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Have you ever tried a free program from bodybuilding dot com only to be absolutely shocked that you didn’t get the results you had hoped for? Take comfort in know that it’s most likely not your fault at all. And the explanation for why this is doesn’t require any type of deep or domain-specific knowledge — the program just wasn’t made specifically with you in mind. Yeah, maybe it was designed with some avatar of you as the target consumer, but this is still a long way from being able to integrate all of the idiosyncrasies that make you you.
This is the round-about premise of the individualization principle: each person will respond differently to a given program, and therefore training should be tailored to each person’s specific needs.
Here is an analogy that should really hammer-home the importance of this principle…
How do you think about buying a cheap suit off the rack? Sure, you might not care about showing up to your 2nd cousin’s wedding wearing an oversized jacket and slightly-too-short slacks if it means you can save a few bucks. But what about your own wedding? Undoubtedly, you will want to look your best, and you’ll go the whole 9 to get a suit custom-tailored to your dimensions.
The suit = your program — and in order to get best results, it needs to be well-tailored to your individual needs.
Sex Differences
At the most fundamental and immutable level of individuality is genetics. Individuality in genes can present across a very wide spectrum of emergent traits, but the most straight-forward (and applicable) is the difference between men and women.
The mechanisms of hypertrophy between the sexes will always the same — the actin and myosin don’t know who their boss is and aren’t biased in how they produce force. Specific overload still reigns supreme. However, sex does matter at a more macroscopic level largely due to one massive difference between men and women: hormones. Men have much higher baseline levels of testosterone, which is a pretty significant advantage when it comes to many of the hypertrophy+strength effects that we’re after when designing a program (and this is a huge understatement). More testosterone means that men will generally have high lean body mass, have lower body-fat percentages, and be capable of handling higher absolute loads in the gym. Additionally, androgen receptors tend to congregate more densely in specific regions of the body (i.e. upper traps) which means that men will typically be proportionally more upper body dominant (compared to women’s general lower body dominance).
Due to ovulation cycles, women experience vast hormonal swings over relatively short time frames; testosterone, estrogen, progesterone, and many other hormones may be significantly higher or lower depending on which phase a woman is in. While trying to program around specific phases of the ovulation cycle is mostly a fool’s errand (despite how desperately some try to will this into practicality), the effects of these hormonal undulations can still have strong implications for performance and recovery. As such, it must be accounted for at an individual level. Additionally, women need to be cognizant of irregularities in their menstrual cycle (e.g. complete cessation of a period) that can result from exceptionally intense/voluminous training.
Interestingly, men and women should largely be trained using the same fundamentals of programming even when taking hormonal differences into account. Yes, capabilities between the sexes will vary pretty drastically (i.e. women generally recovery more quickly and have much greater mobility whereas men tend to have greater absolute strength), but all roads that branch into individuality should still begin and end with principles of specificity, overload and fatigue management.
Morphological Differences:
Anatomy (and the relationships of constituent parts) is also a huge factor when accounting for individualization in programming. Across any n+1 sample size, trainees will have unique limb/trunk lengths as well as muscular origin/insertion points. Even subtle anatomical variations between two individuals can lead to vastly divergent optimal paths in training. For instance, an athlete with relatively short femurs will have a much easier time with barbell squats than someone built like a giraffe — Mr Stumpy will probably be stronger on the exercise, create less muscle damage, and be more tolerant of higher volumes/intensities. Likewise (but different), a trainee that has calves that reach damn-near to their ankle will have a massive leg-up on the unfortunate soul cursed with sprinter insertions — the former’s direct calf work will consist of nothing more than walking whereas the latter will have to make a deal with the devil just to confidently wear shorts. Bodybuilders and physique athletes must work within the bounds of their God-given proportions, for better or (as is often the case) worse.
Another area in which morphology comes into play is the fiber-type composition of muscles. A trainee with an abundance of type-2 fibers (fast twitch) will be able to generate more force and velocity than someone whose muscles are predominantly type-1 (slow twitch), all else being equal. Unlike traditional anatomical features like limb length, fiber-type ratios can actually be affected by training but only to a limited extent; our genetics still set the boundaries. So should we alter our programming in accordance with our fiber types? Yes and no…Without comprehensive testing, it’s going to be impossible to know each of your muscles’ type-1:type-2 ratio. Even if you could know this, as we mentioned before, these values will be changing all the time as a natural side effect of training. What’s more practical is to gain an understanding of which direction your muscles are biased in — that is, are your glutes mostly fast twitch or mostly slow twitch? Do they respond better to high or low volumes? What about high or low rep ranges? Do they get sore easily? Do they fatigue quickly? By answering these questions using data/feedback from training, you can get a reasonable idea of your glutes’ fiber-type bias and then mold the programming accordingly.
Lifestyle and Experience:
We’ve thus far discussed some of the more rigid aspects of individualization, but not all are completely out of our control. Training-age and lifestyle are two such mutable variables that we can take slight comfort in.
Training-age refers to how long a trainee has been homing their craft or practicing their sport — in this case, bodybuilding. An athlete with a higher training-age tends to be more advanced/proficient and able to tolerate/generate higher intensities with lower risk of injury. They can also sustain higher volumes with less risk of overreaching and include complex movements in their program without technique breaking down. However, it’s not all sunshine and rainbows…with greater training-age also comes stronger prerequisites to make additional gains. A newbie lifter (i.e. low training-age) can add pounds of muscle within their first year of serious training just by doing mostly the right stuff — they just need to be in the ballpark and progression will happen. A trainee who has been around-the-block (i.e. high training-age) has to be in the right seat of the right row of the right section within the right ballpark otherwise they can kiss any dreams of gains goodbye. And even then, the road to progress will be jagged and paved with an ever-increasing density of blood, sweat and tears (i.e. greater volumes and intensities).
Lifestyle is the most pliable aspect of individualization. To a degree, we have autonomy over how we live our lives and the circumstances in which our training must conform to. Diet and sleep seem intuitive — if they’re way off, we get easy-to-understand feedback from our body in the way of hunger cues and wakefulness, respectively. More unnoticed, however, is the slow trickle of poor habits which affect the quality of nutritional status and recovery over longer time frames. Scrolling TikTok while in bed or the temperature of the room being slightly too warm doesn’t seem like a big deal, but a decrease in sleep quality by 5% every night can quickly become significant when extrapolated. Similarly, you may prefer to practice intermittent fasting because of some benefit you read online once, but there is a sizable difference between training in a fed versus fasted state. Alcohol, even as little as one or two glasses, can have a profound impact on both acute sleep quality and nutritional/hydration status.
Compared to sleep and diet, stress is much more difficult to manage. With a little pragmatism, we can do a decent job with controlling for fitness-related stressors, but those that are side-effects of being human (i.e. stress from work, family, etc) can prove almost impossible to reign in. This type of stress cannot be eliminated entirely since it’s often unpredictable and you can’t simply decide to take on less responsibility at work or neglect your familial duties. (Well, I guess you can, but you probably shouldn’t.) What can be done is to offset these lifestyle stressors by controlling the controllables and ensuring those aspects of your lifestyle are optimized. Additionally, techniques like box-breathing, meditation, and nature walks can be other useful tools when it comes to managing stress.
Learning to let go of what you can’t control, and how to take control of what you can, is the name-of-the-game when it comes to the individualization principle. Your uniqueness dictates your performance, tolerance and longevity. Not all training advice is universal — what works well for one person may be suboptimal (or even lead to regression) for you. Chris Bumstead’s training can yield incredible results for a ton of people. Yet, this doesn’t mean we should expect his training to be efficacious for any random individual, nor will copying his methods result in the same physique. Instead, rerouting that money you were going to spend on a cookie-cutter program into a coach who can talk to you, understand your needs as an individual, and adapt training to your lifestyle factors is a smarter investment for anyone looking to make maximally-efficient progress.
Individualization-
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Individualization Discussion- https://www.instagram.com/tv/CRJ0l3PnSce/