Accessory Work for Strength and Hypertrophy in Women Over 40

Podcast – Steph Gaudreau

One of the greatest rivalries I see in programming strength training for women over 40 is the battle between strength and muscle. My approach to strength training and muscle growth incorporates a cohesive and holistic approach to your programming that will help you reach your goals and incorporate these philosophies into your training program.

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Key Takeaways

If You Want to Leverage Your Strength and Hypertrophy, You Should:

1. You don’t have to choose between muscle or strength building; you need them both as a woman over 40, especially
2. Think about your goals and make sure your program is aligned with them
3. Use accessory work to break up the repetition and fill in the weak points of your training

Delicious Accessory Additions

I like to think of accessory work, supplementary exercises that support your main lifts, like the toppings to your delicious training burger. Accessory work can help you spice things up in your training, address imbalances, or help you understand what you want to work on.

It is not just about strength development or muscle growth; the goal is to help you weave these things together to further enhance your strength development and hypertrophy, prevent injuries, and so much more.

Building Muscle is a Spectrum

Building muscle takes place across a spectrum. By thinking both bilaterally and unilaterally about your accessory work depending on where you are at in your program, you will be able to find your training tempo and add the necessary context it takes to reach your training goals.

I want you to be able to understand the ‘why’, the rationale. You don’t need to be able to repeat it all back to me, but if you can understand the why behind your programming, you will be more likely to follow through, improve your consistency, and get better results. I want to give you the resources you need to be successful with strength training and reach the goals you are striving for.

Are you ready to get your strength training guide for women over 40? Share your hopes and expectations for the next year of training with me in the comments below.

In This Episode

• Why accessory work is an essential part of a well-rounded strength training program (8:25)
• How to program accessory work to align with your strength training development goals (14:33)
• What is hypertrophy, and what do you need to know to build muscle (22:34)
• The importance of tempo when it comes to hypertrophy (32:20)
• Examples of what the flow of a workout should look and feel like and common mistakes (35:17)

Quotes

“I want you to walk away from this podcast feeling more informed, more educated, and like you can understand the program that is being put in front of you.” (4:14)

“We want to get in, be focused, make it count.” (24:01)

“I can’t say this enough, so slow down. You might have to use less weight, but it is going to be more effective.” (32:27)

“If you are out in the world and you are looking for a program, Strong with Steph might not be for everyone, and that is totally fine. But know what your goals are.” (41:22)

“Having a structured program that is written by somebody who understands programming and all of these concepts is the best bet for saving your brain space.” (49:27)

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Related Episodes

FYS 434: Progressive Overload: How to Keep Getting Stronger

FYS 435: RPE & Autoregulation: Smart Tools for Strength Gains Over 40

FYS 436: Why Movement Prep & Balance Matter in Strength Training Over 40

FYS 437: Plyo and Strength Development for Women Over 40

Accessory Work for Strength and Hypertrophy in Women Over 40 Transcript

Steph Gaudreau

Out in the world, there is no shortage of rivalries these days, things that people want to get behind in cheer for one versus the other, whether it’s David versus Goliath the Red Sox versus the Yankees. Go Socks! Or apple pie versus pumpkin pie, there’s always a rivalry that’s going to get people going.

And when it comes to strength training, as a woman over 40, the one that pops up so much is, should I focus on strength or should I focus on muscle? And we act like we have to choose one versus the other. On this podcast today, I’m going to be sharing a lot more about how to approach strength training and muscle growth. If you have these goals and you’re trying to incorporate them into your plan or find a program that does what do you need to know about the concept of accessory work? We’re going to be focusing on that in this episode of the podcast.

If you’re an athletic 40-something woman who loves lifting weights, challenging yourself, and doing hard shit, the Fuel Your Strength podcast is for you. You’ll learn how to eat, train and recover smarter, so you build strength and muscle, have more energy, and perform better in and out of the gym. I’m a strength nutrition strategist and weight-lifting coach. Steph Gaudreau, the Fuel Your Strength podcast dives into evidence-based strategies for nutrition, training, and recovery and why once you’re approaching your 40s and beyond, you need to do things a little differently than you did in your 20s.

We’re here to challenge the limiting industry narratives about what women can and should do in training and beyond. If that sounds good, hit subscribe on your favorite podcast app, and let’s go. Thanks so much for joining me. I’m so glad that you’re here with me on this episode. So we’re at the end of a five-part series we started at the very beginning to tackle this concept of strength training.

If you’re a woman over 40, you know it’s time. You know the best time to start this would have been 20 years ago. But hey, you’re here now. You’re trying to tackle this idea of, how do I add strength? How do I build muscle? How do I improve my athleticism and quality of life? I’m thinking about bone health as well. How do we start to put all these pieces together?

So we started off looking at what is progressive overload. Then we took a detour into talking about auto regulation and how I teach that to my lifters and Strong With Steph using things like rate of perceived desertion and reps and reserve. From there, we went into the importance of movement prep and balance work.

Then we covered plyometrics and strength development, and here we are landing at the final episode of this series, where we’re going to be diving into everything you need to know about accessory work. This is really confusing for people quite often, and they’re not sure. What is accessory work? How would I put it in a program, or what does it even look like? What are some of the pitfalls that I might fall into along the way? Why do we need it?

In particular, if we’re again women over 40 who are training. So we’re going to cover all of that on this episode today, and I’m going over these facets of what a comprehensive program might look like. For you, if you’re over 40, you’re trying to do all these things that I’ve mentioned, because there’s a lot of information out there, and I want you to understand from the perspective of an evidence-based programming point of view.

Not only, do I program Strong With Steph, which is my flagship lifting program, the way that I do. What should you be looking for out in the world? And how to delineate what’s good quality information in this space versus not? There’s still a ton of things about how to get rid of body parts you don’t like, how to spot reduce. I mean, we call everything strength training.

“We” being the industry. So I want you to walk away from this podcast feeling more informed, feeling more educated, like you can understand the program that’s being put in front of you. So if you are enjoying this content, please do me a huge favor, hit subscribe on your favorite podcast streaming platform, whether it’s a podcast app like Spotify, or Apple podcast, or you’re watching on YouTube, it really does make a big difference, and it’s free to subscribe, so thanks for doing that.

For me, it really does help the show. All right, so we’re going to dive into this idea of what is accessory work. So let’s start off with a basic overview, kind of an introduction, and go a little bit more into this. So just as an introduction, when we’re talking about accessory work, we’re really thinking about, what are the supplementary exercises that are going to support your main lifts?

And in a strength program like Strong With Steph, when we’re doing strength development. We’re not just doing three sets of three forever of bait and barbell lifts as an example. Now, of course, there are tons of different implements that you can use to do strength work. I just use the barbell as a quick way of describing that. But accessory work is kind of the toppings on top of the burger of your training. So it’s how we spice things up.

We address potential imbalances or areas we want to work on for different reasons. So again, we have our main strength work in this case is this is like the burger patty, and then we’re going to put different toppings on to customize it, or to kind of set out some different parameters depending on what phase of the program that you’re in, and depending on what phase that is or what mesocycle, for example, if we’re talking about a year-long program that would be sort of every quarter, right, in three-month blocks, that’s typically how it would go, not set in stone, but that’s very common.

What are we focusing on as kind of our main, our main goal that we’re driving toward? And I said at the top of the podcast, you know, there is a bunch of rivalry that can sometimes come up, where people think, oh, it has to only be strength development, or oh, it should only be hypertrophy. And if we kind of take these two extremes, we would think about somebody, for example, training for a power-lifting meet.

If you’re training for a power-lifting meet, you are going to be heavily focused on strength development, maximum force production. You want to lift as heavy as possible in your three lifts, your squat, your bench, and your deadlift, you will also probably do accessory work, so just keep that in mind. Now, on the other side of that, that coin or spectrum, if you will, would be something like training for only for hypertrophy, where hypertrophy is your main goal.

Maybe you’re trying to do a body-building competition, or you just want to really go hard in that direction. You probably will also, if you’re following a reputable program, do some strength sets, but you may be airing more toward the side of hypertrophy and specifically certain Isolation Isolation exercises, also doing compound exercises, but to really target or develop certain muscle groups or muscle bellies or different parts of the musculature to really target that.

So that’s kind of the other side of the spectrum or the coin, and people want to pit these against each other. Now, certainly, if you want to do these sorts of events, it would behoove you to train in that way, because we know that specificity and training are important. But if you’re overall looking for general strength muscle building to support your athleticism, to build your physique a little bit, to get stronger, to even support a sport, then a lot of times, a pretty general strength training program that’s well thought out will get you a good amount of the way there.

And of course, you could also opt for something like custom programming if you have some super specific needs. But suffice it to say, in Strong With Steph, we include both. It’s not only strength development. It’s not only just muscle growth. It’s weaving these two things together throughout the year. So why do we include accessory work?

We need to make sure we’re balancing out our training. So for example, you might be a little bit biased towards, I don’t know, hip thrusts, and you want to hip thrust all day, every day, and that’s just your favorite exercise. Well, as human beings, we tend to be more biased toward the things that we like and avoid the things that we don’t and that also goes for the gym as well. Also very common is, for example, only going forward and backward in our movement, so we may be neglecting side-to-side movement or rotation.

So we want to make sure that we are balancing out our movement, and that will help us be better developed overall. It will ensure that we’re not overdoing it or putting too much emphasis on one part of the body at the expense of the other. Say, for example, you’re only doing pulling exercises, but you’re never pushing right. We don’t want to end up in balance.

We don’t want to put you at maybe further risk of potential injury because you have underdeveloped certain patterns or certain planes of motion when we are over 40. Yes, we see a decline in strength, but we also see a decline in muscle mass. And if we want to get stronger, we have to build muscle mass. The more muscle mass we build, the more strength we can develop. Now it’s not as easy as our male counterparts.

You know, especially if you’re somebody who’s doing this in a natural way, it’s going to take time. It’s not going to happen overnight, but you can build muscle, and that will help you to further develop your strength. So that’s why, in Strong With Steph, we do both throughout the year. And of course, you may. Need other options. So in the accessory work, we have the ability to change things up, right? We can add in some flavor. We can keep it from getting too boring.

Those of you who are like, Oh, strength training is so boring. Personally, give me a three-month program and let me just implement the same things for three months, and I am happy as a pig and shit because I don’t have to think every week about changing things up exercise-wise. But some of you like a little bit more variety so by including that in the accessory work, we can still get enough repetition, but we’re going to do things long enough on that front and we can also mix things up and keep your interest a little bit better.

So as I’ve kind of mentioned already, what is the accessory work in a program, and why is it important? We really want to think about further enhancing strength development. We want to think about hypertrophy. So hypertrophy is building muscle mass, right? Or in some cases, we can also focus on thickening tendons, ligaments, bone, right?

That is hypertrophy, technically, but usually, we talk about this in terms of muscle hypertrophy, it can help us with injury prevention. So again, we want to work on joint stabilization, being able to absorb impact, if we’re doing plyometrics generate power. If we’re looking to improve our athleticism, we can do all of that with accessory work, and overall, it’s going to give us better longevity in our training. So yes, we need repetition, but we also need variety.

We just don’t want too much variety where we’re like, I need to mix it up every single day because then we don’t have enough repetition. So as an example, just to give you some food for thought, if we’re working on, say, a back squat, that’s what I did today in the gym, right? If we’re working on a back squat, different accessory exercises that you can pair or add-on to a back squat. Now it depends on what kind of split you’re on?

Are you on full body? Are you on upper-lower splits? So there’s some variation here, but we can think about in general, what kind of accessory work can support back squat, right? If that’s our main strength development, we might see accessory exercises like everyone’s favorite love to hate, Bulgarian split squats, or rear foot elevated split squat. We could do a front foot elevated split squat, just a regular split squat with both feet on the ground right.

We can do cyclist goblet squats, if we’re really trying to bias a little bit more toward the quads. That would be an example. We could do some bee stance work. There are lunges. There’s so much that you can do as accessory work to then benefit and further enhance what you’re doing. Now I really like to think about accessory work being both bilateral and unilateral, depending on where in the program somebody is at. I think there’s a benefit to doing both.

And if you’re never doing unilateral exercises, or even unilateral bias exercises, like a b stands or a kickstand, which is where your back foot’s kind of helping, or your non-working leg is helping, but most of the emphasis is placed on the front leg or the working leg. So we can do that. We can do a true unilateral right. All of these things are really great to add in, especially for people like runners, if you’re doing BJJ or other martial arts. I mean, really anyone, frankly.

But those are just a couple use cases where we do a lot of split stance work, or you’re constantly when you’re running, you’re on one leg a lot, right? You’re switching sides, but you do a lot of unilateral work, and in your running pursuit, and so including some of that unilateral strengthening, right, even things like step-ups is going to be important in your accessory work to help you further strengthen standing or transitioning from one leg to the other.

So that’s just a couple of examples of accessory work that would benefit a squat, right? So you mentioned a bunch of things there. Now, if we’re thinking about programming, oftentimes, what you’ll see is accessory work that is specifically for strength development. Now if we go back to the last episode in that one we covered that our main strength work tends to be between one and six repetitions.

Now you’re not always going to one rep max it. You’re not always gonna just try to do a single at RPE 10. That’s generally not every single time you’re in the gym, though, you may have a max session here or there, or you’re just feeling good, so you’re just gonna go for it. But for the most part, the bulk of our work will be between two reps and six repetitions.

And I would also say there’s probably a use case here for thinking about slightly higher reps, like even up to eightish, knowing that there’s a spectrum for specific hypertrophy, which we’re going to get to in a little bit. But also, like some people still will see that strength benefit at maybe slightly higher repetitions, but again, strength work we tend to see in those ranges of one to six.

So when we’re using accessory work to support strength, what we’re really looking at is things like improving technique by reinforcing great movement patterns, building stability in supporting musculature, or other muscles that are helpers in the main compound movement, but may not, might not get a ton of direct challenge there.

We might look at, for example, parts of the lift that tend to be somewhat weak. So let’s say you’re bench pressing and you’re getting stuck in a position like you’re really getting stuck in that sort of half rep position, or doing a squat, same thing, you kind of get stuck halfway up. Or if you’re dead-lifting, maybe you’re constantly getting stuck as you’re trying to actually lock out the deadlift and fully stand to full hip extension.

There are different ways and different types of accessory work that you could use to strengthen those weaker, quote, unquote links in the actual main movement pattern. So again, we covered a bunch of things here. But for example, if we’re dead-lifting, common examples of strength-focused accessory work, that could be again, lower, slightly lower repetition. So we’re not working in the hypertrophy typical ranges could be slightly lower.

So say we’re doing eight reps or less, maybe even six reps or less, we could be looking at stuff like Romanian deadlifts. Y’all, if you’re not on the Romanian deadlift train, single leg Romanian deadlifts are killer. They’re so great for your hamstrings, I can’t even tell you. If you want a really spicy variation, do them with a landmine. Thank me/send me hate mail later, because they’re going to be really hard if you load them appropriately.

So that’s just one example of accessory work that you could use to benefit the deadlift also things like hip thrusts of different variations. So you could do two legs. You could do single leg. So if we’re thinking about having strong lats, right lat pull downs, we could think of almost as an accessory for deadlifts, because we really need that lat to be locked in as we’re getting ready to deadlift, just as an example.

So typically, we’re going to see again, more moderate to challenging weights for the rep range, again, six, eight, maybe a little bit less. Maybe even I could make a an argument for 10, eight, eight to 10. It just depends, and when loaded appropriately, it’s going to be challenging. I would also say here one of the biggest mistakes that I see, especially with beginners, is relying too much on momentum and not really controlling the tempo of the lift.

Now in Strong With Steph, we do prescribe specific tempos for different reasons, but a general rule of thumb is slower down than up. And if we’re really trying to build strength, we’re trying to work on eccentric, which is that lowering phase of whatever exercise we’re doing, then really controlling that is going to help.

Yes, there’s the time and place to go fast. It is in our power work, speed work, right? But one where, and obviously, if you’re standing up out of the hole of a squat, usually you just are going to try to stand up with as much vigor as you can, for the most part.

So you want to have those moments where you’re yes, you want to move forcefully, but oftentimes, even in accessory workforce strength, we’re moving too fast to or let me put it this way, we could see more benefit if we slowed the fuck down just a little bit, at least, and saw a little bit more of A benefit, because we’re really challenging the muscle in the eccentric portion of that exercise.

So programming-wise, depending on what kind of split you’re on, are you on a three-day full body? That’s what Strong With Steph is. Are you on a four-day upper, lower split? Are you doing upper, lower, full body? Right? We might see two to four accessory exercises. Now, in Strong With Steph, I tend to pair them with, for example, if we’re doing squat, you might do something like a hinge accessory so that we’re not hammering one part of your body too much.

Now, again, people want to argue till the cows come home and then some about what is the right split to be on, I will say, as a general broad brush stroke with my lifters, especially since they tend to do other things, like Jiu Jitsu, like running, like swimming, like cycling, you’re doing other sports, and these sports oftentimes will be very dependent on one part of the body, right, for example, running.

So my philosophy is on it, especially since you’re over 40, and your recovery tends to take a little bit longer than it used to. Is if we’re only going to hammer your legs, hammer the absolute shit out of them, one that first day of the week, for example, you might be too slow to recover, to do your sport and feel good, or to be manageable, right?

Sometimes you have to run on tired legs and that. That’s just life. But if we’re smashing one part of your body, jiu-jitsu players are a great example. And many of you who listen to this podcast know that I’m a brown belt and BJJ, I’ve been doing it for seven and a half years, plus. If my forearms are so smoked from a workout that I can’t make grips and hold on to my partner’s gi when I’m training, then it’s going to be not such a great training session for me.

So that’s the rationale, at least in my mind, behind how I program, templated programming for kind of a general population who tends to like to do other activities and is using strength training to also benefit their sport or activities that they like to do. So again, it’s just going to depend, but that would be an example of how I would pair together something like a squat with a sometimes even unilateral hinge accessory exercise.

And again, we would mix it up from there. Now, if you want to see what a sample of all this looks like, and get a week of sample programming, plus my entire Strength Training Guide for women over 40, then go to StephGaudreau.com/workout and I’ll send you a full week of programming with all of the all the details you need to know, including all the exercises, demo videos and so on. So you can check that out at StephGaudreau.com/workout.

Okay, so from here, we’ve already covered strength accessory. Now let’s talk a little bit more about hypertrophy. Now, hypertrophy, as we mentioned earlier, in the sense of muscle, means muscle building, and in general, we’re going to see slightly higher volumes for our repetitions. Now, at one time, we used to think, okay, there’s a very distinctive line between what can help us build muscle in terms of repetitions per set, right?

If it’s seven reps to 15 reps, then it’s going to help us with hypertrophy. If it’s over 15 reps or 20 reps, and it’s going to be for endurance, if it’s under six reps, and it’s going to be for strength. And while the strength part does, for the most part, hold up. And as I mentioned, we might do slightly higher repetitions for the accessory work and strength.

When it comes to muscle building, it really takes place across a spectrum. And potentially there’s a bit more of a genetic component that has an influence on who is able to build muscle at for example, for example, lower ranges of reps, and who might have to do slightly higher ranges or overall volume to really get muscle growth. So there’s a lot of variation in here.

I don’t want you to think it’s like super cut and dry, but for the most part, if we’re talking about muscle building, then we’re going to do slightly higher volumes. And I will caveat by saying we also need to make sure that the effort is high enough percent. That’s very, very important. So doing junk volume for the sake of doing a junk volume, and just like faffing around with extra stats of 20, just because you heard more is better is that’s not what we’re talking about here, right?

We want to get in, be focused, make it count. And to be quite honest, the longer the sets are, the longer time it takes. Just today, I was in doing my isolation work. This is in the sort of hypertrophy part of my programming at the moment. And let me tell you what sets of 15 on each on single-leg exercises where we’re really targeting hypertrophy is it just takes a long time.

I said, last forever, even sets of twelves, for example, if we’re doing single-arm work. So when we were talking earlier about strength accessory, I would say, for the most part, you’re going to be working on compound exercises for that strength accessory, and those are going to be, you know, for the most part, what you’re doing multi-joint exercises, okay, for hypertrophy, we could do compound exercises, and we could also do really those isolation exercises that we tend to think about, like bicep curls, like my nice neon sign behind me, right.

Doing bicep curls is a classic example. An isolation exercise, because we’re only really targeting the bicep. That’s the difference between compound multi-joint exercises like a squat or a dead-lift or an overhead press, and something like a bicep curl, a tricep extension, a face pull, for the most part, hamstring curls, those sorts of things, calf raises, Nordics like those, are really going to be more or less in the realm of those isolation exercises.

So why again, does this matter? For women over 40, we are if we’re not training our musculature to grow, which is called hypertrophy, then we may have a period of time where we’re able to maintain but at some point, we’re going to experience atrophy, which is the opposite of hypertrophy, or atrophy means without growth. So we’re going to see a shrinking of our musculature, and then if we don’t eat enough protein on top of it, it’s kind of a double whammy. So maintaining our musculature is so important. We need to avoid sarcopenia.

We want to be functional. We want to have strength and that muscle. And if we want to build more strength, as I said earlier, we really want to add more muscle, then that doesn’t mean you’re going to necessarily look like a bodybuilder. But when I talk to women, they say, I want to look toned. Well, a huge component of that is building shape through adding muscle, if we’re being really plain about it, right?

So we need that component. And sometimes people will throw in, well, you need body fat loss on top of it, potentially, but without the actual building shape of the muscle, you could lose all the body fat you wanted, and you’re not going to reveal a quote, unquote toned appearance that you’re really describing, right?

So when we’re adding in accessory work for hypertrophy, again, we’re generally looking at higher volumes, and we might be doing some higher volumes of compound exercises, or we might simply be doing higher volumes of isolation exercises, depending on the program and what the goals are and how it’s written.

When we isolate specific muscles, we might be targeting things that may not get enough stimulus during compound lifts, or an area of your body where you’re potentially not seeing as much growth, or it’s been harder for you to elicit growth in those muscles, or even for the sake of improving our athletic performance. And so, for example, again, in Jiu Jitsu, we do a lot of pulling, and we have a lot of bicep work, a lot of elbow work.

There’s elbows get absolutely challenged on a daily because we’re constantly pulling on grips, especially if we’re part of the GI crowd, which is me then building your biceps and triceps, especially if we’re talking about pulling we’re thinking about bicep work, is really important to make sure that our not only our elbows stay healthy and the elbows are very vulnerable in BJJ for things like arm bars and whatnot, but that we are able to actually build strength in pulling because the biceps do help for pulling, right?

Of course, we need our back strong, back for pulling as well. So you may have a particular sport where you really need to work on a particular area of your body, right? Also, as I mentioned earlier, this can be a great way, via the accessory work, to add in a little spice, to change things up, to prevent things from getting too repetitive.

Overall, right? Yes, we want to squat, hinge, push, pull but we also do want some variety at some point, and it can help to work, as I mentioned earlier, in multiple planes, forward and back, which is sagittal, side to side, which is frontal and in rotation, right, very, very important.

So, for example, for your glutes, you might do something like a cable sort of extension out to the side from the cable machine where you’re working a particular aspect of the glue, whether it’s laterally more for your glute Mead, or it’s a kickback, or sort of straight back type of motion, which is more for kind of the center part of your glute, right? Glute max.

Again, I’m simplifying here. These things cross over to some degree. For hamstrings, we could work hamstring curls. We could do something like Nordics, right? We could do some kind of a dumbbell hamstring curl. We could even, you know, potentially, we could add in the idea that, although it might not be isolation, because it’s not that something like single leg RDLs could be used for hypertrophy.

So again, this is an example of a compound exercise that could be used in the place of hypertrophy, because we’re going to increase the repetitions. And generally speaking, we’ll be looking in that 10 to 15 rep range. There could be some exercises that you do a little bit higher. But if every single exercise in your program is 20 reps of everything, I’m going to be questioning, what is the program? Who was it written by?

And what is the point of doing all of that volume, especially if they’re throwing many, many sets at you, four sets of 20. I’m like, I want to know that there’s a good reason for doing that instead of just junk volume to keep you busy, right? It could happen, but we can also get good results with more condensed and focused work.

But I would say, generally speaking, if we’re talking about hypertrophy, we’re probably going to work in that 10 to 15 rep range, maybe even eight to 15, maybe 10 to 20, but it’s kind of that moderate range of repetitions. And generally speaking, it’s really going to depend on what is the exercise and how small is the muscle that you’re targeting, especially if this is the isolation type of hypertrophy accessory work. So for example, a lateral raise with your arm that’s targeting that, that lateral, sort of medial part of your deltoid.

You’re probably not going to use a huge weight to start off with. It’s going to be light. You’re gonna be like, Why is this so small? It’s because those muscles are small, and you’re really targeting that muscle, hopefully not involving too much of your trap, right? And really targeting that muscle on the side of your shoulder. And that’s what people say they want, yeah, I want, you know, a cap shoulder.

Well, you might want to add in a little bit of work, especially if that area is very small for you. But don’t skip out on all of your overhead pressing and all of your bench pressing and those sorts of things too, right? Those are going to be significant contributors before we dive in. If you listen to this episode and you’re like, Okay, I am ready to get to work. I want to take my strength, muscle, energy, and performance and take it up a notch. I want to take it to that next level.

I want to feel like a badass, but at the same time, do it in a way that works with my physiology as an athletic woman over 40, with coaching and community support. Then go ahead and check out Strength, Nutrition Unlocked. This is my group program. We’re going to lay out the framework for you and guide you as you implement and really customize it to all the things that you’re doing, your preferences, your likes, and the places you want to go with it.

Then go ahead and get on board. You can start your process by submitting an application at StephGaudreau.com/apply. We would love to hear from you and see you inside the program for hypertrophy. We really want to emphasize tempo. I can’t say this enough. Slow down. You might have to use less weight, but you’re it’s going to be more effective if we’re only using momentum.

And we’re like, doing this. If you can’t see me on YouTube, go watch me on YouTube. I’m like, waving my arm like I’m doing a bicep curl, but there’s no weight on it. So if we’re moving things super quickly, right? We’re not increasing the mechanical tension. So time under tension is really important stretching the muscle.

So yes, there are times when partial ranges of motion can be applied, but a general concept is to get a full range of motion on that muscle when at all possible. So for example, if your bicep curl works and again, there’s probably going to be somebody who’s going to come at me, because there’s like different use cases for different sections of the range. But one general principle could be, to make sure you’re extending your elbow all the way.

Open that elbow up right all the way, and then bring it up and try not to involve too much of your shoulder at the top. Just a general rule of thumb, right for lat pull downs, for example, if we’re using these more as a hypertrophy element for your lats, like, really get that stretch. That’s going to be helpful in terms of stretching the muscle. That’s very important for building muscle, is it the only element?

No, but it’s certainly not going to hurt for the most part. So make sure you’re getting full range of motion. And if you’re not sure, slow down a little bit. And again, it’s going to depend on where in your program you’re at. You might do a couple of accessory exercises per session. I tend to pair them, you know, with opposing muscle groups.

Again, I’m not a huge person in terms of hammering one part of your body in 10 different ways, especially in isolation exercise and isolation exercises and isolation work because we have a more of a full body approach in my program, but I might do biceps with triceps. I mean, that’s a very, very common pairing because we’re working the opposing muscle groups.

Working the same muscle group isn’t wrong. It’s just like, what is the context and who is using it and what for if you’re a bodybuilder, you you definitely might do a couple variations of something like bicep work in one workout. But for my folks, who tend to be more focused on sport and performance as well as overall longevity and quality of life.

Then pairing the muscle groups means that we are still getting the work in, but we’re not hammering one part of the body and leaving you too sore or too fatigued to carry on with the rest of your life. Okay, so to kind of tie a bow on all of this and this the next couple sections, I want to sort of talk about how.

The overall flow of a workout should usually look what are some pitfalls or common mistakes, and then how overall I structure my first year of strong with staff in terms of accessory work. Okay, so when it comes to a single session of a workout, we should generally be following principles like strength development work comes at the beginning because it is the most taxing and requires the most energy.

Okay, if you’re constantly seeing and you’re following a program from somebody, or you’re making up your own and you’re putting the heaviest strength work at the end, I’m going to need you to find out from that coach what the rationale is. And if you don’t know the rationale for it, and there’s no good reason for it, then let’s put it at the top of your workout.

Now in Strong With Steph, if you’ve noticed, in this podcast series, I’ve kind of covered from top to bottom what a session would look like. So we talked about movement prep and balance. I put those up top because they’re really aimed at getting you ready for your workout. Power/plyometric work next, and then main strength work after your main lifts generally, will come either your secondary, what’s called a secondary lift, or your compound accessory work.

And again, this could be working the same or similar muscle groups, or it could be working a different muscle group, say the opposing like, let’s say we really work quads with squats, and we’re going to then work more hamstring and glute with your accessory work. Those are compound exercises. Finally, we are going to move on to your isolation accessory, right?

If it’s there, depending on where in your program you’re at. So that might be then where you would put something like a hamstring curl, a bicep curl, a tricep extension, a face pull, those sorts of exercises that are really aimed at hitting that one muscle would come at the end. Now, again, this is for general strength and hypertrophy.

If you’re on a bodybuilding program, it’s probably going to follow the same flow. If your coach does have a barbell bench press in there, it’s going to come before all your accessory work, usually. So that’s just what to expect from a session.

And why things are put where they’re put is because the isolation exercises, you’re not going to be able to do as much weight as you would a compound accessory or even right your main strength work, your barbell work, for example, your main lifts. Okay. Now, a common mistake we would see here is just skipping your accessory work altogether.

Now, I don’t want to be alarmist or to make people afraid and say it’s never valid to skip your accessory work, because sometimes, in the interest of time, I do tell my lifters, hey, if all you’re going to get in today, quote, unquote, all you’re going to get in is your main strength work, and maybe you did some power in plyo to warm up or to get ready for that, then that’s That’s fucking great.

And move your accessory work to another day, right? So I’m not going to sit here and say that skipping your accessory work here and there is going to ruin things, and you’re going to end up instantly injured and etc, etc. However, let’s say there’s a particular kind of accessory work that you don’t like, and you’re constantly skipping that whole category of movement, or you’re never doing lateral work, for example, then you could end up just under-training those aspects.

Now, sure that could lead to a plateau that could increase the risk of injury to some degree. You know, it’s hard to say for sure. It might just result in less being less well rounded, less resilience overall. So when you can try to do your accessory work, and again, I would say, if you’re super short on time, I would rather see someone do their compound accessory sort of secondary lifting, your lunges, your RDLs, your lat pull downs, those sorts of things over your isolation work.

If you’re short on time, I’m just saying that the isolation work is probably the least crucial, unless you have a really specific muscle or muscle group or area of your body that is significantly lagging behind. I can think of one client that I have where she had some injury to her bicep, and so she has a bicep on one side that really is quite small and less strong compared to the other side. So for her, that could be a really important isolation exercise to not skip.

So your mileage may vary. Just saying, as with anything else you know, another challenge is doing too much too soon, whether it’s volume or too much weight too soon. Yes, we want you to challenge yourself, but we also don’t want you to do something you’re really unprepared for, and you. Adding volume too quickly will just make you sore, especially if it’s an exercise that you’re not as familiar with. So for example, when I start my three-month blocks of training, I usually take my weights.

I back my weights off a little bit because I’m seeing accessories that I haven’t seen in a long time, maybe ever, maybe it’s a brand new thing I’ve never done. I’m going to end up sore from that just because it’s novel. It’s new SO volume, which is reps, time sets, how much actual work we’re doing, and novelty are the two most common drivers of delayed onset muscle soreness or DOMs. So it can be just worthwhile to sort of ease in a little bit more in that first week or two, especially if you’re working off three-month blocks with your programming, or even just in that first week.

And then the last part is not really thinking about what your goals are before you either get a program, whether it’s templated or it’s working with a coach. If you’re working one-on-one and somebody is programming for you, then they hopefully are asking you what your goals are, what you’re trying to achieve and accomplish?

If you’re out in the world and you’re kind of looking for a program right Strong With Steph might not be for everyone, and that’s totally fine, but know what you want to know what your goals are quite often, and I’m going to be super candid with you about this when I send people my strength guide, right strength training for women over 40, which you can get along with the week of sample workouts at StephGaudreau.com/workout the responder that goes out with it, if you get this on Instagram, will ask you, what are your strength goals?

Hopefully, after listening to this series of podcasts, you’re a little bit clearer about what strength is. But I can’t tell you how many people tell me that they want to lose weight, which is not a strength goal. And I’m not saying that to be mean, but it’s, you know, we have to understand what the languaging is, right?

What is the strength goal that you have some people say, to lose weight? Now we could use strength training as one facet of, for example, a fat loss program, sure, but that’s not a strength goal in and of itself. Or people will tell me things that you know really have nothing to do with strength. So I just want to put it out there that it’s worth considering.

What do you want to what do you want to do? Do you want to climb stairs more easily? Do you want to be able to do your sport with less pain? What is that sport and what is causing you pain, right? What do you or what are you feeling weaker in that you know you need to improve?

The number of people will tell me that their grip, for example, in BJJ, is not super strong. So incorporating grip strength, or increasing grip strength, could absolutely be a facet of a program, if you’re looking for BJJ programming, right? If you’re a runner, maybe you’re trying to work on your single-leg strength, right? You’re trying to increase your calf strength because you know that that’s an important part of being a runner.

I don’t know there can be tons of things, but just to make sure you’re clear on what you’re trying to get out of a program, if you’re not sure, then that could be a great conversation to have with the person who writes the program, the one on one trainer that you’re thinking of working with.

But come in with some idea of what you want to accomplish, because then you can see, wow, actually, I’m on this hypertrophy program. I have a and this is a client that I had in the past for nutrition. She was a very busy teacher with lots of other extracurricular responsibilities.

She had a stepson and a husband. She lived very far so she had a commute from school to home, and she was on a program that was heavily hypertrophy-based, and it had, I counted 15 different exercises per session. It was taking her three hours in the gym. And for her, this is probably not a super good fit, right? Because she’s so time is a very, very precious resource for her and so spending three hours a few times a week in the gym was just not realistic, right?

So think about those sorts of things before you get involved with the program. And then lastly, how we use this idea of accessory work in Strong With Steph. I’m going to go over this a little bit quickly because I don’t want to belabor the points of what we’ve already talked about. But we’re using progressive overload strength development.

There’s hypertrophy, right? We’re going to be working on balance and Power slash plyometrics throughout the year. Now, how I program that out depending on which three-month block we’re in, is going to vary. So for example, the first three months of the year is strength-biased in the accessory work.

So generally lower reps, heavier weights, and I put a lot of unilateral work, especially in the beginning, because people tend to come in with more disparity inside. To side, whether it’s leg side to side or arm side to side or both, right?

There’s a “no one’s perfectly symmetrical” imbalance between their two sides. Trying to chase that absolute perfection is kind of not really worth it. In my opinion, you’re probably going to have some slight variation between the two sides if you have quite a disparity. Of course, that’s another story, but that first three-month block of the year focused on strength in the accessory work in months four, five, and six. So that’s mesocycle two or quarter two.

We switch to hypertrophy, and for the most part, my lifters will vouch for this. I can only think of one or two exercises in the entire program where there’s more than 15 reps. So I’m really trying to keep time in mind as well. We know we’re going to have to invest some time if we want to build strength, we can’t do this passively. Or we want to build muscle, we can’t do it passively. But I’m trying to maximize your time.

So quite oftentimes, if we’re focused on hypertrophy, we really are in that 10 to 15 rep range, Max, usually 10 to 12. So let’s do it. Do it better, and do it quicker than doing 20 reps of everything for the most part. In quarter three, which is months 7, 8, 9, we go back to strength, and then again, we cycle back to hypertrophy in the last quarter of the year. That’s mesocycle, four months 10, 11, and 12, mainly because at that point our main strength work has gone down in terms of repetition range and up in terms of weight.

So giving you a little chance to back off when we’re doing, say, sets of three, we’re doing like 3-3-3, or 5-3-1. Means that we have a little bit more volume to play with at those slightly lower weights, right? So that’s how I spread out the first year of Strong With Steph. Year two is a little bit different, but it still does follow some major flows in terms of strength versus strength in the accessory versus more of a hypertrophy bias.

All right, let’s wrap it up and remind you how you can check out a sample of this. So key takeaways here, if we’re going to listen to nothing else in this podcast, remember, we don’t have to choose between strength or muscle building, and if we’re over 40, we need both to some degree, unless we’re going to go super, super, super duper hard into, for example, power-lifting training or an esthetic based type of body-building or something like that.

But usually a reputable program of those two extremes, for calling them extremes of differences in training will incorporate aspects of strength and hypertrophy muscle building, so it just might shift the bias toward one or the other. But in Strong With Steph which is more of a general hypertrophy and strength program to support either a sport or just your active lifestyle, you’re going to see both throughout the year.

So we shouldn’t just only do strength work or hypertrophy work. We kind of want to mesh both of those so we get the best of both worlds in terms of stimulus and adaptation. Accessory work will complement your main lifts. Help you shore up any weaknesses, work on different movement patterns or directions that you maybe avoid or don’t get in as much so, for example, moving laterally, rotationally.

That could also be part of your accessory work, and it can also help to break up the monotony of your main list and see that you improve your consistency in your program over time, right? So that’s all very, very important. Periodizing your training throughout the year means that your accessory work will kind of shift and evolve over time, but yet give you enough repetition that you’re seeing results.

So if we’re mixing it up every single day, that’s not going to give us the results. If we’re only ever doing the same three exercises for five years, we’re probably going to be missing some elements of our movement patterns, moving in different directions, focusing on different areas of the body, and just making sure we’re really well rounded.

And then, of course, having a structured program written by somebody who understands programming and all of these concepts is your best bet at saving your brain space. I don’t know about you, but most people I know don’t have in-depth knowledge in this in general, and then, once we take that out of the equation, are just so busy that they don’t have time to sit down and plan out their workouts in the big picture.

So I can’t tell you how many of my lifters have told me, If it weren’t for having this program in the app, I would not have trained today. And overall, their consistency across the year is incredible, and because of that, they’re getting stronger and they’re seeing more muscle on their frame, which is super, super important if you’re over 40. All right, so your action. Sort of last step here is to get my strength training guide for women over 40.

I’ve mentioned it a couple times already in this episode. It includes a week of Strong With Steph, a sample, so you can get a sense of what that’s like. Obviously, it progresses throughout the year. So I can’t give you every single way that it progresses in the sample, but you can get enough to get a taster and doors for that open throughout the year.

So stay tuned for the next enrollment period. Thanks so much for joining me on this episode. I’ve really enjoyed walking through these concepts with you more deeply. If you haven’t yet gone back and listened to all of the four episodes that came before this. Do that. It’s going to give you a lot of context. I want you to understand the why, the rationale.

You don’t need to be able to repeat it all back or give a dissertation on it or explain it to even anyone else, but if you’ve picked up something along the way that you found is helpful, and you’re like, oh, that’s why that’s like that in my program, or, Oh, that’s why my coach is asking me to do this thing.

Now you have a better understanding, you’re more likely to follow through and in the long run, improve your consistency and get better results. You are intelligent. You can understand this stuff, and you absolutely deserve to be spoken to in that way. And given the resources that you need to be successful with strength training, it is that important.

If you’ve liked this episode and found value from this series, please consider subscribing to the podcast. It’s totally free for you, but it really does help the podcast to grow and reach new people. So you can do that on Spotify, Apple podcasts, or any other audio platform you listen to, or, of course, on YouTube, hit the subscribe button and ring the bell for notifications for new upcoming episodes. I thank you so very much for being with me. I’ve super enjoyed this, and I hope you have too, and until next time, stay strong.

Accessory Work for Strength and Hypertrophy in Women Over 40 | Steph Gaudreau.