COURSE GUIDE
Hi there, it’s Menno, your course instructor. In this course you’ll learn how to master
your physique and lifestyle with evidence-based methods. We’ll cover how to design
strength training programs, optimal nutrition for your physique and health, how to find
your ideal romantic partner, how to make and invest your money, how to decide where
to live and how to find happiness.
design optimal training, nutrition and supplementation programs for muscle growth, fat
Contents
loss and strength development. We’ll also extensively go into food choices for optimal
health, diet adherence and for the professionals, there are modules on physique sports,
HOW THE COURSE
Powerlifting WORKS
and marketing your business. Let’s get you introduced. 3
THE COMMUNITY 3
COURSE OUTLINE 4
TECHNICAL TIPS 12
PAYMENT SUPPORT 12
COPYRIGHT 13
FEEDBACK 13
COURSE CONTRIBUTORS 13
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How the course works
Every week or two weeks I will post one or several modules of the course in this
course’s e-learning environment. In the Comments section below each post you can ask
questions and discuss the module. Some modules last 2 weeks, as they’re particularly
large and important. All bonus features, such as the live video Q&As and the meet-up,
will be announced and discussed in a post as well, so to follow the course, all you have
to do is follow the group.
The community
Feel free to comment on all the topics and answer other people’s questions! Networking
and interacting with your classmates can greatly enrich your experience of the course.
Many people from previous courses have made long-term friends in this course. We
also have a Facebook group for this course for questions as well as more informal chat
and networking.
Of course, it's also perfectly fine if you just want to lurk in the background and read the
contents without interacting with the group.
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Course outline
The updated course outline - when we will discuss what - can be found below. As new
contents are posted, you will also see them pop up in the group. I’ll generally post new
modules on Friday morning so you can study them over the weekend.
To roughly summarize the course, the first part of the course deals with nutrition, the
second part with training and the third part with lifestyle. We will also do a monthly live
Q&A (that can be replayed for those that can’t attend live).
The course outline is subject to change based on feedback during the course, new
additions and updates to incorporate new research.
Part I: Nutrition
Week 1
• How to study and do your own research
o How to improve your reading comprehension and retention
o How to find and read scientific papers
o Understanding basic statistics
o Improving your logical reasoning skills
Weeks 2 & 3
• Energy intake
o Understanding human metabolism, incl. refeeds, set-points, metabolic
damage and the yo-yo effect
o How to cut, bulk & recomp
o How to estimate your body fat percentage and track progress
Weeks 4 & 5
• Protein
o Individualized protein requirements
o Protein timing
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o Meal frequency
Week 6
• Carbohydrates
o Requirements per type of exercise
o Carbohydrate timing
o Dietary fiber
o Carbohydrate tolerance
Week 7
• Dietary fat
o Requirements for your health and physique
o Understanding cholesterol
o Brown fat
Week 8
• Ketogenic dieting
o Understanding ketosis
o Effects on health, metabolism, appetite, performance and your physique
o Cyclical and targeted ketogenic dieting
o Measuring ketosis
o MCTs and exogenous ketones
Week 9
• Fasting and circadian rhythm effects
o Intermittent fasting, alternate day fasting and protein sparing modified
fasting (PSMF)
o Circadian rhythm effects: timing considerations for the macronutrients
o Carb backloading
Week 10
• Beyond macros: micronutrition
o Common deficiencies
o Bloodwork
o Multivitamins: problems and benefits
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o The functions of each micronutrient related to your health and fitness
o How to fill in your micros
Weeks 11 & 12
• Health science and food choices
o What makes a diet healthy?
o Effects of food processing: freezing, microwaving, etc.
o Organic, wild and grass-fed: worth it?
o Low calorie sweeteners, sugar and dietary fiber
o Food choices for health and anabolism
o FODMAPs and digestive health
o How to recover from illness
Week 13
• Ad libitum dieting: how to lose fat and gain muscle without tracking your macros
o Hunger management strategies
o Physiological vs. psychological regulation of hunger
Week 14
• Supplements: a complete guide to every supplement worth knowing
Week 15
• Nutrition case studies
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Part II: Training
Weeks 16 & 17
• Understanding how muscles work, how they grow and how they get stronger
o Mechanisms of muscle growth
o Systemic and local growth regulation: structural balance theory
o Strength vs. size
o Functional training
Weeks 18 & 19
• Program design fundamentals
o Training intensity
▪ Effects on fatigue, connective tissue and the nervous system
▪ Strength vs. size
▪ The muscle-specific hypertrophy method
o Training volume
▪ How to estimate recovery capacity
▪ Optimizing and individualizing training volume
o Training frequency
▪ Interaction with volume
▪ Effects on recovery capacity
▪ How often should you train each muscle and exercise?
o How to structure your training split
o Estimating training status and maximum muscular potential
o Weak body parts
o Program optimization based on work capacity
o Program optimization based on DNA testing
Week 20
• Muscle functional anatomy: a visual guide
o What each muscle does and how to train it
o Ab training and spot reduction
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Weeks 21
• Exercise selection
o What makes an exercise effective for muscle growth?
o Free weights vs. machines
o Compound vs. isolation exercises
o Accommodating resistance, bands and chains
o Recommended exercises and technique guide
o Counting volume: how much does a certain exercise stimulate a certain
muscle?
o Functional differentiation and exercise variety
Week 22
• Exercise performance
o What is ‘good technique’?
o The mind-muscle connection
o Repetition tempo
o Proximity to failure
o How to breathe
Week 23
• How to structure your workouts
o Rest intervals
▪ Active recovery
o Exercise ordering
▪ Circuit training, supersets & more
Week 24
• Program design for women
o Sex differences
o Contraception
o Pregnancy
o Menstrual periodization
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o Breast implants
Week 25
• Program design for the elderly
o Sarcopenia
o Anabolic resistance
o Neuromuscular changes
o Injury considerations
Week 26
• Periodization and progression
o Progressive overload and progression models
o What is fatigue?
o Cybernetic/autoregulatory, undulating and linear periodization
o Benchmarking and autoregulation
o Overtraining, overreaching and deloading
Week 27
• Advanced strength training techniques
o Forced reps and drop sets
o Reverse pyramiding, cluster sets and myo-reps
o Weighted stretching
o Eccentric overloading
o Post-activation potentiation
o KAATSU/blood flow restriction training
Week 28
• Training gear
o Weightlifting belts
o Footwear
o Knee wraps
o Lifting straps
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Week 29
• Cardio
o Implementation for fat loss
o Estimating energy expenditure per activity
o Implementation for health
o Implementation for sports (limited)
o How to mitigate the interference effect
o HIIT vs. LISS
Week 30
• Training program case studies
Weeks 31 & 32
• Stretching
• Postural correction
• Warming up
• Injury management
o Pain science
o Ice vs. heat, NSAIDs and RICE
o Rehabilitative tools & equipment
o Foam rolling and massage
o Chiropractic & alternative medicine
o Common injuries of each body part and how to treat them
Part III: Lifestyle
Week 33
• Sleep and stress
o Circadian rhythm control
o How to optimize sleep quality
o How to manage stress
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o How to effortlessly increase your activity level
Week 34
• Adherence: the psychology of how to stick to your diet and exercise program
o Physical vs mental effects of nutrition
o Goal setting
o Cheat meals
o Diet breaks
o Social eating events
o How to deal with social pressure
o Food cravings
o Flexible dieting and meal planning
Week 35
• Beauty
o Acne
o Tanning
o Cellulite
o Hair loss
o Dandruff
Weeks 36 & 37
• Evidence-based lifestyle design
o What makes a person happy
o What to do for a living
o How to decide where to live
o Having children: why (not)
o Renting vs buying: commonly misunderstood economics
o A rational approach to the news & social media
Week 38
• The science of romantic relationships
o Economical game theory of partner selection
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o When to stop dating
o What to look for in a partner
o How to improve your relationship
Weeks 39 & 40
• Evidence-based investing
Happy learning!
Technical tips
Most course contents, including the document you’re reading right now, have an index.
If you open the Navigation or Bookmarks section on the left, you should see the index.
This makes it much easier to navigate the documents.
Most course documents are provided as PDF files or spreadsheets (e.g. calculators). If
you don’t have software to open spreadsheets and PDF files, you can download
OpenOffice for free here.
Payment support
For any questions about your payment, you can contact my administration at
[email protected].
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Copyright
All contents of this course are copyrighted by me and/or Henselmans LLC. However,
I’m perfectly ok with you sharing excerpts or quotes to friends or posting them online if
you mention that it’s from the course with a hyperlink to the course page.
Feedback
If you have extensive feedback about the course, complaints or anything you want to
discuss privately, you can email [email protected]. Important matters will
be forwarded to me for resolution. Feedback from all sources, including an anonymous
survey, will be taken into account in the post-course evaluation to improve future
courses. We strive to make each course better than the last, so we greatly welcome
constructive feedback.
Course contributors
The course is officially authored by the following people, in alphabetical order.
• Anastasia Zinchenko: author, researcher
• Antoine Fombomme: tutor of the French PT Course, editor
• Fredrik Tonstad Varvik: researcher, author
• Ivan Brkic: graphics designer, web designer
• Joe Flaherty: editor
• Luis Villasenor: tutor of the Spanish PT Course, editor
• Menno Henselmans: founder, primary author, editor-in-chief
• Nevin Barnett: tutor of the French PT Course, editor
• Reinier de Wit: researcher, editor, head administrator
• Richard Bell: tutor of the Dutch PT Course
• Sanne Leenman: recruitment consultant
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• Sten van Aken: researcher
• Stijn van Willigen: editor, researcher, graphics designer
• Thomas Campidell: researcher, author, tutor of the German PT Course
• Vincent Huisman: author (business module only)
