The easiest way to get strong safely & with minimal fuss
If I gave you 3 months to increase your max bench by 2.5kg, you’d laugh me out the room and ask ‘when’s the real challenge?’ - wouldn’t you?
I’m betting even the biggest pessimist in the room is backing themselves to make it.
The more ambitious and well trained of you might aim for a 5kg increase - this could also apply to a bigger move like a squat or deadlift.
2.5-5kg per quarter. That’s all.
But, what many people don’t realise is that sticking to this patient trajectory would increase their lift by 10-20kg per year. For the non-mathematicians, that’s you potentially lifting 50-100kg more than today 5 years from now (there will be a limit eventually, soz).
Why does nobody do this? Patience, strategy, inconvenience, ego. It takes a whole lot of the first 3, and big lack of the latter. Many would rather ‘go hard or go home’ to feel like they’re doing more, ego lift and get injured on a regular basis, and be ‘all-or-nothing’.
Today I’m going to outline the strategy for you - one which I plucked straight from Dan Cleather’s Little Black Book of Training Wisdom.
Let’s say your 5 rep-max squat (or any other chosen lift) is stuck at 40kg. With this strategy - you’ve got an entire 3 months to stay at that load and improve.
Stable and smoother technique
Develop resilience and resistance to injury at that load
Increasing strength capacity in the process
But how do you go about that? What would that look like in reality? Well, let me show you:
The Consolidation Phase
You spend a couple more weeks adjusting to your current ceiling of 5 reps at 40kg. Each week make sure you do at least 3 or 4 hard sets of your chosen lift - maybe the first working set is only at 30kg (hard enough but manageable), 2nd set 35kg (harder), 3rd and 4th at target load 40kg.
Then, one fine day on week three, on your final set only, you push for a 6th rep. You crazy son of a gun.
Week 4 you try to hit 6 again and consolidate. Manage it? Awesome - as per the ‘2-for-2 framework’ (which I did a whole post about here), you’re ready to kick on.
Now, here’s the important bit - As 5 reps is the goal and we’ve just established we are more than capable of doing that - this is the point where most people will try to increase the load slightly and make 5 reps the target again. Don’t do that - hold back guys.
The Show-Off Phase
Rather than struggle and suffer, week 5 is your opportunity to show off and feel good - you know you’ve got it at this weight, you even secretly want people to watch. So now do as many reps as possible (final set only) - this could well be the day you hit 7 or 8 reps at 40kg.
Now, it’s technically the case that 40kg is not your 5 rep-max anymore. It’s your 8 rep-max. So let’s consolidate that. Week 6 you strive for 8 reps again, just trying to match what you did the week before - but guess what, there’s no pressure. You’re only half way through this 12-week phase!
We could even say for arguments sake that week sucks, you only get 6 out for whatever reason. Or worse, life happens and you completely miss that workout.
It’s not a problem - week 7 you go again, and you strive for 6-8 reps, and do so the following week too. You’re getting good at this now. Easy (but still hard) lifting, slow, steady progress - by this point you’ve spotted various friends pick up training injuries in their rush to improve and head back to square 1. Cheerio.
The Overload Phase
Want to know a crucial aspect of building strength properly?
We can’t confine ourselves to one tiny rep range of 5-8. We need to include some work at higher rep ranges to build hypertrophy and endurance qualities to the movement execution, and we also need to have some even more maximal efforts dotted around the programme too. So what might that look like?
Hypertrophy / Endurance - We begin to switch out the usual load/reps for 10-15 reps at a little notch lighter.
Max strength - Perhaps we also switch out squats for some heavy leg press machine (safer), one leg at a time, 1-3 reps each side, as much load as we can tolerate! Or we try some isometrics where we push as hard as possible against an immovable object for 5x5 seconds.
Now beware - for the reasons mentioned above, this final phase is hard.
We are now trying to overload the body to create the adaptation we are looking for. Weeks 9-12 are all about creating that final push with versatile set and rep ranges to ensure we target different energy systems and different types of stress on the muscles and nervous system.
If, at week 12 we can now tolerate eg. 15 reps at 35kg, then according to our trusty 1 rep-max calculator - our new 5 rep-max is currently somewhere between 44.6-47.3kg.
That’s nice progress!
And how much did I say we need to increase the load by after week 12?
That’s right. You’re nicely placed to increase to 42.5-45kg for your sets of 5 and begin the cycle again.
Now I know, it’s not sexy. But damn is it effective.
So tell me, where do you need to get stronger? Are you prepared to go against the grain and try something that really works?
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