Most people would do almost anything to have a lean, athletic looking body.  Well, it’s no accident that most athletes have the type of body people want.  Thing is, athletes don’t train to look good.  They train purely to improve their performance.  They train for strength, power, speed, and agility.  As a by-product of this type of training, they create strong, lean, muscular, powerful looking bodies.

You should progress through your training program in the same manner an athlete would prepare for an upcoming season.  My new training system, Performance Strength Training has been designed as a performance-based training program for "average Jills and Joes". 

A training program that focuses on performance will probably look a lot different than most of the programs you have seen before.  The primary goal of this type program is to improve your physical performance, while decreasing the chance of injury.  By accomplishing these goals, you will also be sculpting the type of body that commands attention.

One of the first things most of you will notice about a performance program is the way it is designed.  It is not designed to work your “Chest and Triceps” one day, and “Back and Biceps” the next.  A performance-based training program will NOT work body parts.  Bodybuilders train body parts.  Athletes train movements.  Our goal is to improve athletic performance.  Each task has its own unique physical movement requirements, and that is what we aim to improve through this program.  We train movements, not body parts.  We also try to do as many of the exercises in a standing position, because this mirrors the position of the body in an athletic setting.

You may also notice that there are very few “isolated exercises” in this program.  Isolated means the exercise uses only one joint for the movement, such as bicep curls, or pec flyes.  In sports, and life for that matter, we rarely use movements that require only the use of one joint.  All of the movements are compound movements that use more than one joint at a time.  This is what we focus on in this program – compound exercises, or exercises that use more than one joint.  Where you will see single-joint exercises in this program are prescribed primarily to help prevent common injuries.

You won’t see any abdominal crunches in this program either.  The latest research shows we should be focusing on trunk stability and rotation and we should avoid performing exercises that put the spine into flexion.  Further, athletes require the ability to stabilize the torso, and the ability to rotate it with power. 

Lastly, we train opposing movements as equally as possible, with both bilateral and unilateral movements.  The main reason for this is injury prevention.  Training a push movement more frequently than its opposite pull movement will create muscle imbalances, making the body susceptible to injury.  Likewise, we train movements in both a bilateral (two-limbed movements) and a unilateral (one-limbed movements) with equal proportions.  This prevents imbalances between the right and left sides of the body, decreasing the chance of injury.

Performance-based training is effective, efficient, research-based, and field tested.  You will achieve more results with less time in the gym.  After trying this type of program, I guarantee you will see why performance-based training is superior to any other type of program.

For more information, check out my cutting-edge program, Performance Strength Training.