Light Workouts

 

How to Utilize Light Workouts for More Strength, Power, Mass, and All-Around Athleticism

     When it comes to “things that confuse the average lifter,” I think it’s possible that the light-day concept takes the cake.  A lot of lifters either never train with light days or they don’t know how to properly utilize and implement them.  In this essay, I would like to explain the correct implementation of light days—this information can be used by a variety of lifters, whether you’re a powerlifter, a bodybuilder, a competitive athlete, a fighter, or just an all-around fitness enthusiast.  Most of the ideas that will be presented here are not my own, I must admit, but are culled from the wisdom of strength coaches or bodybuilding writers (from bygone eras) such as Bill Starr, Tommy Suggs, Bradley Steiner, and John McCallum.  (It must also be noted that there is a decided “Russian” influence on my lifting philosophy, as well—not just here but in most of my writing.)

     Okay, let’s get to it.

     The idea of doing a light lifting session after a heavy one is nothing new—as evident by the various writers I just mentioned.  Bill Starr, in an article many years ago for IronMan magazine, wrote that both Joe Weider and Bob Hoffman attempted to take credit for light-day training in the ‘60s.  The two early bodybuilding media moguls—magazine owners both, and pretty much hated enemies—were always attempting to out-do the other one.  So-called “Weider principles,” for example, had their “York training principle” counterparts (Hoffman founded York Barbell).  None of those principles were created by either man.  Well before Weider or Hoffman were competing for publishing dominance, in the 1930s, Mark Berry outlined the principles of heavy, light, and medium training in his book Physical Training Simplified.  And Berry, to his credit, didn’t claim to come up with the light-day concept, either.  It had been used by the majority of “bronze era” lifters before his writings.

     Some lifters don’t believe light training days to be necessary.  These lifters generally just believe in training as hard as possible, resting plenty between each training session, then only training again when the muscle(s)—or the entire body—is sufficiently recovered.  While I concede that it’s true such an approach may allow you to have plenty of energy at each session and may allow you to train heavy at each session, it doesn’t provide the means to increase one’s work capacity.  If you’re an athlete, then you must increase your body’s ability to handle more and heavier workloads over the course of a week, a month, and the entire training year.  Although this isn’t as necessary for bodybuilders only interested in aesthetics, I would argue that it’s still the better approach for hypertrophy than just resting a bodypart for a week between each workout.  If, right now, you are a bodybuilder who trains utilizing a multi-bodypart split comprised of a lot of volume and intensity and you only train each bodypart once per week, I think you would see even better results by training each muscle group twice per week where your second session is a light one.  This would permit you to still train as hard, heavy, and use whatever “intensity techniques” you wish for the first session, and then it will allow you to recover better by implementing a 2^nd lighter workout.  Think of the 2^nd workout of the week as an “active recovery” session, and you’re on the right track.

     Many a lifter has stumbled upon the value of light days by sheer accident.  I’ve known more than one lifter who, because of time restraints such as an appointment of some sort or a dinner date, had to cut his training short, only to discover that the following workout, after the abbreviated one, was one of the best workouts in quite some time.  He then makes lighter workouts a regular part of his training, and discovers that his lifts, not to mention his physique, are much improved in a relatively short time.

     When lifters decide to begin using a light day, I’ve noticed one mistake that invariably comes up for most: they do too much work.  This is because they often think of “heavy” or “light” in terms of the amount of weight utilized on their lifts—especially the big lifts such as squats or bench presses—and not in terms of the total workload at each session.  When you begin implementing light workouts, it’s important that you calculate the workload at both the heavy session and the light session to make sure you’re not doing too much on your light days.  I’ve looked at more than one lifter’s program where the “light” day was significantly heavier than the heavy one!  For instance, let’s say you have two bench press sessions per week.  On your heavy day, you lift 225 for 5 sets of 5 reps.  That’s a workload of 5,625 pounds for the lift.  Now, let’s say you do 175 for 4 sets of 10 reps on your light day.  Your light day workload for the lift is 7,000 pounds.  It’s easy to see, when this kind of approach is used, why many lifters give up on “light” workouts and don’t think they work.  Because if you were doing that—or something similar—then you’ll certainly get better results when you return to less frequent, “heavy” only workouts.  Because the example I gave is not heavy/light training, but, rather, heavy/heavier training.

     Obviously, one way to prevent the above from occurring is to keep your sets and reps the same at both workouts but decrease the weight on the light day.  This is exactly what I recommend when lifters first take up light-day training.  As you advance, you can also manipulate your sets or your reps on your light day.  For instance, if you did 225 for 5 sets of 5 reps on your heavy day, you could end up doing something such as 235 for 5 sets of 3 reps on your light day.  Even though the light session is “heavier,” the workload is 2,000 pounds less!  By the way, that’s an excellent way to train for increasing your strength.  On your light day, use a weight that’s heavier, but for less reps or less sets (or both, depending on your work and recovery capacity) and then at the next week’s heavy day, attempt 5 sets of 5 reps with the weight used at the previous week’s light session.  This is the reason, by the way, that on a Bill Starr-style heavy-light-medium system, your medium day is often “heavier” than your heavy day—more weight is utilized but the total workload is less.

    Another way that lifters sabotage their light day is by doing too much on assistance movements.  If you bench 225 for 5 sets of 5 reps on your heavy day, and then 175 for 5 sets of 5 on your light day—so far, so good—but then do a lot of sets of high-rep triceps and shoulder work on the light day, you will often end up with a much higher workload on your light day.  This might just be the most common mistake, by the way, when it comes to light workout sessions.  So, make sure that you look at your workload for your entire workout, assistance movements included, and not just the workload of your big, heavy lifts of the day.

     On average, your light day’s workload should be around 80-85% of the workload from your heavy day.  Any more than that, and it’s too heavy, but much less than that and your light-day workload is simply too light.  A caveat must be noted here, however, if you do high-frequency training that involves training a lift more than two or three times weekly.  In these instances, some of your light days may need to be even less than 80%, even as low as 50% for ultra-high frequency sessions.  In this case, you may have a heavy day on Monday, and a light day on, say, Thursday that is 80% of Monday’s session.  But you could also include even lighter days on, perhaps, Tuesday and Saturday, where you do 50-60% of Monday’s session.

     If I were to design a high-frequency program for the barbell back squat—squats really increase well with high-frequency training—then 5 sets of 5 reps (using 5 progressively heavier sets of 5 reps and not 5 straight sets) done on the above days might look like this:

Monday:

135x5, 175x5, 205x5, 225x5, 250x5

Tuesday:

135x5, 175x5x4 sets

Thursday:

135x5, 175x5, 205x5, 215x5x2 sets

Saturday:

135x5, 175x5x4 sets

     At the following Monday workout, if your final set of 5 goes up, then you increase the weights used at the other workouts accordingly.  This kind of program also works well once you understand how to manipulate sets and rep ranges from week-to-week, but since a lot of that is outside of the purview of this particular essay, just understand that you would adjust other weeks in a similar manner to the above, using roughly the same reps throughout each week.  So, if your heavy day included triples, so would your light days, and so on and so forth.

     Even workout programs where all training days are essentially “light” workouts—any “easy strength” program such as Dan John’s 40-Day Workout or my 30-Rep Program, for example—have days that are heavier and lighter.  With those routines, your reps on each lift (or a muscle group) stays at roughly 10 reps total for all training days.  So, you typically perform 2 sets of 5 reps, but you might also utilize 3 sets of 3 reps, 5 sets of 2 reps (these would be your heavy days), and even 1 set of 10 reps on days when you feel particularly tired.

     Even when they understand and appreciate light-day training, some lifters still don’t like it because they don’t feel as if they’re doing enough in the gym.  I’ve had more than one lifter train under my tutelage and complain that the workouts just don’t feel hard enough.  Now, it must be said, they typically stop complaining about this after a few weeks, when they’re noticeably bigger and stronger through such “easy” lifting.  But some of them still want to be able to get in some harder workout sessions.  When this is an issue, I have an easy solution—and it’s simply, once again, one that I stole from Starr—and it’s to move especially fast through the light sessions, resting little between sets.  If you’re doing an easy strength program or a light-day session where you’re using significantly less weights than on your heavy day, you can rest very little between sets and still get your sets and reps with relative ease.  This is beneficial from a couple of aspects.  First, it’s psychologically beneficial for the lifter, as she finally feels as if she’s getting in a “hard” session.  Second, it improves the lifter’s “strength fitness,” or ability to move quickly through a heavy session.  After doing this on the light days, the lifter soon finds that he can handle shorter rest periods during his heavy days, as well, which is another way to use progressive overload.  Workout density becomes much improved.

     Another approach is to choose harder lifts on your light days that simply don’t allow you to use as much weight as the exercises from your heavy day.  If you do 5 sets of 5 reps for back squats on Monday and 5 sets of 5 reps on front squats on Thursday, then your front squat weight will naturally be around 80-85% of your back squat poundage.  A 4-day, 2-way split consisting of 5 sets of 5 reps on all exercises might look something such as this:

Monday: squats, deadlifts, power cleans

Tuesday: bench presses, overhead presses, barbell curls

Thursday: front squats, good mornings, one-arm dumbbell power snatches

Friday: incline bench presses, behind-the-neck presses, dumbbell curls

     You could even do less on each day, by cutting out the 3^rd movement at each session, or you could do more, by adding 1 or 2 additional lifts, if you’re advanced enough to handle the work.  You could also simply do less movements on the light day.  You could keep the 3^rd lift on the heavy day, or even add another lift, but cut it down to 2 lifts on the light days.  In this case, the program could look like this:

Monday: squats, deadlifts, power cleans, chins, power snatches

Tuesday: bench presses, overhead presses, weighted dips, barbell curls

Thursday: front squats, good mornings

Friday: incline bench presses, behind-the-neck presses

     The beauty of this approach is that it is an easy way to make sure your heavy days are truly heavy days, and your light days are truly light days without having to calculate the workload at every workout.  Sometimes lifters don’t take up heavy/light training because—believe it or not—they simply don’t want to do the math.  But I also understand that lifters are more likely to stick with a program if it’s easy to understand and doesn’t take a lot of guesswork.

     Since I believe all lifters should utilize some form of light-day training, pick a method of training that you know you’ll stick with.  For the first couple weeks, I’d advise that you calculate the workload of all your workouts to ensure that you’re not overdoing it—or underdoing it; that can be a problem too—on your light-day sessions compared to your heavy ones.  After that, just periodically calculate your workload and you should be fine.

     If you’re serious about lifting, and if you’re looking for the best results possible, take advantage of light workouts.  Not only are they highly beneficial, but they’re also necessary for any serious strength athlete.