Building Muscle With High Volume and Low Weight

I have been absent from writing due to being injured for seven months. It sure is a long time. And I've learned a great deal since then, and would like to share that knowledge.


I'm going to introduce a lifting routine, or more specifically a way to calculate and refine this workout for yourself. There is a set number of reps and set, and the targeted weight is programmed via 1 rep max.

I've experienced increaed triceps mass from this workout, abs have came in nicely, and core is very strong, shoulders are popping, pecs are full, upper forearms swole, and quads are bigger than ever.

I've written a lot of workout routines, and the reason I came up with this routine is that I was experiencing injuries, and of course wanted to continue lifting, and to push the boundary of training in a safer fashion by raising volume, increasing frequency, and decreasing intensity (amount of weight). The results are good hypertrophy (muscle building), fast metabolism, core strength, and mobility.

I've been lifting for just shy of 7 years, and the deeper you go, the more complex the workout routine must be to see results. For example a beginner can just build a routine based of linear progression of adding 5/10lb indefinitely until failure (charted out for 1-3 months).

There are not many lifts in this routine, as I prefer barbell powerlifting. It is based around the three main lifts: bench press, squat, and deadlift.

There are two or three workouts per week with a day of rest between days.

Squat: 4 sets of 15 reps at 15%, 25%, 30%, 35% of 1 rep max.
Bench Press: 4 sets of 15 reps at 15%, 25%, 30%, 35% of 1 rep max.
Deadlift: 16 sets of 1 rep at 15%, 25%, 30%, 35% of 1 rep max. (switch between traditional/sumo every 2 sets).

That's pretty much it. The following days of that workout, just raise the percentages by 5%, and on the 3rd workout raise it an additional 5%. You can play with percentage numbers - for example 17.5%, 27.5%, 32.5%, 37.5%. Or add a fifth set if you try the workout, and feel like more volume is possible without fatigue.

It's very effective to lift lower weights for high volume. If you are doing 60-75 reps of bench press three times a week. That's 180-225 reps a week. It will build muscle guaranteed despite the weight seeming very low. The numbers I used for my 1 rep max are 300 for squat, 225 for bench press, 465 for deadlift. None of these are my absolute highest 1 rep max, but I believe in having a 1 rep max that you use for calculating a routine (sometimes referred to as a training 1 rep max) to be a weight I feel I can hit on any given day, and does require special periodization (weeks ramping up the weight in a special pattern to peak at a certain time a month later) to achieve, where I may miss the weight, and it requires great mental focus - that to me is beyond a 1 rep max.

If you find the 4 sets of 15 reps to be difficult cardio-wise, you may need to speed up your reps, or cut the range of motion slightly. It may seem like cheating, but getting solid work in is more important than perfect form and full range of motion. In order to have energy and strength for high volume, I do think near perfect form is required to stay fresh.

I also throw in calf raises, rear delt rows, good mornings, and I plan on adding some shrugs since the deadlift weight is low.

Nutrition advice I'd like to give is to only eat carbs/breads in high fiber and high protein, and to establish consistency with your Monday through Friday lunch habits to be clean and light. I recommend a salad with protein, and one extra piece of protein (grilled/fried chicken good choice).

I highly recommend supplementing probiotics daily (multiple kinds and a high amount). I find aiding digestion is essential for health. I also recommend consuming raw shelled hemp seeds every day. I have yet to find a food with a fuller spectrum of proteins and fats, which satiate the body more than other foods, and can be added to anything because they are extremely small, and only have a subtle nutty taste. They work well with yogurt, salad, and peanut butter.

Cheers.



 

Lifting Weights With Injury Prevention In Mind

The workout routines I've used and prefer bounce between bodybuilding (hypertrophy) and strength training. I found more fun in strength training because you use heavier weights, break records, and your nervous system seems to fire better, allowing you maximum strength more frequently throughout your days. The downside to strength training ironically is that it works, and thus your strength never stops going up, but at some point your body can't handle the stress, and ultimately gets injured.

In strength training I honed my form pretty well in the three main lifts - Bench Press, Squat, and Deadlift, but I also elevated their importance too much. I did routines that only had those lifts, and I thought if I put all of my energy into one thing it would improve, but I found too much resistance. Three lifts don't make a workout routine, and won't shape your body that aesthetically.

In my training, I ended up injured through Deadlifts by wearing wrist straps and continuing to pull the weight despite pain or lack of energy. The wrist straps hadn't failed me before - even with twice the weight, but a single set seemed to rip apart my left wrist, and my left elbow, and left ankle. It taught me valuable lessons. For someone who regularly lifts, their body is probably never 100% healed. But if you keep too low a recovery you won't have access to your full strength, and your body will continue to get weaker.

Sometimes the trick to a more recovered body is to just cut days from lifting so that you lift less days. This can fail to work too though if you have injuries popping up despite being well-rested. This is where I was for a bit, working out once a week, but I've learned to bandage myself up more, which has solved many problems, but I can tell that in the future I will need more and more types of bandages for body parts.

My working solution right now is wrist wraps, elbow sleeve, and ankle sleeves. I use athletic tape for the highest knuckle on each finger, and tape on each wrist. The wraps and sleeves provide compression, which seems to keep joints warmer and limits your range of motion to prevent ranges of motion that would injure you. The tape on the fingers is more about preventing pain and enabling my grip to last longer in both the workout, and in workouts that occur days later. I know that when I've done routines with say 6 days of working out, my hands become what I call shredded. They get red, sore to the touch, and I don't feel my grip is there. The tape eliminates all of that - although with 6 workout days a week, I would have to up my hand maintenance by using a balm and a pumice stone.

The ankle sleeves are my newest addition, and oddly I don't feel ankle pain during workouts. The pain is more typically felt at the end of days (rest days as well), and by using the ankle sleeves, that pain has diminished. I think the next thing for me may be knee sleeves, but I'm going to wait until that's a more pressing issue.

I'm almost surprised that my right wrist and right elbow are holding up, but I am using the same cautionary measures on my right wrist that I am with the left. I'm not exactly sure how you would take care of a shoulder in this situation. Perhaps some form of compression (probably something more like the Sling Shot would work more realistically than a standard compression t-shirt with sleeves - good luck trying to take off a tight compression t-shirt - I nearly died once from that at 4am in the ocean). My shoulders do seem to go what I call 'offline' from time to time, but I've been able to prevent that by limiting the total amount of reps on shoulder exercises like bench pressing and overhead pressing, and by using a suitable amount of weight.

Current Training Program - 2015 Success

I've completed my 13th week on GZCL method. My squat has gone up 20lb, and shows no sign of plateauing. My Deadlift has gone up 15lb. The reason it's lower than the squat is that I played around with sumo for a few weeks, and generally didn't take it as seriously as the squats. My Deadlift PR is practically 200lb over my Squat PR, so I find Deadlifts generally easy for myself. The amount of weight I'm lifting is based off a training PR and not my actual PR. This is to ensure progress and keep momentum, and is obviously easier to recover from.

I am doing accessory lifts on odd days throughout the weeks.  I think GZCL works best for my squats. For Deadlifts, I seem to be preserving my strength, but not excelling as much. I am using a lower weight for my training PR b/c I want to avoid any hitching and encourage better technique. I'm more interesting these days in getting reps on weight rather than just doing heavy singles. I found heavy singles ultimately to be extremely punishing on the body and psych (when failing too often), and makes your body more prone to injury.

I find the days in the gym where I am strongest and the lifts take the least effort are the days that the day prior I had good adequate nutrition both macro/total caloric amount-wise. I've been walking 1.5 miles a few days out of the week. I've started doing weighted pull-ups and shrugs again. There's a new row I do with a barbell. It can be seen here.

I think I could be doing more work to better my fitness and body. I think I lack hypertrophy work, more skill work, and machine work. There's always room for improvement.

GZCL Lifting Program and 2014 Progress

This year has been very humbling. I succumbed to injury quick into the beginning of this year, And it lasted for half of the year. I've been able to train without injury since then, and have been on a good run. I'll dive into what I think was the cause of the injury - the injury itself isn't so important - what it stands for is a roadblock. I have now been lifting for 5 years. For the first 4 of those years I wrote my own programming largely. The last year and a half I've tried 5/3/1, 8/6/3, Juggernaut Method, and GZCL. I did other training during the year, but I was mostly rehabbing and using lighter weights.

I find gauging and maintaining the recovery ability of your body difficult. Not all pains are the same, and to reach as far as you can, you will be willing to take some pain, but that very same pain could end up reversing on you and become more permanent. I think it's a case by case basis. Over the years, I've noticed that using brute strength to throw around weights does in fact injure you, and even if you can recover from it quickly, it can ultimately be your demise. I feel I started lifting weights with very proper form - and I did. As I started using my heaviest of weights though, I noticed my form slipping, but when you are dealing with very heavy weights, your ability to manipulate it will decrease.

I have found that my form in exercises and lifts will increase and decrease over time. You pick up new bad habits, and lose good instilled habits. This all sounds very synonymous with life. Coming back from a shoulder injury lasting half the year, I resumed without training my shoulders. No more raises, laterals pull-ups, rows, or overhead presses for the time being. I mostly trained the squat, and cautiously did some bench press. As time went on, my lifts were going up, but not very quickly, and I wasn't lifting that heavy. My programming had ran its run, and I needed something new. I tried GZCL, and I'm still on it, and very much so like it.

GZCL lifting routine is said to not be a program, but a method. This actually deterred me at first, because I like having linear things to follow. It is quantifiable though, and is just a matter of a 4 week cycle. I don't follow it as described as I am a rebel. I know this in turn breaks the philosophy of periodic training, but my version is just more sped up.

I'm running the program on three lifts: bench press, deadlift, and the squat. I squat and bench press on the same workout, and do it first in the week with a deadlift day following a few days after. This leaves me with 2-3 workouts a week, which doesn't sound like much, but no day is wasted and it accelerates quite quickly.

The things I think GZCL have going for it compared to other programs are that it's more simple with less things to remember and less deviance from training structure. I also think the percentages are just really dialed in greatly, and allows for your body to recover and be ready to execute. It gives mental confidence in gaining much momentum with failure. The lifts I do outside the main three lifts are not something I record. I don't think them important to even name, because I really feel each person should do the lifts that they know won't injure them, and will help sculpt or cultivate muscle in the places that are their specific goals.

I find weight lifting and training to be very different these days then years past. It's no longer a grand discipline to me. I've sort of acknowledged the limits of my abilities, and certain motivations aren't there. There is no longer a veil of incompetence in my mind about all things fitness and weight training related. I'm eager to train. It keeps me healthy.

In the next coming year/years, I'd like to help a greater amount of people in weight lifting endeavors. I think instead of just trying to come up with ideas, I need to just lay things down and let them do what they will and be what they will. So here's to productivity.

Bench Press Technique

The Bench Press seems to be quite different than the other 2 main lifts - the Deadlift and the Squat - which are like each other. Instead, the Bench Press is an outlier, and I will discuss factors which could prevent you from pressing higher weights.

The first thing to nail down on a Bench Press is the desired hand grip width. Choices range from narrow to standard to wide. A closer grip will work the Triceps more, but too close of a grip for your body's proportions will cause shoulder pain and a shoulder (or both shoulders) injury over time. Too wide of a grip is also associated with shoulder pain.

You will commonly see powerlifters bench pressing with a wide grip. This is in order to have a smaller ROM (range of motion), which allows for heavier weights to be lifted (and more records to be broken). Before you jump to conclusions that a wider bench is easier, consider bench pressing 4 or 5 plates on each side. I'm sure it's quite difficult despite grip despite huge ROM changes.

One think that I've learned through lifting over the years is that you should be able to complete high volume comfortably on any given exercise, and that by itself will mean your technique is good or decent enough. The human shoulder is incredibly fragile. If you sat at a computer and didn't use the chair (sat much lower). Your arms would be stretching up, and you might be OK for a few minutes, but then shoulder fatigue would creep in, and if you continued, you'd pop a roto cuff, and it would take a few days to a week minimum to heal. In the same sense you should know when you are damaging yourself in an unhealthy manner.

The grip I've been using on Bench Press until now was too narrow a grip for myself. I've had some chest pain in the past, and assumed a more narrow grip would take more tension off the chest, allow me to strengthen my triceps, and give me a good press. What ended up happening is that I still had chest pain, and I wasn't gaining strength very quickly.

Unfortunately when you think your form is good in a lift, you cease trying to improve it, and you can dig yourself quite a deep hole, and establish a list of bad habits you may never have had to begin with. So recently I saw an elite lifting Bench Pressing, and having seen many of them, their technique does vary but also looks similar to each other. Limb length alone makes lifts look quite different.

The thing I noticed is that although we want a back arch to hit the chest better, lift more weight via slightly reduced ROM, and to have more protected shoulders, is that these lifters don't kill themselves getting the back arch. Even though the Bench Press position prior to benching is said to be uncomfortable, and should be, that you do in fact need to be comfortable in any given lift to execute it correctly.

So a way to get the correct back arch, leg drive, hand grip, and to have your shoulders pinned there's an easy method to use. A strong setup like this will also allow you to lift weights even once you're very fatigued because of the lack of effort necessary to get into a strong position. The first step is to sit on the bench. Then grab the bar exactly where you want to and fix your grip. Now using your feet, slide your torso up the bench (towards the bar and in fact past the bar). Now your head is on the whole other side of the bar, and you can even extend your arms and feel a nice Triceps squeeze to trigger your Triceps ready to fire. Then while keeping your grip fixed, whip your body and push your torso down into the bench (basically without moving your hands, you move your body into the correct place). And as this puts you into correct leverage, lift off should be very easy as you're directly under the bar.

I usually do about 25-35 reps on Bench Press, but using this new method I can comfortably do 104 reps without injury or soreness. Grip width will vary person to person, but I'm using my middle fingers on the rings, and that fills out my chest well, and protects my shoulders and elbows.

How To Become Fit and Remain So

It's been 4.5 years since I've maintained a healthy fit lifestyle. It's been said that the first year is usually wasted, the second year spent learning, and the third year and following years are doing things right. I'm sure that can be said for other industries and hobbies. Ironically in the age of information, there is so much content that it becomes a skill to sift through it and find truths.

You may find many weight lifting routines online and in magazines, and you may wonder how you would fare on then and the results you'd see afterwards. Ultimately though, no program will be tailored specifically for your body, experiences, and lifestyle.

As someone who doesn't like to waste time or effort, I decided early on lifting that I wanted to do the barbell lifts, and that learning their technique would allow me to progress and continue my fit lifestyle for the rest of my life. Alternatively spending time on machines, and using too many different types of exercises will not lead to foreseeable gains from utilizing more determination and focus.

Although I'm not a powerlifter, I find the three power lifts to be the most valuable as do many others. They are the Squat, Deadlift, and Bench Press. It is more common for people to be the most proficient in Deadlifting over the other two lifts because of the nature of the lift and the leverage you are able to apply. Deadlifts are also the most taxing to the body and its nervous system. For this reason they're performed less ofter than the other two lifts.

A strong squat ultimately decides the strength, stability, and mobility of a person. I feel it's the most life enhancing out of all of the lifts, and that it's smart to program it as your first lift for every workout - if even just for a warm up. I see many people clinging to smith machines, other machines, and walls when performing squats, and I would advise against any sort of handicap if possible. The thought process is that someone will start on machines, learn form, and then transition to free weights (barbells), but that transition doesn't seem to happen with many people, leading me to believe you should never use the crutch in the first place unless you are truly injured.

Lifting is about using correct leverages, which allow you to lift more weight, which spurs even further strength and muscles gains. While on one hand you want to have the knowledge to know the correct cues and body position for each lift, you also want to simply let your body act as efficiently as possible (and simply not take the reigns, or try to force anything beyond what should happen).

Lifting Routine to Maximize Strength, Muscle, and Recovery - Mercury

Having ran into injuries while strength training, I've focused more on muscle building and general health while still keeping strength, and possibly increasing strength. I've ran into recovery issues despite having a good recovery ability, and I devised a method to streamline a more consistent recovery, which allows you to keep lifting and progressing with less deloads (programmed rest weeks).

To establish an ideal intensity, it's necessary to base a routine off the 1 rep max for each lift. To calculate a percentage number (e.g. 70%)  into your 1 rep max (e.g. 225lb bench press[102kg]), you can use a calculator, and type is '.7' multiplied by 225 equals 157.5lb[71kg]. So 70% of a 225lb bench press is 157.5lb.

The routine I made is a full body workout done 3x a week. It's 6 weeks long, and scales from 63-87% of your 1 rep max with sets of 5. Each workout day has the squat and bench press, and deadlifts are done 1x a week (or 1x every other week is recovery is too effected.) The deadlift sets are programmed with the squat and bench press percentages. This way the intensity is uniform across the big three lifts.

I only have 2 work sets for the three lifts, and 4 warm up sets in the same rep scheme (5).  The first week, the first work set is 63% and the second set is 70%. Each following workout simply adds 1% to each set, and after 6 weeks (18 workouts), you end up at 80% and 87%, which are considerably challenging lifts, but far more doable after completing the first 5 weeks. The body works through periodization. After this routine, I'll maybe take a week off, and tweak the routine for a different rep scheme and adjust the percentages accordingly. Feel free to do other lifts while doing this routine as long as it doesn't annihilate recovery. I add dumbbell rows, calf raises, hanging knee raises, and weighted pull-ups.