The Rule of 3

Musings on “Good” Workouts and Effective Training Strategies

     I’m sure that you’ve heard of “the rule of 3.”  Actually, just kidding.  I’m sure that you haven’t because, well, I made it up.  Like right now.  This moment.  But it should be a rule, and once I hit “post” on this essay, it will forever be on the internet, so it, you know, will be a rule.  Forever and ever.  Or until the internet collapses in an apocalyptic, cataclysmic downfall.  But maybe then it will be rediscovered by Max and all those grimy kids when they go in search of Tomorrow-morrow Land, and find a copy of it that one of you printed off the internet.  Anyway, rule or not, it is a good way to look at your training.

     Now, there are various “rules of 3.”  After writing that first paragraph, I did a cursory search and Google spat out a handful of different “rules.”  The only one I was familiar with, I must admit, was the writing rule of 3.  Basically, the gist is that, when writing a story, if you group concepts, characters, or whatnot into “threes,” it will be a more memorable piece of writing.  Or something like that.  But that has nothing to do with my rule.

     My rule of 3 states that, simply enough, 1 out of every 3 workouts should be “good.”  If that happens—or at least happens on a regular basis—then you’re going to also get “good” results out of your training, no matter your goals or what it is that you’re training for.  Of course, “good” is different for different lifters, depending on whether you’re a bodybuilder, a powerlifter (or you compete in some sort of strength sport), or an athlete.  It’s even different for different lifters within each category.  Bodybuilders use a wide range of different training methodologies, for example.  If you train with “high-intensity” Mike Mentzer-style workouts, your definition of “good” will be different from a fellow bodybuilder who trains with a lot of volume, plenty of reps, and is in search of a massive pump.  For the latter group, the pump is the definition of good.  And if a massive, shirt-stretching pump equals good, then you’ll be on the right track if 1 out of every 3 workouts fits that bill.

     What makes this rule “true” is the simple fact that, no matter how much you strive for every single workout to be “perfect,” you only reach that, or come close, about 1 out of every 3 sessions.  I think that old-school lifters and bodybuilders knew this, even if it was more intuitive than anything else.  It’s probably one of the reasons that many of them, especially those that used full-body workouts 3 days per week, utilized some form of heavy-light-medium training.  If 1 out of every 3 workouts are the only ones that are truly “good,” why not just use a system that takes advantage of that in a “programmed” manner?

     One of the issues I have with modern workout routines—many of which aren’t really “routines” but haphazard workouts—is that trainees think that every workout must be good, and “good” in this case means that it’s sweating, straining, and working out with all you got.  Every workout has to be more intense, more voluminous, and (often) more vomit-inducing than the last.  Those of us who have been lifting for several decades know better.  That’s just not the way that training works, or not the way that it should work.  But when a modern lifter trains on a bro-split, using once-per-week-per-muscle workouts, the session just has to be that way or it’s labelled “bad.”  Trust me.  You can go with that style of training all you want, yet only about 1 out of every 3rd workout is going to “measure up” to your qualifications, which means that you’ll only be getting about 1 good workout per month for each muscle, or something close.

     The truth is that no matter how many “advances” have been made in training, nutrition, supplementation, and whatever cutting-edge recovery techniques have been discovered, or will be discovered in the future, we’re still not very good at “designing” the “perfect” workout session.  Perfect workouts do happen, but they’re fairly random, and in my experience it’s hard to measure exactly what it was, if anything, that produced them.  They just happen.  That’s it.  If the science behind “peaking” was exact, more athletes would peak at the Olympics or various world championship contests.  But they don’t.  A good workout is similar.  It’s more of a perfect “storm” of factors rather than a concise, linear diagram of reasons as to why good happened.

     This is one of the reasons that I’m a fan of “moderate” or “easy” high-frequency training (HFT) routines.  With these approaches, you just “show up,” do the work, and let “good” happen on its own and in its own time.  But since you’re training 3 (or more) times per week for each muscle/lift, you’ll end up getting more than just 1 “good” session in during the course of a month, even if it ends up being less than every 3rd workout.

     Take (what I call) the “everything moderate” approach of old-school bodybuilders, exemplified by “silver era” bodybuilders such as Clancy Ross who I wrote about in my last post.  Ross, typical of others of his day, recommended doing 3 to 4 sets of 6 reps when looking to add mass.  He suggested using a weight where you knew you would get all the reps—perhaps not ridiculously “easy” sets, they could push you just a bit, but a weight where you still know you can get the reps in.  Then you just stick with that weight at each session until you naturally feel like adding weight.  I think training in this manner is one of the best approaches you can use.  What you’re going to find is that, every couple weeks or so, you just feel good and you’ll do more on that day.  You’ll know it when you get to the gym and all of your weights feel lighter than usual and you, yourself, are feeling almost buoyant.  At the session after that, you might use that same weight again, or you might go back down to the weights that you were using in previous sessions, but before long your “new” (heavier) weight(s) becomes your “moderate” sessions, and you stick with those poundages until you feel like increasing the weights once again.  Now, this does take a more experienced, “instinctive” lifter.  If you don’t know your body well, you might want a more systematic approach.  What follows, then, are a few practical suggestions that may help you until you reach the intuitive level.

     You can, of course, just take the time-honored and well-tested heavy-light-medium method of training.  You can be very systematic about it, by having your weights planned at each session.  If that sounds as if it’s something you’d like to try, then I’ve written so much on it that I won’t re-hash it here, but you can start with THIS article.  If you want to learn everything you can about the system, then consider purchasing my most recent book “The Strongest Shall Always Survive: Lifting Lessons from an Iron Legend.”  It covers the basics of Bill Starr’s training system, including his 5x5 method and all of the nuances of his H/L/M program.  However, you can also be more “laid-back” about the training.  If you train 3 days per week on a full-body program, one workout can be “hard,” one can be “easy,” and the 3rd can be “moderate,” in between the other two.  Most lifters find that they naturally gravitate toward hard, easy, and moderate, in that order, but that’s not necessarily the case for everyone.  Some like to start with the moderate workout, do the easy session in the middle, and then end the week with the hard and heavy workout.  Even Starr wrote that some of his lifters did better utilizing a medium-light-heavy rotation.  Most lifters who end their weekly sessions with the heaviest/hardest one like the idea of having 2 entire days off after their heaviest workload session.

     Although I have been discussing full-body workouts so far, this applies no matter the system—full-body training, 2-way splits, 3 or 4-way splits, or even one-bodypart/lift-per-day workouts.  The main thing to understand with one-lift-a-day workouts, however, is you just need to “get over” thinking that you have to absolutely “kill it” each time you go to the gym.  Know roughly the workout you plan on doing each day, and just do it.  On days when you feel good, then really push it.  On other days—you know, the usual, not-great sessions—just get in the work.  If you don’t feel as if you have much in you that day, fine; go home, drink a big post-workout protein shake, don’t worry about the fact that you just had a crappy workout, and get ready for the next day’s session.

     One schedule I like is to follow a light-medium-heavy rotation.  Let’s say that you have a 10-rep max in the bench press with 225 pounds.  That’s the kind of weight that I like to use for something such as 8 to 10 sets of 5 reps.  However, if you show up at the gym your first session and do 10 sets of 5 reps with 225, and then try to add a few pounds to each session after that, it won’t be too long until you burn out.  Oh, you’ll make gains for a few workouts, until the weights don’t even seem to budge by the 4th or 5th workout.  At that point, most guys then just switch to something else—maybe a new movement for the same sets/reps or the same exercise but a new set/rep combination.  However, if you cycle your workload, you could keep the gains going for a bit longer before you run into the need for change.  Try something like this:  At the 1st session, put 80% of 225 (180 pounds) on the bar and do 10 sets of 5.  At the next session, go to 90% of 225 (202.5 pounds) and do another 10 sets of 5 reps.  Finally, on your 3rd session, go to 225 (100%) and do another 10 sets of 5 reps.  (This would be a good plan, by the way, for 2 days per week of training on the lift.)  Now, at the next session, drop back down, but this time go to 82% of 225 (185) and do 10x5; follow that up with 92% (207) for 10x5; and then go to 102% (229 pounds) for 10 sets of 5 reps.  This, or something very similar, is a systematic way to use the rule of 3.  It’s also something you can keep going for longer.  How long?  Depends upon the individual.  I would stick with it until the “medium” session (90% to start with) reaches roughly your original 100% weight—225, in this case.  Although you can train with a lift for longer when you cycle training loads, it still has its limits.

     You can also apply this principle to training weeks and not just individual workout sessions.

     I often recommend hitting a really hard week of workouts about once every 4 weeks, and not much more.  My typical recommendation is to do a week of “moderate” workouts, followed by a “hard” week (not all-out; a little something left “in the tank”; but still a relatively hard week of training) followed by an all-out, train-as-hard-as-you-possibly-can week.  After that, you then take an easy “active recovery” week before you repeat the process.  Doing this usually means, but not always, that you should have some pretty good workouts during your ultra-hard week.  But, even then, it doesn’t always work that way.  Otherwise, my whole idea about not really being able to “peak,” might be a little off.  But whether that super-hard week is actually a “good” week, in the way it has been discussed so far in this essay, is not really the point here.  The point for this kind of training is simple and matter-of-fact: cycling workload, over the long haul, through both workouts and within weekly training cycles, will lead to more gains—perhaps much more—long-term than not cycling.  However, occasionally (once out every 3 mega-tough weeks?) that really hard week is good, almost magical, even, where you have the kind of workouts that stick with you, that you think about weeks, months, sometimes even years later.  The kind of workout that you can only call “perfect.”

     The perfect ones are rare.  I may have only had a true handful of them throughout almost 4 decades of lifting.  If you’re me, you end up writing about them.  I’ve written about some of them before on the blog.  Like the time that a buddy of mine bet me that I couldn’t do 40 reps with 250 pounds on a deadlift.  Let’s just say that I did more than 40 reps.  You can read about what that workout ended up inspiring in THIS article.  But the point is that those kinds of sessions just happen and sometimes, as in the case with that workout, aren’t even planned whatsoever before engaging in them.

     For instance, there was another time, a little over a decade ago, when I was watching the women’s Crossfit world championships (or whatever-the-hell it’s called) on CBS Sports.  One of their competitions involved doing 30 reps of power snatches as fast as they could with, if memory serves me correctly, 115 pounds.  (I think it was interspersed with 30 reps of those stupid kipping pull-ups, but that’s neither here nor there for this discussion.)  Anyway, I thought to myself, heck, that looks so easy, I think I’ll go out to the garage and do the same thing but with a heavier weight.  And proceed to my garage gym I did, where I loaded 135 on an Olympic bar.  I did 10 sets of 3 reps on hang power snatches with that weight, taking around 15 to 20 seconds of rest between each set.  My lats got a massive pump, which reminded me of the benefits of density training.  Oh, and I definitely should have stopped at that point, but I went ahead and cranked out 30 reps of pull-ups, as well, albeit in strict fashion but with more rest between sets.  Why was that such a memorable session?  Because the next day I’m pretty damn sure that my lats, mid-back, and traps were more sore than they had ever been in my entire life!  Soreness, of course, is not necessarily an indication that you had a “good” workout, but it should be used as at least one barometer.  After that, I did more density-style workouts, just with less total volume and a bit more rest between sets to mitigate soreness.  Even now, though, that workout has stayed with me.

     As you get older, especially if you’re over 50 like me, perhaps it should be the “rule of 5 or 6” as I sometimes have a handful or more of “easy” workouts before attempting a “good” workout. This has more to do with recovery than anything else.  No matter how much my nutrition is “on point” and no matter my work capacity—older lifters who have been training for decades may not be capable of outlifting our younger counterparts but we often are capable of out-training them—it still takes me longer to recover from a higher-volume, higher-intensity workout (intensity here being percentage of one-rep maximum and not how “hard” the workout is).  The answer, however, is not to train less often but to train heavy-and-hard less often.  I rotate between full-body HFT sessions (“easy strength” or “easy muscle” workouts), 2-way splits, and, less occasionally but still periodically, 3-way splits.  Right now, just to give you a glimpse into my approach to training, I’m utilizing a 3-way split and training on a 6-on, 1-off schedule.  Day 1 is legs, day 2 is chest, back, and shoulders, and day 3 is biceps and triceps.  The first 3 training days of the rotation are my “hard” workouts.  I train with an “everything moderate” system and just make sure that I get a good pump in the trained muscle groups on these days.  If I feel “good,” then I will push it, but I never really know until the workout gets started.  (I’m training this way at the moment because I needed a break from the heavier, full-body workouts that I was doing beforehand.)  In the 2nd half of the 6-day split, I do some really easy workouts.  For instance, on day 1, if I did 8 sets of 8 reps on front squats, then on day 4, I might just do 30 to 50 reps of bodyweight squats and that’s it.  Same thing for the other muscle groups.  Once every 2 or 3 weeks, I train “easy” the entire week.  My schedule might look something such as this:

Week 1:

Day 1 - Legs, hard workout

Day 2 - Chest, Back, Shoulders; hard

Day 3 - Arms, hard

Day 4 - Legs, easy

Day 5 - Chest, Back, Shoulders; easy

Day 6 - Arms, easy

Day 7 - Off

Week 2:

Day 1 - Legs, hard

Day 2 - Chest, Back, Shoulders; hard

Day 3 - Arms, hard

Day 4 - Legs, easy

Day 5 - Chest, Back, Shoulders; easy

Day 6 - Arms, easy

Day 7 - Off

Week 3:

Day 1 - Legs, easy

Day 2 - Chest, Back, Shoulders; easy

Day 3 - Arms, easy

Day 4 - Legs, easy

Day 5 - Chest, Back, Shoulders; easy

Day 6 - Arms, easy

Day 7 - off

Week 4:

Day 1 - Legs, hard

Day 2 - Chest, Back, Shoulders; hard

Day 3 - Arms, hard

Day 4 - Legs, easy

Day 5 - Chest, Back, Shoulders; easy

Day 6 - Arms, easy

Day 7 - Off

     I train “instinctively” when it comes to how many completely “easy” weeks I take.  Sometimes it might be every-other-week for a few weeks.  And sometimes I might do an entire week that is “hard.”  If you want to try something similar and you don’t know your body well, then I would do an easy week after every 3rd week of hard/easy sessions.

     Keep in mind that training is just as much (or more so) art and skill as it is “science.”  It takes time to learn the skill and perfect the art of lifting because each one of us is different.  It’s the reason there are so many different training systems out there, both good and bad.  With that in mind, remember that the “rule of 3” isn’t really a rule at all.  Think of it as more of a guideline that may help you to understand the best way to program your own workout regimen.  It’s just one more tool in your training arsenal that can help you to achieve your goals.