How to rotate your main movements to avoid overuse and injury and still gain strength.
Key Takeaway
In our current live programming, BUILD, we are concentrating on strength and aerobic capacity. The foundation to everything else you’ll do as you make it through your long-term programming for 2026. A strategy we are using in this phase is rotating our movements a bit more frequently than we have in our past phases.
It isn’t wrong to stick with the same exercises for longer, and that is particularly true if you’re new to training or trying to get very good at a given lift. However, first responders and tactical populations (in general) don’t have a huge need to get too “good” at any one movement.
The key is still making progress over time, whether that be through more reps with the same weight, more weight with the same reps, or both.
If you can make progress without overspecializing, you’ll get stronger while avoiding overuse injuries and you’ll be able to apply this capacity over more diverse movement patterns. It also can keep training more novel and enjoyable, particularly for those who struggle with staying on a program for long.
Program Examples
Below is our “upper focused” day in week 1. It doesn’t look exactly the same in week 2 but it is similar in the sense that you will repeat the same main upper body (B1) strength movement:
You’ll do a pin press in weeks 1 and 2. In week 1 you’ll work up to a challenging set of 5 (really about 4-7 reps ideally). Once rep speed slows substantially or your form gets a little sloppy stop the set and move to your accessory work. That is your best for that day.
Now this is where people see the progress…in week 2 you’re instructed to either beat the number of reps you did with that weight- so if you did 250x4 in week 1 and your form was questionable maybe you go for 250x5 in week 2.
Or if you’re feeling really good you can throw on 260 and see if you can get 4 reps or more. That is progression.
Then in Week 3 we move to this set up:
Same idea here, except now we use a floor press (B1) with different upper body accessory movements (C1-C3). We are rotating movements, but they’re similar enough to continue to make progress in a pressing pattern but provide a different stimulus each week. In week 4 we again go for a rep or weight progression of some kind. Ideally it is both, but life happens and this game isn’t perfectly linear.
Closing
This is just one example for the first four weeks of our upper body focused day. This doesn’t include the lower body focused session later in the week, along with two separate work capacity sessions and 2 “optional” Zone 2 low impact recovery days.
What shocks most people is weeks later when we return to these movements that we didn’t spend a ton of time on. Either the weight they did last time feels much easier, or they flat out beat the reps and weight on the first go round.
This is how holistic long term training looks. Planning it out like you should plan out a 20 year career. BUILD is going to be an exciting training cycle for We Go Home Human Performance Training Team. Questions? Comment or reach out.
