In this YouTube update, Victoria S. Dorsano walks viewers through her experience midway through the ATG Women’s Standards Program, a strength‑and‑mobility regimen designed for athletes recovering from injuries such as ACL reconstruction. She begins with a sponsor plug for Freak Athlete, highlighting equipment (Nordic Mini, TriFlexor) that aids her knee rehab. Dorsano then details the program’s weekly layout: alternating A‑ and B‑weeks, each with five training days (reverse step‑up leg day, chest press, full‑body mobility, ATG split‑squat, shoulder press). She explains the “standards” component—26 unlockable benchmarks split into strength standards (e.g., 40 % body‑weight barbell step‑ups), mobility standards (e.g., seated butterfly knee‑to‑ground), and quantity standards (e.g., pull‑up or Nordic rep goals). The standards are gamified, prompting her to identify weak spots and regress movements to pain‑free ranges before progressing. Dorsano compares her subjective outcomes to the prior DENSE program, noting that while DENSE produced more visible muscle hypertrophy, the Standards program has improved joint stability, range‑of‑motion control, and overall mobility. She discusses specific challenges, especially the knees‑over‑toes squat and Nordic eccentric work, which are taxing on her reconstructed knee. Coaching via the ATG app is highlighted as essential for form feedback and tracking unlocked standards. She concludes with plans to keep addressing weak links, invites viewer questions, and encourages subscription for future updates on her elder‑athlete journey.
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What is up, you guys? It is time for another ATG program update as I'm now in the middle of the Women's Standards Program. A lot of you guys have been asking about how that's been going for me, how the Standards Program's been, what my results have been, what I've kind of noticed in my body, how it's been for my knee, um, since I've had ACL reconstruction and all that good stuff. And I wanna dive into that and share all that information with you guys. But before we do, a few quick words from our sponsor. Freak Athlete has been creating some of the highest quality equipment out there on the market for those of us that not only are doing the ATG style training but also just want to improve our joint health and just perform better as athletes. Whether you're an athlete or not, Freak Athlete has a piece of equipment that I'm confident will change how you move and feel for the better. Some of their trademark pieces such as the Nordic Mini and the TriFlexor have helped me to drastically improve my knee pain and continue all of my ATG style training from the comfort of my own home or even at the gym too, as a lot of their equipment is modular and can be broken down really, really easily and tucked into your gym bag and brought with you to the gym. And the folks at Freak Athlete believe in their products so much that they even have a lifetime warranty and a 100-day money-back guarantee. So if you're looking to get out of pain and become a freak athlete yourself, I highly, highly recommend you guys checking out their equipment. You absolutely won't regret it. And if you click the link below in my description and use code Victoria10 at checkout, you will get 10% off your entire purchase. Again, that's discount code Victoria10 at checkout. And thanks again to Freak Athlete for sponsoring today's video. All right, so the first thing I want to chat about is the layout of the Women's Standards Program. And I had previously done part of the Standards Program before it split off into men and women's respectively, and it has changed a little bit in structure. Um, actually, I prefer the new change. There's a lot added into it that I really actually like and helps keep things fresh, and I want to talk about that. So the first main difference is that there's like an A week and a B week in the Women's Standards program. The A week, you know, is set— there's Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, so 5 days. And same with the B week, there's 5 days. The structure week to week is the same, but the exercises embedded into that weekly structure differ a little bit. So Mondays are always reverse step-up leg days where there's some sort of Peliquin or Peterson step kind of built into the routine that day. Tuesdays are always a focus of a chest pressing movement and focusing on the upper body. Wednesdays are one of my favorite days. It's a full mobility day. You are still kind of working the muscles and you're doing a lot of, you know, seated good mornings and other stuff that still involves a lot of muscle activation. Um, but the mobility day is really nice. It's a good, you know, hour-long mobility routine and it feels amazing. And Thursday is the dreaded ATG split squat day. I have a distinct love-hate relationship with the ATG split squat. It is such a great movement and it has helped me so, so much, but there's just a level of mental focus and like intricate level of fatigue that you feel in your body while you're doing it where you're like, oh, just get these over with now. But anyways, that's what's going on on Thursday. And Friday is a shoulder pressing focused upper body day. So all those days of week have a level of 4 to sometimes 10 or 12 different exercises built in with different sets and reps, different supersets and triceps and things like that that go into it. So it's pretty dynamic as far as how they've built it out, but there's definitely distinct focuses like I mentioned day by day throughout those A and B split weeks. Now let's talk about the standards portion of this. So by standards, and I've explained this in other videos, it really means hitting a strength standard. So in dense program, you're building up, um, your strength through volume and you're doing a lot of volume training. So just a lot of reps and sets of a certain exercise and really building this like dense strength. Hence the name, right? And standards, you're kind of pushing the limit of strength and really getting to that upper limit of pushing a certain capacity of strength through that range of motion or through that movement. So you're trying to hit different kind of standards that you should be at to kind of hit a certain degree of athletic movement in each exercise. So for the women's standards program, it's like, you know, 40% of your body weight on a barbell to do, let's say, pelican steps. You should be able to do a set of 10 each side with that amount of, of, uh, weight added. So 40% of what your body weight is on the bar, for example. So there's several different exercises that are kind of body weight focused as the standard, where they take a percentage of what your body weight is and that's the standard amount of weight you should hit to kind of hit that like top capacity of strength in that movement. And then there's other mobility standards which are, you know, not necessarily measurable by an amount of weight, but more so by how mobile you can be in that pose. For example, The seated butterfly, you want to try to get your knees to touch the ground, which is incredibly hard even for somebody like myself that is pretty mobile. I'd almost consider myself hypermobile in a lot of ranges of motion, but that one I'm almost, almost there. So there's different mobility standards too. There's stretching standards like being able to put your foot on a slant board, lean forward, and not feel a significant stretch in the upper calf, meaning that you have you know, well-stretched-out calves if it's not pulling taut at that point. Um, so yeah, and then there are certain exercises that are more of like a quantity standard where it's about trying to hit a certain number of pull-ups or a certain number of push-ups with good form, um, you know, doing the full HGG push-ups or even Nordics, like doing 8 eccentrically focused Nordics really well. Now in the program there are 26 standards to unlock and they almost gamify it in a way which I really, really like, and it's made me like very driven to try to get all these 26 6 standards. But man, let me tell you that it definitely highlights a lot of the, um, imbalances in your body. Like, there were certain standards that were just easy peasy for me to hit right off the bat, like no issues whatsoever. And then there are other standards where I'm like, it's probably gonna take me like 6 more months to get to this standard. Like the Nordics. Oh, the Nordics. Good thing I have my Nordic mini bench by Freak Athlete to help me get there. Another one that's incredibly difficult for me to get down, that's more of like a quantity goal to hit its standard, is the knees over toes squat, where the goal is to have your shins parallel to the ground and be able to tap your knees all the way down to the ground and keep your glutes contracted and stay in a nice line. And it is very, very hard, and it's going to take me a while, and it just doesn't feel great on the knee that I had ACL reconstruction on. So I'm really— I've regressed the movement back. I'm taking my time on that one. But yeah, there are definitely some standards that are much more challenging for me than others to hit, and I think that's the point, is to become a really well-rounded athlete. You should be able to hit all these targets, and that's really what the standards program is challenging me to do. It's absolutely highlighting my weak spots and attuning me to where I need to allocate a lot of my focus to. Again, it's helping me to regress the movements to a point where I can eventually progress to hitting that standard. I've regressed a lot of them to a point where it's pain-free, and I've been working through those ranges of motion and have been slowly being able to progress further and further, just little bit by bit, so I can get closer to some of those standards in time. And that's where, again, I know I've, I've talked a lot about the coaches through the ATG online coaching app. They've been amazing. They help a lot with helping you to modify movements, to form coach, and all that good stuff. So highly recommend actually getting the app and following the program and submitting your form in for coaching because It just, it makes the experience so much better. But yeah, the cool thing is once you reach one of the standards, you get to submit your form in and kind of hit a little button that says like submitting form in for hitting a standard. The coach will review it and then kind of list that one as unlocked through the app. And you get to see like how many of them you have unlocked and how many of them you still have to work on. So that's a little bit on the like overall structure of the program that I've gotten into and gotten used into the swing of things and gotten to see, you know, how these standards work for my body in particular and which ones are more challenging to hit. But I want to talk a little bit about the results that I've experienced, you know, just how I felt in my body in comparison to DENSE. You know, I've done another video where I've talked about my results from DENSE. I did a body composition test and was able to see the muscle mass gained and even, you know, body fat percentage lost and all that good stuff. I haven't done a body comp test recently, but I will tell you a little bit about how I've felt in my body doing this program and up to this point of being, you know, X many weeks in, 8 weeks into the women's program and several weeks prior to that doing the original standards program. So I'll say from like an aesthetic component, I felt like I looked a lot more lean and muscular after completing Dents. Um, I felt just more cut in a way too. And I think that might be a byproduct of the dense workouts being a little bit longer in duration. Sometimes they felt a little bit more intense. There was a lot of volume training. And yeah, I just felt like I was building muscle a little bit more efficiently. However, during the Standards program, I will say I feel like more like I have control over certain ranges of motion that I didn't before. Like there's more of a control of of the strength that I have, if that makes sense. And everything just feels a lot more stable in my body. So whereas I might have felt stronger during the dense program, I feel more stable throughout fuller ranges of motion than I did in the dense program. And I think that has to do with there being a big mobility focus in the standards program too. Like there's an entire mobility day built in and that's really I think helped with that too. So that's kind of where I'm at with it. I'm curious to do another body composition test to see, you know, from a muscle standpoint, if muscle mass has stayed the same or decreased or increased. But I'm going to say probably stayed the same or maybe decreased a little bit and maybe more of my actual like joint health has gotten better throughout the Standards program. So that's just how I feel subjectively from my experience in my body. Anyways, I'm just going to keep working on these weak links from the program and really trying to get those down. And, you know, I've been really working on them sometimes even my off days, really trying to knock out some of those standards and progress on those. So hopefully I can move through this program and advance to whatever next one I want to choose next. If you have any questions or ideas of any of the other ATG programs you're curious about and would like me to try, I'd love to hear your feedback on that. Put that down in the comments below. If you have no idea what ATG programs there are out there, I'll put a video down in the description where I've gone through all the offerings on the app currently. But yeah, just wanted to provide this update. Again, I know a lot of you guys have been asking, so that is all. And if you want to continue to follow along with my journey as I progress through the ATG program and work on my knee health after having ACL reconstruction, and also just work on my overall body and performance and longevity as an elder athlete, definitely hit that like button, subscribe to my channel. I would love to continue to see you here watching these videos and Until next time, I will see you later. Bye!
