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Originally Posted by BradG

I was gonna ask about the calves...I'm thinking, maybe on Friday's....

Originally Posted by Glenn Pendlay

There seem to be a lot of people who do the style of training we usually can "5 by 5" for a while, then wonder "whats next".

One general comment i would make, is that if this style of training has been successful for you, why change it? And by style of training, I’m not talking about one specific program, but the general style of doing whole body exercises, training the whole body or at least most of the body in each workout, and doing multiple sets not taken to failure.

I do, however, understand the mental side... you do the same thing over and over and you want something different. There are lots of ways you can change things without totally changing to a "new" program. Switching back and forth between widely differing types of training isn’t that good of an idea... small and systematic changes over time in what you are doing however IS a good idea.

for instance... say you’ve been squatting 3 times a week. How about changing one of the workouts to front squat, hell you could change 2 of the workouts to front squat. I hate leg presses, but if you really wanted to, you could squat on monday, front squat on wednesday, and leg press on friday!!! If you’ve been doing only rows for back, change one or two of the workouts to chinups... substitute stiff legged deadlifts for deadlifts, change mondays workout to 3 sets of 8 for a month, change fridays squat or bench workout to 5 singles, etc, etc, etc.

I’ve even seen people who after a while on a 3 day a week program, switched to a 4 day split, doing squats and pressing exercises on monday and thursday, back and pulling exercises on wed and saturday. I don’t see this as retreating from the principles of the 5 by 5 at all. You are STILL working your whole body, or very nearly so, every training day. Squats work the back, they work everything... and deadlifts or stiff legged deadlifts work the legs, not as much as squats, but they still work them. This is in fact the favored program of mike stone, probably the best ex phys guy on the planet and former head of sports science at the olympic training center.

The main thing is to go about it in a systematic way.

One of my lifters, josh wells, who made the junior world team in 2004 in weightlifting, and can jerk close to 400lbs weighing around 180lbs as a teenager, did this program about a year ago in his "off season" to try to gain some general strength.

monday, squats (5 sets of 3), push presses (3 sets of 5) then glute ham raises or reverse hypers

wednesday, snatch pulls (5 sets of 2), powercleans (5 sets of 2), chinups (5 sets of 10 with extra weight, hanging from a 2" bar)

thursday, front squats (6 sets of 2), push jerks (5 sets of 2), military press (3 sets of 5), then glute ham raises or reverse hypers.

saturday, powersnatches (5 sets of 2), clean pulls (5 sets of 5), barbell rows, (5 sets of 5)

obviously this is geared toward olympic weightlifting, and not really what most of you would be doing. I’m not sure many here have that much interest in doing so many snatch and clean pulls. And he’s using lower reps, because of course for him strength is a bigger deal than size, but even his reps changed over time, sometimes were higher, sometimes lower. This is just as representative of the 5 by 5 training style as the simpler 3 day programs... because we did it systematically, sets across instead of failure, gradually moving the weights up, gradually adding then subtracting volume of training to force the body to adapt


the important thing is to think thru the changes, don’t make too many at one time, but make them slowly and steadily.

The real value of the "5 by 5" style of training isn’t that it can or will add a certain amount of muscle or strength in an 8 week cycle. The real value is that it is a framework that when used right can work for years, slowly changing and morphing along the way to fit itself to your particular goals, and making for steady progress for 3, 4, or more years. It is more than anything, a mindset. a mindset of writing your workouts down, being systematic, knowing what you are going to do before you go to the gym, having a plan, and knowing that 5lbs a month is 60lbs a year and 180lbs in 3 years.

and more than that it is a mindset of THINKING, thinking about training, and rejecting the latest and greatest thing that forces many, even most, to run from one program to the next, changing things totally every time they get bored or have a bad workout. By recording everything, thinking a lot, planning, making small changes instead of wholesale ones, going back and looking at your workout log and looking at the last month, 6 months, year, etc, and planning the next month... within a year or two you know more about your body and what to do than me or anyone else could ever tell you.

Now... last comment. I have, in a big drawer, a record of every single workout i have ever done, from the time I was 15 back in 1975 to my last month of competitive training in 2003. Every single one. I also have descriptions and comments, tables in the back of the logs that showed weight gain and strength gain on a yearly basis, monthly, etc. comments on what happened to weight/strength when I changed exercises, changed reps, etc. there is very little I don’t know about how my body responded, what worked and what didn’t, etc. you all should do the same thing. Approach training like a scientist working an experiment.

Originally Posted by Glenn Pendlay

If your doing 5 sets on monday, lighter squats on wed, and one set on friday, or something like that, you would be trying to do your one set on friday with more weight than you used on monday.

its important that you approach it in a systematic way, start with weights that are easy to handle. just for example, if you are capable of doing say, 300lbs for a set of 5, you might start with 225lbs for 5 sets of 5 on monday, 200lbs for 3 sets of 5 on wednesday, and then 275 for one set of 5 on friday. you could then try to increase the monday and friday weights by 10lbs 3 weeks, and the wednesday weights by 5 lbs. that would give you a PR of 305 for 5 on week 4, and depending on the person, you might be able to get 310 or 315 for 5 on week 5. if friday of week 4 feels like you just might be able to get a PR the next week, you might try dropping the monday workout back to 225 monday of week 5, and letting yourself recover a little more preparing for week 5 friday.

there are lots of options for the next cycle... for instance, you could choose to push the monday workout hard and not push your single set of 5 quite so hard. a good goal here would be to do 5 sets of 5 on monday with your previous best single set of 5. you would then start your monday workout in week one with a weight that is say 40lbs below your best single set of 5... keep the wednesday workout similar to the first cycle, and on friday simply add 5 or 10lbs to mondays weight, roughly the same weight you will try for 5 sets the next monday. given steady 10lb increases, if you started with 270lbs on monday, you should have a good chance of doing 310 for 5 sets of 5 on monday of week 5.

options for the next cycle would be to change the number of reps... say to the same number of sets but 3 reps... or you could run another 4-5 week cycle similar to the first with lower numbers for the monday workout, say this time starting with 235lbs, but trying for 320-330lbs for a single set of 5 on week 4 or 5, or you could start with lower weight and make bigger jumps if you feel your getting tired around week 3 or 4 on the previous cycles. starting lower and making bigger jumps takes some of the fatigue factor away.

OR... two things we have done that work really well, have been to do a cycle with monday and wednesday the same, but take fridays workout and turn it into either 5 singles, or into a westside style DE day. If the friday workout is 5 singles, then you again have the choice of doing the 5 singles with a weight that is say 20lbs above mondays weight and trying to make a PR 5 sets of 5 mark at the end, or of keeping the 5 sets of 5 at a slightly lower weight than maximal, and pushing the singles up to a PR weight at the end. If you choose the second option, you can also try decreasing the number of singles each week by one, so that at week 5 you are going for a true max single. If you are doing this, increasing mondays workout by 10-15lbs for the first 3 weeks, then decreasing it by 10-15lbs a week for the last 2 weeks is a good option.

If you use the westside DE day as fridays workout, you again have several options. you can use 6 weeks as your cycle length, and do 2 of the 3 week waves that louie likes on friday, incorporating a higher weight single into each workout at the end of fridays DE work, and trying for a new max single on friday, OR you can keep the DE work fairly light, and push mondays training hard and try for a new max 5 sets of 5, or 5 sets of 3, or whatever scheme you are doing on monday.


whatever you choose eventually, you should do it the way i initially described it for the first cycle, and probably should follow with my second recomendation for the second cycle. if you have never done this style of training before, keeping the weight relatively low on monday and concentrating on a higher single set of 5 on week 4 or 5 will help you get used to it without the strain of all out training with 5 sets of 5 when you are not really ready for it. after a 4 or 5 week introduction, you will be ready to really push the harder monday workout, and should be able to really make gains by doing so. going straight back to the first cycle for your third time thru is usually the best option from what i have found. after really pushing the monday 5 sets for a month, you should be ready to make a much bigger single set of 5, and backing off of mondays weights a little and pushing the single set on friday will help you realize your new potential for a big single set. from here its anyones guess, but you should by this time be familiar enough with how your body is responding, how tired you are getting, etc, to know what to go to for your next cycle.

Originally Posted by Madcow2

"As for recovery - do you really think muscles recover in a few days? Maybe a week right? Nope, look up complete tissue remodelming, it can take well over a month from a single bout of weight training if I remember correctly but regardless it is far longer than any split in use. Bottom line you are almost always training in some type of recovery deficit.

Where did the 1x per week come from? It came about because BBers started talking about overtraining back in the late 1980's (at the time just previous to this the common workout in the muscle mags was 3 on 1 off and I remember a fair amount of AM/PM days too). A few guys began to notice that if they took time off they came back stronger. They then thought that this was because their workouts weren't optimally spaced and timed. This is the essense of single factor theory or Supercompensation where you go in the gym and work ultra hard pushing your muscles to the point of full exertion (welcome to the training to failure school). Then you retreat quietly and heal up slightly stronger. Just after you've gotten your growth response but before you begin to detrain and lose it you hit that muscle again and do the same thing. The idea is that you can link up a series of these and grow in a linear pattern.

Pretty fucking cool eh? Too bad it's wrong. First, there's no scientific backing. Arthur Jones is partially responsible for this shit and he's long since recanted his short, intense, and infrequent methodology a la Mentzer's Heavy Duty . I will say that this program does work for beginners but for an experienced lifter it is drastically suboptimal. Oh yeah - if you take a shitty stimulus and magnify the response with enough drugs you can still make progress but for a given individual a supperior stimulus would allow for more gains at an individual's given dosage or equal gains for that person at a lower dosage level.

So where does that leave us? Well luckily people figured this stuff out a couple decades ago. There's a fatigue factor that gets built into this stuff and managing this fatique is important (both CNS and at the muscular level). You see, you can make gains and train without being fully recovered, it's actually better (think back to the people taking some time off and noticing they came back stronger - we'll revisit this in a moment). Rather than thinking about a single workout as a stimulus, consider a block of training - let's say 2-4 weeks. The fatigue is actually a recovery deficit that accrues during stimulative training. Unfortunately, a deficit means that it can't continue forever because you are running your body into the ground - but wait! This is actually fortunate.

You see, the idea that an experienced lifter can go into the gym and train once and then have his body respond with increased musculature on a consistent basis is rediculous. The body is first and foremost a survival machine. Muscle is calorically expensive and it's the last thing the body wants to add (people who had this genetic makeup died in famines very quickly and aren't around to reproduce). So a single session for an experienced lifter won't convince the body to pack on more muscle, and definitely not a short and infrequent stimulus because the body isn't convinced there is need. Bring in the fatigue accrual - in a training block of coninuously increasing fatigue the body gets a different message. The message is that there is a frequent, sustained, and increasing need for adaptation and that the body is falling behind and will soon break down under the strain. This is the stimulus we are looking for.

So now you train hard for 4 weeks and build up this deficit where you are right on the verge of overtraining (this point is called overreaching and the 4 weeks are called loading). The body knows it's screwed. What do you do? Pull the rug out and allow it to recover (deload). Generally you slash volume and frequency for a period to allow the body to recover and add some muscle in adaptation to the training stress. After a period of deloading you come back and load again - bigger and stronger (wait - remember about the BBers who took some time off and came back stronger - amazing fit is it not?).

This whole idea is called dual factor theory. Now most BBers haven't heard of it and couldn't explain it. It's largely greek to most of the people reading this. I mean, there are guys on here that know just about everything about drugs and diet but this is brand new to them. Well, it isn't brand new. It's not even remotely new or a little bit obscure. This is how 99.9% of the world's elite athletes are trained. We are talking near universal acceptance by every researcher and strength coach in the US, China, Europe, the Eastern Block, the former Soviet nations - everywhere. It's absolutely and totally prolific. On top of that there is a massive mound of scientific evidence to support it.

So how do you incorporate something like this? Logical question because in all my time at EF <I was here for a while as Madcow1 in 2000-2002ish too> I see people posting their programs and splits but there are critical factors missing. I can take the best split and exercise selection and bust my ass in the gym yet the stimulus is subpar because I'm not providing for loading/deloading. Generally this is handled by managing volume. A high volume period and then a low volume period.

There is a good program here that breaks many of the common rules in this thread (number of sets, frequency of training, all kinds of stuff). It has you squat 3x per week in addition to DLing once, rowing and benching twice. That won't work you say, no one can squat 3x per week. Well it's actually not a problem and people have been running this program for 30 years and making huge gains. Several board members here are running it now or have just finished with big steroid like results but they were natural lifters (off the top of my head one is up 17lbs in week 7, another 16lbs in week 6, one younger guy was up 12 in week 6-7 but got that damn flu and has been out of commission). I didn't make this program so I can't take credit but it was orignally designed by Bill Starr, one of the greatest strength coaches ever, and later adapted by a Johnsmith182 from Meso who is actually one of the US' finest strength coaches - incidentally this job entails adding LBM to athletes in time constrained environments and this program is as good as any designed at doing it and far far better than just about anything most guys are using around here to add muscle. It's also avoided like the plague by weightclass constrained athletes who are near the top of their class as it simply causes too much weight gain and the diet restriction to prevent it is very severe. I ended up running it a few years ago and had to slash my calories twice in order to keep my gains down to the 8-10lbs range over 8 weeks (and I was not stuffing myself before). The cream of the program is that it is fantastic at adding LBM to an athlete but is also a very simple and easy to understand implementation of dual factor theory.

So anyway - that's the jist on training. None of this is revolutionary. It is in fact very standard stuff. The single factor camp is nearly empty devoid of anyone except BBers and I can certainly respect an educated choice to disagree in the face of all this but the fact that almost no one understands or has heard of what is the basic and dominant theory of training around the world doesn't exactly give me confidence that this is the situation. In fact the situation is that BBing has fallen so far behind on training knowledge that something really needs to be done."