Training Days (or Training Nights)

Occasional All-Day Training Challenges for New Gains in Size and Strength

     In his book The Education of a Bodybuilder, Arnold Schwarzenegger discussed the fact that, on occasion, he and a training partner would take some weights into the woods and do endless sets of squats or other exercises.  He said the first time they did this bit of insanity, he did something like 55 sets of high-rep squats with 250 pounds, and couldn’t walk correctly for over a week.  He said it became a regular part of his training at the time.  Eventually, it turned into several workout partners, women who would come along for some lovemaking, grilled meats for an all-night barbecue, and an endless amount of beer and/or wine-drinking.  If I remember correctly, they would even swim naked in lakes and carry on as if they were gladiators or Vikings from centuries ago.  When I read that as a teenager, crazy as I might have thought it to be, it also sounded like pure bodybuilding Valhalla—weights, wine and women; what wasn’t to love?

     I still think it, or something similar, is a pretty good idea.  Oh, you can subtract the wine and the women if you want (not that you have to, mind you), but occasional days—or nights, in Arnold’s case—devoted entirely to training can have a beneficial effect on your gains.

     The fact is that our bodies need challenges at different times to spur on further progress.  Strength coach Dan John has this to say on this very subject: “Without challenges the human body will soften.  We thrive when we push our boundaries, reach goals, and blast personal records.  We perform better, we look better, and we feel alive.  Get this straight: you’re either progressing or regressing.  There is no maintenance phase.  Moderation in training can easily turn into stagnation.  If we want to improve, we have to seek out new challenges, struggle and win.”

     Now, let’s get something else straight, too: you shouldn’t make the entirety of your training about challenges.  They are meant to be used rather sparingly, maybe once-per-week if you’re training “reasonable” for the rest of the week.  Sometimes they’re even good for a period of training lasting no more than 3 or 4 weeks.  That above quote from John, for example, comes from his article “The 10,000 Kettlebell Swing Workout.”  It involves 20 hard-as-hell kettlebell swing workouts.  Once the program’s finished, however, and you’ve completed all 20 workouts over approximately a month—the actual length will depend on if you train 4 or 5 days in a week—then you go back to your sane, reasonable workouts.

     Conversely, challenges can be done for entire days so long as you do this sort of Arnold-inspired craziness only once every 3 to 4 weeks.  What follows are some all-day (or night) programs you can follow if you decide that you want a really hard challenge only once every 3 to 4 weeks.  I’m sure that some lifters can get away with doing these a little more frequently, but be careful not to overdo it.

Gene Mozee’s Rust-Busting One-Day Blitz

     When I was stuck in a muscle-gaining plateau when I was younger—as in 1991—I came across an article in IronMan magazine by the legendary bodybuilding trainer and writer Gene Mozee.  It was called “Plateau Busters.”  It had a routine that he recommended—which didn't bust me out of my plateau; it was simply too much volume for me at the time.  (Later, however, I would use such high-volume routines with a great deal of success; I just didn’t have a strong enough of a work capacity in ‘91.)  But the same article also contained a "One-Day Blitz" that Mozee recommended for those trainees stuck in a bad rut.

     And the one-day "cure" did work.

     This is what Mozee had to say about the program:

     "Here is a tough but highly effective routine that you can use occasionally to jolt stubborn muscles into new growth.  If you are doing whole-body workouts three days a week, as most average trainees do, once every two weeks is as much as you can handle of this exercise barrage.  Advanced intermediate trainees will  get best results on the same schedule.  Highly advanced trainees can do it more often, say once a week.  Either way, it will help you smash through a no-progress slump."

     Mozee always recommended a high amount of volume, especially for advanced lifters.  But, even if you are advanced, I would stay away from doing this as frequently as Mozee recommended.  Once every 3 weeks should be plenty for even the most advanced lifters/bodybuilders.

     Here’s the program:

10 a.m. workout

Incline presses   4x10

Leg presses   4x10

Long-pulley rows   4x10

Dumbbell presses   4x10

Preacher curls   4x10

Dumbbell triceps extensions   4x10

1 p.m. workout

Barbell bench presses   4x5

Squats   4x5

Barbell rows   4x5

Behind-the-neck presses   4x5

Barbell curls   4x5

Skullcrushers   4x5

4 p.m. workout

Flat-bench flyes   3x15

Hack squats   3x15

Lat pulldowns   3x15

Lateral raises   3x15

Incline dumbbell curls   3x15

Rope pushdowns   3x15

     Here are my tips for getting the most out of this program if you decide to give it a try:

• This program works the best if you are currently performing a three-days-per-week, full-body workout (which is what Mozee recommended in his original article).  Let's say you train Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and plan on using this on Saturday.  On your Friday session, either take the day off or—and I think this is even better—perform a "light" workout where you use about half of the weight from the Monday workout on all lifts.

• You will get even better results from your Saturday blitz if, on Friday, you do little other than rest aside from your Friday workout.

• Eat a lot of calories daily in the week leading up to this workout.

• This is a mass-building program.  It should not be used by anyone who is currently trying to get ripped, or is on a diet that has one in a caloric-deficit.

• Always take the day off after completing this one-day blitz, even if you are following a split training program when you attempt it.

• It really works well if you are performing extremely low reps in the workouts leading up to it.  For instance, if you're performing a three-days-per-week, full-body routine, consider using triples, doubles, and singles on all workouts that week.  Your Monday and Wednesday workouts can be fairly "intense", but drop the weight way down for the Friday workout, even while maintaining the triples, doubles, or singles.

• At each session, do a couple of warm-up sets for each exercise.

• On the day of your blitz, eat your first meal about 8am, and not much later.  As soon as you finish the first workout, eat another meal.

• Eat immediately after your 1pm and 4pm workouts, as well.  Eat two more meals following the meal after your 4pm session.

• When the day of the blitz is over, you should have consumed 6 meals.

• The last three meals of the day should be the highest in calories, and the total amount of calories consumed should be higher than your average days during the rest of the week, even if you already consume 6 meals a day.

• Use this blitz three or four times over the course of a training cycle before you deem it either a success or failure.

• If possible, do no "taxing" activities the day or two following your blitz.

The Squat-All-Day Program

     The great Paul Anderson, legendary strongman and world-champion weightlifter, had an interesting way to build up his squat.  If you’re after more strength and power, then Anderson’s method of training might be something that you should try.  I think it’s really good for more advanced lifters who have sort of hit a wall in their squat poundages.  This technique should get your squat moving again if you’re one of them.

     The basic premise of this is simple.  Simply squat all day.  But Anderson had a particular way to do it.

     To make this work, you really need access to a squat rack that you can utilize during your entire day.  As some people don’t want to live in the gym, I understand that this workout might not be a viable option, but it’s absolutely perfect for any of you who have a squat rack in your garage, barn, or wherever it is that you have your home gym.

     One word of note: as just mentioned, this is best done by advanced lifters, or at the very least, lifters who have already conditioned themselves to quite a bit of squatting.  Do not, under any condition, attempt the following if you don’t already have a very good work capacity on your squat!  You have been warned, so proceed with caution.

     On the day of your training, start by doing ramps and working up to a heavy set of 5 reps.  Once you’ve reached your first hard set of 5, stop.  If you end up squatting 325 for a set of 5, then your ramps should probably look something such as this:

135x5

185x5

225x5

275x5

315x5

     That just happens to be 5 sets, but it could be less sets if you’re not that strong or several more sets if you’re considerably stronger.  Now rest for 30 minutes.  And repeat.  For your next set of ramps, you may not have to start with 135; you might start at 185 or 225.  Work up to another heavy set of 5 reps.  Rest 30 more minutes.  Now work up to a heavy triple using ramps once again.  Start off with 5s, and once those start to get heavy, switch over to triples, and keep doing ramps with 3 reps until you hit a tough triple.  Rest 30 minutes, then repeat for more triples.  Rest 30 minutes, and go for singles, doing ramps of 5s, then triples, then singles.  Stop once you reach a heavy, but not all-out, single.  Rest 30 minutes.  And repeat the ramps of 5s, 3s, and singles.

     At this point, you could stop.  In fact, you might want to do just that the first time you attempt this workout.  But Paul Anderson would’ve continued.  After another 30 minutes, assuming you do continue with this madness, start doing partial squats in the rack, working up with ramps of 5s, 3s, then singles.  Stop once you reach a heavy single, the same as you just did with the full-range squats.  Rest 30 minutes.  And repeat.  At this point, if you want to continue going, then rest another 30 minutes, and utilize the same method as the partials, but move to lockout squats, doing only the very top of the movement.

     If you decide to attempt this method, then take off entirely the next day, getting plenty of sleep, rest, and eating as much food as possible.  Like the workout that preceded it, this one ain’t for guys trying to stay lean.  It’s for those of you looking to get big and strong.  Trust me, you’ll need the calories.

The All-Day Bodyweight Blitz

     If you want something decidedly less intense than the Anderson-inspired mayhem above, this idea might be just your ticket.  It’s also good for those of you who are trying to get lean and are in a daily caloric deficit.

     Also, I think my suggestion here is actually best followed by those of you who don’t train with primarily bodyweight exercises on a regular basis.  For instance, I use bodyweight training as part of my training, but never for some extremely high reps, the way that some trainees do who use almost exclusively bodyweight training in their programs.  If you mainly train using bodyweight exercises, while you might still want to try these tips for regular workouts, they probably won’t be as effective for you simply because you’re already doing something similar to this.

     That’s one of the keys to making these challenge workouts, all of them, work.  You need to do something that is quite a bit different from your usual training in order to elicit the biggest response from challenges.

     For this method, pick one, maybe even two, exercise(s) and do a hard, but not maximum set, every 30 minutes or every hour.  How often should depend on how well conditioned to the exercises that you already are because you’re going to do this for the entire day.

     Start as soon as you wake up, and don’t stop until a few hours before you go to bed.  So if you wake up at 7AM on training day, and go to bed at 11PM, start doing your first set(s) as soon as you wake.  Set a timer—I set mine on my phone if I use this technique—for 30 minutes to an hour after you finish each set.  Do a set(s) as soon as that alarm goes off.  Stop doing your sets around 7 or 8PM, long enough for your nervous system to sort of “normalize.”  Otherwise, you may have a tough time going to bed at night.  Sometimes, all-day training can make you very tired but, oddly, not very sleepy.  If you’ve ever been “too tired to sleep,” then that’s the feeling that I’m discussing.

     Choose an exercise—or exercises, if it’s two that you go with—that works a bodypart or a lift that is lagging behind in your more conventional barbell/dumbbell-centric workouts.  If legs are your weak bodypart, then bodyweight squats are clearly the appropriate choice.  If you already have a large, well-developed pair of chest and shoulders, then push-ups probably shouldn’t be your choice.  But they most definitely should be if those are your lagging bodyparts.

     Wherever movement you choose, do one set of the exercise(s) but stop when the set gets tough.  Don’t go to all-out failure, and, conversely, don’t make the set too easy.  You need to push yourself but not too much.  This is a standard “grease-the-groove” way of building up a bodyweight movement, whether it’s bodyweight squats, push-ups, chins, walking lunges, or dips, or whatever else you may want to try.  Hell, it could be handstand push-ups if you can do them.

     As with the heavy-as-heck Anderson squat workout, take off the next day, or, at the least, only do an active recovery workout.  And even if you’re dieting, make sure that you consume enough calories and protein on both the training day and the next day.

Beer, Barbecue, and Training Buds

     It’s always good to have a group of lifters that you can get together with for an occasional entire day of training.

     When I was competing in powerlifting, I had a couple of regular training partners—which is always a good idea as long as you can find dedicated ones—but I also would get together, on occasion, with my training partners and two or three other guys.  We would lift weights for a few hours, then drink beer and have a large barbecue.  Just for fun, we would often start drinking before our training session was over, but even once we were finished with our workout, and were pigging out on, well, pig—though it was sometimes burgers or steaks—we would still do some challenges throughout the evening.  Since alcohol was involved, it wasn’t something that could hurt us, or not hurt us too much.  This meant squats were out of the equation, or even bench presses, since you need some ability to properly balance your body on heavy benches.  We would typically do either some kind of loaded carry—farmer walks, sandbag carries, sled drags were our most common movements—or maybe even some heavy deadlifts.  Also, we typically did some sort of full-body workout to start the evening and that itself would last two, or even three, hours, so we would end up training for 5 or 6 hours.

     It was a blast.  We would usually do it once every three or four weeks, typically the culmination of a heavy week of training.  At the time, I would rotate between weeks of light, medium or heavy training loads, and these kinds of sessions were perfect at the end of a “heavy” week.

     Our very inspiration was the Arnold story that began this essay.  It wasn’t quite as wild as what Arnold and his partners did.  I was, after all, married at the time with young kids and a full-time job, so we usually saved these challenges for a Friday or Saturday night.  Most of the lifters I trained with were married with kids, too, so it was sort of a kinder, gentler, family version of Arnold’s insanity.

     We always started in the evening, but these are also great for Saturday or Sunday afternoons.  Even if you don’t have a home gym the way I did, everyone can bring over some weights—dumbbells and kettlebells travel well—or some various implements—stones, heavy hammers, sandbags, barrels, or kegs are all good choices—that the group can experiment with.

     Get creative.  And have fun.  That’s the key.

Final Thoughts

     In the mid ‘90s, my training partner Dusty and I did attempt to replicate, almost exactly, Arnold’s method.  We took the two girls we were dating down to a local park that had a pond you could swim in.  We brought along beer in a cooler, and a portable little charcoal grill for cooking some brats and burgers.  The workout itself went fine, but let’s just say it didn’t go exactly as well as it had for Arnold.  A plethora of swarming mosquitoes and other insects, snakes swimming in the pond, and our girlfriends’ fear of what else was swimming in the water put a damper on it.  I was the only one that ended up skinny-dipping, and even I didn’t last long since some small fish—probably nothing more than minnows—kept nipping at my, well, how should I put this… anyway, I’ll just leave it at that.

     Maybe Arnold’s method was madness, but his idea is still as sound as ever.  Give one of these all-day training challenges a try.  You, and your muscles, will be glad that you did.