Squat Every Day, page 18
Also, don’t be shy about using any of these approaches with squats as well. Heavy partials can have a place in squat training, and you could throw in quarter squats or dead-stop squats (set the bar on pins and start the lift from the bottom) as a replacement for back-offs on your heaviest days. As with pulling, you need to get a decent range of motion or else you’re just showing off.
The same goes for the cycling methods mentioned above. These work just fine with squats as an alternative to daily maxing.
To summarize the two approaches: Squat a lot and limit deadlifts to fast pulls or one hard deadlift day. Or pull a lot, limit squatting, and cycle the daily training intensity and the range of motion (by pulling out of the rack or off blocks).
The Lite Program
All the options so far assume you’re lifting at least five days a week, and potentially up to 14 if you’re doing two-a-days. I realize that’s a big time commitment, and not everyone wants to spend that kind of time lifting weights.
I’d like to remind you that the principles behind heavy autoregulated lifting don’t commit you to any set number of workouts each week. If you want to make use of these ideas, then you can do it with four or even three days.
Since you’re lifting fewer days, you’ll probably be able to take a little more volume. You might want to take a harder look at Anthony Ditillo’s single-reps, or if you’re adventurous, Jamie Lewis’s suggestion for as many as 15-30 sets of threes, twos, or singles. A happy medium might be warming up and then making 3-5 single attempts to a daily max, and then throwing in a back-off set. A heavy set of 3-6 and(or) 8-10 would be good medicine.
Since I have issues with benching, both being weak and having some limiting injuries in my shoulders, I’d probably limit that to a top triple or five for the day. Working with near-max singles doesn’t have a great track record with me, but benching does like slightly higher reps and more sets. You might want to consider that an option if you’ve got any lifts that react similarly. Throw in a couple of back-offs if you’d like and call it a day.
Simmer to Boil
In the time since I started writing, some things have changed for me. Call it ‘life’ getting in the way or just boredom, but I’ve lost my interest in training for big numbers. Don’t worry, I’m not pulling a bait and switch. I stand by everything I’ve written here, and if I ever do get the urge to powerlift, this outlines the exact strategy I’ll use ― and what I’d recommend for anyone I coach.
But speaking for myself, it’s been a shift to the more mundane goals of “don’t be fat” and “keep in reasonable shape”. I’m much more interested in hanging on to a reasonable amount of muscle at a low-ish body fat, and being able to enjoy beer and occasional junk food, than I am with any performance goals.
The end result is that I don’t lift that much anymore (in any sense). Two or three days a week is about all I care to be in the gym. But that’s not to say these are the only days I exercise.
As I say, I practice what I preach, and based on the lessons I learned here, I still train often ― just about every day, in fact. Just not with a barbell.
I started playing with kettlebells after my wife picked up a small set for us. I figured that if I wasn’t going to be Serious Training, I could at least stave off the inevitable disuse atrophy.
My kettlebell workouts are roughly what I outlined as “easy” training. They aren’t heavy enough to constitute any real resistance, but by playing around with the movements and the rep-counts and rest-intervals and so forth, I can get reasonable workouts in. Squatting, pressing, carries, cleans, snatches, pushups, pullups ― there’s a whole lot you can do between kettlebells and bodyweight.
In another of those ‘huh, that’s cool’ surprises (much like what happened when I discovered daily squatting), I came to find out that these short daily sessions ― by no means do I invest longer than maybe 10-20 minutes at a go ― were doing a great job of hanging on to strength in pressing and pulling movements.
These aren’t ‘stressful’ workouts either, so there’s no real hit to recovery. If anything, they’re more like a tonic ― making stiff joints and tight muscles feel better than they did.
To me, this is just more evidence that ‘easy’ training is not to be written off. A simmering pot of water can quickly roll into a boil.
As I thought about it, I realized that there are plenty of examples of this, and it really comes back to the same Longtails pattern. If you look at Olympic lifters, they get in far more “squatting” than might be evident. Every recovery on a snatch and a clean is a squat (albeit only the upwards concentric phase).
With that thought, suddenly it becomes clear that the bulk of an Olympic lifter’s training is a whole lot of squatting with weights that might be a moderate percentage of their maximum front and back squats.
In other words, lots of low-effort practice punctuated by occasional and brief rounds of grinding.
And as my home KB workouts have been showing me, the same principle applies even without a barbell. Innocent-looking moves like the KB clean & press, the swing, and even the goblet squat have a powerful effect when used as a regular ‘groove-greasing’ tool.
Of course, I haven’t dropped ‘real’ weight training either. Two or three times a week I still try to lift something reasonably heavy, following the auto-regulating methods I’ve outlined here. I have no set schedule; I just try to hit a mixture of front and back squats, bench press, overhead work, chin- and pull-ups, deadlifts, and whatever beach work for the arms and shoulders.
I’ve found myself wondering why I’m still lifting with daily maxes when I have no ‘strength’ goals as such. Since you might find it relevant, I’ll share my answer.
Even without a concrete goal of competing in powerlifting or strongman or anything else, I still believe that heavy resistance training is indispensable the purposes of ‘being in shape’ and ‘looking better’.
The point here is two-fold. One, you can adopt a similar auto-regulated ‘chaos-friendly’ mindset no matter how you actually train. The methods here are about how you think of stress and recovery ― not that they don’t exist, but that what we’re told about them is largely wrong (or at best taken out of context). If you want to lift every day in the gym to push up your squat, have at it. If you just want to stay in shape and ‘not be fat’, cool. You’ve got options, too ― train at home with whatever tools you have, even if that’s just body weight. The point is that activity stimulates, and fitness demands stimulation.
Second is what a focus on volatility implies for ‘common wisdom’. You’ll notice that, even to ‘just stay in shape’, I still lift. Of course, strength as such is less the issue than keeping a body mobile and under weight. Moving heavy resistance is probably the best way of keeping joints and muscles and nerves operating under high demands. And, in so far as I want to keep my body under those fitness-inducing demands, barbells and dumbbells make for a nice blend of overload and instability. Standing up and moving a heavy weight is the best way to get that stimulus, so I stick with presses, pulls, and squats as the centerpiece of my weight training.
Note that my volatility is not to be confused with ‘randomness’ or throwing darts at a list of exercises on the wall. I stick to a battery of exercises and train those exercises in more or less the same way. Sure, I may decide on a whim that I want to front squat today, and that I want to hit a max triple instead of 3-5 heavy singles. I may decide the next time I train that I want to see where my deadlift is, so I’ll work up to a decent gym-max.
But that’s not even close to random. It’s just picking what version of a lift I’m going to hit, and how I’m going to hit it. What looks random actually has a logic to it simply because there are only so many options.
To pre-empt a ‘but that isn’t necessary!’ rebuttal from those well-meaning folks who believe that heavy lifting is dangerous and that doing so to ‘stay in shape’ is risky: I don’t buy into all these concerns about “improper form” or joint damage or impending injury for all the reasons of complexity and volatility that I’ve previously outlined. Your body is not an idiot, and it is in fact smarter than many movement analysts who can only think in static slices of right-now. Your body operates over time as well as space, and what is low-grade harm right now is the future adaptation to that harm.
As we’ve repeatedly seen, a lot of little injuries and harms are beneficial, since they add up over time to a more resistant body. And as we’ll see in the next chapter, I believe that it is these excessive attempts to minimize transient ‘damage’, by locking a body into rigid patterns (or worse, encouraging them to use machines instead of real weights) and naively connecting injury risk with amounts of training, that ultimately leads to the avoidable catastrophes we call injuries.
Clearing out forest underbrush to ‘manage’ fire risk by preventing small burns is a direct cause of raging firestorms. I train with acutely “risky” methods precisely for that long-term trade-off.
9
Reality Checks
“‘Tis not enough to help the feeble up, but to support them after.”
―William Shakespeare
Suntanning: How to Ease In
If you’ve got milky-white skin and go for a vacation at the beach, it wouldn’t be a great idea to spend eight hours out in the sun your first day there. The smart way to do it is more gradual, immersing yourself for a few minutes each day and letting your skin adjust with small doses of sun. Do that long enough and you’ll eventually get that equatorial bronze everyone seems to love.
Let’s have a brief intermission for a reality check: training heavy every day is not for the timid. Squatting to a max every day hurts until you get used to it, and even when it stops hurting, it still hurts. It’s not that it gets easier as much as that you teach yourself not to care so much.
There’s just no getting around that, so if you’re of the type that doesn’t handle discomfort well, remember that I did warn you. You have to be patient, and you have to be consistent. Most of all, you don’t want to treat your workouts like the tourist who takes his top off and gets burnt to a crisp on the first day.
When you first begin, you’ll face two hurdles, and both of them are more mental than physical.
You’re nervous when you train. You’ve been told repeatedly, but you haven’t trained yourself for calm arousal yet, so nerves are normal. You’re going to get worked up automatically at the sight (or thought) of a heavy weight. Your nerves trigger the stress-response before you lift and make it worse after you lift. As long as this is happening, your perception of recovery time will take a hit. You’ll learn to relax with time and practice, but it’s probably out of your hands at the beginning.
Your muscles and connective tissues aren’t prepared for regular exposures to intense loading. When you squat every day, it will hurt no matter what weights you lift. Frequency has it’s own break-in curve. After a week or two, your legs (or whatever else) get used to it and it becomes part of the daily routine. But that can’t happen if, instead of just squatting, you decide to alternate box jumps, sprints, leg extensions and leg curls, and whatever else you think of. You never give the legs time to adapt to any single input.
You’re always the most sensitive to the least familiar. Anything new ― a new weight, a new exercise, more volume than usual, different rep range ― triggers all the problems you want to avoid. Consistency, sticking to a handful of exercises and favorite rep-ranges, helps cut way back on the novelty symptoms, so you want to break in slowly. Make only gradual increases in frequency and volume, and give yourself time to stabilize, as the Russians say ― let the weight and workloads mature and ripen ― and only then add a little more.
There are two approaches to take when jumping in to higher frequency. The slow and gradual approach has you add sessions over months, and only when your volume gets high enough do you let it spill over into an extra workout. And then there’s the head-first approach, in which you jump right in to five, six, or seven days a week. This has the advantage of quickly adapting you to the frequency, at the cost of extra soreness and probably a few weeks of diminished strength.
If you’re after longevity and planning out over a career, the slow and steady approach is worth keeping in mind.
I favor the second approach if you want to give daily squatting a try for shorter training cycles. Frequent loading needs its own adjustment, and there’s no real way to get your toes wet without going all in.
The first week or two, it won’t matter if you’re using the unloaded bar or even doing a set of pushups or bodyweight squats. Once you adjust, all is well again. You’ll find that it’s easier and easier to put weight on the bar, and few weeks in you’ll barely notice anymore.
A Little R & R
No matter how well you manage your training and keep your stress in check, you might find that you hit a wall after 4-6 months of training. It won’t be physical. You might notice that you feel more soreness than usual, maybe the aches and pains acting up a little more, maybe some nagging tendinitis. Otherwise you feel good, without any of the expected “overtraining” feelings, but the spark’s gone. You’re just sick of training.
When that happens, I think that you’re as close as you’ll get to genuine overtraining by way of lifting weights. You lose the desire to go to the gym, you have no motivation to train. You’ve gone stale when, just a few days before, you were ready to go squat. When this happens after several months of high workloads, you can almost bet that you’re dabbling with emotional exhaustion. You’re literally sick of training.
The problem is all the more insidious because you won’t see it coming. You’ve learned to ignore the sickness symptoms, but the accumulation of allostatic wear-and-tear is inevitable with any productive training. Over a span of 2-3 months it’s not a problem, but you eventually reach a tipping point where the cumulative stress boils over.
Don’t panic, though. You can be saved.
If you notice this happening, the first thing to do is handle the symptoms. Mild doses of anti-inflammatories help both with physical pain but also in controlling cytokine production, which can be useful in blunting the feedback to the brain which triggers the central symptoms.
The key thing, though, is getting the skillet off the fire: remove the cause and the symptoms settle down on their own.
Plain old rest is one way to do this. Stay home, eat good food, and relax instead of worrying about your squat. Don’t be shy, either. Take two, even three weeks, and get your head out of the gym. That’s one option, though I don’t like it very much.
John Broz says to keep going through these dark times. “You can always squat the bar,” says Broz. Keep moving, rather than retreating to the couch, even if you’re only doing a whole lot of reps with the bar. You’re keeping muscles and joints mobile, and more importantly, you’re keeping in the habit.
I think the not-stopping part is key. Stopping means you lose your momentum, and it’s hard to get back when you’re feeling mentally burned out. Do something, even if it’s just body-weight squats or kettlebell swings. Active rest is better than atrophying on the couch.
Remember the Longtails strategy. Ups need downs, and light means light. Light doesn’t mean that you show up and think, gee, I feel pretty good so maybe I’ll work up to 95%, and oh what the hell, I’m already here so might as well take that shot at a new PR.
Light means light. Light means that the weights feel way too easy and you leave before you’re anywhere near tired. It means feeling like you wasted a workout. You feel like you didn’t go anything? Good. That’s the point.
What can you do for light days?
If you’re going by autoregulation, keep everything at an RPE of 7 or 8. With a planned-out training max, cap yourself at 60% for a set of 3-5 and call it a day. Everything should feel fresh and snappy, so if you have a day where 50% of your usual training max feels slow, you’re done. No arguing. Go home.
If you’ve been in the gym 5-6 days (or more) every week, scale that back to two or three. Keep mobile at home with body-weight exercises, stretching, and mobility drills.
I’m less interested in treating “active rest” as damage-control. That implies that we’ve done something “bad”, that we’ve “overtrained”, rather than simply dealing with a natural consequence of a hard-training life. A Longtails strategy means that ups will require inevitable downs, and this is for our benefit.
I’d rather treat this as a long-term wave: we spend a few months going all-in. Now it’s time to throttle back and train lighter for awhile. Just as your daily and weekly workouts will self-organize into a program, as if by magic, your yearly schedule will naturally break itself into phases.
This all assumes you have a flexible schedule, of course. If you’re an athlete with specific competitive seasons or events, you’ll need to plan accordingly, but otherwise, why not let things develop as they will?
You’re a step ahead if you keep records, logging your weights and your RPE scores and any abnormal good or bad feelings that might be relevant. Did you feel “on fire”? Were you unusually down? Get in a habit of record those details for a few months and you’ll notice trends.
My suggestion is to not rely solely on feelings, as they will lie to you, but on feelings combined with performance. Feeling bad by itself can mean anything. Feeling bad and then having a bad workout means something.
For me a bad workout isn’t when I feel okay but grind at 90%. Neither is a day when I feel awful but still hit 95% pretty easily. Grinding on a single at 80% and feeling awful at the same time? That’s a bad day.
