Building Up Your Work Capacity

A Method for Developing a Work Capacity That Can Handle High-Volume, High-Frequency Workouts

     I often preach the benefits of high-frequency training along with full-body workouts.  I think they are two of the best ways to build a lot of muscle and strength, especially for the natural lifter.  Another central component for the natural lifter is to develop a strong work capacity, or the ability to do a lot of work and then recover from it quickly.  Read that last sentence again if you have to and let it sink in.  There are, I would guess, a lot of lifters who are capable of doing a lot of work in the gym, but very few of them can then recover from it quickly.  You can blame that on modern training, I suppose, more than anything else, since we live in some sort of upside down, topsy turvy training world where bodybuilders “blast” their muscles with endless sets and then give those muscles a week—hell, sometimes even more—before training it/them again.

     If you can reach the point where you can do a hard and heavy full-body workout, comprised of, say, 5 (or more) work sets of squats, bench presses, overhead presses, rows, curls, deadlifts or other pulls, along with some abdominal work and loaded carries, and do that kind of workout 3 days a week, then, trust me.  You will be one big, strong, muscular, and well-conditioned bodybuilder.  You will be able to do more than just lift weights and stand on a bodybuilding stage, too.  A lifter who can do that kind of workout multiple days per week can also apply his “functional” muscle to a host of athletic activities.

     The question, then, is this: how do you go about developing the work capacity to handle those kinds of full-body workouts 3 days per week?  The short answer is: You build up to being able to do them.  But, of course, the follow-up question is: Okay, but how the heck do I do that?  That’s what we will discuss here.

     There are, as the saying goes, many ways to skin a cat.  I admit to never really understanding that statement.  I mean, I suppose—I’ve never done it, mind you, I’m too much of an animal lover—you could skin a cat in varied ways, but just why, exactly, that saying became the one to explain to us that there are many ways to achieve something, I don’t really know.  We could also say that there are many paths up the mountain, but the point is to reach the summit in whatever path you take.  So, yes, there are some different ways that you can build up your work capacity to handle heavy, hard, and frequent workouts.

     You can, for example, start by simply doing light workouts every other day.  If you can squat 315 for sets of 5 reps, then just do 3 sets with, say, 185 3 days per week.  Once you’re not sore, add weight until, after a few weeks, you can handle your “typical” weight at each session.

     The method I usually recommend the most is the heavy-light-medium system.  You train heavy on Monday, then on Wednesday, you use about 50% of what you did on Monday.  On Friday, you use about 75%.  After a few weeks, you use 80% on Wednesdays and 90% on Friday, the “standard” percentages used by Bill Starr.  (My recent article, “The Mass Made Super Simple Regimen,” takes this approach.)

     After working with a lot of American lifters who are accustomed to training much less frequently, I have found that neither of those methods, however, are best suited to the “common” gym-goer.  There are many lifters who love training with hard workouts to the point of momentary muscular failure, or, at least, close to it.  Many lifters, when they attempt a H-L-M system, because they have been training their muscle groups and lifts only once per week are so sore on their light days that even 50% of the heavy day’s workloads are too much for them.

     This is what I recommend if you are in the same boat.  It’s a tried and true method that was used by old-school lifters and bodybuilders.  It’s the method that George Turner recommended in his “Real Bodybuilding” series, and column, for IronMan magazine in the ‘90s.

     Train your full-body using a handful of lifts.  Don’t do too much.  3 heavy sets of bench presses, squats, overhead presses, some sort of pull (deadlifts, power cleans, power snatches, et al), and barbell curls will suffice.  Train on a 1-on, 2-off rotation.  If you are still sore at your 2nd workout, then use weights that are a little bit lighter from your 1st session.  After a few workouts, however, you shouldn’t be sore at each workout.  If you are, then just do a little less at your workouts and slowly add some more sets.  After 2 to 3 weeks, go to a 1-on, 1-off, 1-on, 2-off rotation.  Stick with that for another 2 to 3 weeks.  Once you reach the point that you’re not sore after taking just 1 day off, then go to a 3 days per week rotation, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, for example.  Stick with 3 days per week for around 4 weeks.  At that point, go to a 1-on, 1-off rotation, and just take an extra day off when you feel as if you need the additional rest.  Stick with that for as long as you want.

     The truth is that you could stick with a 1-on, 1-off schedule for the entirety of your training life and do just fine.  I understand, however, that most lifters wouldn’t want to do that for the simple sake that they need more variety.  Even if your body doesn’t need the variety, your mind most certainly does need it.  You could also just stick with a 3 days per week schedule for, well, years on end if you wanted.  That’s what your old-school bodybuilders, such as George Turner, did.  Whether it’s 3 days per week or 1-on, 1-off, slowly increase the amount of work you are doing at each session.  If you started with 3 sets per lift, work up to 5 sets per lift.  Eventually, work up to as many as 10 sets for each muscle group, perhaps 2 lifts for 5 sets each.

     If lifters are accustomed to doing 10 sets for a muscle group and then waiting 5 to 7 days before training again, they often think that such volume done multiple days per week would be almost impossible, but you would be surprised what your body can handle once you’ve adapted to it.  Once you do build up the work capacity to handle such workload, you will be big, strong, muscular, and athletic.

     Once you reach the point where you can handle voluminous full-body sessions multiple days per week it is then that going on a split routine can be a good idea.  You might have to do that for the simple reason that you don’t want to be in the gym for 2 to 3 hours at a time.  At that juncture, go to a 2-way split.  Don’t do any additional work for your muscle groups—at least, at first—but simply split your workout in half and train on a 6-on, 1-off schedule or something similar, such as a 3-on, 1-off rotation or a 3-on, 1-off, 2-on, 1-off schedule.  Any of those will work for the lifter who has built up the work capacity to handle it.