I have a mitochondrial disease, which causes mild degeneration specially in my upper body and hands. This means, that even with training, my progress is much slower with the upper body. I have been doing the beginner prescription and my improvement in squats and deadlifts has been quite rapid. Now that my lower body is in a pretty okay state and stable condition I was thinking of focusing more on my upper body.
Would it make any sense to have for example one week every month, where I only focus on the upper body strength? I could of course just add more movements to my sets, but unfortunately I don’t have the time to do that. So basically one week a month I would do 3-4 days of only upper body and the rest of the month I would follow the beginner prescription program, so I have some repititive structure in lifting as well.
Very cool that you’re training -that’s awesome to hear.
As far as modifying a program, I don’t think I’d assume that you would respond readily to a bunch of added volume. Some added volume? Maybe- that’s one potential training modification I would make if someone wasn’t making acceptable progress. What’s more likely (IMO) is that the reduction in fatigue from skipping lower body training may goose your upper body performance in the short-term, but I don’t think that would increase training adaptations.
So in this case, I’d probably run the beginner template without modification and get a better sense of how you respond, what you like, etc. and plan your next training program based on that feedback.
Thank you for the answer. The diagnosis is very new, and luckily I have a relatively mild one. Physicians couldn’t say much about training and trainers couldn’t say much about general health, but I just put 1 and 1 together. Since I’ve gotten stronger before, I can at least at the very least slow down the progress by doing resistance training. What’s also positive is that I respond well to training and have none of the excersise intolerance that is sometimes a common symptom, unless I overdo things.
Does the specificity matter or is it enough that I just mix it up quite randomly? This is what I’ve been doing for about a month now, but I was wondering, if that is “optimal”. At the same time I’ve been aware I’m probably just overthinking it out of old habit. What I’ve learnt from your podcasts is that things seem to be really not that complicated and pretty complicated at the same time!
I think specificity matters when there are very specific outcomes you’re trying to achieve, e.g. increasing bench or press strength. I don’t think a random approach would be preferred even if you didn’t have specific strength goals.
Alright. Bench is definitely my weakest point: by far I would say. I’ve increased my Deadlift from something like 80% of my body weight to around 160% of my body weight within a year (pretty much an amateur here), but bench progress has been really really slow. Then again, it might be something, that never gets as strong as I would like (at least not as fast as I would like) with my health status. That’s alright, but I will definitely keep up with the program!