Hard, Moderate, and Easy…

 

…but Moderate Most of the Time

The great Tommy Kono, the inspiration for this essay

Programming Made Simple

     The legendary Tommy Kono—an Olympic gold-medalist in weightlifting and Mr. Universe; you don’t see that any-damn-more—believed in following the “American” system of weight training.  In the ‘60s (Tommy won the gold medal at the Olympics in ‘52 and ‘56; the silver medal at the ‘60 Games) he believed that too many American lifters were attempting to follow the Soviet-style (also used by the Cubans) that involved meticulously planning exactly what one was going to lift each day, and using a high-volume of training with multiple auxiliary movements (think of this as similar to Westside “conjugate” training today) or lifters of that era were following the Bulgarian style of heavy, daily maximal training.  And by the “American” system of training, Kono meant following simple, basic workout programs that rotated between hard, easy, and moderate workouts.  The majority of workouts should be moderate.  It must be noted that Kono would also do a few weeks of bodybuilding training after 6 weeks of strength workouts.  By the way, 2 weeks of “pump” training after 6 weeks of intense strength workouts isn’t such a bad idea for anyone reading this.

     If you’ve read any of my material before, then you know that I’m absolutely a fan of all things “Russian.”  I got the best results of my entire life by following a “Sheiko-style” training plan, and it’s what allowed me to squat and deadlift over 600 pounds in the 181-lb class.  But I think Kono is correct.  Sheiko worked for me because I was already an “elite” powerlifter before I started using those methods.  The Russian style of training also requires that you focus on that and absolutely nothing else.  But I think most lifters reading this would do better by following Kono’s advice.  Save the ultra-high volume, high-intensity stuff for brief periods throughout the year—perhaps for no more than 2 or 3 months, or when you’re prepping for a weightlifting or powerlifting meet; it will work wonders then—and the rest of the year follow more of the kind of training advice I’m going to offer here.

     This approach works well whether you’re after muscle mass, strength-only, or a combination of both.

     The problem with most American lifters is that they don’t follow this “American” system.  Hell, to be honest, a lot of gym-goers don’t follow any system at all.  The issue is that usually lifters want to go hard all the time.  Our modern gym culture believes that a workout is “good” if you sweated a lot, or if you’ve reached a point of exhaustion, or if you got an intense muscle burn.  But none of that is necessarily indicative of a good workout session.  It’s what I often refer to as “letting the means justify the ends.”  Modern lifters go to the gym, do a hard-as-hell workout, then see what kind of results they get from it.  But that’s not programming.  That’s not effective training.  To get good results—the kind you’re really after—you must let the “ends” (the results you want from your training) justify the “means” (the workouts themselves).

     Lifters I’ve trained, or lifters that have trained with me, have often complained (at least at first) that my programs were too “easy.”  Multiple sets of low reps, resting plenty between sets, and stopping a few reps shy of failure seem almost baffling to them because they had been brainwashed into thinking that harder is always better.  But they always stopped complaining after a few weeks when they hit personal bests on their lifts or when they seemed to pack on muscle almost overnight.

     Okay, back to the title of this essay and the main thing that I want to talk about: how to easily program your workouts.  (In many ways, this short essay is nothing more than an addendum to my last post “How to Design a Full-Body Workout Program.”)  In that essay, I mentioned that you have two options when it comes to full-body workouts performed 3 days a week.  You can either train each week with a heavy, light, medium system, but what might best be thought of as a “hard, light, moderate,” system for lifters interested more in hypertrophy than strength.  (If you don’t want to think “hypertrophy,” then just think “aesthetics,” as I have a feeling that the vast majority of lifters in American gyms—male or female, doesn’t matter—simply want to look better.)  Or you can simply train “moderate” the majority of the time.  I think this 2nd option is probably the best route for the majority of lifters.  You don’t have to train moderate all the time, but it should be the de facto “system” used the bulk (pun intended) of the time.

     I also wrote in my previous essay how I think this might very well have been the “secret” of old-time lifters who followed full-body workouts.  When I first read the workouts of some of the lifters from the ‘30s, ‘40s, and ‘50s, I certainly thought that their programs contained too much work.  I had been exposed to brief but hard workouts in the pages of (primarily) IronMan magazine, the kind pushed by the likes of Ellington Darden, Mike Mentzer, and Arthur Jones (pretty much the founder of “H.I.T”), along with the Randall Strossen in his book “Super Squats,” which also promoted brief full-body workouts, but also ones that were incredibly hard.  And, so, I just assumed, upon first reading the workouts of many of the old-school bodybuilders, that they must have trained that hard, as well.  But I don’t believe now, with quite a bit of hindsight and perhaps a little bit of training wisdom under my belt, that is how most of the old-timers actually trained.  I think they, for the most part, stopped most of their sets well short of failure, at least until they built up the work capacity and muscular endurance to handle those sorts of sets.

     Another writer for IronMan throughout the ‘70s, ‘80s, and, yes, the ‘90s (when I first started writing for the magazine) was Bradley Steiner, a definite proponent of full-body, 3-days-per-week workouts, but one who didn’t believe in training as hard as the aforementioned writers.  But I believe that his way of training was the key to how most old-school bodybuilders lifted.  Here are some words from Steiner about what he considered to be the “indicators” as to whether or not a lifter was training correctly:

• You feel comfortably and pleasantly tired when your workout session is done.  You feel as if your mind and body have been renewed.

• You feel energetic—not as if you have the strength to train again, but as if you'd do it again if you could.

• You feel positive about your training.  You're deeply satisfied with the session you've just finished.

• You're buoyant, almost high, about an hour later.

• You're relaxed when it's time to go to bed.  You sleep deeply and well, and you feel good when you wake the next morning.

• You feel absolutely super on the day following a good workout.

• When you train right, you enjoy it.

• When you train correctly, you find that you make steady progress.

• And, finally, you feel exhilarated, not exhausted—and that's a good way to feel.

     I think that last line about being exhilarated instead of exhausted is the best indicator.  If you feel that way at the end of your training session, then there’s a good chance that the remainder of Steiner’s indicators will be in place.

     As Arthur Jones also once said, “You can either train long or you can train hard, but you can’t do both.”  Jones, of course, thought that training “hard” was the better option, but I’m not so sure about that.  But, perhaps, training “long” isn’t the better option either—though I have, to be honest, always been a fan of it over the “hard” option.  No, perhaps the best option is to train somewhere in between.  Moderate may not be the popular choice.  It’s definitely not the “sexiest” option.  But it just might be the best.