The Forgotten Secrets to Building Size and Strength

Old-School Workout Methods for Achieving Your Training Goals

     I admit that I’m not up on anything new in the world of strength training and bodybuilding.  I couldn’t tell you a single thing about any modern bodybuilder or strength athlete or any new methods of training.  I guess that’s a bit of a personality fault on my part considering the subjects I write about.  However, it’s been my view for as long as I can remember that there really isn’t anything new under the mass-building sun.

     To be honest, there isn’t anything new in, well, anything.  There is more stuff that is forgotten than is discovered.  And even when something new is “discovered,” it’s more often than not simply something that had been lost.

     I take this view in almost any subject that I love, whether it’s strength training, martial arts, or even philosophy and theology.  I am a classical theist, after all.  Around 20 years ago, I had a “mystical experience,” for example, and it completely changed my view on not just religion but the nature of reality itself.  I was raised in a rather “religious” household, of the evangelical Christian bent, and when this happened to me, I didn’t even think it was a “Christian” experience.  I had practiced zazen (seated meditation) when I was a young kid in an “old-school” Karate dojo, so I thought it had something to do with the experience of “enlightenment” in Asian religions.  I read and explored all I could in those areas for a number of years, only to discover that my encounter was best explained by many Christian mystics, particularly in the first few centuries of the new (at that time) religion founded upon the teachings of this rather odd Jewish fellow we now know as Jesus Christ, and most explicitly in the writings and teachings of the desert fathers and mothers (and writings about them), hermits and ascetics who arose in and around the Egyptian desert of the 3rd century.  Why hadn’t I ever heard any of this before in the churches of my childhood, I thought to myself.  Well, the answer is quite simple.  It had been forgotten.  I hadn’t experienced anything new, much less New Age, as some of my family and fundamentalist friends may have feared.  Rather, I had experienced something ancient.

     When I did return to the religion of my childhood—though I would argue that I didn’t “return” to anything; rather I discovered something I had never known in the first place—I was baptized in the Eastern Orthodox Church.  I like attending a Sunday service where I know that the worship has remained unchanged for at least 1,500 years.  Nothing new about that whatsoever.  I’ll take the oldest form of Christianity on the planet, thank you very much.*

     I still train in martial arts, and have done so now for over 40 years.  Occasionally I visit different dojos and dojangs.  I must admit that I don’t like much of what I see.  It’s new and modernized, and quite watered down to boot.  The karate-kas and others that I talk to at these places often think they’re practicing something “old.”  They’re not.  The old ways, sad to say, have been lost and in their place is something to appeal to the modernist masses.

     I write all of this just to say that the old-school way is still the best, and it doesn’t really matter what subject it is.  Strength training, bodybuilding, and just “health and fitness” in general is no different.  Here are a few old-school training ways that are still better than anything else you’ll find modern gym-goers doing.

Full-Body Workouts

     As I am apt to go on about in different essays (not just this one), the majority of modern trainees utilize various split workout routines.  I’m not against split training, mind you.  At least half of the programs that I write use them.  But I’m generally not in favor of the way they’re used by your average bodybuilder, which typically means multi-split, one (maybe two) bodypart(s) per workout regimens.  There are bodybuilders that benefit from that kind of training, but most lifters that utilize them would be much better off using full-body workouts instead.

     If you’re new to training, or, heck, if you’ve been training for years and you haven’t seen the results you want, then get on a basic, full-body workout program where you train 3 days each week.  Even if the only thing you want out of training is to look good, this is exactly how you should train.  Of course, if you want to get really strong and absolutely massive, that is also the way to go, but it works even for those who are only after aesthetics and nothing else.

     I have plenty of full-body routines on the blog.  I won’t write a new example here.  Look through the blog, and discover one of them that appeals to you, a workout that you think you would enjoy doing and one that fits into your schedule, your lifestyle, your activity level, and the equipment available to you, whether you train at a big commercial gym, a small one, or at your home with limited equipment.  If you get on a full-body workout routine, you’ll be glad that you did so.  (If you don’t want to do a whole lot of searching, I recommend starting with my program Full Body Big & Strong.)

Treat Your Lifting More as “Practice” and “Skill Training” Rather than a Hard “Workout”

     This one really is a forgotten art.  I’ve been pushing this approach for a couple of decades.  Pavel Tsatsouline has, as well, along with a handful of other writers and coaches, but we are in the decided minority.  (Charles Staley and Dan John are two writers/coaches I recommend in addition to Pavel and me.)  Most average gym-goers still use the “no pain, no gain” approach.  They only think that a workout is “good” if it’s hard, where they take each set to failure (or close), or if they’re tired and sweaty when the whole thing is over.  They also expect to be sore the next day (or two), and if they’re not then they think they must have done something “wrong”.  Now, some soreness is good, and is a valuable indicator that you had a useful workout, but you don’t want to be really sore the day after a session (aside from when first starting a program, where soreness is only natural).  Even worse is the kind of training where you’re even more sore two days later.  You should, especially when you first begin a routine, be a little sore the day after training, but it should be decidedly less so the following day.

     If you’ve never trained in this manner before, one good method to start with is to go with an “upside-down” approach.  Take your usual sets and reps and inverse them. Think about some of the usual set/rep combos that are used by most trainees, ones such as 3 sets of 10, 3 sets of 8, 4 sets of 6, 5 sets of 10—the list could go on and on.  Try doing the opposite.  Use the same weights you would use on the movement but reverse the sets and reps.  So, you would do 10 sets of 3 reps, 8 sets of 3, 6 sets of 4, or 10 sets of 5, and so forth.  Each movement will have the same workload, but now you’ll be able to make every single rep of every set powerful, strong, and not approaching failure.  Yeah, I know, that seems a bit upside-down from the usual advice, and that’s the point.  Once you’ve adapted to the workouts, you can now easily use quite a bit more weight than what you would typically use and still not miss a single repetition of a set.

     That’s right, you can also increase the weight that you would typically use for lower sets of higher reps and still take this upside-down approach and get all of your reps without reaching failure on any of your sets.  Let’s say that a common workout for you is to use 225 pounds on your squats for 3 sets of 10 reps, where the first set is hard, but you get all of 10 reps, then on the 2nd you reach failure on your 10th rep, and on the 3rd set you have to get help from your training partner(s) in order to get all 10 reps.  But you could increase the weight to, say, 250 pounds and get 10 sets of 3 reps without reaching failure even on your final sets.  Now, even though you still have 30 strong reps, your workload will be higher.  And a higher workload means, in the end, more gains.

     You don’t have to do such a high number of sets when using this approach, however.  If you do full-body workouts 3 days per week, for example, a good method is to do around 15 reps total on each movement, for something such as 3 sets of 5 or 5 sets of 3 reps.  Whether it’s 3x5 or 5x3, use a weight that is around 90% of your 5-rep max on your lifts.  This is still heavy but not so heavy that you can’t still treat each lift as a practice session for those movements.

     You can also go the “easy strength” route by training each lift at least 5 days per week, but limiting your total number of reps on each lift to 10.  So, you might do 2 sets of 5 reps, 3 sets of 3 reps, 5 sets of 2 reps, or just multiple singles.  Though, if you use singles, you might want to do even less than 10 total reps—6 to 8 singles is probably the best plan.

     For more on this skill training approach, check out my article Skill Training as Size Building.

Utilize Standing Lifts for Your Entire Workout

     Bronze era lifters, such as George Hackenschmidt and Herman Goerner, treated their training sessions as practice sessions and not what we think of as modern “workouts,” but they also did something else that has been almost entirely lost in modern gyms.  They utilized standing lifts for their entire workout whether training with barbells or dumbbells, and even kettlebells, just so you know there’s nothing “modern” about that particular implement, either.

     Walk into any gym anywhere in America today, and you’ll find that most trainees are doing their exercises sitting or lying down, usually with machines or cables to boot.  Bronze era bodybuilders didn’t have that luxury.  And that was a good thing.  They did almost all of their movements standing up.  Standing movements are still the best movements today.  One way to think about it is this: the more your body moves through space the better the movement.  If your entire body moves through space on a lift, that’s what you want to use.  All kinds of free-weight squats, deadlifts, overhead presses, the various quick lifts, as well as chins and dips fit this category.

     All you need is a barbell, some dumbbells, and maybe a bench if you want to do a seated or lying movement (or two) just to round things out.  In fact, you can get plenty of good results with nothing but a barbell.  For more information on what you might do in that case, read my article Nothing but the Barbell.

     You don’t need to do much at each workout.  Do a squat, some sort of lower body pull, an upper body press or two (you can do both an overhead press of some sort and a bench press), an upper body pull (chins, rows), and maybe barbell curls.  If you add in a loaded carry of some sort such as farmer walks or sandbag carries, that’s really all you need for the remainder of your training.

Final Thoughts

     I suppose that there are a number of other forgotten, lost ways I could have discussed here.  If I think about something I should have mentioned, I’ll just save it for another essay.  In the meantime, apply these 3 methods to your training.  They may be little-used but that’s also the reason why most trainees don’t get the results out of their training that they’re seeking.  Use these methods and you will.

If you have any questions or comments about this essay, leave them in the "comments" section below or send me an email for a more private correspondence.

Also, if you find this article informative, then consider purchasing one of My Books. Click on the link for more info on all books that are currently available.

     

*I’m not writing this to debate whether the Orthodox Church, in its various ethnic jurisdictions, or the Roman Catholic Church is the “original” form of Christianity, or any other ancient Churches not in communion with either.  I am simply referring to the Divine Liturgy of Saint John Chrysostym, which we use for our liturgical worship every week.  There are churches in communion with the Roman Catholics who use it, as well, and there are other ancient liturgies, such as those of various Oriental Orthodox Churches, different Syriac liturgies, the liturgies of the Armenian Churches, and even the ancient Babylonian rites.