judd's Training App Free For 7 Days

The Bottom Line

Remember, everything but the two patterns is nice but not essential. If life gets hectic, then two patterns every other day is all you’ll need to stay strong and functional until things calm down again.

Simple things made him happy. A boat that ran well, a cooler filled with beer, some good red dirt music, and a long cast into blue water on a sunny day was all he asked for in this life.

His diet wasn’t perfect, and he didn’t bu…

Read more

There are a lot of things we can do to slow the aging process at a cellular level, but aging is inevitable. Soft tissues and bones will become more brittle, healing times will slow, motor units will be lost eventu…

Read more

Read more

Read more

We love to lecture people on how they eat. We …

Read more

We’ve learned that when compared to other factors, cardio do…

Read more

There are a handful of universal characteristics that govern human movement.

Humans can execute movements and exercises in a variety of ways. This allows for differences in anatomy and goals, and even the ability to work around limitations caused by injury. We are robust systems. We can …

Read more

Dr. Gabe Mirkin, the guy who coined R.I.C.E. (rest, ice, compression, elevation), later came out and said he was wrong. Trying to suppress acute inflammation after injury may actually be one of the worst things we can do.

One of the main reasons cold plungin…

Read more

A linebacker’s first job is to stop the run. To do that we obviously need to find the running back. But the average running back is under six feet tall. When those massive linemen come at yo…

Read more

I had spent decades building size, strength, and work capacity most people only dream about. I also had chronic inflammation, wrecked gut health, constant joint pain, and declining cardiovascular function.

So I made a decision most lifters would never consider: I deliberately lost muscle.

Twenty pounds total. About hal…

Read more

Nutrition is the primary lever when it comes to getting lean. But it’s not the only one.

The …

Read more

And whether you’re trying to get in shape at 25 o…

Read more

Not because they’re too old. But because their tissues are no longer prepared for the forces sprinting demands.

Sprinting is the most demanding thing humans voluntarily do. On a second-by-second basis, nothing else produces forces as high or as fast.

It is also one of the most powerful signals you can give the body t…

Read more

This is where I’ll go deeper from now on, into what actually builds resilient athletes. We’re starting with the foundation most of you neglect: your hips.

Hips are something the ladies have and train, not us tough guys. We squat and deadlift. Occasionally we lu…

Read more

Bills, errands, problems, injuries, worries.

Whenever there’s a want, a task, or a goal, there’s always a “where do I start” question. That’s the first hurdle, and it’s the toughest. For that reason, when it comes to attempting to build a new habit or accomplish a new goal, the beginning is usually the end.

Fitness is…

Read more