'Ball Busters', Widow-Makers, Man Breakers. These are words used to describe the 20 rep squat. But back in the golden age of bodybuilding, before expensive supplements and better living through chemistry, this is how the old school weight lifters got BIG. If you can suffer though the 6 weeks that it takes to get through this routine you will grow bigger legs and even bigger balls. Mark Rippetoe says, "Trust me, if you do an honest 20 rep program, at some point Jesus will talk to you. On the last day of the program, he asked if he could work in." Don't say I didn't warn you.
My version of the routine is apparently the "metabolic conditioning" regimen: squat, pullovers, and circuits of dips, pullovers and abs.
A related article by Randall Strossen has it:
It builds real muscle, increases one's strength enormously, and gives the cardiovascular system something more than a tickle in the process. About the only drawback to following this routine is that you will outgrow your clothes.
The nucleus of this venerable program is one set of squats - twenty reps in the set, to be sure, but just one set. Additional exercises are incidental, two or three sets of several other basic exercises at most, and the general caution is to err on the side of doing too few additional exercises rather than too many.
Amen!
Two things I've learned from recent research: 1) I'll do the SMR for 6 weeks, not 8, since there's no need to overtrain when the gains should already be adequate under 2 months. 2) I think I'll start with 100kg, since the consensus seems to be to start with 10-rep max. I can do 12 reps at 90kg fairly comfortably for my first set. 18 workouts in 6 weeks with a 2.5kg gain per workout means I'm shooting for 20 reps at 145kg by the end of it! Insane? Impossible? We shall see!
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