Natty on Pennies

Training Logs
582

I’ve been trying to sew together my ideas (I should probably say beliefs as I did not exactly invent any if this stuff) considering lifting for the past couple of days - this time in a larger scale with a couple of new things such as gasp volume work

So I’ve been thinking - hard variations, rest pause, overload work, high frequency, cycling exercises but keeping it rather simple, supports, all that good stuff into one program. It’s a hell of an project to put it together (in my heart I can see the program perfectly but I find them hard to shape, for me it’s art. The program must be beautiful even on the paper)

Then after I’ve done the version 1.0 I’ve got to test it myself and see what works and what doesn’t, what I’ve got to change and so on. That’ll take some time. I’d say that in 10 weeks the program is on stage 1.1. Which is the “obvious mistakes have been removed” - stage. At that point I should put 1-2 other people on it as well and observe them. It’ll show how different people do on the program and that’ll help me remove the flaws that do not bother me but may bother them. That’ll take like another 10 weeks or so

Then it’s stage 1.2. - the real test stage. This is where the program would be ran for a couple of months (or cycles if it is a cyclic program) to see if it is actually effective with building muscle and strength, that’ll take yet another 10-12 weeks. (If I can’t see visible change in one’s appearance in 12 weeks and they haven’t put on considerable amount of weight on their lifts I’d say that the program needs readjustment - this excludes the really advanced guys of course)

As you see, putting together a program in a way that allows you to proudly present it to other people may easily take over half a year!

So it’s not all that easy. Of course anyone can come up with a “10 exercises for this and that bodypart in these days for 3 sets of 10-15” in 20 minutes but real programming takes time. You should note that this is just when we are talking about completely new things (in this case, some new things and more old things than ever before, so it’s really a big project)

I’ve written a couple of programs before and usually I’ve had someone else (a trainee) do the test drive for me - the results have been good practically every time. But those programs were done in a much smaller scale, they focused on less things and were rather simple in nature (not that I would start writing astronomically complex programs now, that’s just stupid) but as this is a project that’s supposed to unite all of my thoughts for once, I want to test drive this myself first before I let anyone else touch it. It may be that the program ends up being too rough to do during the army, which will mean that it’ll wait until I’m out, or it may be that the program flops big time (it would surprise me, but with this many moving parts it’s a completely possible option) and I’ll just scrap it.

We’ll see, we’ll see. You can expect me to write some observations down here as well, but don’t expect me to lay out the program anytime soon.

Now I’m off to bed, I’ve got a lot to do tomorrow and my phone is dying.

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583

Christ

I can only imagine

If even that

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584

Whew

I just got done with a full-body volume day (testing my first scribble of the program out)

30 total sets, 3 of which were isolation

Rest periods ranging from 30 seconds to 1 minute depending on the movement (all timed)

Now this is the “easiest” volume day there will be as the volume builds up for five weeks as the program goes on and then I drop back down to this and up the weights.

I have a feeling that this may work quite well, actually

In five weeks I won’t be thinking that after finishing my volume session which will consist of a total of 50 sets (yes, it’s pretty extreme but that’s the point here)

We’ll see

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585

Your mad.

586

I’ve yet to see a completely sane person make unbelievable progress :wink:

Got to say, I’m quite sure today - after my shift (17 hours) I’m still going to go and do my GPP session to get some blood flowing and to make them sweet conditioning/health gains

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587

There’s basically a while gym (squat rack, pulleys, multiple bars, over half a ton of plates, dip station etc etc.) for sale near some of my relatives who happen to own an empty space of about 50 square meters in the middle of a city

It would cost 3,500 euros so it’s not really even that expensive

So I’m contemplating
My girlfriend doesn’t like the idea and I get it, it’s still a big investment and I don’t have a place of my own for it (my relatives live 300km away - of course I could move there and make it a full - blown gym business with personal training)

I’ve got to decide pretty soon because the deal is really good for people who’ve got the space and the money

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588

Why is it so cheap?

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589

That’s what I was wondering too, I should probably drive up there and test it out before deciding on anything

590

Yes for sure! And preferably take someone who has experience with properties.

There has got to be a reason why it’s so cheap, and you really should know what that reason is before committing.

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591

I think you might be mixing things up, the gym equipment is 3,500, the space I referred to is already owned by my relatives

But basically the equipment of a whole gym for 3,500 is still really cheap, so I’d have to go and test everything out before deciding on anything

592

Oh yeah my bad!

And you are thinking of renting the space in the city off your relatives to put the gear in?

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593

Yeah, that’s my plan - but it’s completely possible that they don’t even want my money. Here we help each other out whenever we can.

This is a great opportunity for me, but I got to say, I’m a bit suspicious about the quality of the equipment.

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594

So, after today’s shift (16 hours of work but you’ve got to get it done) I’m going to do hard variation work and overload work for my current “big three” - incline bench, box squat and snatch grip deadlift

First I’ll do the hard variation work - paused close grip incline, pause squat and paused snatch grip deads standing on a block

Then I’ll move onto the overload exercises - incline pin press, Anderson squat and snatch grip block/rack pull

After that I’ll do some accessories for rear delts, neck, calves and abdominals

During this microcycle (8days) I’m going to do sets of six for the hard variations and a max set of five for the overload

As the mesocycle goes on the sets will become shorter until I’m down to doing doubles for the hard variations and singles for the overload, then I’ll just go back to sets of six and fives and start over again.

So, in a sense the program starts off with the days being relatively close (well, not close, but as close as they can be while still serving their purposes) and in the end the days are just extremes in different ends of the volume-intensity spectrum

This concept is really intriguing to me and I do feel that it could work really well, but nothing is certain.

Another thing I really like about this is that one mesocycle takes 40 days which is a long time

Why is that good?

Well, I’m only going to do a maxium of 5 complete mesocycles before going home from the army and that makes it feel just so much shorter.

Weird to think that I’ve got so little time in the army left, even with the leadership training.

Here is the current outline of the program (it’s not nearly ready yet)

Day 1 - Max effort (maxium set + backoff sets on the main movements)

Day 3 - Volume day one - push focus

Day 5 - Hard variations and overload (explained briefly in this post)

Day 7 - Volume day two - pull focus

Days 2,4,6,8 - GPP work/active recovery

So that’s really it at the moment, very simple stuff, but there’s really no reason to overcomplicate things here.

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595

I saw your full body training, and I too experimented with full body containing roughly 50-60 sets. They were broken up, and some sets had more or less reps than others ranging from 1 being the short end, and 15 on the higher end.

Can I ask how you set up your full body session? And, where your reps roughly fell?

That session was rather decent, but I favored the higher reps with moderate-semi-heavy weight concerning my lower body and deadlifts. Upper body was okay, but I flip flopped back and forth in terms of set and rep scheme, and I do it for lower body too sometimes. Some were on the Low end of 1-5 reps for 1-5 sets, relatively heavy, and some sets where on the high end 6-15+. It’s like a low,high,low,high,low type of pattern, and a light, heavy, light, heavy, pattern as well, sometimes its not exactly going back and forth like that, but generally It will.

Do you think It makes that much of a difference to flip flop like that compared to the usual thing I do Such as a heavy working set involving few reps, and most assistance being on the high end.

If I’m not making any sense let me know. This went a lot smoother in my head lol. I don’t do this a whole lot, and I mostly implement it when I find myself stalling to some degree, and I used to do this Every so often when I first started building up a decent strength base. I’m incredibly sore afterwards, and I usually won’t delve back into my usual set and rep schemes for maybe 3-5 days after that. I notice it feeds my squat, and bench a decent amount, but most times I need a week or so to let my body recover from deadlift, which I’m fine with.

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596

I take it that you are referring to my volume day I mentioned earlier

When doing full body training I like sessing it up as follows:

Push movements first
Leg movements second
Pull movements last

Of course there are times when I make exceptions to that rule but usually it’s pretty close to that

I like that order because push movements are rather small and don’t interfere with the other stuff too much, but they would go down if they were done later in the training. Pull movements (such as rows and rack pulls) on the other hand are too heavy on your back and stabilizers to be performed before free weight leg movements such as squats.

Now that this has been gone over, let’s move into a bit more detail

I set it up as simply as this:

Volume day 1 (push focus) microcycle 1

Main push 6x6 (60s rest)
Assistance push 3x12 (45s rest)
Assistance push 2 3x12 (30s rest)
Main leg movement 6x6 (60s rest)
Assistance leg movement 3x12 (45s rest)
Main pull 6x6 (60s rest)
Assistance pull (3x12 (45s rest)

So as you see, it’s very simple. Over time those 6x6’s will become 10x10’s and those 3x12 will become 5x20’s , then the cycle repeats with heavier weights.

When doing a lot of volume with full-body training I prefer to use short rest periods and moderate to high reps to limit the weight being used and the time required to complete the session. With higher reps I’m also trying to get some lactate buildup and pump going on to stimulate muscle growth, and I’m using max effort and overload days as a way to include heavy weights and microtrauma to stimulate the muscles in a different way.

Using lighter weights every once in a while also gives your joints a break, so that’s a plus.

The fact that I wasn’t using nearly the maxium amount of weight here does not mean I wasn’t working hard, on more than one occasion I went to failure, I did do squats in a breathing squat fashion and I had to hang on the chin up bar for extended periods of time to get all reps done. Some would say that I started too heavy but for me it’s all about grit, if I can get the sets done it’s not too heavy.

But to answer your question, if you want to train in the lower rep ranges with full body training I’d start off with lesser number of sets and ramp it up as you go on or I’d start with the amount of sets you want to do in the end but with higher reps and then as the weight gets heavier the sets become shorter - eventually you’ll be doing sets of 1-5.

I wouldn’t necessarily bounce between doing singles and doing sets of 20 or so, but if it feels right it’ll probably work, that’s a good rule of thumb.

On the other hand I don’t see anything wrong with alternating between sets of, say 4 and 8, as they are rather close to each other.

I hope I answered your question

The deadlift usually saps people’s explosiveness for a couple of days as it is a big movement that stresses you central nervous system to a large degree. From what I’ve seen, the first three days after a big deadlift session is where you are really slowed down.

Squat and bench on the other hand really like frequency - with bench I’d use a couple of variations to save the shoulders. Say a dumbbell bench, close grip bench and regular bench all done once a week.

597

Yeah you got everything spot on, I just wanted to ask because on occasion I do similar things you do. VERY occasionally lol.

I mainly just wanted to ask about your setup, because I know everyone will divy up their set and reps differently how they see fit. I just wanted your input on a setup like how I described because I have a feeling not everyone does it that way, and I’m still sorting out the kinks concerning my upper body because some days it seems unresponsive to anything.

And by unresponsive I just mean, carrying over enough for my main bench lift.

Just for extra clarification though, I’ll use your 6x6 as an example, since you’re getting 36 reps as a total, do you think that yields better results than if you did 12x3? They both give you 36 total reps. Same with the 3x12. I’ve played around with this, but I don’t think I’ve done it enough to really decipher between the two, that’s if there really is any difference.

And I ask that because, I see a certain kind of template use a setup like 1-5x1, or 6-15x1-2, but I usually see it concerning the bench press. I’ve tried to implement it to see if I could get my deadlift moving, but I also don’t think I’ve done it enough.

And I’ve always thought of setups like that to be some kind of hybrid of strength and hypertrophy? Maybe a setup like that allows you to use heavier weight while allowing for higher overall volume? I could be wrong though.

598

The difference between say, 3x12 and 12x3 has actually been studied. They found similar increases in hypertrophy but if I remember correctly the 12x3 group got a bit more of an increase in strength. That’s understandable as 12x3 allows you to move more weight. But the 12x3 group took ridiculously long to get the workouts done and they had more joint pain and such.

Comparing 12x3 and 3x12, I’d say that 12x3 should be reserved for speed and technique work as it allows you to move fast through the whole set and you get 12 first reps instead of 3.

3x12 on the other hand is better suited for hypertrophy - it allows for lighter loads and it’s faster to get over with.

Now why do I use 6x6 on my main movements?

First off, it gives you a good compromise of heavier weights while still being rather fast to get done with. It’s also a really easy starting point for building towards 10x10, 3x12 and 12x3 would be outright stupid ways of starting that.

For assistance work I start with 3x12 and build up to 5x20 because it would take far too long to do 10x10 on every single exercise. That would be just crazy.

Those templates are meant for speed work, say 6x1@50% of your max

You shouldn’t be grinding 12 max doubles, you’ll just fry yourself out really quick.

You’re pretty much right, schemes like thins definitely help build muscle and strength. As my program goes on, these days will change into being more hypertrophy spesific rather than strength, but a bigger muscle is a stronger one so in a way it’ll help with strength as well.

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599

The overload session went well, it’s hard, but it’s fun to move big weights.

What was not fun is my both quads cramping up as I’m in the bottom of a squat, I guess that’s what you get when you’ve got to live on skim milk, the bread and five hours of sleep for a week

Another problem was that my snatch grip is too wide for the power rack (even if I don’t go full snatch grip but a bit narrower), goddamn it.

But still, strength is going up and I can see visible fat loss in the mirror. (I’ve become really skinny in the past couple of weeks, I wouldn’t be surprised if I dropped under 200 pounds soon, yeah, I’ve lost some muscle mass as well)

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600

Ahh okay gotcha. I just wanted to ask because I’ve always been slightly confused concerning things like that.

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601

Hopefully I managed to clear things up for you

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