Hi, I'm Kevin Dunn, the Get Fit Guy, and I'm here to share my accumulated decade of knowledge in the

strength and conditioning industry with you to help you to become the best version of yourself.

This week, I want to talk about the basics or principles of program design for strength training.

The first thing we have to do when writing any program is identify whether or not we are

training a novice, an intermediate or an advanced lifter, because each phase of this training

life cycle will have a different approach and a different training

intensity, volume and prescription. An intermediate trainee will be one who has maxed out their novice

gains and now requires more complexity to training, while an advanced trainee will be in the same

category but will typically have a more sport-specific

goal like powerlifting as a strength-focused goal or triathlon as a longer aerobic type goal.

The more specific the goal, the more specific the training prescription will be, and typically

these will be built upon mastery of the novice phase.

Typically, novices want to focus on developing control or mastery of their motor patterns.

Motor patterns are what enable us to express all of the different ways we can move our bodies in space.

We talked about this briefly in my first episode, but there are six motor patterns and six degrees of freedom in space. The six motor patterns are core, lunge, squat, push, pull and hinge, and the degrees of

freedom are surge, sway, lift, pitch, roll and yaw. If we want to have mastery of our bodies,

we need to have some degree of control throughout these six patterns and degrees. It's really

important that we learn how to move our bodies correctly, because contrary to the popular statement

that practice makes perfect, when strength

training, perfect practice is the only thing which makes perfect.

If we practice movements in a non-perfect manner, we're going to develop muscle memory and

adhere to a pattern which is going to be non-optimal. Therefore, novices should prioritize mastering

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