I can’t emphasize enough how effective a good cycling plan — periodization — can be in getting off a plateau. It’s not just a plateau-buster, either; it’s a way to live.
1. Keep your routine simple, using just a few multi-joint moves. Try Squat, Row, and Bench for the first few cycles; DL, OHP, and Chin for the next few.
2. Work out three times a week in a whole-body routine.
3. Use a Heavy/Light/Medium weekly mini-cycle.
4. Make your heaviest set on Week 1’s heavy day (say, Monday) ~85 percent of your 5RM and do 5 on that heavy set. Do one more work set with 90 percent of that first set.
5. Monday on Week 2 should see you using ~92.5 percent of your previously-established 5RM.
6. Monday on Week 3: 100 percent.
7. Monday on Week 4: Go for a new 5RM and lay off the rest of that week.
8. Week 6: Start over using the new 5RM as the basis of the next cycle.
9. Use 80 percent of Week 2/Monday’s heavier set for Week 1/Wednesday’s heavier set; 90 percent of Week 2/Monday’s heavier set for Week 1/Friday’s heavier set. Follow that template for each of the first 4 weeks.
Poundages go up with this simple cycle. You get big and strong.
Some of the basics are what you’ll read from other people, like using a full-body routine, using multi-joint moves . . . and very few of those at a time.
The point I like to harp on is cycling. I first read about cycling in the 1970s, but I couldn’t make myself exercise at anything less than full-bore intensity. That was a legacy of my Nautilus days. Even when a coach in New Hampshire named George Elder was writing great articles on the concept in Iron Man, I’d flirt with cycling for a short while but then revert to driving every set to failure.
Never think an old dog can’t learn new tricks, though. And, hey, it only took me a few decades. Pavel Tsatsouline’s outline of cycling in his book, Power to the People! was what finally brought me fully over to using cycling.
The cycling he advocates is different from what I toyed with in the early 1980s and gained a lot from (amazing how even success won’t convince the person who’s been so thoroughly educated in and convinced by another school of thought!). It forms the basis for one method of gaining strength without much mass and another method combining strength and mass. Both approaches, which are based on the same foundation, guide you to real success.
The idea behind cycling is nudging the body into greater and greater accomplishment, rather than trying to force it. Like all of life, growth in strength and size comes in cycles.
Stimulus is followed eventually by growth. And because growth can happen as the result of some unknown minimum of intensity (percent of 1RM), cycling poundages up and down but with an overall increase, allows the body to recover enough to respond.
In Power to the People, Pavel states that a good cycle lasts between 8 and 12 workouts. If you exercise 3 times per week, that’s an overall upward increase in poundage used over 2.5 to 4 weeks. If you follow that with a week of low intensity – exercising with resistance and reps that feel pretty light – recovery is enhanced. A full layoff might be even better, if the HST crowd is correct, because it allows you to strategically decondition (”soften up for gains,” a la McCallum). A good compromise might be to go light on Week 4 (and later, on Week 8) and lay completely off after 2 or 3 cycles (at about the three-month mark).
Linear cycling
A linear cycle is one in which the weights just go up from session to session. This is what I did – or intended – during 2 productive periods of my training life. One was when I progressively pushed my bench press way beyond where it’d been before. But I got stuck with a double at my highest poundage. Unfortunately, the things I’d read about cycling hadn’t really penetrated my sometimes-thick skull, and I hit an impasse. If I’d known what I was doing, I’d have backed off to about 85 percent of that and gone slowly up again, doing triples or slightly more reps. But I was dumb and impulsive, and I turned my attention in another direction.
Another productive time was when I decided to give deadlifting a go. I was busy and chronically tired from getting up early and battling Beltway traffic, to get to work by 7:00. I worked on DLing for a few months, never having really concentrated on them before, and I added chins late in that game. Both were cut short by medical need, but not before making really good progress. My DL got pretty good for a few months’ work, and the cycle was rarely modified from a small increase almost every session.
Step cycling
On the few occasions that my DL progress slowed, I kept the poundage the same for another session. I didn’t really think about it, but it was a form of defacto step cycling. Stepping is simply alternating an increase in poundage (over several workouts) with keeping the poundage the same. So, 8 sessions might look like this: 225, 230, 235, 235, 240, 245, 245, 250.
Wave cycling
Don’t confuse this with wave loading. The best way to think about wave cycling is to look at the tried-and-true heavy-light-medium weekly mini-cycle. My favorite way of doing HLM is to make Wednesday’s heaviest set 80 percent of next Monday’s heaviest set. Friday would be 90 percent of next Monday’s.
Why next Monday’s heaviest set and not this Monday’s? It’s a small detail, but if you’re planning out the cycle in advance, you’re going to know what each heavy day’s going to look like anyway. And I like making this week’s light and medium days a run-up to next week’s heavy day.
I like wave cycling the best, because (especially as you get stronger) the light and medium days help with recovery and still stimulate muscle growth to varying extents. That’s important both for advanced weight trainers and older weight trainers, because both populations need to pay attention to recovery issues.
Frequency
A lot of people might look at the 3-session/week nature of HLM and dismiss it, because they prefer more volume over fewer workout days in the week. I think frequency is important, though. Like everything in this art, it is a variable, but in general, I think that if you’ve got a choice between less frequency and more, and overall volume is the same, more frequency is generally the way to go. The body likes repetition when it’s training to get stronger.
Next I want to discuss how a simple cycle can serve both for neural training and muscle-growth training, but let me sidetrack for just a moment to respond to a comment of Fred Fornicola’s:
Along the lines of “cycles”, those who really understand high intensity training (or as I prefer to refer to it as simply “hard work”) utilize some type of cycling as well. It’s not as formalized or planned out but I don’t feel anyone can make progress banging it too hard all the time - it just becomes counter productive.
It’s my opinion (based on several conversations with those who were there in the beginning and just my own feelings) that Arthur Jones was still “discovering” and “experimenting” and never really took his concept to the “next level”. The next level I am referring to is how to implement the level of intensity to the recreational lifter as well as the older trainee. AJ would recommend significant layoffs to recover - which I feel is counterproductive. I believe a smart coach/trainee understands that you don’t need to bury yourself into the ground to make progress (progress defined as your own, specific goals - not someone else’s) and that you learn how and when to accelerate and when to brake. Basically, using your head to cycle your training.
I have implemented this approach over the last few years and have had good success with the people I work with. It’s amazing what little amount of exercise is truly needed if applied intelligently.
During one of the conversations I had with Ell Darden about 15 years ago or so, I asked him his opinions about cycling. He didn’t think it was necessary to plan such a thing out, even if you do back off every so often. (The big exception to that would be his recommendation of cycling higher-volume — but still high-intensity — work for specific bodyparts throughout the year.)
I said, “Well, what about some of Arthur’s earlier writings, which advocated making Wednesday a session using lower intensity than on Monday or Friday?”
“That’s for when a trainee progresses to the point where his recovery ability can’t keep pace with his strength.”
I knew that, but I pressed him: “But isn’t that a tacit admission that some level of intensity below 100 percent can still yield muscle-building results?”
“Well, those workouts are more to prevent losing gains than making them.”
“Which makes it a matter of degree, right? I mean, if 85 percent intensity prevents me from backsliding, that’s sort of like progressing, but slower. The thing that keeps me from losing progress is progress. It’s just relatively less progress.”
There was one of those long pauses you get in a conversation with Darden, and it doesn’t mean he’s confused. It means he’s choosing his words . . . or mulling over your words. Finally, he said, “You can put it that way, yes.”
“So, if one day a week is sub-maximal, and you plan that, it’s really a kind of cycling of intensity.”
“Well, you can say that, but bear in mind Arthur’s changed a bit on that recommendation.” At that point, we began talking about working out twice a week, rather than three times. It was a direction of Nautilus theory that I embraced for a few years and ultimately rejected; frequency, I began to understand, really is important to continued progress, especially on the neural level. It requires less than 100 percent effort on a high percentage of your workouts, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
Back on track, here’s the foundation of the program.
This is the neural piece.
Getting strong is accomplished partly by getting a better neural connection to your muscles and partly by getting bigger muscles. The neural connection is more than just skill, though skill is probably its biggest component. It’s increasing what Arthur Jones called neurological efficiency. Jones said that NE was fixed at birth (actually, at conception). He said most people have around 30 percent NE, meaning that 3 muscle fibers out of 10 are contracted at any single moment during a maximal effort. On either end of a bell curve, you’ve got “genetic freaks,” who have 50 percent NE, like Paul Anderson and Casey Viator, and “motor morons,” who have only 10 percent NE.
The history of the strength sports seems to contradict Jones, though, concerning the fixed nature of neurological efficiency. Weightlifters are able to get stronger and stronger over a period of years without leaving their weight classes, for example. Beyond questions of drugs and motivation, there appears to be a good case for NE improving with the right kind of training.
Tension and strength
So, first, what is the right kind of training to get stronger on the neural level? Neural training is the same thing as training for high levels of muscular tension. Such tension is the end result of that kind of training. So, the statement we can work with is: Acquire the skill to generate more tension.
Like any skill, this takes repetition. You don’t learn to play the guitar like Eric Clapton overnight, and you don’t learn how to lift a large barbell over your head overnight, either. Both involve learning and practicing a set of smaller skills. In the latter case, they’re the skills involved in creating more and more muscular tension.
The five key conditions for training these skills, creating high levels of muscular tension, are:
1) moving slowly
2) consciously maximizing muscular tension, as though you’re posing
3) using heavy weights most of the time
4) minimizing fatigue
5) using specific techniques: a. power breathing, b. hyperirradiation, c. pre-tension, d. successive induction
Slow motion
Force/tension drops off rapidly when velocity increases. When you have to deal with resistance over several seconds, rather than for a fraction of one second, you just get better overload. Lifting heavy weights will always trump throwing things for building strength. One reason is because to get sufficient overload, you need resistance greater than what you get in something you can throw.
Arm-wrestlers and powerlifters are good examples of athletes who move slowly and get very, very strong. There are exceptions to this slow-speed rule, but the general principle holds. (I’m not talking about super-slow training here, by the way.)
Does this mean you’ll slow down for some other sport you’re engaged in? Not necessarily. I think the important thing to do in such cases is not to make strength training the main thing you do (it doesn’t take long, and, done right, it doesn’t exhaust you, so this shouldn’t present a problem). Spend most of your time training the fast thing you do. Keep those skills highly honed. The small investment of time using slow, heavy weights won’t, in my opinion, take away from the fast skills you work on at other times.
Maximizing tension
Even if you’re using a light weight, it’s good practice to handle it as though it weighs a lot, if you’re aiming at training yourself to create high muscular tension. Tense the muscles on purpose. You’re using dynamic tension, which can build a lot of neural strength.
Using heavy weights
We’re talking about the 85-95 percent range of your 1RM. There are at least three reasons for using heavy weights.
One, you build strength in the connective tissues and joints. An added benefit is the effect using heavy weights has on inhibiting your mechanoreceptors, the governors of your body’s strength. Those guys say “okay” to your using heavy weights, once they’re used to them through repetition.
Two, you need to experience real, live resistance to gain skill at creating high tension levels in your muscles. Electrical and chemical signals in your body are generated in response to heavy resistance, and experiencing that on a regular basis builds the skill we’re talking about.
And three, Henneman’s Size Principle states that motor units are generally recruited in order of smallest to largest (fewest fibers to most fibers, as well as slowest-contraction to fastest-contraction fibers) as contraction increases. And this is in response to greater and greater resistance.
You might see that these three reasons overlap. Regardless, they build a strong case for using heavy weights when you’re training for the skill of strength.
Minimizing fatigue
Fatigue is your friend when you’re training for size, and we’ll get to that. For the neural part of the equation, though, it’s your enemy. Don’t worry; there’s a simple way of both avoiding it and using it in the same workout, and that’s coming up.
Next, I’ll talk about minimizing fatigue.
Using specific techniques
Power breathing: Hold your breath as the weight’s coming down and going back up again, until the last part of the concentric, when you blow roughly half of it out. Or blow it out after the rep is completed. If, for some reason, you’ve been advised not to hold your breath under the load of a barbell, try this alternative: Instead of holding your breath, blow out through pursed lips at the beginning of the concentric and whoosh it out hard on the last part. Don’t completely empty the lungs; keep enough air in there to stabilize the spine. In other words, keep abdominal pressure high. Make your ab wall hard but not bulgy.
Hyperirradiation, in a nutshell: HI is purposeful tensing of muscles other than the ones directly responsible for the task you’re doing. Although we’re really talking about tensing the whole body during any one lift, there are three key points: the grip, the abs, and the glutes. If you grip the bar as if to squeeze juice out of it (on upper body drills) and you make a shield of your ab wall and you mentally try to grip a coin with your butt muscles, you’ll generate more strength in your lift. There’s a big neural stimulus sent to your working muscles when you simultaneously tense the ones here. As an added benefit, you create a safer foundation for exercising, preventing hyperflexion or hyperextension in your joints and properly aligning your body in the process.
Pre-tension: Stay tight. Keep in mind the high correlation between tension and strength. Tensing up before unracking the bar has a strong effect on creating tension and strength.
This might be one reason why walk-outs are so effective. If you load a squat bar with weights you can’t actually squat with, unrack it and walk backward a step or two, as though you’re going to squat, and then, after standing there a sec, walking back and re-racking it, your squat workout a few minutes later can noticeably improve. Part of that is psychological: You’re less scared now. But I think you’ve also disinhibited a bunch of your neural protective mechanisms, too.
Successive induction: What this means is when you’re doing the negative part of a press, for example, you’re not just lowering the weight (or dropping it). You’re actively pulling it down with your biceps and lats, as though doing a pulldown. This is actually an extension of pre-tension. You start by tensing before unracking; you finish by pulling down on the bar during the eccentric contraction with the muscles that oppose those that do the concentric part. The power of this technique probably has to do with the body saying to itself, “Hey, I don’t have to protect this guy by inhibiting his power; he’s protecting himself.”
Again, there’s a safety windfall: Your joints are stabilized way beyond what they’d be if you made it a habit to drop the bar on the eccentric or swing the bar up and down. A lot of us old-timers have joint problems. Maybe the young turks among us won’t be dazzled by the safety promises of a lot of this material, but if they see immediate and long-term strength gains by following the principles, they’ll appreciate the safety aspect in the years to come.
Your strength dance is your safety dance.
We’re going to talk about minimizing fatigue in neural training, but I swear to you the very next part will get to the size-building part of this equation. I wanted to go through neural training first, because it really is foundational.
Why minimizing fatigue? Because, as Pavel puts it,
“Fatigue and strength/tension are mutually exclusive! Metabolic waste products like lactic acid hamper further powerful contractions. Cardiovascular insufficiency forces you to prematurely terminate your set. Mental fatigue from doing too many reps or sets prevents you from generating required intensity. The ‘communication lines’ between your brain and your muscles get overworked and no longer conduct your orders effectively.” - p 18, Power to the People!
Those weaned on the writings of Arthur Jones and Ell Darden will see what looks like a big departure of opinion here. It starts with definitions, specifically of the term intensity. For Jones, it was perceived effort. For Pavel and the researchers he cites, it’s percentage of 1RM. This is something I brought up with Darden a long time ago. First of all, percentage of 1RM is much more friendly to accurate measurement than is perceived effort, and measurement is foundational to science. Perceived effort changes daily and even hourly. One-rep max also changes, but it’s not as subject to emotional and psychological states as is the perception of effort.
I asked Darden about something he wrote in one of his books, a variation on a theme running through just about everything he’s written. My question concerned what Jones called “the rush factor.” I understood its role in metabolic conditioning, but I questioned its efficacy in creating strength gains. I pointed out the importance of overload, one of the very principles Darden himself said was essential for effective strength training (the other being progression). I asked him how a person could overload in a given exercise when he’s gasping for air after doing several exercises full-bore and back-to-back. He said that it didn’t matter that a person could only press, say, 80 pounds for 8 in the middle of this fast-paced workout, when normally he could do 100 for 8. What mattered was that he hit failure with that 80.
Then he added, “Besides, you’re going to meet and exceed your old numbers soon enough.” He offered, I should add, abundant proof, including the results of the West Point study in 1975, in which the participating members of the football team really did exceed their old PRs by a long shot, and they did this working out with fifteen seconds max between exercises.
Another apparent wrinkle here is that Pavel himself cites a couple of studies in his first kettlebell book, showing how the use of moderate poundages in the competitive KB lifts yielded tremendous performance results. In a 1983 (I think) study, comparing a KB-only group with a control group using more traditional exercises, the KB guys outperformed the control group in the very exercises the control group had been working on the whole time.
So, is Pavel contradicting himself, and has Arthur Jones been right all along? Well, the contradiction is only apparent. The KB observations and the Nautilus studies noted improvements in muscular strength. Growth in that area has a neural component (through motor skill refinement), but the improvement is essentially made through growth of muscle. On the continuum that joins strength-through-purely-neural-means and strength-through-growth-o f-tissue, neural strength training really does prefer a low-fatigue environment. It might even require it.
The advantages of working for metabolic conditioning (something we can talk about at another time) include physical improvement across the board (e.g., various types of strength, systemic endurance, and local muscular endurance). The advantages of a slower, low-fatigue approach to strength include being able to stick with a routine that doesn’t threaten to kill you every time you follow it.
Now, I’ll get to the promised nuts and bolts of minimizing fatigue in order to build neural strength.
Part of the challenge of reporting on Power to the People! is the fact that it’s not a well-organized book. It jumps around a bit. But Pavel does organize some things well, and this is one of them. He lists 5 ways to minimize “various types of fatigue.” Here they are.
1. Keep your reps low
Pavel advises reps in the same range Bill Starr does, up to 6. Both simplify by saying, “Five.” Although he spells out why he likes low reps better in other writings, essentially it’s for a couple of reasons:
a. You don’t exhaust the stabilizer muscles, which — in a high-rep set — tend to give out before prime movers, making an exercise more dangerous. This was a point made by a chiropractor friend who was also a muscle-head way back in the early 1990s. When I made mention of 20-rep squats, he said, “I wouldn’t do more than 10, and even that’s high.” His reasoning was that the lower back muscles, which are held in isometric contraction during the set, fatigue faster than the muscles of the thighs — and that they tire unevenly. So, when one side of your spinal erectors begins to fail before the other, your spine begins to tilt. This is dangerous under a heavy load. For his part, Pavel recognizes the usefulness of 20-rep squats but says not to stay on such a routine for long.
b. Doing five reps prevents the possibility of overdoing sarcoplasmic hypertrophy. Pavel calls such growth fake. While some of such growth will occur, especially in the Bear-style training I’ll get to, myofibrillar growth is responsible for the greatest growth. Why? Because Bear-style training emphasizes heavy weights and low reps, even while going for a pump.
2. Keep rest intervals up around 3-5 minutes
ATP stores are depleted during exercise, and, while short rest periods are good for creating a cumulative breakdown of muscle tissue, longer ones are better for doing consistently heavy work for several sets of an exercise.
3. Keep the number of sets low
Fatigue will eventually set in, even when your reps are low and your rest intervals are longish. So, for neural strength training, don’t do a high volume of work. Hit it fairly hard and heavy, and then go home. The PTP! template involves two work sets per exercise: The first one conforms to the overall cycle, and the second one is 90 percent of that first set.
Pavel’s caveat is that such a percentage is not precise. Just take some plates off and do a second set. Bam, that’s it.
4. Pause and relax between reps
This is something I remember reading Larry Scott did when working his biceps. Each rep was its own thing: He’d rest for a moment at the top of preacher bench curls before lowering the weight for another rep. That short rest allows you to “generate higher values of muscular tension” as your set progresses. The ATP thing mentioned above is a big reason why.
5. Lift frequently but not too frequently
Tsatsouline likens exercising to practicing. And practicing any skill requires repetition. He cites numerous studies and lots of historical examples for practically everything he writes, and for this principle, he tells about Bob Peoples, the great deadlifter, who practiced his pet lift 4 to 5 times a week. You can be assured that these sessions were heavy but not intense the way Arthur Jones described intense. Peoples didn’t carry a lot of muscle, and his training style shows one reason why. He didn’t try to exhaust muscle; he just practiced lifting progressively heavier weights.
How Pavel combines neural training with higher volume, fatigue-oriented work to yield an effective size-building approach: Get a pump with heavy weights.
That’s the gist of size building, according to the Energetic Theory of Muscle Hypertrophy. It rings true for me. Although I tried lots of set/rep protocols when I was a pup, that’s the one that delivered the most for me.
How does it work? There are two main things going on when you train heavy, using multiple sets and comparatively brief rest periods (compared, that is, to the intervals I described for neural training): tension and fatigue.
You get tension by using heavy weights. By using five reps per set with weights that’ll allow 6 or 7 reps (if you went to failure), you can use heavy loads. Also, there are the tension producing techniques mentioned above.
You get fatigue by doing multiple sets and keeping rest intervals brief. Forget all the chemical things going on in your muscle cells; you’re getting a pump. Ted Arcidi called a high-rep pump a “suck pump.” I don’t know how he came up with such an interesting term, but it reveals his attitude. Arcidi was a very strong, very big man. Whether his size was pure accident or intentional, I don’t know. I do know that a low-rep pump, one utilizing heavy weights, is one even that power man would respect.
Combine the previous principles
Remember when we talked about creating high levels of muscular tension? Well, doing that over several sets creates a real nice growth stimulus. It’s almost like posing with a barbell. Employ all the performance principles mentioned in my above posts for multiple sets.
Here’s how the set/rep approach is done.
You’ve set up your cycle already. Let’s say you’re going to follow the HLM weekly mini-cycle. Also, you’re going to go increasingly heavy for 3 weeks, back off somewhat for one, then hit that pattern again. That’s a good, solid approach, time-honored and proven.
So, let’s say today’s first set is 92 percent of your 5RM. Never mind that it’s 92 percent of what you can do… today, it’s your “money set.” You do one set of 5 with it. Rest for 3 minutes or 5 minutes or anything in between: your call. Now, take 10 percent off the bar and do another set of 5. That’s 90 percent of today’s heavy set, not of your 5RM.
If you were going for strength without size, you’d leave it at that. Instead of going for workout volume, you’d go for frequency throughout the week. You could get away with training the lift 5 times a week, if you cycled properly. None of those sets would be limit sets. You’re training a skill, remember: the skill of being strong.
For size, though, you don’t stop at those two sets (and you don’t train the exercise 5 times per week; stick with 3, when you’re using this kind of workout volume). After you finish the second set, you strip another 10 percent off the bar and start doing sets of 5. Rest 30-90 seconds between these sets and do as many as you can. This means you keep doing sets until 5 reps won’t go up anymore. That’s when you call it quits.
So, it’s:
Set 1: poundage indexed to your cycle.
Set 2: 90 percent of Set 1
Remaining sets: 80 percent of Set 1
Some people end up able to do a lot more of the 80 percent sets than others can do. A lot of that has to do with the muscle fiber types making up the involved muscles. The more fast-twitch fibers you’ve got, the fewer sets you’ll be able to do (all other things, like rest intervals, being equal). They’re strong, but they have little endurance.
The reason Pavel has you doing 2 – or at most, 3 – exercises in this approach is that you’ve got to account for recovery factors. His recommendation for exercises is the deadlift and the side press. I’d do rows, too, but I wouldn’t do Bear-style sets (all those 80 percenters) on all 3 exercises. I’d do them with 2 movements at most, doing just the 2 strength sets (Set 1 and Set 2) for the third. After a cycle or two, change out which 2 you do Bear-style.
Pavel’s simple advice is to pound protein. Remember when I wrote above that using heavy weights increases tension? That’s because, as Pavel writes, tension increases amino acid uptake by the muscles. The more tension there is and the longer the muscles stay under tension (always balanced by adequate recovery), the better, for the purposes of getting big muscles. He likens it to throwing scoops of protein into your muscles with every rep… and bigger weights make bigger scoops.
Well, combine that with actual, literal protein. According to PTP!, to build muscle, you need extra protein and a lot of it. I remember Bob Simpson writing essentially the same thing in Iron Man many years ago. Neither Pavel nor Bob sells protein (to my knowledge), so their words aren’t backed by a profit motive. Pavel urges the reader to experiment both with sources and amounts of protein to find what works best.
Adequate rest is the last — but not the least important –- leg of the stool. Train to be calm when you’re awake, and rest well when you’re asleep. By resting well, I mean for example that you can knock yourself out with a lot of booze, but it isn’t a restful sleep. Be healthy. There are lots of quality-of-life reasons for that, and one of them is building a big, strong body.
Not just one way
The point should be made here that this is not Pavel’s only recommendation for gaining size. He’s got a whole book out there called Beyond Bodybuilding, which describes many approaches toward building size. What they all have in common, though, is that they also build strength. He even goes on to say in an interview that an advanced bodybuilder can use any routine he likes; just add the breathing and high-tension techniques described above (if you don’t already do them), and you’ll have a greatly improved routine.
My addendum is that the minimalist approach (3 exercises) described in PTP! is a valuable one to consider, due to stress-and-recovery balance issues. Too often, we drive too hard for too long, and we defeat ourselves, because we’re not recovering enough. You don’t have to fully recover, I don’t believe (anymore), but you have to recover enough over time to make progress. If you measure progress on, say, a monthly schedule (rather than a workout-to-workout schedule), you might end up doing better. There will be some over-reaching, and there will be a nice overcompensation as a reward.
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