The Art of High-Frequency Strength Training

Approach Your Lifting as a Skill and Craft to be Honed

     There is a certain science to lifting.  I won’t deny that.  But if we only approach training from a “science based” perspective, we won’t see the whole picture.  We’ll also miss out on what makes lifting one of life’s true joys.

     Lifters who approach training as an art learn more than just how to build strength, power, and muscle mass.  A lifter whose art form is lifting itself learns about his body, particularly what kind of training works for him alone, but he also learns about life and all that lifting has to offer outside of just physical transformation.

     How does one go about the art of training?  For the remainder of this essay, we will see what this might look like.

     To start with, just as with any craft, you need a plan that focuses on the essence of the craft.  Begin with a basic plan, an outline for your training.  Make your plan fairly simple.  There’s no need to attempt to design some kind of “state-of-the-art” routine with all sorts of different exercises, varying rep ranges, and all kinds of different “intensity techniques.”  Something like this works well.  Train 3 to 5 days each week.  At each session, do between 2 to 5 lifts—less to start with.  On each lift, do around 5 to 8 sets for 2 to 5 reps per set.  Focus on squats, pulls, and presses.  So, you might do back squats, power cleans, and military presses.  Or just a squat and a one-arm dumbbell overhead press.  Or a front squat and a power snatch.  Or a deadlift and a bench press.  Or front squats, weighted chins, weighted dips, and barbell curls.  For a training cycle, select a handful of lifts or a few more (no more than 8 total throughout a cycle works well)—you may not, and probably should not, do all of them at each training session—and focus only on getting stronger on those lifts.  Your lifts might be front squats, power cleans, military presses, bench presses, weighted chins, and barbell curls, for example.

     Just the other day, my sons were training in the garage with one of their lifting friends.  They asked me a question similar to many that they have asked me before.  (I often joke with them that I taught them everything that they know about training, but not everything that I know about training.)  Anyway, they asked me, quite simply, “What are the 10 best exercises for building muscle and strength?”  They wanted to know the 10 movements that I would have a lifter utilize if he could never do anything else.  Like ever.  They also know I don’t care much for these questions, since I don’t know what world we live in where that would ever be the case, but I gave them an answer nonetheless.  10 movements is kind of a high number, after all.  They know that, just like in this essay, I rarely suggest more than a handful of movements for most lifters.  Without giving any thought to it, I rattled off my list: barbell back squats, front squats, power cleans, power snatches, military presses, weighted dips, weighted chins, bench presses, deadlifts, and barbell curls.  In other words, do some kind of heavy squat, lower body pull, overhead movement, bench press, upper body pull, and curl and you’ll be in good muscle-building company.

     From that simple structure, your art will emerge.  It will be unique to you.  Now, let’s look at how that emergence might happen.

     Start your workout with squats, whether it’s back or front squats.  If you’re new to training, or have yet to build any real amount of muscle no matter how long you’ve been training, then the back squat is probably the best choice.  The total number of sets you do will depend upon the reps.  If you do sets of 5 reps—this is also your best choice if you’re starting out—then around 5 sets is ideal.  If you work up to triples or doubles, your sets might go up to as many as 8.  You can’t go wrong with the classic 5x5—5 progressively heavier sets of 5 reps, working up to a max, or near max, set of 5.

     5x5 training is an art unto itself, to be honest, and focusing on it will teach you almost all you need to know about how you respond to training and what you need to do moving forward.  Start by doing 5 progressively heavier sets of 5 reps and stick with that method alone throughout a training cycle.  Don’t jump all over the place to different set/rep combinations.  Even when lifters choose the correct movements and the correct programming (such as 3-days-per-week, full-body workouts) they often sabotage their results by constantly doing different set/rep combos.  Do one for a training cycle of 6 to 8 weeks and finish the cycle before moving on to something else.  That will teach you more about yourself, and what you respond well to, than anything else.  At the end of 6 to 8 weeks of 5 progressively heavier sets of 5 reps, you will understand more about your body, and whether that simple plan worked for you.  Or not.  If it works, stick with it for another training cycle.  Or even two.  Then see how well you respond to more straight sets.  Do 2 or 3 progressively heavier sets of 5 reps followed by 2 or 3 sets with the same weight.  Do a training cycle with just that and see how it works.  At that point, once your body has adapted to the training, you can do 5 sets of 5 reps with the same weight on all 5 sets.

     You can also try something such as 5-rep weight ladders after you have accustomed your body to 5 sets of 5 reps.  Let’s say on squats, you do a workout of 5x5 using 135x5, 165x5, 185x5, 205x5, and 225x5.  After you finished your last set with 225, go back down to 185 and repeat your last 3 sets, so you would now do 185x5, 205x5, and 225x5 again.  You can do this for 2 or 3 ladders.  The beauty of this method is that you get in more work but only a few sets that are really hard with the 225, allowing you to build up your work capacity while still managing fatigue.  Let’s say that this is your squat workout for the day: 135x5, 165x5, 185x5, 205x5, 225x5, 185x5, 205x5, 225x5, 185x5, 205x5, and 225x5.  That’s 11 sets of 5 reps but only 3 of them are “hard.”  That is the kind of training that you do to build up your work capacity and manage fatigue. 

     When you are finished with the squats, then move on to either a pull or a press.  If you plan on doing both in the workout, then start with the pulls.  If you select a quick lift for your pull, such as power cleans or snatches, then work up to a heavy triple or double.  If you choose deadlifts, then it’s fine to stick with 5-rep sets, though you don’t have to—deadlift training responds really well to triples and doubles, as well.  When starting out, however, make sure that you do the same kind of training for one training cycle.  So, similar to the squats, you might do 3 progressively heavier sets of 5 reps, followed by 2 to 4 progressively heavier triples or doubles.  After one training cycle, you can then start using some straight sets.  Again, weight ladders work really well for pull training, especially when training with triples, doubles, or even singles.

     Speaking of singles, let’s discuss them for a moment.  Part of what you must discover for yourself is how frequently you should train with max, or near-max, singles.  Some lifters can do them once every few weeks.  I’ve even known a few powerlifters who did well by working up to a near max every-other-week on one of the three powerlifts.  Other lifters can only handle them about once every couple months.  And others are going to be somewhere in between those two extremes.  After a couple of training cycles of higher reps, start off with working up to a near max single just once every 4 weeks.  If it works, then stick with that system for a few training cycles.  If you find yourself struggling on those days, you might want to consider doing them only once every 8 weeks.  If, however, it does work well for you, then you might want to try adding in more frequent singles.  Also, on some lifts you might be able to max out more frequently than others.  Generally, lifters can handle more single-rep training on squats, overhead movements, and quick lifts, while deadlifts should be trained less frequently, and benching movements somewhere in between the two.

     After the heavy pulls, either move on to presses or simply call it quits.  Maybe you had a great workout, but you also want to return to the gym the next day and do your presses.  If you can’t make it to the gym the next day, then do the presses at this workout.  Whether it’s in the same workout or the next day, do the same kind of workout with the presses—5 to 8 progressively heavier sets of 5s, triples, and/or doubles, weight ladders if you find you respond well to them and you need to increase your work capacity, and singles on occasion.

     If you decide to split your sessions, then I would start by doing a 2-on, 1-off schedule.  In the first workout, do the squats and pulls.  In the 2nd workout, do presses and follow it up with either an upper body pull (chins or rows) or a curl.  You can also just do presses at the 2nd session and nothing else.  If you know that you might have a hard time making it to the gym that frequently, then just stick with full-body workouts.  For the full-body route, train on a 1-on, 2-off schedule until your body adapts to the training, then you can go with either 3 days per week of training or train on a 1-on, 1-off, 1-on, 2-off schedule.  So, you might train Monday, Wednesday, and Saturday the first week, then Monday, Thursday, and Saturday in the 2nd, and then Tuesday, Thursday, and Sunday in the 3rd week, and so on.

     This is going to sound a little “odd” at first glance when you read what I’m about to write, but I’ve found it to be true.  Lifters who respond well to higher volume do best by training with full-body workouts.  So, a “high-volume lifter” might be better training 3 days per week on a full-body session that includes the squat, the bench press, the power clean, the military press, and the barbell curl, all with the kind of training I’ve discussed so far.  On the other hand, the “low-volume lifter” will do better on the split regimen.  If you find that you’re fatigued after doing a squat, a pull, and an overhead press, then stop there and come back to the gym the next day for some benches and curls, but don’t do any more work on any of the lifts than what you would do on a full-body routine.  This goes counter to the common recommendation that the so-called “hardgainer” should do full-body workouts and the “easy gainer” should do split sessions.  I have found that there aren’t really easy gainers and hardgainers—some lifters do gain muscle easier than others, that’s true, but it’s best to “frame” it in a different manner—but, rather, there are “higher volume” lifters and “lower volume” lifters.  By utilizing a 3 days per week, full-body program, the higher volume guys get great results.  Conversely, the lower volume lifters do better by simply splitting the workout into 2 sessions and training on a 2-on, 1-off schedule, which actually means less training frequency, not more.  You won’t know which lifter you are until you put all of this information into practice at the gym.

     As you advance in your training—increasing your strength, gaining muscle, and increasing your work capacity—you will begin to understand whether you should do more or less as far as both frequency is concerned and the amount of work you do in the gym.  As I’m fond of saying, however, more isn’t always better but it usually is.  I know this goes counter to the common gym mentality, but I have found it to be more and more true the longer that I train and work with other lifters.  Having written that, however, there is still quite a discrepancy between individual lifters as far as just how much one should do.  Generally, though, lifters that respond well to 3 days of full-body workouts to start will eventually want to go to a 2-way split and train 5 or 6 days per week and the low-volume lifters that do well at the outset on a 2-on, 1-off regimen will eventually want to move to a 3-on 1-off (or something similar) while still splitting their workouts into just 2 sessions.

     After a few training cycles, you also might want to experiment with multiple sets of low reps—8 straight sets of 5 reps or 10 sets of 3 reps are the two that I suggest most often.  Don’t do this until you are ready for it.  A couple of training cycles of 5x5 workouts, in whatever guise you do them, should be enough to prepare you for it.  I have workout programs galore that use multiple sets of low reps, so scour the blog and find something that you think you would enjoy and that fits the goals you are seeking.

     Lifting really is an art.  It’s also a journey.  It’s time to start your journey, craft your art, and learn the lifting skills needed to succeed.  A lifetime of training joy awaits you.

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