Why did we change the programming?

Booty by Bret introduced no-equipment training during the COVID-19 lockdowns in March of 2020. While training without equipment can yield very good hypertrophy, you’ll be limited in the conventional metrics of achieving progressive overload (adding weight to the bar). With limited equipment also comes limited exercise variety and options, often leaving the feeling of redundancy with the C options. From a programming perspective, we face issues of members having varying fitness levels and resistance training experience, making it near impossible to appropriately scale the program difficulty for each member; some members found the at-home training to be nearly impossible to even complete a few reps with, while others were able to get through the program with relative ease (depending on the month). 

How did we address this?

Since proximity to failure is a critical consideration for optimizing progress, it’s important you’re able to sufficiently fatigue individual muscle groups. When you’re training with equipment, this can be applied linearly by simply adding load or a few reps. While this hypothetically could work with no equipment training, as many of you have experienced, it quickly becomes not a viable option, with certain movement patterns being incredibly difficult to load, and others you become limited by cardiovascular conditioning. 

Coach Jamie and Kevin came up with a system of manipulating mechanics and exercise variables as a form of progression. While you’ll still be limited on the total exercises, you will have clear progressions once you reach certain rep thresholds for a given exercise. You’ll run this program for 12 weeks to allow for more time to progress through each movement pattern.  

Here is a video of Coach Jamie going over how to use the tracker to carry out the program: