IF YOU WANT TO GET BIGGER, STOP LIFTING 6 DAYS A WEEK

 

Oh boy am I going to upset a lot of folks with this one, but turn-about is fair play, because this has been upsetting me.  Didn’t we learn anything folks?  Hardgainer already covered this in the 80s, as did Stuart McRobert, Paul Kelso, Randall Stroseen, John McCallum, and then even modern contemporaries like Paul Carter, Jim Wendler, Dan John, etc etc.  When size is the goal, we lifting 3-4 days a week has historically been THE successful approach, with OCCASIONAL forays into 5 days a week, but just as frequently deviations into twice a week or 3 times every 2 weeks.  This 6 days of lifting each week thing is a goofy fad that has hoodwinked a lot of new trainees and brought them onto a path of lacking gains and wasted time and energy.  If you want to get bigger: train LESS.

Between the two of them they trained 1/4 as much as you do and carry 11x as much muscle...take note

 

Why train less?  Haven’t we scientifically proven that training a muscle twice a week is the optimal amount for maximal hypertrophy? Any of my regular readers will know how painful that sentence was for me to write.  First of all: you’re not going to prove anything with a study: all you can hope to do is observe.  You can observe trends, you can observe CONSISTENT trends, but you’re not going to prove anything.  It’s up to us to take the findings of these studies and draw our conclusions.  But along with that, any discussion of “optimal” as it relates to a human is silly, because we are NON-optimal beings living non-optimal existences: nothing we do will ever be optimal.  And in that point of fact, often it is the case that, when living a non-optimal existence, the “optimal” approach is actually LESS effective than the non-optimal approach.  Example?  Let’s say the Bulgarian method was, for the sake of argument, THE optimal method: it’s certainly not optimal for family man that works a full time job and takes night school classes: that dude probably needs a far more INFREQUENT approach to training to get optimal results.  And finally, “maximal hypertrophy” is a silly concept: we don’t know what that is, because, again, we can’t prove that.  All we can do is observe.

 

All of THAT said, even without my little “semantics tantrum”, training twice a week STILL isn’t the optimal amount for maximal hypertrophy: RECOVERING from training is what is needed for hypertrophy.  Training is CATABOLIC: it breaks down muscle.  After the catabolism, we need anabolism: that’s the recovery portion.  I covered this in a fairly recent post about training for self-destruction and eating for self-preservation, so rather than beat you up again over all that, I’ll get to my obvious conclusion there: the “secret” to getting bigger isn’t about training more: it’s about RECOVERING better.  It’s why steroids are popular among bodybuilding: it improves muscle protein synthesis, so the body recovers from training better and you gain more muscle than you naturally would.  Yes yes, some of you chuckleheads will talk about how they can also increase recovery and allow for more frequent training: do yourself a favor and read the “Metroflex Gym Powerbuilding Basics” book and TRY to find a 6 day a week program in it, to include the ones used by Branch Warren and Ronnie Coleman. 

Just imagine what they could have accomplished if they trained CORRECTLY...

 

But let me get to the REAL meat of the issue here: folks, if you’re lifting weights 6 times a week, you’re phoning it in.  I’m sorry, that upsets you, but it’s the truth.  The effective muscle building programs are 3-4 days a week because THAT’S THE MOST YOU CAN TRAIN.  You’re REALLY going to run Super Squats 6 times a week?  You’re really going to add 2 more days of lifting onto Deep Water?  You’re really going to run the lifting in 5/3/1 Building the Monolith back to back in one week?  Triple widowmaker DoggCrapp weeks?  No: not if you’re ACTUALLY putting in the required effort that these programs demand.  This is how I know that folks don’t understand effort: they balk at these programs because they “want to spend more time at the gym”.  If you LIKE spending time at the gym, that means you’re DEFINITELY not putting in the required effort to grow.  When you’re training hard enough to grow, it SUCKS.  I legit laid on my back in between sets 6 and 7 of a Deep Water workout one day and contemplated selling all of my equipment and quitting lifting because I hated it THAT much.

 

We make the body grow by imposing a significant demand on it, and said demand is going to take a WHILE to recover from.  I would legit walk like a wind-up toy solider for 6 days after the Deep Water squat workouts: leg day wasn’t happening twice a week.  When you set out with the requirement that you MUST lift weights 6 days a week, you put yourself in a position where you’re holding back 6 days a week to be able to meet your arbitrary programming requirements, which defeats your goal of training HARD enough to actually grow muscle.  Yes: even if you split the muscle groups “intelligently”: reference my previous discussion on bro-splits.  Unless you figure out a way to exclusively employ isolation exercises in your muscle group split, you’ll never NOT have overlap in your training, which means muscles will get stimulated from indirect work, which ALSO means that your “twice a week” approach is resulting in MORE than twice a week stimulation and, in turn, that you must hold too much in reserve to be able to accomplish that sort of frequency.

The berserker at Stamford wasn't planning on coming home

 

But fear not, follower of studies and science: it’s STILL possible to train a muscle twice a week without lifting 6 days a week: it seems you have (convieniently) forgotten about conditioning work.  What a shock, I know: everyone wants to lift weights because it’s easy: no one wants to do a burpee.  But conditioning is the answer here, specifically intelligently selected conditioning: stuff with minimal to no eccentric loading.  Pull a sled, push a prowler, walk up a hill with a weight vest, skip rope, do some Crossfit WODs with Olympic lifts, load stones and kegs, throw stuff, etc etc.  You get to train the muscles AND, when done well, these serve as “feeder workouts”: getting restorative bloodflow to your muscles in between these incredibly brutal muscle building sessions so that you can recover and give MORE effort into your lifting, which, in turn, will drive you to grow bigger and stronger.  It’s self-perpetuating. 

 

Ever wonder why Jim Wendler put all that conditioning in between the lifting in Building the Monolith?  Notice how Jon Andersen put in a day of stair work on Deep Water?  Remember John McCallum talking about getting in mile runs?  It’s because it’s been understood that, in the pursuit of getting jacked, we don’t ONLY lift weights.  Getting big means doing things that suck, and conditioning sucks.  Lifting weights is easy: you can do it while you lay down.  It’s natural that trainees want to gravitate toward doing THAT more often…and doing what comes natural to us is what makes us fat, slow, weak and soft.  Our nature betrays us: go be a freak.

Both are freaks: we wanna be like the one on the left

 

Lift hard enough that you CAN’T lift more than 3-4 days a week, and spend that extra time doing conditioning so that you CAN do the next workout and grow.