Jacked & Athletic – Training Wisdom for Simultaneous Muscle and Performance Gain

Every intervention has potential positives and negatives:

Increased vertical jump 6 inches with a plyometric program but now you’re more likely to get injured because it wasn’t backed up with strength.
Gained heaps of muscle in the off-season but now you’re less explosive at jumping, cutting, and sprinting.
Spent the time and energy to take your back squat from 400 to 500 lbs. but it did nothing for your vertical jump and acceleration.

These things happen all the time in S&C.

Training interventions should yield net positives for health and performance. Yet often, the opposite is the case. This is especially true when multiple goals are chased at once.

Simultaneously trying to gain muscle, hit PRs, jump higher, improve agility, all while staying injury-free… it’s just too much for most athletes.

But this is exactly what I’ve done over the past decade – train to get jacked, strong, and athletic.

What follows are the lessons I’ve learned to gain juicy muscles, Deadlift over 600, increase approach vertical to near 40 inches, and become quite legendary at Spikeball (in my opinion) all while staying healthy in the process.

Milk the Newbie Gains with 1×20

Volume. Early off-season and novice athletes don’t need a lot of volume (work done) to see results from training. Instead of throwing yourself into a high-volume lifting plan, use a slow build-up. All the qualities you desire (strength, power, hypertrophy, endurance, etc.) will benefit short- and long-term when you start off training with a Minimum Effective Dose program like 1×20. And as you stall, you will always be able to increase volume and/or intensity.

Recommendation: Depending what level you’re at, run the phases of the 1×20 program for 1-2 weeks each (shorter for more experienced, longer for less experienced). The 1×20 progresses nicely from 1×20, 1×15, and finally into 1×10. This adjusts you quite well to lifting after time off and prepares muscle, tendon, and ligament for more intensive programming down the line.

1×20 Method Workout

1×20 Method Training Program PDF

Keep All Qualities Running at Once

Repeated Bouts Effect. What happens when you perform a new mode of training? Chances are, muscle gets damaged and you get sore. If the volume is excessive, you get extremely sore. This forces you to take time off from training. Take too much time off and perform too little work and you can say “bye bye” to future gains.

How can you avoid excessive soreness from training? The Repeated Bouts Effect (RBE) says, when you consistently perform a type of training, the body adapts and protects you from incurring too much damage.

Because you are chasing so many goals, the best way to use RBE is to train all qualities all the time. This results in less damage, less soreness, and more ability to train. This keeps the gain train rolling.

Recommendation: Multiple times per week, train fast (jumps, sprints, med ball, etc.), heavy (~80%+ 1RM compound exercises), middle intensity (60-80% 1RM), light pump work (20+ reps), multi-directional (sport practice, small-sided games, etc.), and some type of conditioning to keep the protective effect of RBE going.

Research on RBE here and here.

Keep Variation Running All the Time

Antifragile. In the book, Nassim Taleb says, “Complex systems are weakened, even killed, when deprived of stressors.”

Your body is a complex system. If you perform the same routine day in and day out, you become weakened to variability. This holds true for movement patterns – You can get really good at the low bar back squat, but what if you can’t high bar/front/split squat proficiently? What does this say when you get in sport and the same exact movement doesn’t present itself twice? If you only do one thing, you are only prepared for one thing.

Not only is it a good idea to use a high degree of variability to be more resilient to soreness, but also to reduce the overuse seen from performing the same exact pattern over and over. Throw a decent amount of variability into training and the body adapts to become more Antifragile over time.

Recommendation: Vary exercises routinely. Maybe this is every workout or every week – it depends mainly on your personal preference. But don’t run into the scenario where you are performing the same exact squat variation, jump variation, or bicep curl variation for weeks on end. To become Antifragile to random stressors, you need to consistently expose yourself to random stressors.

Phase Potentiate and Use the Backburners

Phase Potentiation. As size, strength, and performance markers increase, you need more concentrated loading to continue seeing results. The Phase Potentiation model offers a sequential system where all goals can be trained, with the end goal being a performance increase:

Gain some muscle for a month or so… raw material is increased that allows for better strength later on.
Gain some strength for a month or so… force-velocity curve shifts, allowing for better power later on.
Train power/speed for a month or so… all qualities add up to increase sports performance.

Recommendation: After the 1×20 has run its course, use Phase Potentiation. Train for size, then for strength, then for power/speed. Spend as much time in each phase as you feel you need. All qualities can still be trained, simply increase the volume for the specific goal of the phase and throw the other goals on the backburners (doing less volume).

Avoid Traditional Hypertrophy Sets

Cluster Hypertrophy Sets. Research by Oliver et al. compared two hypertrophy styles with trained subjects. One did Traditional Hypertrophy Sets (4 sets of 10 reps) and the other did Cluster Hypertrophy Sets (8 sets of 5 reps) for compound exercises (Squats, Deadlifts, Presses, etc.). All else within the training plan was matched as well as assistance work, which was 3 sets of 10 for both groups.

After 12 weeks of training:

Same body composition changes between groups
Bench Press 1RM: Cluster +13.7% Traditional +9.2
Back Squat 1RM: Cluster +51.1% Traditional +43.1%
Bench Press Power: Cluster +15.0% Traditional +6.1%
Back Squat Power: Cluster +46.9% Traditional +36.8%
Vertical Jump Power: Cluster 11.1% Traditional +7.2%

8 sets of 5 was superior to 4 sets of 10 for increasing power and strength while lean mass gains were equal.

Recommendation: If you have goals to get jacked but also athletic, don’t do traditional hypertrophy sets (4 sets of 10 at 65-75% 1RM load). Instead, use the same load, double the sets, and half the reps. This helps to maintain quality of work, keeps velocity higher, and overall will make you feel better than grinding through traditional hypertrophy sets.

Study: Greater Gains in Strength and Power With Intraset Rest Intervals in Hypertrophic Training

Daily Extra Session for Tendon Health/Performance

Viscoelastic. Tendons connect compliant muscle to stiff bone. The state of this connector has major implications for performance and health. According to Dr. Keith Baar, when tendons are loaded slowly, collagen molecules work individually and break cross links between each other. This slightly decreases tendon stiffness and increases health of the tendon (useful if you have tendinopathies). When tendons are loaded quickly, collagen molecules work together as a sheet. Over time, fast training makes tendons get stiffer (useful if you have no tendon issues and want the connector to be stronger).

Another Dr. Baar Gem:

Tendons respond maximally to a stimulus after 5-10 minutes of activity then have a refractory period of 6 hours before they are able to respond again.

Recommendation: In a session at least 6 hours away from a normal training session, perform a tendon-focused workout. If you have had injuries to the tendon before, perform slow eccentric/concentric or isometric holds. Start with bodyweight holds and add load with time. If you have had no injuries and want to maximize performance (increase tendon stiffness), perform fast movements in this extra session for the day. Instead of training only once per day, add a short tendon session in to target whatever direction you think fits best (performance or health).

Keith Baar Video

Extra Juice Session: Use Isolation

Some athletes live in the weight room. Sadly, these are often the ones who aren’t the best at the sport. Maybe these athletes try to hide a technical/tactical/psychological issue with pure physical ability. Or maybe they just love the weight room. Either case, if you are going to lift extra because you want to get bigger, stay away from compound exercises.

Firstly, getting big often means training with slow, grinding reps. Do this enough and the nervous system shifts to get good at producing slow, grinding force. To avoid this, simply perform more isolation-type exercises because it won’t have such a big impact on global signaling.

Secondly, it won’t take as much energy away from normal training to do a few sets of delt raises than it does a few sets of heavy push-press.

Recommendation: If you want to add more weight room stuff on top of your existing plan, use dumbbells over barbells, train smaller muscles instead of bigger ones, and do things that are overall less stressful to your body (both for recovery and for nervous system signaling).

Compete Year-Round

SAID Principle. In regards to the last point, some athletes are beasts in the weight room but terrible in sport. This could be for a number of reasons, but the SAID principle makes this quite easy to train. Specific Adaptation to Imposed Demands. Team sports are perception-action sports. Athletes perceive something from the environment, they decision make, then they act on their decision. The best athletes are the extremely fast at this process.

How do you train this ability specifically? The game. And if you can’t play the game for any reason, a way to train general perception and action is with small-sided games (2v2 basketball, tag, etc.).

Recommendation: Throw these games into the warm-up during the off-season. Athletes are usually taking a big break from perception and action within their sport anyway, so it makes sense to provide chaos in some way during all times of the year. If an athlete sucks at communicating, decision making, and executing, all the heavy squats and sprint technique in the world won’t help… but maybe med ball tennis will.

What This Looks Like – Hypertrophy Phase:

Upper Body Monday

Spikeball (Perception & Action Warm-Up)
Med Ball Throws & Slams (High-velocity)
DB Bench – Find 3RM (Heavy work)
Hypertrophy Clusters – DB Bench + Inverted Rows (Medium intensity)
Shoulder Press – Heavy (Medium intensity)
Push Up – High rep (Pump work)
DB Curl – High rep (Pump work

Check out Hypertrophy Cluster Protocol 1.2 to see how I structure training to get both jacked and athletic.

About Jake Tuura

Jake Tuura, MS, CSCS is a collegiate strength and conditioning coach. He currently works at Youngstown State University. Prior to YSU, Jake was an assistant S&C coach at the University of Minnesota-Duluth.

He earned his bachelor’s degree from the University of Wisconsin-Superior (2014) and his Masters from The College of St. Scholastica (2015).

His website: jackedathlete.com helps athletes gain copious amounts of muscle, hit PRs in the weigh room, and improve athletic performance.