Winter is Upon Us: The Season of the Bulk

 

Winter is the Time for Bulk Building

     A couple of occurrences precipitated this essay.  First, my last article on the legendary powerlifter Hugh Cassidy.  His training is just the kind of program anyone seeking bulk should follow.  And not just his style of training, but most certainly his “method” of eating.  You know, if you can call scarfing down every calorie-laden, protein-packed, carb-loaded thing in sight a method.  Second, and most obvious, the cold.  Much of our country, as I type these words on my laptop, snug against the warmth of my fireplace, is in the grip of a bone-chilling freeze.  Even in the Deep South of Alabama where I live, work, and train (outdoors), we have been told by the wintry weather prognosticators that it will only get slightly above freezing as the high for the week.

     I have long believed that we should do “seasonal” training.  Too many lifters, train as they do in the confines of a temperature-controlled gym, train the same way year ‘round.  There are many reasons why modern gym-goers don’t get consistent results, but the fact that they train pretty much the same 12 months a year, year-in and year-out, assuming they actually do train all year long, has to be one of them.  To keep it simple, we could break it down like this:

• Winter: basic, brief, hard workouts.  Train like a madman, then go home.  Eat like it’s winter-time, as well, the way a bear does when he is preparing for hibernation.

• Spring: start training more outdoors.  Enjoy the sunshine.  Prepare yourself for the coming summer months when you want to look good in a pair of swimming trunks or a bikini.

• Summer: Now it’s time to really enjoy the sun.  Go to the beach—heck, train on the beach.  This is the time when you should have fun.  Experiment with new workouts.  Play in the gym.

• Fall: Just as it’s time to return to school for kids, it’s time to get serious about your workouts.  Have a plan.  Get regimented.  You can still train outdoors, and, in fact, this is the best time in my book for outdoor training.  (It’s also my favorite time of the year.)  It’s the time for basic workouts that include a lot of loaded carries.  Train more than you do at any other time of the year.  Come winter again, you’ll be ready for those hard, heavy, and brief sessions after the Autumn volume.

     For almost this entire century, I have foregone the local commercial gym and trained in my dungeoness garage gym. The only time that I didn’t do this was in 2009, when I separated and then divorced my wife of more than a dozen years and had to find a gym to train at.  I enjoyed those months, since I did manage to find a hardcore lifter’s gym, replete with chalk, a monolift, and screaming, behemoth powerlifters.  But I was also happy once I had a house again and could return to my garage gym training.

     In the early ‘00s, when I was preparing for one of the many powerlifting meets that I competed in during that decade, I remember a particular winter that was exceptionally cold.  One week during that freezing winter, it was similar to this week—temps in the single digits, hypothermia warnings on the evening weather news.  I had a small cadre of powerlifters that trained with me, and under me, back then.  But only my training partner Puddin’, AKA “The Ox,” was willing to brave the cold of my garage.  We did our best to make it reasonably warm that week.  I put some space heaters in the garage, and put my Olympic bars against one of my propane heaters so, at the very least, our hands didn’t turn to ice once we gripped the bar.  I never trained with gloves—still don’t—and since I was preparing for an upcoming competition, I wasn’t about to start.  If you train with gloves, you might think that they help.  They don’t.  Especially when it comes to gripping a knurled bar and pulling a monstrous deadlift.  Gloves make your grip weak, not strong.

     I remember that week well because, despite the temperature hovering around 15 degrees in my garage, it was the 1st time I managed to deadlift over 550.  The Ox and I warmed up as best we could.  When it’s cold out, and you train in that cold, that’s one thing you need to keep in mind.  You need to do more warm-ups than usual.  A cold muscle is a more injurious one.  So, if you train in your garage like me, and you decide to implement a workout plan like I’m going to outline below, make sure you take your time to get warm.  Despite the cold—our bars never really got warm regardless of our effort; I suppose we did improve them a little bit—when it came time to pull 550 on our deadlift day, I did it with relative ease.  Of course, it didn’t really surprise me.  I was already well-versed in the fact that how you feel is a lie, and I, without a doubt, didn’t feel good on that sub-freezing day, but I still had a great workout, a session memorable enough that it still sticks with me 2 decades later.

     Winter is the time to lift big.  It’s also the time to train hard.  Minimal movements but maximum intensity should be the name of the game.  What follows are a couple of workout programs that would be good.  Follow them to a tee, or do something very similar.

     These are full-body workouts.  Brief though they may be, they are not easy.  A lot of times—in fact it’s the way I train the remainder of the year—I opt for longer over harder workout sessions.  As Arthur Jones quipped, you can either train long or you can train hard but you can’t do both.  Jones thought that the answer is to train harder.  I, on the other hand, believe that longer might be the answer.  But, and if you’ve read enough of my material then you already are aware of this, I don’t believe there is one way to train.  I don’t think that one method reigns supreme over all others.  Instead of an either/or approach, I take the both/and path.  But there is a time for hard, heavy, and brief workouts such as these.

     If you read my article on Hugh Cassidy, then you pretty much know what you’re in store for here.  It is, in many ways, similar to the kind of workouts that the aforementioned Jones recommended in the ‘70s, or the late, great Ken Leistner in the decades after Jones.  I have, in various writings, been quite hard on so-called “HIT” or “high-intensity training.”  But my primary ire is aimed at the later writings of Mike Mentzer and others that followed in his wake.  I think that early HIT—such as what Mentzer did in the late ‘70s or when he probably should have won the Mr. Olympia in ‘80—was pretty good, however.  Whether you’re in agreement with me or not, just ponder this briefly: Could it be that original HIT worked NOT because of training with 1 hard set to momentary muscular failure, then waiting until that muscle had completely “recovered” before training it again, but, rather, from doing a brief, hard full-body workout frequently, usually 3x per week?  Because what Jones recommended was not to train each muscle group just once-per-week with a multi-bodypart split.  Not at all.  His workouts involved training the entire body in almost non-stop fashion, employing heavy (and obviously hard) squats, pulls, presses, rows, curls, and the like.  In many ways, he was just returning to the kind of training that early “silver era” bodybuilders did but had been lost in the decade or so since that time.

     Okay, with that preamble out of the way, let’s look at a couple of training routines.  Both of these employ full-body workouts done just twice per week.  You can train on any days you want, as long as you take off 2 days after the 1st session and 3 days after the 2nd.  So, you might, like Cassidy, train Saturday and Tuesday, or you might lift Sunday and Wednesday, or Monday and Thursday, or so forth.  Since you are only training twice weekly, make sure that you select 2 days when you know you won’t miss making it to the gym.

     The first program uses fewer exercises but more sets per movement.  The second program takes the opposite approach with more lifts but less sets per lift.  Select the one that you simply prefer or alternate back and forth between the two.

Winter Bulk Builder #1

Day One

Squats: 5 and 3-rep ramps; 2 back-off sets of 10 reps.  For the 1st movement, do barbell back squats.  Do progressively heavier sets of 5 reps.  Once you work up to a hard, but not all-out set of 5, start doing triples.  Work up to 1 absolutely all-out set of 3 reps.  If you get 3 reps on your last set, add weight at the next session.  If you miss that set, get it at your next workout.  When you are finished with the triples, drop back down to a weight you could do for one all-out set of 10 reps and do 2 sets of 8 reps with that weight.  On the ramps, rest somewhere between 3 and 5 minutes between sets, more as the weights get heavier—rest times between sets is very individualistic, which is why I give broad guidelines instead of set-in-stone times.  On the back-off sets, rest only a minute or two between the 1st and 2nd set.

Bench presses: same as the squats

Deadlifts: same as the squats and bench presses

     That’s it.  Those 3 movements will be plenty.  Go home, rest, and eat as much food as possible so that you will be ready for the Day Two session.

Day Two

Front squats: 5-rep ramps; 2 back-off sets of 8 reps.  For your 2nd session of the week, you will train a little bit lighter.  Do progressively heavier sets of 5 reps until you reach one all-out set of 5.  As with the triples from Day One, if you miss your last set of 5, get it at your next session.  If you make it, then add weight at your next workout.  Do the same 2 sets of 8 reps for back-off sets.

Military presses: same as the front squats

Barbell curls: same as the front squats and military presses

     As with the Day One workout, don’t do any extra work.  You now have 3 days off before you assault the workout again in week two.  Use that time to rest, take it easy, enjoy the cozy indoors, and eat as much as you can scarf down.

     The Day Two workout is technically a “light day,” as the exercise selections don’t allow you to train as heavy as Day One.  This program will work as long as you put in the effort, and train as hard as you are capable of doing.

Winter Bulk Builder #2

Day One

Squats: 3 sets of 5 reps.  Unlike the 1st program, you will do “straight” sets on this routine.  Do 2 or 3 warmup sets of 5 reps, working up to the weight for your 3 work sets.  Nothing too heavy for your warm ups.  You want to be fresh for your 3 sets of 5 reps.  Select a weight for your work sets where you know you can get 1 set of 5 reps, but you are unsure about being able to do so on the 2nd and 3rd set.  At your first session, you might get 1 set of 5 reps, 1 set of 4 reps, and 1 set of 3 reps.  Or something very similar.  Stick with that weight at each workout until you do get 5 reps on all 3 sets.  At that point, add weight and repeat the process.  Use this exact same approach for all other movements in the program.

Bench presses: 3 sets of 5 reps

Stiff-legged deadlifts: 3 sets of 5 reps

Military presses: 3 sets of 5 reps

Barbell rows: 3 sets of 5 reps

Barbell curls: 3 sets of 5 reps

Day Two

Front squats: 3 sets of 5 reps

Incline barbell bench presses: 3 sets of 5 reps

Thick-bar dumbbell deadlifts: 3 sets of 5 reps

One-arm dumbbell overhead presses: 3 sets of 5 reps (each arm)

Weighted chins: 3 sets of 5 reps

Dumbbell curls: 3 sets of 5 reps

     As with the 1st program, this is a “no frills” routine.  Also, as with the 1st one, if you work as hard as you can, eat as much food as you can, and rest as much as possible, you will make good gains.  With both of the programs, you get out of it what you put into it.

     Now, despite that very last sentence, even if you commit to one of the programs “perfectly”—you don’t miss a session, you do your very best to give it your all—I doubt you will make gains, definitely not impressive ones, unless you also eat as much food as you can!  I don’t mean to “eat clean” or to “eat healthy.”  I mean to eat as much wholesome, mass-building food as you are capable of.  And then some.

     In my last article on Cassidy, the powerlifting maestro told lifters under him that, if need be, they must “eat their way through sticking points.”  Are you struggling to constantly increase the weights in the 1st program or to get all sets of 5 reps in the 2nd?  Well, if you weigh 150 pounds in the 2nd week of the program, how about eating your way up to 155 by the 3rd?  Do that, and I bet missing those weights and reps will become a thing of the past.

     This kind of training is hard.  It’s not for the “soft” lifters out there.  Earlier, I mentioned that you need to eat like a bear preparing for hibernation when you’re on your winter bulk.  And that was no exaggeration.  If a bear doesn’t eat enough food, and therefore pack on the pounds for the coming winter, it’s likely that the animal won’t survive.  That’s right.  His very survival depends upon it.  You need to want to gain muscle mass so desperately that not only do you want it but that it becomes a need—as if your very survival depended upon it.  If you train and eat with that attitude, you will succeed in your bulk-building endeavor.

     If you enjoyed reading this article, then consider buying a copy of one of my books.  My book "Ultimate Mass and Power” is packed full of workout routines in every single chapter.  My follow-up book “Ultimate Mass and Power Essays” is crammed with great workout ideas, training theories, and even more programs.  And, if you’re looking for a book that can take you from neophyte beginner to a full-fledged advanced lifter, consider my book “Ultimate Strength.”  You can find more information in the My Books page.

     At the moment, I am also putting the finishing touches on my book on the training methods of Bill Starr.  It contains all of the heavy-light-medium essays that I wrote for the blog along with some brand new chapters.  So, be on the lookout for it very soon!