It’s started already. Every year, The Holiday Season seems to creep back earlier and earlier. When I left the US, you could see Christmas ads starting in October. Halloween be damned! Thanksgiving gets some kind of individual respect, though you can tell that it too is being assimilated into this vague “holiday season” that seems to last about four months.

I don’t mind the holiday spirit. I do hate how it’s become so commercialized that the entirety of Q4 is given over to a continuous spree of BUY! messages. Halloween seems to kick it off, and it doesn’t really quit until New Year’s Day. Then everybody wakes up on January 1st with a hangover and a new stack of credit card bills.

And of course we have the infamous dietary speedbump that is the month of December. With a flurry of Christmas parties, oh-so-tasty foods, and a nigh-inconsiderable number of days off work (which begets heavy drinking, let’s face it), the number one complaint you’ll hear in January is how badly the diet went last month.

Combine this with the on-going tradition of the New Year’s resolution – which is always “I’m really gonna get in shape this year! Really!” – and you’ve got a perfect storm that makes the sales staff at gyms world-wide salivate with the thought of their late Christmas bonuses.

Like the predictable beasts that humans are, every year we collectively give the waiting gyms our money for memberships that will not be used past February. If you look at the numbers, something like 1% of new joins in January will still be there at the end of the year. I totally made that statistic up, but it’s still depressing.

This will be my second year living in the southern hemisphere for Christmas, and let me tell you it’s a little different when you’re used to the end-of-year festivities being a winter thing. My last Christmas was spent in 35 degree swamp heat (that’s 95 F for you ‘merkans), and while this year won’t be so bad due to change of venue, the point remains: it’s still summertime, so we can add the typical “gotta get abs for summer!” motivation on top of the extant Resolutioner behavior.

What does all this mean? Well, for starters, it’s also a good time for the Back-Scratchin’ Blog Crew to gear up for their holiday hustlin’. Thanks to the Internets, no longer are the membership consultants at local gyms the only ones that can make a few bucks off the institutionalized insecurity that Western culture relies on to exist.

People already have Program Fever. It’s in the blood, and the fitness industry won’t tell you differently because it’s not profitable. Canned programs are the kernel of “working out”, really, and everyone has The Best Program Ever – as long as they’re using it when you ask, it will be beyond reproach. Ask them a month later and the opinion may not be the same, though. We’ve always been at war with Eastasia, of course.

For those of you that don’t know, Program Fever is what I call the obsession with canned, pre-made programs that come out every so often, be it in magazine articles or when the latest Big Name Rising Star of Fitness releases a new book from Rodale Publishing.

These programs become the fad-of-the-month; people follow them religiously, recommend them to each and every person on forums, and otherwise fall over themselves to sing the praises of the new workout. Fast forward six months later and maybe 10% of the original disciples will still be talking about it, let alone still doing the thing.

I’m not even sure I can blame the fitness industry for this one, as much as I want to. This is just the Disposable Society at work, a product of collective ADD that we’ve acquired in our on-demand culture. We want everything now, with the end result being that we have so many options that we literally cannot process them all.

I shouldn’t have to remind you that this thought process is at odds with the actual results-getting quintessence of any strength-building or physique-improving process. When I bitch about Program Fever, there’s a few points I always have to hammer home:

• A canned program is just a collection of rules, which in turn force you into specific behaviors. It just happens that those behaviors (ideally, anyway) bring you closer to the goal. Think of it like a recipe. It’s not doing 3×5 with a 3/0/X tempo and 60 seconds of rest that matters – what’s important is that if you follow the recipe, you get a cake. That doesn’t mean other recipes won’t work just as well, nor does it mean that an expert chef can’t whip up the best cake you’ve ever seen without looking at anything more than the ingredients list.
• You know what’s more important than the precisely-defined workout you’re doing? Consistency. Getting your ass to the gym when you’re supposed to be there. Working hard when you get there, instead of half-assing your sets and chatting for most of the time you’re supposed to be lifting. Focusing on getting stronger, instead of doing 50 sets for your biceps and telling everyone you’re training for size – and completely failing at both. I won’t suggest that you ignore the role of a well-designed workout, but I do suggest that it matters a whole lot less than most people think. It’s the effort and consistency that matters a whole lot more, and you can’t write that down.

But that doesn’t sell, does it? I mean, I might get one good long book out of that. I say might, because even that doesn’t have the marketable hook that claims of 35 LBS OF LEAN MASS IN JUST 7 WEEKS!!!!! can bring you. Bullshit talks, man.

Instead, if you market things as innovative programs, intricate masterpieces of flowing design that only the experienced coach, holder of all things knowledge-y, can bring you – well, if you sell things as Programs rather than teaching the man to fish by explaining guidelines, hell you can sell as many books as you want. There’s an infinite number of ways to create a Program, based on the simple principles that define “What Works”.

Gurus like to exploit the variety concept to make this work; how often are you told you need a new program every 4-6 weeks? Really? That’s kinda true, but here’s the fun part: “variety” is sufficiently vague that it can be used to justify just about anything. Yeah, if you do the same program for months on end, you’re gonna stall out.

At the same time, that doesn’t mean you need to haphazardly change your whole workout routine every month, either. Here’s a dirty little secret: a well-designed program that incorporates some kind of daily or weekly periodization scheme already incorporates all the variety you need. You can make progress off that one “program” for months if not years without changing a damn thing.

But that only sells one program; why do that when you can sell twenty by just re-writing the same concepts in different ways?

If that’s your bag of chips, eat it and be merry. I just don’t see the point if you’re after results.

I’ve always hated the Good Morning. It gets a lot of attention from a lot of really strong guys, and because of that advice I’ve tried to give it a fair shake over the years. No matter how much I tried, I was never able to find a way to make this an enjoyable exercise.

Usually I consider not liking an exercise to be a good thing, since that pretty much means you suck at it and will benefit from getting it stronger. That’s not what I mean here. Yeah, it’s awkward if you don’t do them regularly, but it’s not just that. The mechanics of the lift are just weird.

I think that part of the problem was trying to follow what Westside was doing a few years back when they were really pushing them as Max Effort exercises. They seem to have backed off that somewhat lately, although it’s still pretty common to see maxed-out GMs floating around.

For my money, I just can’t do them that way. Maybe with more time and practice, but as it stands for me right now they just aren’t compatible with me when you’re talking maximal attempts. I notice in a lot of cases that I don’t even find my groove until the second or third rep in some cases, even with lighter weights.

I also couldn’t (and can’t) see much point in trying to get really strong on a non-specific lift; that is to say, why am I going to spend that much time and effort getting really strong at a lift that’s not the lift I’m interested in being strong in? And don’t think I didn’t test this, either. The times I did drop deadlifts in favor of pushing up my GM strength only resulted in weaker deadlifts.

This may work for really strong guys, mind you. Maybe if I was pulling up in the 600s, I could get away with only deadlifting under 70% and using GMs as my main exercise. Perhaps that’s something to try in the future if I reach my goal. As it stands as a low/mid 500s puller, I can’t completely get away with it.

I am noticing that as my deadlift goes up, I need to put more effort in other special exercises and weak-point training. I’m doing a lot more back raises, box squats, and low-percentage pulling, with relatively small amounts of heavier deadlift training (which includes deficit pulling and low-rack pulling).

This is what made me decide to give the GM a second look. Instead of using it as a max-effort lift, I decided to throw in lighter sets of 6-8 reps after whatever heavier stuff I’d done for the day. Has it worked? There’s no way to say for sure, but I did get mad soreness in my glutes, hams, and midsection from them. Yeah I know I’m the main one to tell you that DOMS isn’t results talking, but it does indicate that something’s being worked in a novel way, so I take that with the grain of salt it’s worth.

If they’re building up the hammies and glutes and low-back in a way that squats and deadlifts aren’t, then cool. I probably need that kind of strength gain. I think there is something to be said for increasing your volume from special exercises like this, as opposed to just doing higher reps and/or more sets of the main lifts. So maybe that’s where GMs will fit in for me now.

It may also be that as I get stronger and enter real PR territory (not the get back to old lifts PRs I’m setting now), I’ll find that using heavier and even Max Effort GMs will become more beneficial. I do know that high volumes of deadlifts stop being so good for you past a certain weight, so the GM may well be able to pick up that slack as far as strength-building volume for those muscle groups.

I’m also inclined to wonder how much my lack of equipment has colored my outlook. I normally train in commercial gyms, which always have crappy racks and very little choice of barbells. You can choose the crappy bent bar with no knurling, or the crappy bar with no knurling that’s not quite as bent. Things like a cambered bar, SSB, or anything like that which could make the GM a little more painless are just not found. Given that most people at the average gym can’t even figure out how to squat right, that’s not surprising.

Anyways, I’m keeping it simple for now. Just a few sets of 6-8 reps with 100kg, and gradually increasing the weight as I get adjusted to the volume. It’s been doing the trick.

In virtually every textbook and manual about strength training that I’ve ever read, the suggestion for “hypertrophy” workouts is always something like 3-5 sets of 10-12 reps at around 70-75% of your 1RM. This tends to double up as a suggestion for beginners, as well – the rationale being that they need to use lighter weights and build a foundation before moving into heavier weights.

Of course there are some differences of opinion there; Bill Starr suggested sets of five, and this has been continued by Glenn Pendlay and Mark Rippetoe with their ongoing use of the now-classical “5×5″ workouts.

In reality it seems that it just doesn’t matter much what beginners do. They’ll grow and get stronger regardless of the program as long as they’re showing up and trying to get stronger. And in Maximum Muscle, I questioned the idea of the “hypertrophy protocol” to begin with. This entire notion is based on these beginner gains, firstly, and secondly, on the notion that the hormonal response elicited by this kind of training actually correlates with muscle and/or strength gains.

It doesn’t actually appear that it does once you actually look at the scant research that uses well-trained subjects, by the way. I’ve said for quite awhile now that there’s little purpose for using high-volume/low-intensity methods like that exclusively if you’re interested in getting either bigger or stronger. Please note the emphasis on the word exclusively, because that means it’s important.

What seems to be happening is that beginners get a pretty massive spike from resistance exercise, and the magnitude of that spike does tend to correlate with the amount of work done (so the hypertrophy protocol will create a more pronounced hormone response than your typical strength protocol). However, your hormone response to exercise is one of those things that tends to be blunted as you get stronger and generally “more adapted” to lifting weights.

In advanced guys, not only is this hormone response blunted (PMID: 18714223), but the hypertrophy protocol also produces inferior results in trained strength athletes (PMID: 12734759 – also note that while the non-athlete group made gains, and despite the conclusion of the authors, the strength athletes did rather poorly).We also see that the hormone response tends not to affect the growth-signaling chemistry (PMID: 19736298) nor real strength or size gains (PMID: 19910330), and that results can be achieved without these transient spikes in the first place (PMID: 16972050). There’s also this gem (PMID: 19077743) that shows the hormone response to diminish with training, and suggests it may not be predictive of actual gains.

In short, I don’t think the hormone response means much of anything, and a real critical analysis of the research (as opposed to cherry-picking the abstracts) agrees with that premise. With that in mind, it would also make sense to re-examine why we’d use this kind of training and for what purposes, especially for those moving past the beginner phase of training.

Beginners and Bodybuilders

These two groups have something in common: they both love to do a whole lot of volume in their workouts. Beginners do it because they tend not to know better, and because they almost always want to be bodybuilders. It’s funny to me how the general wisdom of bodybuilding has come to dominate virtually every commercial gym in the world, because even people that claim not to have bodybuilding goals almost always work out with a routine designed for bodybuilding.

Funnily enough, I don’t think anybody’s sure why bodybuilders train how they train. Much of it stems back to Arnold’s weirdo fetish about “the pump”, but there’s not much evidence-based rationale for it. Simply put, training for the pump is training for strength endurance, when muscles actually respond to progressive loading (i.e., getting stronger).

There is a volume component to this as well, so it’s not just about getting your 1RM up like a powerlifter, but you still have to add weight over time while operating within a reasonable limit of work in each workout. I’ve touched on this before, where both empirically and academically it seems that the limit should be somewhere in the range of 40-60 total reps per muscle group.

I think it was Pavel Tsatsouline that said you want to try to achieve a pump with heavy weights. Just working the muscle with 3-5 sets on 10 different exercises isn’t cutting it; if you’re training with useful weights and putting enough effort into each set, you won’t have the stamina to knock out that much work.

Yet this is what just about every damn body does.

Pumping can work just fine if you’ve got anabolic steroids to automatically switch on protein synthesis for you. It doesn’t quite cut it for natural bodybuilders, or even for those of you that just want to be Pretty^TM. If you want to optimize your muscle mass as a natural, then you need to be putting your efforts into getting stronger with a reasonable volume of work – not too high, not too low. That’s what reasonable means.

It’s no coincidence that the best bodybuilders also tend to be the strongest, even amongst the drug users.

Excluding the Middle?

Shifting gears slightly, I want to talk about relative weights and rep ranges – more specifically, how these things change as you get stronger.

You would think that the trend would be towards doing more sets, fewer reps-per-set, and heavier weights as you get stronger and become more advanced. To an extent, this is what happens.

However, as is always the case with advanced strength athletes, it’s not always so clear. Strangely, it seems that you see people gravitating towards the top-end strength work like that, yes, but you’ll also see some of the opposite.

Some guys do a ton of sets at low-ish reps, or maybe a handful (1-2) of very hard sets in the 5-10 rep range, which is the range of 85% their 1RM (or higher). Then you see other guys that seem to never go above 70% and instead do very high reps, or the Dynamic Effort/speed work that’s still fairly popular.

What you don’t see are the top guys doing the middle-of-the-road stuff that can benefit a beginner, and that most wannabe pump ‘n tone guys (and girls) end up doing for the next five years while not seeing any improvements.

Firstly, things like 4-5×10 just lose their utility beyond a certain point, at least when used as the sole training method. I think the worst thing a person can do as an intermediate (that is, past the first 3-6 months of training but not yet officially mature enough to be “strong”) is trying to use a high-volume approach like that. At that level, the person is not strong, relative to his/her capability anyway, and using low percentage workouts by and large will not get you strong. What that person needs is heavy sets of 5-8 reps – moderate reps, moderate percentages.

So why do advanced guys get away with it? Why do you see some of them thriving, for that matter?

I think there’s a kind of synergy that can happen once you’re strong enough to take advantage of it, where you sorta come full circle. Whereas very heavy weights “pull” your strength up from the top by exposing you to heavy stimulus, light weight/high volume work can “push” your strength up from the bottom by helping to adapt your muscles and connective tissues (and probably by serving as a nice break from heavy work).

Once you’ve spent years working with heavy weights, you’ve developed a hell of a foundation, for one. At that point, you haven’t exactly exhausted the potential of heavy stuff, but you’re at a point where you’ll benefit from more profound changes in stimulus, even if it’s just due to the alternation of heavy and light weights.

At the same time, that middle ground that worked for you as a beginner and even as an intermediate – workouts with moderate percentages and moderate volumes – can lose steam. I think that as you get stronger, this “no man’s land” of percentages results as you have to balance the need for higher stimulus with the greater effects on your recovery.

Say you rack up say five doubles, or six triples, or even just five singles up to a max, and you’ve done 10, 18, and 5 total reps, respectively. The weights are fairly high, sure – easily up in the 85-90%+ range – but the total tonnage isn’t that great simply because you haven’t done all that many reps. In this case, the weight itself serves as the stimulus and you don’t need a ton of volume – a ton of volume would wreck you.

On the other end of the curve, if you’re doing percentages at or below 70-75%, then the weight itself isn’t really the key stressor. You can still knock yourself out with a ton of volume or taking a lot of sets to grinding-failure, but the lighter weights won’t tend to impact recovery to the same extent. Even so, the volume has its own effect on your muscles and surrounding tissues.

But you take a guy that squats even 500 lbs and have him try to knock off a 5×5 squat workout, and you’re looking at some serious poundage for that session, and with a fairly substantial weight to boot. Obviously this will get worse the stronger you get, too; anecdotally you’ll see guys working down the percentages with their lighter work as they get stronger.

That may sound odd, but consider 60% of an 800 lb squat – that’s still 480 lbs. Even though it’s “just” 60%, it’s still a heavy enough weight in absolute terms that it can be a stimulus.

I think that as you get stronger, the need to “widen the gap” becomes more important. You need heavy work at the top-end – singles, doubles, and triples with pretty heavy weight. I’d also suggest that the occasional “toughness set”, a high-rep set of 8-20 reps with a challenging weight on a big lift, could be useful too. For that matter, it’s not like there aren’t big strong guys that don’t do higher reps on average, too – the key difference is that in general, they tend to be all-out “intense” sets (in the HIT/bodybuilder definition), instead of multiple sets of pump ‘n toning work. At the other end, you can benefit from lighter work, at or below 70% for volume (be it high-rep 5×10 kind of stuff, or speed-type work).

The middle-ground seems like it will trend towards over-working you if you’re getting on up there. It’s great for beginners, but maybe not so great for more advanced guys. I think those middle percentages may be a place for Westside-style special exercises to shine. You try to do that kind of work with your big compound lifts and you’ll burn out fast, but all the stuff WSB recommends to build general fitness overcomes some of that.

Train the lifts very heavy or very light, and make up the rest with special exercises. I like the sound of that.

Even though I’m not all that strong, I’ve found that this wisdom applies to my deadlift. When I do actually pull off the floor, it’s very rarely more than a few singles, doubles, or rarely triples. This is coupled with much lighter “speed” work, generally 70% or less (I’ve played with heavier stuff and haven’t found it useful, go figure). Any “volume” work I want to do comes from Good Mornings, box squats with bands, or plain old 45-degree back raises.

On the other hand, my weaker lifts still benefit from plain-old volume work and progressive overload. It’s all about where you are in terms of strength and how much you want to add.

So what about the guys that want to be Pretty^TM? Well, obviously growing muscles is a slightly different tangent, but I don’t think there’s a huge difference in suggestions simply because of the overlap in getting bigger lifts and getting bigger muscles. Bodybuilders will likely benefit from the One Hard Set method (i.e., max reps with a pretty heavy weight) combined with the lighter Pump N Tone sets (your typical 3-5×10), which gives you the top-end high-percentage work and the low-end higher-volume work.

Otherwise, besides a change in the rep ranges (higher average reps for bodybuilders vs. strength types) I think the rules still apply – exclude the middle as you get stronger.

I’ve been slack with my blogging lately, I realize. I’ve been busy elsewhere, doing other Internet things and spending more time out in the Real World. I’ve not abandoned you, my five readers, I promise.

Specialized Training for Casual Lifters

The last six weeks or so I’ve been training for a powerlifting meet, which is in a little over a week.

To train for this, I adjusted my training away from the very generalized program I’ve been doing while trying to starve myself pretty (which I call MattFit to avoid trademark issues).

I’m now wondering if this wasn’t a mistake. My deadlift has gone up compared to my local maxima PR* of 230kg (506 lbs) at the end of September, as I hit 232 and 237 (512 and 523 lbs, respectively) the other day, and plan on at least 240 in the meet. This is good news, because it’s one step achieved in my plan to get back up into the 250+ (550 lb) range. The ultimate goal of course is to break 600 lbs, so the target is 272 hopefully before the end of 2010.

* Which means I’ve done more in the past, but these current lifts are my best post-trainwreck status

However that’s about the only good news. My raw benching hasn’t really gone down, but it’s not up any, either. That may or may not be a big deal, since I’ve been doing a heavier shirted bench session in my Titan F6 as well. Not much past data to draw on here, so I can’t really say either way.

And of course who can forget my obligatory pre-meet injury, which is awarded to my torn vastus medialis oblique (VMO). I’m not even sure how this happened to be honest. My squatting had been going just fine; I’d gotten back up to 140kg for 10 solid reps, no belt or wraps. Then I started working with slightly heavier sets with my loose knee wraps and a belt – I’m talking 150kg/330 lbs here – for sets of 5-6 reps. One day it just went pop, and that’s been the end of that.

It wouldn’t be a powerlifting workout if I didn’t blow something out, though, so I can’t say I’m surprised. I suppose this means another six months of non-squatting rehab.

Anyways, this wasn’t to complain about my exploding joints and muscles; it’s more to mention an insight I had that may be worth discussion. Before I began this PL routine, I was doing a fairly balanced mix of strength work and conditioning work, as I mentioned in the last post, with the goal of leaning out. I did pretty well on that, I think, going from 97kg down to a low of just under 89, and while gaining strength at the same time.

What’s interesting to me is that as it stands now, one lift has done OK (up at least 10kg from the last max-test), one may or may not be doing OK, and one is sidelined because it injured me. What I’m wondering is, did I screw up by moving away from my mixed-training MattFit workouts?

I was getting consistently and routinely stronger on the three-week low-volume wave cycle I was doing, and my conditioning was about as good as it’s ever been considering most of my training years have been devoted to lifting heavy things and eating a lot.

I’d dare say that the conditioning work was actually helping my strength out across the board, from the benefits to work capacity and recovery. Recovery, you ask? Well yeah; I’m not hung up on the “blow your legs to pieces” HIIT workouts in vogue these days, so I tend to do lower-intensity bike rides after or in between my leg training, which gets blood moving in there without trashing them.

The instant I went back to my old habits – i.e., lifting like a lazy fatass – things fell apart for me. The effects of the increased lifting volume was noticeable right off the bat. I adapted to it pretty quickly, but I think the stress effects never went away. Which, of course, nicely explains the effects on my appetite (I went from several months of great diet discipline to totally falling off the wagon) and the niggling injuries that keep popping up. The VMO tear is just icing on the cake once you start looking at it that way.

In fact, it’s gotten to the point that I’m actually ready for the meet to be over just so I can go back to a milder three-day workout schedule with a blend of strength and conditioning work.

The point of this diatribe, you ask? Well, it’s pretty simple. I’m not a competitive powerlifter and with my string of injuries, I never will be. I enjoy lifting in meets because it’s fun, but I’m under no delusions I’ll ever be good at it. So the question becomes, why go out of my way to over-specialize my training for it when, firstly, I don’t seem to have gotten any benefits from it and secondly, when it definitely detracted from my overall “fitness level”?

If you’re a hardcore powerlifter, I’m not speaking to you of course; you need to train for your sport. I’m talking to glorified gym-rats such as myself that want to be reasonably strong, maybe even gangsta-strong, but have other needs to account for. Frankly I’ve come to enjoy having a base of conditioning, and it’s suicidal for me to neglect my joint mobility and tissue-quality work, so those things need to be given their share of time in my routine as well. And of course those things dove-tail nicely with the real goal, which is to be Pretty^TM.

So in a global sense, I’m talking to you bodybuilders too. The same applies – why are you copying the routines of a high-level pro bodybuilder when you’re really just a gym-rat trying to be Pretty^TM?

The problem isn’t any given “kind” of training, like “bodybuilding” or “powerlifting” or “functional” [sic] training. The problem is over-specializing when you don’t have a sport to compete in. The ideal program for the recreational guy/girl would involve elements from all these things – heavy powerlifting, bodybuilding fluff, and general conditioning work.

As for me, I’m going back to the fun of mixed-quality training*. I’ll keep my hard-out strength workouts in there, since I’ve still got to break that 600 lb deadlift, but I’m also going to remember that I need (and even like!) my conditioning work, too. Plus I’ve got it in my head to get a 140kg power clean and get my chinfag strength back up to doing reps with two plates around my waist.

* Note that you actually can do this intelligently, vs. a string of randomly-programming strength-endurance sessions.