Back-Off Sets and Extra Work for the Strength Athlete

 

Some Thoughts on How/When to Use Back-Off Sets, Add Extra Work, and Increase the Total Workload of Your Training

     The other day, I received an email from a reader who wanted to know my advice on back-off sets and how to use them.  His question was based on the fact that he was having a hard time increasing the weight on his “top-end” sets using a standard 5x5 training model.  This essay is partly an answer to that question but, in addition to that, I want to use it to discuss how (and when) you should not only do back-off sets but also when a lifter should add extra work, whether that additional training is at the end of a workout or in another workout altogether.  The goal of all of this being, of course, greater strength on the core lifts, whatever those core lifts might be, whether you’re a powerlifter attempting to increase the three powerlifts, an Olympic lifter looking to increase your quick lifts, or just an “all-around” strength athlete looking to get stronger on a host of exercises—most of your average gym-going strength lifters being in the last category.

     This essay will primarily use the “Bill Starr” model of 5x5 training but will also apply to other forms of lifting that involve working up to a heavy set during the workout, whether that set is for 5 reps, triples, doubles, or a max single.  Although I will use Starr’s system as our mirror for looking at things, much of the musings here pertain to other systems of training.  For instance, if you’re a powerlifter who trains each lift separately, the methods here still apply.

     Anyone who has followed a strength program has encountered this issue of being “stuck” on your top-end sets.  Now, you may not have encountered this if most of your training has been done in the largely “American” style of training—which has, I’m afraid, now infected a large portion of the rest of the world—where you train “for the pump” and do endless sets along with a lot of reps, using a lot of different exercises for each muscle group.  If you use that method of training, you may never need to do a max lift for less than 5 reps.  As I have written before, that training pretty much sucks for building absolute strength, though it can be good for hypertrophy.  There are plenty of large, muscle-bound men (and women) in gyms who are proof of this.  It doesn’t mean, however, that they are necessarily very strong, or that this style of training is good for athletes. I don’t mean to get off-topic, but I want you to understand the kind of training that I’m discussing in this essay.  If you’ve ever followed Bill Starr’s 5x5 heavy-light-medium (HLM, from here onward) system, or a typical “progression” powerlifting system, or, heck, even Westside’s system (which we’ll discuss a bit later), then you understand the “problem” of our discussion.  That problem being that sooner-or-later, usually sooner, you reach the point where you really struggle to add weight to your top-end heavy sets.

     Okay, let’s look at how you progress on a standard HLM template using 5x5 training so you can see what we’re talking about.  If you don’t know, with Starr’s methodology, you select, typically, three core lifts that you focus on during a training cycle.  It might be the squat, bench press, and deadlift or it might be the squat, the overhead press, and the power clean, or anything similar, but, basically, a squatting movement, a pressing movement, and a heavy pull of some sort.  On the first training day of the week, the heavy day, you work up over 5 progressively heavier sets of 5 reps.  On the light day you, typically, work up to about 80% of the weight used on the heavy workout, and, on the medium day, you work up to around 90% of the weight used on the heavy day.  As you progress over the weeks, you are constantly attempting to push up the numbers on your heaviest sets on the “heavy day.”  This also means that, throughout a training cycle, the other days will see an increase as well.  The problem that lifters face is that it gets harder (and harder) to steadily push up those top-end sets.  One of the answers to increasing the weight is to, eventually, add some back-off sets or other extra work.  This will become, in fact, a necessity.  But it’s not the first thing that you should do.

     The first thing you should do is rotate to some new sets and reps on a weekly, or every-other-week, basis.  Weekly if you’re advanced.  Every two weeks if you’re not.  For most lifters, two weeks will be ideal for this reason.  Using Starr’s recommendation, after two weeks of 5s, you would then go to 2 weeks of either triples or doubles.  You do sets of 5 for two to three progressively heavier sets, then switch over to triples or doubles for three or four sets.  After 2 weeks of triples or doubles, you go to sets of 8 for 2 weeks.  Higher rep sets are done for a reason.  As you start utilizing sets lower than 5 reps, and therefore heavier weights, even though you will get stronger, you will also begin to get slower.  Sets of 8s for a couple weeks allows you to get your speed back.  Then, after the 8s, you do 2 weeks of singles, working up to a near max each week.  This near max won’t just help your strength to improve—which it will—but it also allows you to see if your max strength has increased.  If you’re a competitive powerlifter, this will allow you to get a good feel for what your max weights might be at a meet.

     Now you’re ready to add some back-off sets.  On the heavy day and medium days, do two back-off sets of 8 reps at the end of your heaviest sets.  On the weeks where you were already using 8s, you can drop down and perform two sets of 12.  On the light days, at least at first, until you adjust to the extra workload, you can omit the back-off sets.  You can also start adding in auxiliary movements to work on weak points.  Extra lat work and triceps work will aid in increasing your presses—whether it’s your bench presses or overhead work.  Additional lower back and abdominal work will help your squats and pulls.  Movements such as good mornings, hyperextensions, weighted incline situps, and ab wheels are all good exercises for your squats and pulls.

     Once you reach the point that you’re adding back-off sets and extra work, you will also want to start rotating in some different exercises.  The way that Starr implemented this was, I think, ingenious.  Instead of calculating workload for the heavy, light, and medium days, he let the exercise determine the day.  If, on your heavy day, you use back squats, bench presses, and deadlifts, then the light day might be overhead squats, military presses, and power snatches.  The medium day might be front squats, incline bench presses, and power cleans.  No matter how hard you train at each session—and you should train hard—your light day will never be 80% of what you are capable of doing on the heavy day movements.  Same goes for the medium day lifts.

     At some point, it’s also a good idea to begin to rotate your workload, not just from workout to workout but from week to week.  Keep in mind that, with Starr’s system, “heavy” doesn’t mean the poundages that you use—sometimes, the medium day, for instance, uses heavier poundages than the heavy day—but it means the workload utilized at each session.  The light day is “light” because it has the lowest workload of the week.  Now, however, you also rotate the total workload week-to-week.  I recommend this—and this is a good system to use (I know I keep “hammering” this point, but it needs to be understood) even if you use a multi-lift split and not Starr’s system: On the 1st week, train in the “typical” manner that you have been training.  On the 2nd week, increase your workload each day so that this week is slightly harder.  On the 3rd week, increase your workload even more so that this week is very hard.  By the end of the 3rd week, you should be rather worn out and more than just a little bit exhausted.  This is good.  If you were to continue in this manner you would be in a state of overtraining.  But on the 4th week, you will go to an “active recovery” week, using weights that are about 80% of what you used on the 1st week.  Continue in this manner from week to week from now on.

     Around the time that you begin to rotate weekly workloads, start increasing the number of your total sets and stop working up to all-out top-end sets.  Once you get fairly strong on all your lifts, it simply becomes unreasonable, if not impossible, to constantly get stronger on your heaviest sets of the day.  For strong lifters with a lot of experience, the following is the way you should be training, anyway.  Let’s say you have a max set of 5 with 405 pounds in the squat.  No matter how hard you train, this number doesn’t seem to budge.  Ditto for heavier triples and singles.  Most lifters, to get their numbers moving again, must learn to coax the weight up by doing multiple sets with lighter weights.  Not much lighter, but still lighter.  It would work something like this on the 5-rep heavy days:  Olympic bar for a set of 5 reps, 135 for 5 reps, 185 for 5, 225 for 5, 275 for 5, 315 for 5, 365 for 5 for 3 to 4 sets.  365 is 90% of your 405 weight.  90% of your heaviest weight, for whatever rep range you’re utilizing for the week, is a good number to begin to do multiple sets with.  Stop the sets once they start to slow down.  So, let’s say your first 2 sets with 365 felt pretty fast but your 3rd set didn’t.  Stop on the 3rd set.  If it does feel fast, continue with another set.  Use the same 90% formula for your triples, 8s, and singles, as well.

     One issue that lifters have (American lifters in particular) is that they discount sets that aren’t all-out.  What Bill Starr calls 5 sets of 5 reps, a HIT bodybuilder would call 1 set of 5 reps, because only the last was to the “max.”  That kind of view is limited not just in thinking but in workout design.  There are a lot of good training programs that never take sets to the absolute limit yet they build tremendous amounts of strength.  As you advance and get strong—and, eventually, once you get really strong—you will only continue to progress by increasing your work capacity, your ability to handle more (and more) work.  Using our “90% formula” example I just discussed, your top end sets will start to increase again as you get faster on the 90% sets and as your body adapts to the extra workload.  Keep this in mind when designing a program: back-off sets and extra work doesn’t necessarily mean higher reps and/or isolation movements.  Many lifters will get stronger by simply increasing the number of sets they do on their core lifts.  Or, as I’m also fond of saying, more isn’t always better but it usually is.

     One good method for advanced lifters is to simply repeat the sets on their core lifts in a “wave” fashion.  If you did 135x5, 185x5, 225x5, 275x5, 315x5, and 365x5x however-many-sets, you now start back at 185x5, then 225x5, 275x5, and 315x5.  Stop at 315 and do a few sets, working on speed.  You could also just drop down to around 75% of your heaviest weight for the day—275 in this example—and do multiple sets of 5 with that weight

     Since I mentioned it earlier, let’s talk Westside for a moment.  And by Westside, I am, of course, discussing the method of training created by Louie Simmons and made famous by the Westside Barbell Club in Columbus, Ohio.  If you don’t understand the training methodology used by Westside, I’m not going to go into detail here.  You can “Google” them and read about their methods or you can just continue reading this and look it up later.  Anyway, one of the reasons that Simmons created his system was to counter the very issue that we’re discussing.  Simmons believed—and he was most certainly correct—that Western models of training, such as the standard “pyramid” model of American powerlifting routines, had a couple of problems.  First, it didn’t (and doesn’t) build up different levels of strength at the same time due to its use of “macro-periodization” as opposed to Wetside’s (and other methods that largely came from countries of the former Soviet-bloc, where Simmons based his theories) “micro-periodization” model.  Second, since this is what we’re discussing, it didn’t allow the lifter to steadily and continually increase the top-end sets of his powerlifts.  Westside’s answer to this was to incorporate a dynamic effort day or “speed” day into the powerlifter’s training, along with extra workouts to focus on “GPP” or “general physical preparedness.”  There is much debate over whether you need to do the speed work on a separate day from your heavy training or whether you can do it on the same day.  Simmons certainly believed that the extra day was necessary, but I, personally, have had success using both techniques.  In our squatting example above, you could use 275 for multiple sets of doubles or triples at the end for 6 to 8 sets, making each rep as fast as possible while maintaining good form.

     Westside’s method of doing GPP works really well for adding extra work and increasing your work capacity.  At the end of your session, do a few sets of loaded carries or sled drags.  These sets should be taxing, so add them at the end of a heavy session, but not after a light workout.  On the very next day, do the same loaded carries as the day before, but decrease the weight used to 60% of the previous day’s load.  Simmons said this contributed greatly to restoration.  I discussed this method in more detail in my recent essay “Non-Lifting Workouts.”  It’s an essential read for anyone interested in what’s being discussed in this article.

     Okay, I’ve probably gone over enough “stuff” in this essay, and anymore might just be information overload.  I’m sure that, once I’ve published it, I’ll probably think of one or two (or three) things that I should have included.  If that’s the case, I’ll simply post another essay on whatever topic I’ve overlooked.  Also, if you have any questions about the subjects I’ve brought up, you can ask them in the comments section below or you can shoot me an email.

     If your strength has been stuck for some time, or if you’re just having trouble increasing one of your lifts, give the suggestions here a try.  You can always get stronger.  Sometimes, it just requires a little ingenuity.