[Allow me a little nostalgia: I decided to take up weightlifting "for realz" in June 2010. I weighed 87kg. I trained at 中力 gym until May 2011, at which point weighed a solid (or solenoidal?) 98kg. I kept using my own equipment at home, with a big emphasis on grip training, until fall 2011, during which time I got married, then got ready to be a parent. This February I decided to return to a gym "for realz". I weighed 95kg. Less than three weeks later, I weigh 97kg. Presumably, if I keep it up for another year, now that I know a little better what I'm doing, I'll weigh about 110kg. That's my goal, anyway. This Crossfit table {PDF!} presents good goals I also have for the major lifts in the "Advanced" bracket.]
Yet the most important thing about it is that it makes recovery an essential part of training. I call it the "even keel" regimen precisely because it saves from the Charybdis of overtraining this or that muscle group and the Scylla of punishing my body based on some arbitrary (or even "scientifically proven") timetable. I only train once my body feels ready to train (which is not to say when I "feel like it"!). As I like to tell people (myself included), "Rest is the missing exercise from most regimens, and the most difficult in all of them."
Along those lines, let me cite one article I've just been reading, and then segue into this post's main topic: how I'm trying to calculate/schedule my training period. According to Dr. John M. Berardi, Ph.D., in his (astute but whimsical) article, "Weight Lifting and Post Exercise Muscle Recovery" (first published at www.fitdv.com, Mar 2002):
During conventional weight lifting, muscle force production (strength) is diminished for at least 1 to 3 days after the damage has occurred. … [W]hile the muscle is healing, its ability to "refuel" with carbohydrate is decreased because of disruption of the muscle glucose transport mechanisms. This means that no matter how many carbohydrates you eat, you simply can't get your muscle energy back up to normal for at least 48 hours after exercise. So don't convince yourself that pigging out on pizza and beer will help you recover more quickly from your sore muscles. …
[T]he only way to get improve your muscle size and muscle strength is to allow adequate recovery time between performing exercises with the same muscle groups. Without adequate recovery of calcium balance, muscle energy, and muscle protein content, your muscle force will be lower with each subsequent workout, thereby reducing the quality of the workout in terms of the weight lifted. … [U]nless you wait until full structural recovery occurs, you will simply be destroying the new muscle tissue being formed to replace the damaged tissue. And this is no way to get bigger.
So how long should one wait between weight lifting bouts using the same body part? … [I]t appears that when doing intense weight lifting workouts and letting nature take it's [sic] course, a period of 7 or more days may be a good starting point.
Seven days! Or more! As a starting point for rest! I think most "gym rats" would find that kind of advice insulting and "weak". But my experience with the Even Keel regimen bears out Dr. Berardi's opinion. (Not that I got the idea for the even keel from a loser!) Further, Berardi recommends at least "7 days" of rest between heavy training in the context of "detraining" and "recovery techniques", which he discusses in the sidebars of the article cited.
Now, I may be hypocritical, but, since I'm not training as heavily as professional, nor even as heavily as serious amateur, lifters, I'll stick with my 4–5 day rest period.
In any case, to cite Berardi again:
Detraining is defined as a prolonged period of reduced exercise volume or muscle inactivity. Interestingly, although frequent and intense exercise is needed to yield gains in muscle strength and size, detraining studies have demonstrated that muscle strength and power can be maintained with intense workouts separated by as much as 10-14 days.
The data suggest that two weeks is the extreme of rest for heavy trainers, so I feel my off-day training with hula hoop, jump rope, neck training, ab wheel, grip training, swimming, etc., is enough detraining for now. Interestingly, after my baby is born, my schedule might be so much busier that I'm forced into an ideal regimen with 7+ days of rest!
Interestingly, Lee Apperson says virtually the same thing in his discussion of training periodization:
[E]ven though you are always adding weight to the bar it is done in small (8 ounces or 1 pound at most) increments and the change in weight is often imperceptible. … You can really build up training like this, but you have to really recover fully between workouts, or you won't grow. A week of rest is often taken between workouts.
With that in mind, I'll now talk about cycles. Seeing as I developed my Even Keel program from him, I must defer once more to Lee Apperson on the issue of cycles. In a word:
You don't NEED CYCLES to progress, they help but they are not some magic formula. You need to workout progressively on a regular basis, that is all that is needed in the final analysis of weight training. In many ways cycles complicates training unnecessarily. Bodypart recovery also does this. … Training is simple. Don't complicate it.
FORGET Bodypart recovery: Your body recovers as an organism. … [T]rain with a "total body" mindset. If you are tired from legs, don't do arms or anything else till you recover. Train with a mind toward total body training and recovery. Do uppers one day and legs 2 to 3 days later, repeat forever.
… Train hard for 6 to 10 weeks then take a week off or switch to light workouts. Lift progressively. Slowly add weight or reps to your exercises over time using linear progression. Forget cycles, just lift and get stronger.
There you have it. Intensity. Rest. Progression. Variation. Apperson's blunt exhortation––"Forget cycles and just progress!"––matches up exactly with the main lesson I've learned from reading John Wood's emails: progression, by any means, in any increment, is the key to victory. Indeed, I'll lay out in one sentence what I think is the core of strength training.
Ready?
Strength (S) is a function of muscle mass (M), and M increases as a result of sustained progression (SP), whether a progression in the number of reps (R) at a fixed weight or in the amount of weight (W) for a fixed number of reps.
S = f(M), M α SP, SP = R x W
S = f(M), M α SP, SP = R x W
If all you did were five or six exercises (from a repertoire of maybe a dozen), adding a little weight each time, or a rep or two more each time, alternating that progression forever, you would see dramatic gains.
But I anticipate myself.
Now Apperson is being hyperbolic, since he himself followed an annual competitive cycle. Apperson, then, doesn't mean to forget about progression, he just means to stop fixating on a tedious schedule. So, to put it in terms of this article, my basic plan for my program-cycle is this:
MICROCYCLE: ((Even Keel A + Even Keel B) / 7 to 10 days) + Detraining & Recovery x every day or two
MACROCYCLE: (12 Microcycles + 2 Cycles of Conditioning) x ?
I returned to the gym February 8, so my first macrocyle should wrap up in mid- or late May. This Thursday was actually only the first phase of my 3rd Even Keel microcycle. When the 12 (or so) weeks are up––and I will only stick to this schema, of course, if my body keeps progressing without injury, otherwise, I'll just adapt!––, I'll do two weeks of high-rep conditioning (at about 60% intensity), bodyweight drills, super-slow reps, isometrics, (more) swimming, etc. And then it will be back onto another macrocycle of Even Keel.
Or perhaps not.
For a while now, I've been toying with an idea I'd love to try, which relates to the 'anticipatory' points I made about progression.
One of my tags for this blog is "The Big Three"––the Squat, the Deadlift, the Bench––, and one of my tenets is simplicity. So… what if… I only trained… The Big Three!
Call it the Big Time regimen.
Big Time AUnusually for me, the Big Time would not use compound sets, i.e., for day A, I would do all five sets of five reps of SQ, then do all my BP sets, then finish with all DL. No session should take more than 45 minutes.
Aerobic warmup & stretching
SQ / FSQ: 5 x 5 @ 50%, 60%, 70%, 80%, 90%
BP / IBP: 5 x 5 @ 50%, 60%, 70%, 80%, 90%
DL / SDL: 5 x 5 @ 50%, 60%, 70%, 80%, 90%
Big Time B
Aerobic warmup & stretching
FSQ / SQ: 5 x 5 @ 50%, 60%, 70%, 80%, 90%
IBP / BP: 5 x 5 @ 50%, 60%, 70%, 80%, 90%
CJ: 5 x 5 @ 50%, 60%, 70%, 80%, 90%
(CJ means the Clean and Jerk. Percentages refer to a fraction of my single-rep max on any exercise. If one session I do SQ, the next session I do FSQ. If one session I do DL, the next session I do SDL. And so on. I could also alternate db's for bb now and then.)
One problem with implementing this program is that 中力 is entirely too small for me to do CJs. I don't anticipate being at 中力 after July, however, so that's not a big deal.
Now, let me see how this feels. (You should have stopped reading this long ago, you know that, right?)
I reckon my max SQ right now is 140kg (my max FSQ being 115kg). My max BP is probably 100kg (and my max IBP maybe 90kg). My max DL is maybe 160kg––with lots of chalk and a hook grip!––and my SDL max might be 145kg. As for my max CJ, I have no idea, since it's a very technical lift, and I need time and even coaching to master the sheer mechanics of it. So let's just say my max is 80kg.
Assuming the above is basically accurate…
Big Time A
SQ: 5 x 5 @ 70kg, 85kg, 100kg, 115kg, 130kg
BP: 5 x 5 @ 50kg, 60kg, 70kg, 80kg, 90kg
FSQ: 5 x 5 @ 60kg, 72.5kg, 85kg, 100kg, 112.5kg
Big Time B
IBP: 5 x 5 @ 45kg, 55kg, 65kg, 75kg, 85kg
DL: 5 x 5 @ 80kg, 95kg, 110kg, 125kg, 140kg
CJ: 5 x 5 @ 40kg, 47.5kg, 55kg, 62.5kg, 70kg
That's very respectable, and, in my mind, attractively doable! All in due time, I suppose. Patience. Humility. Confidence. Progression.
Stay tuned….
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