[Vickie]

My reply to the trainer's concept of warm up is simply that your approach to any workout is more about the individual's conditioning and objectives than anything. If your primary focus in life is on power then you will be willing to pay a price higher than most of the people that I work with. I simply don't have time to be injured or sore and don't want my workouts to interfere with the other things I like in my life like golf and tennis.

Sounds to me like your approach is more sensible. The slow gradual increases in weight (popularly called a pyramid) allow you to condition the golgi tendon and it will be more forgiving throughout the workout. It is the golgi tendon that gets in the way of making break-thru gains in your training as it sends a big ole STOP message to your brain just at the time you are really creating the micro trauma that causes growth. Again better conditining and a strong mental state overcome this trecherous body function but sometimes the consequences are significant soreness. To the degree one is willing to risk injury and endure soreness most programs work.

Ultimately, I really don't believe in a single program. I really think the best, and only, way to really get the most from your exercise is to place a lot of mental focus on the whole process. It is not a popular concept because everybody thinks you should 'just do it'. I think that is the reason most people quickly abandon their training; they simply don't get what they want because they don't understand what "that" is or how their body can get it.

It's tricky on an open forum to talk about training in the 6-8 repetition range because my guess is that most of the readers will not want or need to train at this level for their objective. I deal with professionals and retirees and gym rats but most of my people keep the reps a little higher and the weights a little lower; again it's the soreness/injury prevention factor. I have a number of 40's and 50's and 60's that are very concerned with physique training and body image but they don't want to miss their time on the course and soreness and muscle fatigue would surely affect their game.

So . . . we do a lot more trickery with the reps and cadence and organization of the exercises to keep the body changing/adapting positively to the work. I actually learned this from Lee Haney (eight time Olympian) back in the early eighties. I had trained very heavy (up to a 200 lb squat at 5'4") and found that a great deal of my energy was being drained since I could accomplish my goals with less weight and therefore less wear and tear on my body.

There is a guy in Atlanta that has a studio and all you do if you work with him is about 4 reps per body part with massive weights. He get's results but only a small % of the people who start the program actually finish it.
But he gets results so . . . some of the people will do some of the work some of the time but all of the people will not do the same work any of the time and they shouldn't expect to.

It really is a 'what works for you' field, not like accounting where the numbers always fit together the same way in the same collum according to the same schedule (can you tell I have a finance background?). I will tell you JohnThomas1 that the chest combination you referenced worked (without even worrying about the cadence) mainly because the flat press is more full chest, less weight on the incline as it begins to focus on the connection at the clavical bone and then even less on the butterfly as it is really focused on the attachment of the chest to your arm and at the sternum so it's more vulnerable. So you're doing that right and you know that 'real' people need to warm up and real fun people want to be at their prime on the golf course. So there.

Thx for the post. Nice exchange! Vik