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Great post Eric. Wish more people would take it to heart.

Thanks, Wids..

Honestly I don't thing people will take it to heart as long as they think that methods are the same thing as principles. I've done a lot of damage, imo, in the past, with this whole beginner, intermediate, advanced thing and I want to try to undo some of my part in that.

So like I've said several times lately the whole definition with beginner, intermediate, advanced that so many of us have passed around, based on Rippetoe and 5x5 stuff in general really only applies to that particular training model. I.E. it is how you use 5x5 if you want to make a religion out of 5x5 training...and come out with some nice injuries like shoulders and hips but to name a few...

But it's this volume mentality that I am railing against. Don't talk about STRENGTH training and then say I need to work more and more volume and frequency as I advance, lol, that is the antithesis of an advanced stregnth trainee. Basically what your are telling people is that as their neurological efficiency increases so that each and every rep takes a BIGGER toll on their abiltity to recover...they should be doing MORE VOLUME. If they can do that and survive it, ummm....they ain't so advanced as you think they are.

Take a guy who has spent a bunch time doing 8, 10, 12 or even 15 reps training in this "bodybuilding" vein for a while and put him on an "intermediate" 5x5 and he is going to get great results owed simply to the fact that he has increased intensity while allowing just enough volume to see results and also just enough volume to keep the intensity mangagable for his level of efficiency.

Hell, that guy will probably even like it better than the guy who does starting strength and then moves on to an intermediate 5x5 because it is much easier to get stronger by systematcially rasing intensity while lowering volume than it is to get stronger by raising volume while looking for ways to make it a bit heavier....the reason ramped sets on 5x5 is so popular.

But then you take that guy who has went from the typical bodybuilding routines and completed his intermediate 5x5's, if not a couple of them and you want to take him to the next level. Instead of taking that ability to work at higher intesities, to handle heavier loads with good form, and expanding on that...raising the intensity while managing everything from a recovery standpoint you do something quite ludicrous in my opinion.

You take the "5x5" reps and tell him to simply do even more of that. With a very unbalanced and overkilled appraoch. You've given him just enough strength and efficiency to make it "count" an then you have him use that strength with such a volume that you practically or certainly potentiall destroy his joints as well as simply risking all sorts of strain injuries. You also are giving him a thought process that is the bane of any one looking to increase strength as long as possible for a nice long lifting career.

You make him believe that "quantity" wins out over "quality". Everything begins to center more and more on "getting reps" by any means possible. Accruing fatigue on as a means to an end! The businees of accruing fatigue and lifting with good form are polar opposite when it comes to this.

Course I can anticipate the response so let me say it for you. "I've been doing this for years and it's always worked for me". Or "I've never had a problem". Well, to say nothing of problems, if you can do the same shtick for years with the same results you must be a magic man. Or, like most you have stopped and started, changed goals and "cut" for a while, etc. In other words you have NOT had the same goal for "years and years" that you have sought like a straight arrow. You haven't been increasing your absolute strength consistently without big breaks of detraining or emphais shift...and therefore the same "strength" things keep working because you never quite exhaust their usefullness.

On the other hand you got what 0311 termed "falling off the deep end" which is what so many do just fishing around for something different. It's all about goals and being consistent.

Anyway, the jist of what I'm saying here is that I don't think that the defintions of beginer, intermediate, and advanced STRENGTH trainees that we have been going by are an accurate depiction of reality...just a depiction of a training model. And not really a great one, I don't think.

No doubt someone will bring up strongman training, etc...again..don't confuse the methods someone uses based on their goals and fundamental principles. Strongman don't train primarily for absolute strength, dude, they need to rep out have beaucoup physical endurance. Their absolute strength training would have to match that goal and the intensities would be much higher so of course the volume would be much lower.

A lot of this is not so general as it sounds. I am basing much of it on my own experience and realizing just how many frigging reps I did for such small jumps in strength for so long when I could have made much bigger jumps without all the nagging little injuries an such I incrued by not mangaging volume as well I should have.

In summary, if your goal is strength then 5x5 is absolutely great to visit...but don't move there permanantly. Many may disagree..trust me I don't take it personally.

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If you act sanctimonious I will just list out your logical fallacies until you get pissed off and spew blasphemous remarks.

Eric,
i really appreciate your post. There's tons of good info, and you seem educated i've read alot of your post on these forums. I really didn't want to keep up on the 5x5 because of the beating i take from it. In no way am i complaining about the mental, or physical beating of a good workout, i know what i feel is just my body feeling really beat up, and not in a good way. I love hurting myself in the gym, as long as its healthy. It's just that i was enjoying the gains so much i didn't want to loose them/ or quit gaining. If you look at the begging of this post i did have another idea lined up, but i guess it wasn't very good. I just want to continue gaining size and strength, i don't think im going to be concerned with "cutting" or "getting shredded" for another couple years....im in this for the long haul.

So my question is what would you recommended i do after two 8 week sessions or so of the 5x5 that would be a good transition to help me keep the gains coming, especially in the big lift areas?
I'm always ready to learn as much as i can from people with more experience then me, i'd rather learn from someone else's mistakes than my own. (Nothing personal....lol)

My general advise would be to find ways to decrease volume and raise intensity on your priority lifts. Think quality always over quantity.

I advise that it is time to get away from the idea of trying to increase absolute strength on a lift at the same time as you are trying to gain a lot of size from that lift. Separate your circa maximal lifting from your lifting with more volume. Combining the two only works well for beginner intermediates, imo. So move toward more intensity based (as percentage of 1RM) for a main lift and use assistances and accessories, etc...to accumulate volume, assist the big lifts, train the core, hypertrophy, what have you...it's all a side effect of a proper distribution of stress, imo.

But the idea in all this is you have to accept one main goal. If "mass" is uppermost in your mind over strength..it won't work. You'd be better off training for "mass" even though that would be less efficient than continuing to build strength. But if you keep strength uppermost and really believe that mass is intimately related to that and is a side effect of the training (and a lot of eating) than you'll be more successful. It's all in your attitude toward what you are doing.

so maybe stick to the same lifts as the 5x5 (i'm still nursing the bench) but lower the weight and do a higher rep count maybe only 4 sets.

Example: if i was doing 315 on Deads at 5x5 switch it too 4 sets of 8-10 w/ say 245??---Im not trying to bombard you with questions, just curious.....

And im kind of confused on the Mass/Strength thing, if i steadily did my best to increase weight in the gym (and eat accordingly of course) would the size just be a natural side effect of getting stronger....

Ummm...it's a never-ending source of frustration when beginners or semi-beginners are pushed toward, or tacitly encouraged to do, complex periodized programs (relatively) but they don't really even know the basic terminology. That is no an attack on you, altus, it seems to be a trend. It really shouldn't work that way.

Intensity is the percentage of your 1RM (one rep max). Volume is basically the amount you are doing...the numver of reps times sets. To raise the intensity you have to lift CLOSER to you absolute ability...the amount you can lift for only one rep. To LOWER the volume you would do LESS reps and sets. Higher intensity means less volume. More volume means lower intensity.

Now after I said my advise would be to lower the volume and increase the intensity on the main lifts you hit me with a plan that would RAISE the volume and LOWER the intensity

Some of these are more advanced things I'm talking about. But then we have people who are doing a so-called advanced program but when I talk about volume and intensity they don't get it. That makes it difficult to give advice.

If you know just the basic principles of resistance training...some of which I just stated..you don't even need a program at first. Yet people do PROGRAMS without having any knowledge of the basic principles. This is crasazy.

Since your shoulders are not healthy that really should be the determiner of what you do on bench. Also, what you have been doing is about volume across the board. All the volume affects everything. You can't just think of everything in isolation.

But if you want to increase your strength on bench then you have to push the neurological efficiency. Going to higher reps and raising the volume is hardly a recipe for strength...that doesn't mean than higher reps don't contribute to your strength training just that they are secondary.

Based on what you've said here you don't even need to go to very low reps yet. If you look at the program you were doing the idea is that you are not recovering completely from the workload week in and week out. You are supposed to be overreaching from a fatigue standpoint after at most, what 6 weeks? Yet you say you kept going and going without plateauing? Which means you WERE recovering more than "planned" which means you really didn't need the program and were pushing all that extra volume for, in my mind, no real reason. You TRADED volume for intensity. You could have lifted heavier and hit the same point in absolute strength in the same time frame if not sooner.

And you probably could have done it with better overall quality since your weren't engaged in some much rep counting. Which means you form wouldn't have been sacrifised to fatigue and maybe you wouldn't be nursing your shoulder.

Since you've been doing all that volume, but with absolutely no attempt to distribute the stress, just simply decreasing the volume for the max lifts and distributing the stress differently thoughout each week should work wonders. You stop carrying around so much extra recovery debt that way and you basically are pushing more weight. You could mess around with 4 or 3 reps and it doesn't even have to be so close to max ability. Just an increase in intensity to get you used to more near maximal work to come.

You could do bench even for 5x5, or 6 to 8x3, for your max bench and then do a secondary bench in the 8 to 10 or even 10 to 12 range (say three sets maximum) and then if you are doing an overhead press that could be in the 6 to 8 rep range depending on what press...you could end up with damn near the same amount of reppage in pressing but the stress would be distributed in a much more favorable way. Or of course, you could do less volume than that (or periodize the volume throughout each week).

Or for your secondary "volume" lifts you could use single, double, and sometimes triple progression. For someone in your position that is a good and sort of natural way to periodize the volume and intensity. You keep you maximal lifts to a plan though.

How you set up depends on whether your want to do 3 days a week or 4 days.

I think that maybe some people do not understand the difference between "intensity" and "resistance". It may be a source of misunderstanding and confusion.

When I say intensity I mean simply how close a given weight is to your 1RM as I said before (the way most of us view it, I think). So keep in mind I am NOT talking about your perceived exertion level (see my signature). There are other definitions that different people use but any definition that allows a very broad, sweeping, and nebulous viewpoint is almost worthless from a programming perspective.

When you are engaged in some type of linear load progression where you are simply increasing the weight on the bar in some sort of straight forward way that is not really raising the intensity. That is raising the resistance. Theoretically your relative intensity range hasn't changed. If you take 3 by 8 and add 5 pounds to it every week....you still are using the same intensity. It's just that, supposedly, your absolute ability has changed and thus the weight that that intensity range represents has increased.

You have become stronger but you haven't changed the intensity of your workouts. Sometimes raising the reps and adding a set can overcome a plateau and give you a little more strength. Especially when your are fist starting out. But you will NEVER reach your true strength potential until you start working at truly high INTENSITIES.

If you DO raise intensity, then by definition that means the volume DECREASES. The closer you get to your absolute 1RM the lower the reps. And the lower the sets you can do.

I know this seems like duh...basic beginner common sense stuff but I believe maybe this stuff needs to be said based on some of the questions I see.

Good stuff Eric. A lot of people end up misunderstanding intensity. Personally, for the major lifts I train with very intensity generally hitting 90% or above of the 1RM for 2-3 reps (I prefer to stay away from the single). Over time the resistance has changed (heavier weight) but the intensity stays high. High volume work definitely has its place but I do not train that way very often. BTW thanks for putting that info out again because many people (some on the site ) need some clarification once in awhile.

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Height: 6 foot
Weight: 240 pounds

Bench: 415 (1x1)
Deads: 565 (1x1)
A2G Squat: 425 (1x1)

Cardio sucks
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WOW!!! Im trying to take that in and figure it out. Thank you. I really wish i had a good partner, or even a knowledgeable person to train with...it would help me so much. Unfortunately i don't, so i look in areas such as this forum.

Now i see what u meant, i did raise volume and lower the intensity, by dropping way lower than my 1RM, yet train in a higher rep range...if im understanding correctly...

So i'd be looking to stay close as possible to my 1RM, and complete around 5-10 reps in that target range for 3 sets total perhaps??

As far as the program thing, i understand i was not educated enough to start a program, and thats why i picked the DFT 5x5 because it was very cut and dry....pick a weight you can complete 5 sets of 5 with...easy stuff (like i said earlier i didn't really have anyone to ask advice from personally)

Until then i had spent over a year "over training" on the one body part per day scandal, if you will. I had realized my errors though, and that was why i picked DFT 5x5, i felt i needed a "program", and as i stated it was so cut and dry.

I really dont mind going 3 or 4 days, it doesn't matter for me i have the time. So maybe i'll give what I talked about above a shot....though today i did workout wrongly, i worked the higher Volume, and lower Intensity...eeekkkk...oh well just one day, will get back on track Wed.....Again Thank You!!!

Also on a side note: Is it unusual that the bench is still a sticky situation as far as my shoulder injury is concerned....but overhead shoulder press does not bother it one bit....

Going to get an MRI on that for sure when i get back to the states....