Squat Every Day, page 16
There’s a wisdom to that, and in fact I believe it is good wisdom, but it also comes equipped with a major blind-spot. By focusing on raw analytical efficiency, you ignore the total impact of the workouts out in the “long tail”.
For us, that means workouts that are deliberately sub-par, what have variously been called GPP, feeder workouts, ‘punching the clock’, or just ‘light workouts’. These workouts all contribute to fitness-building, and in a way that the Apollonian’s Bell curve cannot allow.
The contrast between hard and easy adds up to more than is obvious with a single-minded focus on efficiency.
For the purposes of getting stronger, I want to point out the parallels with the daily autoregulation strategy I’ve outlined. Consider that in any given week, most of your workouts will be mediocre. You’ll hit the daily minimum and call it a day. Some smaller percentage will be great, where you hit weights around PR territory, and some will be bad, where nothing clicks at all.
The entire point I’ve tried to communicate is that, by autoregulating, the “daily max squats” will, more or less, take on this power-law structure. Most of your time will be spent doing lighter, easier work in the eustress zone with occasional breaks into high-payoff, PR-delivering workouts.
Your body rarely ever needs complete rest, and it has become clear to me that we need to be thinking less about inactivity and more about varied activity. We need to frame training in terms of big payoffs and long tails, with lots of mild training broken up by small drips of extreme effort.
Consider Dave, who trains with the same program all the time. Dave’s conservative, always doing the same reps for the same number of sets. Dave tries to get stronger doing what he read on the internet, by steadily adding weight in progressive increments. But he always stalls out around the same weight until he loses interest and goes back to playing video games (or he gets hurt, which is a real issue I will discuss later; either way he’s back on the couch).
Then you’ve got Joe. Joe doesn’t really have a program, or anything you’d consider a consistent schedule. Joe just shows up, works his ass off for a couple of weeks, and then spends the next week or two on the couch with Dave. Joe has to spend a week working all the kinks and soreness out when he gets back to training, but it seems like he has no trouble getting stronger despite his erratic workouts.
Don’t be like Joe. The whole story is ridiculous on several levels ― although not as much as you might think ― but that’s okay because Joe is just here to illustrate a point: being extreme can pay off.
Your body seems to react much like the ‘punctuated equilibrium’ version of evolution. Evolution is often explained as a process of gradual, incremental changes that add up over time. Punctuated equilibrium offers a different account in which substantial changes happen almost abruptly, over spans of thousands of years rather than the numbingly slow pace of geological time.
You don’t always see the best improvements by aiming for small increments and mediocre progress, hanging out around the middle of the Bell curve. Think big. Think aggressive. Think extreme. Contrast between ups and downs is a better fit to living bodies than a fixed schedule of progressive overload. Lots of small doses and occasional extremes can create better long-term results than a gradual, incremental process.
Since we can see the pattern, but can’t predict the highs and lows, we autoregulate. You cannot predict your condition, but you can prepare yourself for the uncertainties.
There’s another advantage to thinking this way, and I actually consider this to be more important than the physical issues. When you train on a typical split routine, you invest a lot ― mentally speaking ― in each workout. You walk in the door with an expectation in mind, and you’ll judge a “good” or “bad” day according to how close you got to the mark. This is even worse when you’re running a planned-out training cycle with numbers you’ve got to hit at risk of upsetting the whole plan.
That’s all great when things go to plan ― but what happens when they don’t? If you get sick or have a tweak or twinge that makes it hard to keep up the pace one week, you’ve just lost a whole week of training. Planned-out programs work great in principle, but they don’t hold up well in the face of the unexpected. This is why the best training cycles are relatively short, varied, and come Break In Case of Emergency back-up features.
Even simple “linear progress” is not immune to this. Building a lift up week by week by adding five or ten pounds at a time is not a bad way to do things. A lot people push this strategy long past its usefulness, however, adding weight until the whole workout is an exercise in willpower and you’re resting 20 minutes between sets just to make the quota.
Don’t do that. That’s a great way to make friends with staleness and mediocrity. In that position, you’re better off backing off and starting a new cycle with lighter weights to build back up. Even so, a shocking number of people have it in their heads that running head-first into the wall of a maxed-out lift is the way to get stronger. All that does is wear you down and destroy your motivation.
By thinking in terms of “lots of training” and contrasts between ups and downs, none of that even matters. When you’re squatting 5-6 days a week, a bad workout is nothing. So you’ve had a bad day? You’re coming back tomorrow.
You’ve totally removed your mental investment in any single session. On a 12-week cycle, a bad workout can be ruinous. When you’re auto-regulating on a regular basis, mistakes are painless. No single workout is that important; you can absorb a screw-up and still benefit from it.
This approach to performance improvement, ditching the Apollonian in favor of the reckless and unpredictable Dionysian – exploiting the contrast between highs and lows – is what I’ve taken to calling the Longtails Strategy.
When to Grind, When to Chill
As we know by now, your mental and emotional condition is a crucial part of stress, and it’s also key to workout performance. When I talk about “light” training and “heavy” training, your emotional state is inseparable from that. “Heavy” training is that dig-in, drop some adrenaline, strain on nerve-power type of session where you get blasted out of your skull to train ― taking stimulants, listening to loud music, brooding for three hours before lifting.
Easy days are meant to be chill. You want to be relaxed mentally as well as physically. “Physically relaxed” is probably the wrong way to say this, as exercise is physically strenuous by definition, but the idea is more that you aren’t pushing to any limits. If you’re keeping the mental energy dialed back, this won’t be an issue. On these days, chilling out is as much a part of the workout as getting hyped up is for the hard days.
We can talk about intensity and volume and all that, and those things are important, but it’s the psychological and emotional that I am most concerned with. I want to emphasize again that it isn’t what you see ― the workouts ― that is so important to recovery, but what happens outside the gym, throughout the rest of your life. These factors are often invisible, sinking into the background noise of life as we take them for granted. But all that chronic stress adds up, and it is far more damaging both to your performance and your health than a one-hour workout every day.
Learning to relax in the rest of your life is as critical to this process as what you do during training.
This is emphasis on both the visible and the hidden aspects of recovery is the centerpiece of our strategy, no matter what your actual workout ends up looking like. My program design strategy will focus on when and where to drop adrenaline and go all-in, and when to pull back and stay easy.
Drawing on the Longtails Strategy, we’ll be putting this asymmetry between brief, stressful effort and cool relaxation to work. Our mindset needs to be thus: Light is light. Heavy is heavy. The middle ground is best avoided. Light doesn’t mean literally lifting 10 lb dumbbells, and likewise heavy doesn’t mean a 300kg squat. These terms are vague at best, so let me clarify that I’m talking about a somewhat less vague idea which I’ll call training effectiveness.
Training effectiveness is all the effortful things about the workout. Heavy weights count. High reps taken to the limit, even as high as 20-30 or more, count. Even high volume, short rest types of training can qualify. Anything involving mental effort, grinding, and straining ― and lots of it ― would be a “heavy” workout by this standard.
A light workout would fall on the other side of the continuum: medium to light weights, lower volume, and most importantly, only lightly tapping into the mental-neurological stuff. You’d be tempted to call that “easy” training, but that’s not the route I want to go. “Easy” gives the impression that these workouts are useless or somehow not manly enough to be productive, but I don’t believe that to be the case. The effort dimension and the actual fitness-promoting effects on the body are two different things. You’re still moving in a light workout; nerves are firing and muscles are contracting.
Training effectiveness, as I mean it here, can be summarized as the net effect on your body, which is maximized by exhausting yourself with straining, grinding effort. A light workout would score very low, whereas a heavy workout would be high. In that sense, we’re trying to tie it back to our emotional state. You need to be able to train without emotional effort most of time, and then to intentionally drop adrenaline on days you’re good for it. Most of you will naturally want to do the latter, all the time, when in reality we need to learn to do what Dan John calls “punching the clock” for the bulk of our workouts.
You might be a neurological hard-ass who can get away with mentally-exhausting training (or maybe get away with it longer than most), but I don’t think this applies to Joe Average. Unless he has reason to believe otherwise, Joe Average needs to relax.
This does not mean that you should never ever get excited when you train. Getting fired up from time to time is not just a good idea, it’s key to getting stronger. The whole idea here is to practice what needs practicing ― if demolishing a PR set is part of what moves you, then you need to practice it, adrenaline and all, and then cool back down.
We just need to let that happen with some kind of variety, instead of every single time you lift a weight. Spend most of your time cool and then let all the energy out when you’re ready. We’re after volatility. We want a sharp contrast between the highs ― the daily-max sets and the heavy days alike ― and the lows, which will make up most of our training.
We want that asymmetry at all scales. Only a small number of sets should be psyched-up attempts. Your mind before and after those sets should be calm and relaxed. Tomorrow’s workout should be a break from today, and next month should be different from this month. The power-law pattern will turn up wherever you look: maybe 10% to 20% of your training week, your training cycle, and your training year will be “hard”, on these terms, with the remainder left for “easy” training in the long tail.
The Russians knew this, as evidenced by what Yuri Verkhoshansky called concentrated loading. In a block of concentrated loading, they’d take a group of athletes and hammer them with insane workloads for a few weeks. Just when their bodies couldn’t stand it anymore, the athletes physically stressed and emotionally drained, the training effect would throttle back to nothing. Suddenly all that adaptive energy had nowhere to go; after a week or so to let the fatigue settle down, these athletes would see amazing jumps in strength and power.
This is the idea behind currently popular load-and-release methods like the Smolov squat cycle. You deliberately over-work yourself, switching on all the growth and adaptation processes, and then take the work away. Your body responds to the contrast of extremes better than it would by spreading out that same amount of work.
When you go hard, go hard. Push your weights, add more volume, and lift all the time. When you rest, don’t half-ass it by saying you’re “deloading” while hitting the gym for a couple of PR attempts. Rest. Stay away from the gym. In fact, donft think about the gym. Eat bad foods and drink beer.62
You might spend 2-3 weeks going all-in, and then take that much time cruising with easier training. If you’ve had an easy spell and feel like you’re settling into a rut, then you can ratchet up and really push yourself the next few weeks, or shift into cruise-control if you’ve been busting ass for the last 3-4 months. You might not plan out anything at all, training until you get tired of it and then taking a week or two for easy R&R. This, too, can be as organic or as structured as you need it to be.
Now let’s take a look at how this might look on a day in the gym.
8
Squatting Every Day
“If it’s worth doing, do it every day.”
―Dan John
Daily Squatting: What I Did
Since daily lifting is not something you can write out as a program, you might still find yourself confused. To see it in action, I’d like to walk through the strategy I used and my observations about what happened and what might be worth exploring.
Before we dive in, I want to remind you that these are only examples. This style of training depends heavily on the tacit knowledge arrived at by doing the thing, and tacit knowledge doesn’t summarize into neat lists and tidy sets of rules. There are going to be a lot of vague suggestions and loose ends that won’t fit into a fixed workout template, and that’s okay.
Lists of exercises and sets and reps should only be a skeleton in the first place. What actually happens in your workout depends on what actually happens in your workout, so what you’re reading here is best understood as a recounting of a story, not a workout strategy as such.
I understand that some of you aren’t comfortable with that, and that’s okay too. There are plenty of programs that will fill your need for certainty and control, and you can learn while you’re doing one of those.
As I’m not an Olympic weightlifter, and my goal was to see how this worked with “slow” lifts, I had to make some big changes from the systems used by Abadjiev and Broz, so I don’t even consider my template “Bulgarian”. Bulgarian-inspired, maybe, but in reality this is just a system of very-frequent strength workouts. I took as much from Anthony Ditillo, Doug Hepburn, and Jamie Lewis as the Olympic weightlifting routines that inspired me.
My workouts were set up to focus on two main exercises, which were a squat and a press, and then anywhere from one to three accessory moves depending on my motivation and energy level. It was almost always one upper-back exercise, either chin-ups or dumbbell rows, and then if I felt like it, a few sets for arms. Back squats and bench presses were the bread and butter, with front squats making an easy substitution if I wanted a lighter day. Also, if you have any concern about your overhead pressing strength ― and I did ― you might want to rotate it in as well. I alternated days between push press and bench.
The first time I ran through this, I alternated back and front squats, as well as bench and overhead presses, each workout, for a total of five days a week. I found this made for a nice heavy-light contrast between days. In a later cycle, I stuck to back squats but alternated between belted and non-belted lifts as a way of tinkering with the daily effort levels. Since I get a fairly consistent 10-15kg boost from a belt, that works well for me (more on exercise variety below).
I aimed for the daily max as I outlined in the last chapter, and it quickly turned into a focus more on the daily minimum ― after a week or two, I knew what I’d be able to hit as a “no-brainer” weight for the day, and I always made that my benchmark. If I could do more, I would. If I wasn’t feeling so hot, I’d hit it and call it done. When that weight wasn’t on the table, because I was achy or just couldn’t get the juice to switch on (you will come to know what this means), it meant I needed a couple of days off.
There isn’t much more to it than that, really. It’s just a matter of tinkering with the details.
Ramping It Up
I tried two ways of warming up to the top lift, each having pros and cons. The “small jumps” approach gets in a lot of volume, easily 10-12 sets before you get anywhere near daily-max territory. I found this was useful for building “strength fitness”, since the small change in weight combined with low reps means you don’t have to (or want to) rest very long.
If you’re doing this every day, though, it can get boring, and sometimes you don’t want to go through all the motions. Eventually I wound up at the “big jumps” warmup, which is exactly what it says. I’d take as few sets as possible to get near the day’s training weight, and then see where I stood. Most days, I’d stop there or add maybe five kilos if I was feeling good. An exceptional day would hit anywhere from 10-20kg over that baseline weight.
As I said previously, after you get into a habit of daily maxing, most days turn into “punch the clock” workouts where you can predict the weight you’ll hit any day of the week (allowing for injury, illness, and random bad days). That’s your target for the day, the weight you will attempt before making any decisions.
Taking small jumps can mean a lot of sets. At a point when my daily baseline was 160kg, I’d start with the bar (because why not? It still gets blood moving and joints mobilized) for a set or two, add a plate for a few sets of 5-8, two plates for a set or two 5-6, then start with 10kg increments for doubles or triples on up to three plates, then 5kg increments for singles on up to the top lift. If a weight feels heavy, you can repeat it for 2-3 sets on the way up. This quickly adds up to a lot of sets, but you donft have to rest all that long either (and if you are resting a long time, try to bring that down. Part of the rationale for all the sets is to “get in shape”, and if you’re too tired to hit an ego-lift as your daily max after all that, well, good.)
Notice also that you aren’t really hitting a lot of high reps. I found it was better to cap the reps at say 5-6 on the light weights, maybe as much as ten with the bar, and then limit it to triples on anything beyond the first plate or two (if you’re a lot stronger). You make up for that by doing multiple sets at each weight.
