[quote]Aragorn wrote:
NewDamage wrote:
Towards the end, I was doing 5x5 with 565.
Fuck me, that’s strong. No wonder you’re pushing 700.
I had a similar experience, albeit not near those kinds of gains. I used a total body plan one summer as an experiment–it was a mixed olympic/PL routine comprised of solely whole body lifts (clean, clean/jerk, snatch, clean and snatch high pulls, barbell bent over rows, squat/box squat, deadlift variations, good mornings) except for bench and chins. Not a Waterbury routine.
I started training 4x a week and increased frequency to 5x a week over the summer (I kept the daily volume pretty low, so after a point I upped frequency instead). My strength went up and it felt great.
I did in fact gain some size from it, and that’s all the more surprising since I was umpiring baseball in 100+ degree weather 6 nights a week for 4 hours, along with doing construction work during the day.
I’m convinced if I could have cut one of the jobs so I could have eaten more, I would have actually gained appreciable size. It was literally, get up–> construction–> eat–>train–>officiate–>eat–>collapse at 1 am and do it again the next day. I didn’t get any heavier, but I did lean up a lot, which amounts to a net gain of muscle.
That being said, I’m not going to go back to it any time soon. It didn’t allow me to focus on any one lift or to address technical problems in any problem area for me. And it may have just been my schedule, but I was DRAINED after a while following this.
Now that I think about it, my volume wasn’t as low as I thought at the end of the program. I burned out on it.[/quote]
Heh, thanks man.
Aside from working as much as you did, sounds like we had similar experiences.
Basically, I wanted to lean up, and get stronger, but because of a bunch of shit going on in my life, I wanted to just wreck havoc in the gym.
So, I wanted to work. Hard. A lot. I was determined to gain strength even though I was cutting, and I also BELIEVED I could gain strength during the process, which helped a lot.
It probably wasn’t optimal, but in the overal scheme of things, I’m bigger and stronger because of that summer.
I think you mentioned something about this before, Aragorn, where you just wanted to destroy yourself in the gym - serious motivation can make all the difference in the world.