Question: I am following a ‘HIT’ (high intensity/low volume) routine that consists of one or two hard sets of a few compound exercises twice a week. Although I am shot for days after each workout, I am making good gains in my lower body. But my upper body just refuses to grow or get stronger. Help!
Although I am not a fan of ‘HIT’, I will not argue that one or two all out high rep sets of squats or deadlifts pack muscle on the bodybuilders who survive it without getting hurt. Yet I have met very few talented iron rats who have made gains on this type of training in their upper body. Stop denying the reality! The problem is not that you are not working hard enough; the problem is in your routine, emotion rather than science and experience based.
Up the volume, the poundage, and the frequency. Cut the reps and say no to the failure shtick. Consider the classic 5x5 system; unlike HIT, it has never failed to build strength and muscle. Take a weight that is slightly below your 5RM and try to do 5x5 with five minutes of rest in between. Don’t fail on any of your sets! It will not be easy, given your HIT mindset, but if it was easy, everyone would be doing it.
Chances are, you will manage something like 5, 5, 4, 3, 3. Stay with this weight and train two to three times a week. Next time you might do 5, 5, 5, 4, 4. A workout or two later you will put up 5x5. Then add five pounds and repeat the procedure. Six weeks later, fresher, and noticeably meatier, you will start reconsidering your lower body routine, even if you are still making gains.
Question: Is it a good idea to take a month off training once in awhile?
World champion weightlifter Trofim Lomakin would barely show up at the gym once or twice a week, mostly to check in with his boss. Then, three months before a USSR or a world championship, the square jawed Siberian would kick up his training into high gear – and win. Lomakin remained the king of the hill for ten years, well into his thirties.
Working on his 1997 thesis, Vladlen Voropayev, one of the leading kettlebell lifting experts in the world, observed sixty top gireviks, or kettlebell lifters, members of the Russian National Team and regional teams. A whopping 59.3% of these iron athletes reported taking 1-4 months long layoffs from training!
Weightlifting, kettlebell lifting, or bodybuilding, certain things are the same in all iron sports. An occasional layoff, perhaps a month each year or two weeks every six months, will recharge your batteries and will make you want to go to the gym. More importantly, your muscles and the nervous system will become more responsive to training once you resume training; the gains will be fast and furious. Here is how to make the most of this phenomenon.
Start with very, very easy training. Not just for the sake of safety but to make as much gains in the next couple of months as possible. A detrained body will not need much of a stimulus to make it respond. But eventually, as you adapt, a bigger and bigger dosage is needed. Exercise is not that different from drugs in this sense. If you are disciplined enough to set up a powerlifting style cycle – where you start with easy training and do not pop more ‘iron pills’ until the old dose stops working – you will have a smoothride with three to four months of size and strength gains.
Question: I know bodybuilders who rigidly stick to a routine and others who just wing it. Which is the better way?
In the aforementioned study of elite kettlebell lifters, 57.7% of the athletes followed a training plan, 23% free styled it, and 11.6% did not answer. The same is true among top athletes from other iron sports: some have plotted their ascent to the top while others just winged it.
Obviously, you can succeed either way, but you had better have some structure, at least until you have learned to listen to your body. US Armed Forces Powerlifting Champion Jack Reape made some interesting observations on the dragondoor.com forum: “… most people have no business free styling their training. It just takes too much experience, discipline, and self-knowledge to go in and continuously go by feel, IMHO. Almost nobody who freestyles ever sufficiently backs off. There are days you feel like hell but you can have a good training day. In training, for me, bad warm-ups are a good sign, and easy warm-ups can be a sign of a not so good day. Most new trainees are not physically or mentally tough enough and consequently back away much too early. Most experienced trainees don’t know when to back off… I MIGHT have been guilty of this myself a time or two!
Not that everybody needs a 16 week periodized peaking schedule… Having a basic plan to follow is key to making progress, as you must be able to handle more volume and intensity as you progress, or you won’t progress. A simple scientific fact… You don’t need to be pedantic although that IS allowed, you just need to have it clear in your mind what you are doing this week, month and year, then balance it with your time constraints and priorities.
“No plan survives contact with the enemy, but no one without a plan survives contact with the enemy either!”
Well said.
Question: I hear contradictory opinions on training twice a day. Some coaches say that these days you cannot succeed in any iron sport without it and others claim it just leads to overtraining. Who is right?
Twice-a-day training has a fascinating history. Upcoming Russian weightlifter David Rigert met the great coach Rudolph Plukfelder (in case you are wondering about the names, both R. and P. are Russified Germans). Committed to his training, young David moved to Plukfelder’s hometown Shakhti. Obsessed with strength, Rigert wanted even more pain than whatever his coach was dealing out to him. He secretly made a copy of the key to the gym and started sneaking in for another workout at night. When Plukfelder’s backstabbing enemies learned about Rigert’s insane regimen they snitched on the coach to the authorities claiming he was killing the young athlete. But a following medical commission found Rigert in excellent health. Rigert went on to become one of the greatest weightlifters ever. Science validated twice-a-day training. Bulgarian coaches visited Plukfelder to learn his moves. You know the rest of the story: a continuous domination of the Russian weightlifters and an explosive rise of the Bulgarians.
Yet there is an expert opinion that such training has led to the decline of American weightlifting. In his interview to powerathletesmag.com weightlifting legend Tommy Kono said that “The U.S. lifters have to go back to the American system of training and not follow what the Europeans are doing. The lifters must return to basics and not have tonnage or intensity govern their training. Believe it or not, it is the old system of light, medium and heavy training 3 to 4 times a week and each workout lasting no more than 90 minutes. It is a matter of taxing your muscles and giving ample time to recover. Too many of our current lifters are over-trained and getting injuries because they lack the recovery time.”
Who is right? Don’t be mislead by the weightlifting examples, the same two camps exist in bodybuilding. Lee Haney has successfully lifted twice a day while others burned out.
The bottom line is, twice a day lifting works great, but only if you have a military discipline and a relaxed life style, listen to your body, and keep a detailed training log. Do not suddenly add an hour-long evening workout to your usual hour long morning session. That is a sure recipe for overtraining. Do two thirty minute workouts instead- essentially split your normal session in two. This approach, taking your current workload and fragmenting it, has been documented to be very effective by Russian scientists. Which does not mean that it is right for you. It is a high maintenance, non-forgiving regimen. You are probably better off listening to Mr. Kono.
Go lift now. As Rigert used to say, “No squealing. No whining. No complaining.”
Question: What split should I use with your ‘Strong as You Look’ series workouts?
One high volume/high intensity workout a week for each body part will do the job. This arrangement hits all your muscles hard and direct every seven days – and indirect a couple of times a week. It as a unique form of cycling invented by American bodybuilders, rather than borrowed from Russian weightlifters or American powerlifters.
I suggest the following breakdown:
After three weeks, reduce the reps by 33-50% for a week. E.g., instead of 4x4 do four sets of two reps. Five sets of three instead of 5x5. Two sets of six instead of three sets. You get the idea. The last week of the month will be very easy. It is supposed to be. The unloading week will rejuvenate you physically and mentally and set you up for great gains in the next month.
After a nine-week growth spurt, switch to an altogether different routine. Since you have been working all your muscles with a variety of exercises, mercilessly cut back to the basics, e.g. the powerlifts plus pullups. Because you have been putting in high volume, cut way back, e.g. 3x6 per lift, a mere twelve sets for the whole body. You have been blasting each body part once a week; now train moderately three times a week. This radically different course of action will once again stir up your muscles to new growth.
Question: Why is it that the abs can be trained daily and other muscles need two, three, and even more days to recover?
Any muscle can be trained daily provided there is time and a good reason. The Russian National Powerlifting Team benches up to eight times a week. It has been shown that fragmentation of the training load in many mini workouts boosts strength gains (Zatsiorsky, 1995). The idea is to lift heavy as often as possible without tearing down the muscle. If you are training for strength and are not concerned with mass you will be better off doing 1x5 every day rather than 5x5 every five days. This mother of all splits is not ideal for hypertrophy though; Alexey Sivokon benches almost 500 pounds but weighs only 148. A bodybuilder is better off working his or her muscles harder and less frequently.
Since most physical culturists do not dig abs bigger than their pecs, working your midsection daily, heavy but not to exhaustion, e.g. 3x3, is indeed a good choice. Your waist will get tight and strong – and your lower back will thank you for it when you squat or pull.
Question: I read that Russian power athletes purposefully overtrain to make greater gains. Can a bodybuilder do that?
Soviet coaches realized that waiting for complete recovery between workouts could take an athlete only so far. Indeed, controlled overtraining – known in the US as ‘overreaching’ – followed by a taper, leads to gains far superior to those possible with total recovery training.
Although Russians employ some very sophisticated controlled overtraining models it does not have to be rocket science. Any intermediate to advanced bodybuilder can easily follow the approach suggested in one of the free articles posted on dragondoor.com. Work your whole body for two or three days in a row. Then either take a day or two off or taper with very easy, active recovery training. Push, back off, push, back off.
If you like your training cycle to fit nicely into a week, try training Monday through Thursday and take Friday through Sunday off. A fellow named Uru I corresponded with a few years back used that schedule with great success. But with either plan it is essential that you listen to your body. Overreaching is a powerful tool and if abused it can lead to overuse injuries. So use your head!
As a bodybuilder who favors split training you might not like training like this full time. No problem, you should not anyway. Explains former world weightlifting champion Prof. Arkady Vorobyev, “… constant training on the background of incomplete restoration can have dangerous consequences... chronic fatigue and overtraining. Therefore the organism needs a chance to recover completely.”
Overreaching for a week every month is more than adequate for a bodybuilder. You will experience great muscle growth, but surprisingly, the best gains are likely to take place during the first week of going back to conventional full recovery split training.
I urge you not to misinterpret the above as the superiority of full recovery training! This is a delayed adaptation made possible by earlier overreaching. Vorobyev explains that incomplete restoration training stimulates the recovery ability; your body literally has to learn how to recoup faster or else! To give you an analogy, say you signed up as a logger and got very sore after the first day of work. If you persist and keep logging day after day through soreness and fatigue eventually your body will adapt and have no problem handling the daily grind. On the other hand, if you were given the unlikely choice of chopping the wood only when you have totally recovered, you would be working twice a week at the most and always recover slowly and painfully (sounds familiar?).
By taxing your recovery ability through intense daily training, you will be building up your adaptation reserves. When you finally go back to hitting up each muscle every three to five days, your muscles will fill out with power like never before!
Question: You have stated before that a muscle will grow if “it gets pumped with a heavy weight.” I am not an instinctive bodybuilder and I would like a less subjective guideline.
Recall that best size gains call for a high percentage of your max lifted for as many total reps as possible in the shortest time. Naturally, these requirements contradict each other so a bodybuilder needs to find the best compromise between the intensity (the average training weight), volume (the total poundage), and density (work to rest ratio).
If you do not like lifting by the seat of your pants use the ‘power index’ proposed by John Little and Peter Sisco in their book Power Factor Training. Say you have squatted 3x10 with 200 pounds in 12 minutes. Start by adding all the poundage lifted: 3x10x200=6,000. Square that number, or multiply it by itself: 6,000x6,000=36,000,000. Squaring the tonnage was a very smart move on the authors’ part as it encourages the bodybuilder to up his volume; even a small increase leads to a noticeable jump in the power index.
The final step is to divide the result by the time it took you to complete all the sets. 36,000,000/12=3,000,000. To keep your life simple get rid of six zeroes. You will get the power index – which should really be called ‘the mass index’ – of 3.
To quantify your training further, start tracking your intensity in its Russian weightlifting definition (Chernyak, 1978). That means the average weight lifted per set. Just divide your total poundage, 6,000, by the total reps performed or 30 (3x10). The intensity will add up to 200 pounds. It goes without saying that if you employ different weights from set to set, your calculations will be a little more involved. Say you have squatted 200x10, 210x8, 220x6. First add up the tonnage of each individual set. 200x10=2,000. 210x8=1,680. 220x6=1,320. Then add them up to get the total poundage: 2,000+1,680+1,320=5,000. Add all the reps, 10+8+6=24. Finally, divide the poundage by the reps, 5,000/24=208. The average intensity is 208 pounds.
Now all you have to do is strive to improve your power index and your average training weights – and meat will start sticking to your bones, if you eat enough. Very quickly the numbers will teach you to lift moderately heavy, keep your reps low, do a lot of sets without lollygagging too much in between, and terminate them before you reach muscle failure.
Understand that although you should up your power index and absolute intensity over a long haul, striving to do so in every workout is unnecessary and even counterproductive. Your loads should wave up and down to pack the greatest punch.
A recent development: Charles Staley’s ‘Escalating Density Training™ is the most ingenious and foolproof way to plan your power bodybuilding workouts I have ever seen. EDT takes all the guesswork out of your weights, sets, and reps selection. More importantly, it builds muscles that are as strong as they look. Alternating EDT and neural strength programs such as Power to the People!, “Grease the Groove”, or 5x5x5 every six weeks will give you the look and the strength of an old-time physical culturist.
Buy Charles’ book from edtsecrets.com. Or else.
Question: Is varying exercise tempo worth the trouble?
Lelikov (1975) investigated the effects of the rate of exercise performance on strength gains. He learned that a fast tempo was inferior, very slow lifting was a little better, and a medium pace was the best. However, when the tempo was varied, the gains were 50% greater than those from the leading medium tempo!
Yes, slowing down or speeding up your reps will help you make greater progress in strength and size. And it does not have to be rocket science.
Most of the time you should train at a moderately slow pace, it is conducive to generating the greatest muscular tension. This patient tempo mimics a grinding max lift. You do not need to purposefully slow down; if you keep your whole body tight and lift with calm confidence, your muscles will naturally find their rhythm.
Once in awhile go on a brief stretch of compensatory acceleration or exaggeratedly slow training. My good friend Marty Gallagher, former Coach Powerlifting Team USA, occasionally does a few weeks of Super Slow™ ‘for diversion’. In a squat cycle by S. Y. Smolov, Master of Sports, that is popular among powerlifters, two one month long ‘grinding’ mesocycles are separated by a two week ‘switching’ period of explosive training and plyometrics. The idea is to provide a radically different stimulus to the nervous system and the muscles – and to get a break between two gruesome phases.
Question: I’m totally unsatisfied with my progress. I train my heart out, yet it seems like I have hit a wall; I haven’t gained any muscle and strength in six months. Have I reached my genetic ceiling?
Have you noticed that many bodybuilders, stars and everyday guys and gals alike, burn out or get hurt after just a few years of training and quit? On the other hand, there is the powerlifting community where a career spanning decades is common, forty some year olds set world records, and sixty year olds pull triple bodyweight deadlifts. What is it that your iron brothers and sisters know that you do not?
The answer is cycling, the method of starting out with light weights, not training to failure, and slowly building up to a new peak that is weeks or months away. Lifters do not try to impress the gym with their prowess by pushing up max weights every time. A five hundred pound bencher is content with training with three or four wheels, only to add another five pounds to his ponderous max at a meet that is twelve weeks away. In fact, it is the rare powerlifter who maxes more than three or four times a year – and these PRs are never wasted in the gym but carefully saved up for a competition.
Although structured formal powerlifting cycling is a great idea, there are other ways of implementing this conservative attitude into your training. Learn from the post a comrade named Jake Mueller made on the dragondoor.com forum. “I have come upon a new principle that is certainly not new, but new to my own training: Building Momentum... a good way to go about things is to gently “nudge” or “prod” your progress along. For instance, my practice of the barbell clean and military press involves me varying the load each workout. The last two weeks I did 195x10x3 (sets x reps), 235x8x1, 205x10x2, 225x12x1. Now, I might be able to do 225 for 3 sets of 3, or 205 for sets of 5, but the point of this was to practice the lift with relatively heavy weights (7590%) and NOT incur excessive fatigue. When I start this over again, I’ll only add 5 lbs. to each training weight, using 200, 240, 210, 230 respectively. Like Dan John once wrote years ago, “5 lbs. here, a rep there” is what leads to progress, not going to every sort of limit each time you hit the weight room. Progress steadily, backing off occasionally, and you will keep your momentum and avoid burnout (physical and mental).”
As the ancient wisdom goes, “He who understands life does not rush.”
Question: On one hand you advocate the minimalist approach to training and on the other you teach all these weird exercises and their variations. How do you reconcile minimalism and variety?
The fewer parts something has, the less likely it is to break down. The success of the famous -or infamous – Russian Kalashnikov assault rifle is a case in point. My routines are maximally simplified. They always consist of a very limited number of exercises, all basics, but sometimes with a twist. Here is the logic behind the ‘twists’. On one hand, experience has shown that basic moves like squats and deads deliver maximum strength and size gains. On the other, ‘the basic variations of the basics’ do not always work around injuries and sometimes fail to target one’s weak links, be it in strength or in development. Properly selected mutations of the basics do – and much better than the sissy isolation exercises. A couple of examples are in order.
Bob’s bench press has stalled. He has a sticking point a couple of inches off his chest. His training partner diagnoses the problem as a deltoid weakness and recommends military presses and front raises. Three weeks later Bob’s bench is still stuck and his shoulders start hurting.
Bob says no to his non-specific overtraining, heals up, and asks a powerlifting coach for advice. The latter lays a couple of 2x4s or a phone book on the bodybuilder’s chest. Bob is told to lower the bar until it touches the boards, which places it exactly at his sticking point. Bob is supposed to pause to kill the bounce (without letting the bar sink in) and push back up (without heaving or getting cute in any other way). The power coach prescribes regular benches once a week moderately heavy plus two days a week of intense board pressing. A month later Bob’s sticking point is history and his bench is up 15 pounds to a PR of 335.
The board press: a basic with a twist.
Jane wants to cut up her ‘lower quads’. She is not happy with the squat-based routine she has been doing as it has bulked up her legs. She follows the gym standard operating procedure and switches to leg extensions. A month later Jane’s strength is down; she can tell during her softball games. Her quads have started cutting up but her knees have started aching.
Jane meets a trainer who has been around the block. She explains to Jane that many folks’ knees cannot take leg extensions and nothing beats squat type exercises. Jane argues that squats have bulked her up. That is because the loading parameters were wrong for her goals, points out the trainer. To avoid hypertrophy while strengthening and toning the muscles the reps and the sets must be kept low. Furthermore, de-emphasizing the negative will help prevent the unwanted muscle growth.
The trainer tells Jane to do behind the back deadlifts. This cross between the SQ and the DL targets the ‘tear drop’ vastus medialis muscle and makes it safe to de-emphasize the negative. 3x3 twice a week is the trainer’s recommendation. A month later Jane’s quads got defined without getting bigger, her knees stopped hurting, and she was faster than ever on the softball diamond.
As you can see from the above examples, a highly abbreviated basic routine can be customized to your individual strength and physique goals, weaknesses, and injuries. Well thought through variations of the basic ‘big’ exercises is the way to go. Stick with one variation for six weeks or so, then go back to the ‘basic-basic’ or find another variation to address another weakness. This is the essence of the ‘minimalist variety’ approach to strength and muscle training.
The behind the back deadlift: another customized basic.
This cross between the SQ and the DL targets the ‘tear drop’ vastus medialis muscle and makes it safe to de-emphasize the negative
