Heavy, Light, and Medium Workouts

 A "Both/And" Approach to Training

     We often live in a world of dichotomies, juxtapositions, and sometimes the downright oxymoronic.  Despite the obviousness, however, of the “yin/yang” of our world, we, as people, tend to take an “either/or” approach to life.  This is especially so in the worlds of bodybuilding, strength training, and, really, just general fitness and health.  It’s either high-volume with a lot of sets and reps or “high-intensity” with brief, incredibly hard workouts.  Or it’s Carnivore and other high-fat, animal-forward diets versus vegan and high-carb, incredibly low-fat diets.  To paraphrase Kipling, East is East and West is West, and never shall the ‘twain meet.  But the problem is that’s simply not the way of things.

     Good religions, philosophies, and theologies always take a “both/and” approach to things.  I once asked a priest what he thought defined a “heresy” as opposed to just some muddled, wrong—but not necessarily heretical—thinking.  He thought about it briefly, and then, paraphrasing (he would later tell me) from a particular theologian, said, “A heresy is anytime that you take a partial truth and make it the absolute truth.”  In other words, truth is “both/and” not “either/or” or “this/not that.”  (Based on that definition, I would say that we have a lot of nutritional/training “heretics” in our gyms and on a lot of spaces on the internet.)  Or, in Star Wars vernacular, “only the Sith deal in absolutes.”

     Perhaps later on, at some point on this blog, I will cover some other “both/and” training and nutrition aspects than what we will cover here, but for now I want to focus on an “either/or” mentality—what we could also call a “do this/never do that” mentality—that seems to affect the vast majority of lifters, bodybuilders, and trainees.  I’m talking about workout “intensity” (and here I’m using “intensity” as it’s used by modern bodybuilders; being how “hard” you train) and the fact that most modern lifters too often fall into an “all-or-nothing” mindset.  But that’s decidedly not a “both/and” approach.

     A whole lot of modern trainees—and this seems to affect bodybuilders more than any other subset of our gym population, but it absolutely is a “problem” among almost every subset—think that they either must train as hard as they can, or they might as well not lift at all.  It’s an all-or-nothing, everything-or-bust approach that prevents a lot of lifters (and, yep, just average gym-goers) from achieving the results they really desire.  And, just like bad theology, it doesn’t reflect the reality of the world that we live in, multitudinous and diverse as it is.

     Part of the reason for this everything-or-nothing approach is because these average gym-goers (doubtful that these would be regular readers of this blog, but I think it’s a mentality of modern American gym culture that really does affect everyone, even those who should know better) think that a “good” workout is mainly constituted by how “hard” or “tiring” the workout is/was.  If you think that a “good” workout means that you sweat a lot, or it’s painful, or it pushes you to physical exhaustion, you are probably confused about how to really go about getting the results you want.  I often refer to this as letting the means justify the ends, whatever-the-hell those ends are, as opposed to—the way a good workout program should be designed—letting the ends justify the means.  Because if you’re simply training as hard as you can, and then letting your body rest long enough—however long that might be—before training incredibly hard again at the next session, then repeating the process, you may get good results (if you’re one of the body types that actually responds to that sort of training) but you may very well not achieve good results (I think most lifters do not).  In fact, almost everyone reading this would probably get the best results by alternating between hard (heavy) workouts, moderate (medium) workouts, and light, or active recovery, sessions.

     We’ll get around to what these workouts might look like shortly.  First, I’ll briefly mention another group of lifters who can also be guilty of this “either/or” thinking but, believe it or not, from the almost opposite perspective.  There are some lifters who actually think you should never push it really hard, but should make almost every single workout “moderate.”  And, yes, I do recommend some programs that use only “moderate” workouts (any easy strength program of Pavel Tsatsouline’s or Dan John’s “40-day workout” fit the bill here, for instance) but these programs aren’t meant to be “forever” programs.  Like most programs, they are meant to be used for about 6 weeks before moving onto something else.  And for 6 weeks, they really work.  Hell, they might just work better for strength for a short period of time than just about anything else.  But so do the “H.I.T.” programs of Arthur Jones, Ellington Darden, and Dr. Ken Leistner when it comes to hypertrophy.  In fact, if you spent months, or even years, grinding away at high-volume, multi-split routines, but to little avail, and then you do a H.I.T. program for the first time ever, you will probably get such great results that you may even come to believe that you’ve stumbled upon the “Holy Grail” of training (as many have believed before you).  But then after 6 weeks, your results grind to such a sudden halt that you wonder what on God’s green earth has happened.  But that’s the problem with “either/or” programs or approaches.  They often work really well when first attempted, but those results can never be duplicated again.  Like ever.  Instead, what will work at that point is H.I.T. occasionally, combined with a high-volume approach (the “both”), but also combined with several other methods (the “and”).

Some Heavy, Light, and Medium Approaches to Training

     With that little intro out of the way, let’s get around to the practical: what some approaches to training might look like incorporating both heavy sessions, light sessions, and medium sessions.  First, I’m not necessarily talking here about the “Heavy/Light/Medium” system of training created by Bill Starr, and then used by lifters such as me.  That’s one way to approach this—and it probably is the best approach for the lifter just venturing into this territory of training—but there are some other approaches (and just general ideas) that I want to discuss here.  Now, having said that the first approach we will start with is Bill Starr’s style of training.

Bill Starr’s Training System

     All lifters, when first they start out, should begin on a 3-days-per-week, full-body program.  I don’t care if you want to grace the Mr. Olympia stage one day, or win the World’s Strongest Man competition, or compete in the upper echelons of powerlifting, everyone should start on a full-body, 3x weekly training program.  Once you start to gain muscle, get stronger, and become more advanced, however, you will probably find it hard to recover and give your all and your everything to each workout session.  This is usually the point where lifters either go to a split workout program or start taking extra days off between sessions—both of which, of course, can be viable options.  But I don’t think—and Starr certainly didn’t—that those are the best options.  No, the best option is to rotate between heavy, light, and medium workouts.

     I have multiple posts and articles here at Integral Strength that cover this in more detail.  (And if you want even more on the genius that was Bill Starr, read my recent article “The Strongest Shall ALWAYS Survive.”)  Here I will just go over the basics.

     Heavy, light, and medium in Starr’s system is based on the total workload for each workout, not how “heavy” you actually train.  In fact, as you get more advanced on his system, you will often train the “heaviest” on the Medium day.  The easiest way to use this system, at least when first doing it, is to use somewhere between 50-75% (of your Heavy day workload) on your Light day, then use somewhere between 80-90% on the Medium day.  Also, at first, you should probably stick with the same exercises on each training day (with the exception of the deadlift if you’re utilizing it; it’s simply too much on your lower back to work the conventional deadlift 3x weekly).  After a while, however, you can start determining workload based on what exercises you employ.  If you squatted, bench pressed, and deadlifted on your Heavy day, then you could use overhead squats, power cleans, and barbell (or dumbbell) overhead presses on your Light day, and no matter how damn hard you train on the Light day, there’s no way that you will be able to use more than 75% of your Heavy day workload.  For the Medium day, pick exercises that would fall somewhere between those two, which means it might be front squats, stiff-legged deadlifts, and incline bench presses.

     Even if you decide not to use Starr’s approach after reading this, the one thing I want you to take away from his methodology is this: determine heavy, light, or medium based on total workload for that day and apply that to any program where you are utilizing varying days of intensity.  Anything that follows here takes this approach.

The Texas Method

     The Texas Method—developed, I believe, by Mark Rippetoe, but don’t hold me to that—is very similar to Starr’s H/L/M system.  In it, you also have a “heavy,” “light,” and “medium” day, but they’re not called this.  If you train, say, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, instead of the days being heavy (Monday), light (Wednesday), and medium (Friday), they are volume (Monday), active recovery (Wednesday) and intensity (Friday).  I’m not an expert on this method, so I’ll just leave it right there, but there are plenty of websites on the internet that can explain how to “do” the Texas Method.  Probably the best of those is Rippetoe’s “Starting Strength” site.  (Although I did create a sort of pseudo-offshoot of it one time called “Texas Volume Training” that I still think is pretty damn good.)

The 3-On, 2-Off Method

     Here’s a way that I often train.  I don’t think I’ve written about it before now.  (I usually “test drive” any program myself for a few months—or have a couple of other lifters much younger than I do so—before committing myself to writing about it.)

     The gist here is that you train for 3-days-straight, and each workout is a “whole body” workout, although the exercises can change each day.  On the first day you do 5 exercises for 3 to 5 sets each (you want to push it more toward the 5 sets if possible) and you push each exercise hard.  On the 2nd day, you do 4 exercises for 3 to 5 sets each (4 sets being most ideal, probably), and don’t train quite as hard as on Day 1, but still “push it” somewhat.  And then, on the 3rd day, you do only 2 or 3 exercises for 3 sets each, training not quite as hard as the 2nd day.  After that, you take off a couple of days—relax, take walks, do some yoga or tai chi, but nothing at all strenuous—to recover from the 3 days straight of training.  Then repeat.

     Here is what an example program might look like:

Day One (Heavy):

• Squats: 5 sets of 5 reps

• Bench Presses: 5 sets of 5 reps

• Power Cleans: 5 sets of 3 reps

• Sumo Deficit Deadlifts: 5 sets of 3 reps

• Barbell Curls: 5 sets of 5 reps

Day Two (Medium):

• Squats: 4 sets of 5 reps

• Barbell Overhead Presses: 4 sets of 5 reps

• Power Snatches: 4 sets of 2 reps

• Weighted Chins: 4 sets of 5 reps

Day Three (Light):

• Overhead Squats: 3 sets of 5 reps

• Weighted Dips: 3 sets of 5 reps

     Take days four and five completely off from resistance training, but feel free to do the other aforementioned things aplenty on your two off days.  After that, repeat using the same heavy/medium/light approach.  You can either stick with the exact same program for another cycle or two, or, especially if you qualify as an “advanced” lifter, change exercises every 5-day-cycle.  When it comes to exercise selection, just remember: same but different.

Applying the Heavy, Light, Medium Approach to ALL Training Methods and Systems

     The three example programs above are just that: examples.  The “key” I believe is to learn this “line of attack” on any training system.  And, to be honest, the truth is that a lot of great lifters and bodybuilders stumble upon this way of training through trial-and-error.

     Perhaps the best example of this—whether the majority of readers know this or not—is the “Silver Era” or “Golden Age” of classic bodybuilding training.  Actually, I didn’t know this until I was speaking to Jeff Everson (may he rest-in-peace) one evening.  Over ten years ago, when I was writing regularly for Planet Muscle Magazine, I got a call from Everson one night.  (Everson, by the way, was the coolest publisher I ever worked for.  He would call me out of the blue some evenings—Everson could be a little “quirky,” and would do spontaneous things such as this, which is why I liked him—to discuss upcoming articles.  Sometimes, he would also send me supplements in the mail to “test drive,” and then call me up to see what I thought about them.)  Anyway, he called me this time because he thought my “view” (in an article I had just sent him) of the training of bodybuilders from the Silver and Golden eras was slightly “wrong.”  (He didn’t say that, exactly, but he did come close.)  He was adamant that the training of bodybuilders such as Arnold and Franco—I think he used them as his example, but my memory could be mistaken—as it was presented in old articles was a bit disingenuous.  He said that although these bodybuilders did train with upwards of 20 sets-per-bodypart 3x-per-week, they didn’t train heavy or “all-out” at each session.  Having watched them train, he said their first workout of the week was a tough, hard session.  But he said their 2nd workout of the week was more of an active recovery session, where they may have done 20 sets, but everything was for half the weight of what was used in their first workout.  Then he said that their 3rd session would often fall somewhere in-between the other two (in terms of workload and “intensity”).  As soon as he relayed this to me, I thought that it made perfect sense.  And I wondered why I hadn’t “realized” that of my own accord before our conversation.

     So try your best to emulate the old-time bodybuilders, and apply this to whatever training “split” or program that you are currently using.

     Another technique is to apply this to weeks of training, not days.  During my years of powerlifting, for instance, I found the best results were obtained by doing a week of sort of “moderate” training, followed by a week of hard training, followed by a week of extremely hard training, and then follow that up with a week of “active recovery” workouts.  Once again, this is nothing new on my part.  It, in fact, is pretty much exactly what Starr recommended in his writings.  Here is how it looks “on paper”:

Week One - Moderate training intensity

Week Two - Hard training intensity

Week Three - Incredibly hard training intensity

Week Four - Active recovery workouts only

     I could give more examples, but have a feeling that this article has gone on long enough.  As usual, if there are any questions, leave them in the “comments” section below or, even better, email me and I will get back in touch with you as soon as possible.  (If you have a point-of-view or a comment that you think will help other readers, however, leave them in the “comments” section.)

     No matter what you take away from this, the one thing most important is to not have an all-or-nothing mentality, or a “herd” mentality, we might say.  Apply the “Both/And” approach to all aspects of your training (and your life, for that matter) and you will be better off for it.