A THEORY: DO WHAT YOU ARE BAD AT TO GET BIG & WHAT YOU ARE GOOD AT TO GET STRONG

So here’s something that’s been resonating with me for a bit now, and I’m stealing from Dan John, of course, because geniuses invent and winners steal.  But Dan talks about how he equates himself as a “hinge-pusher”, meaning that, in the realm of “push-pull-hinge-squat-loaded carry”, Dan primarily gravitates toward hinging and pushing.  He is excellent at the Olympic lifts, the swing, the deadlift and pressing weight overhead, and he struggles with squatting and chins.  And when Dan designed a program for gaining mass (Mass Made Simple), it was based around the high rep squat.  Dan gives an outstanding reason for it in the Easy Strength Omnibook, regarding how the body seems able to perform high reps of squats to an almost unlimited capacity compared to deadlifts and why it’s best suited for mass gaining….but when looking at Easy Strength, there’s something else worth observing: Dan advocates AGAINST using the squat there.  Here we observe my own curiosity: for getting bigger, Dan is doing the thing he’s bad at, and for getting stronger, he DOESN’T do that thing: he does what he is good at.

We all pay something don't we?

As a fellow hinger and not a squatter, I totally relate to Dan.  I was able to cat-back deadlift 540lbs without a belt when I was 22, but I STRUGGLED to get my squat to 400lbs.  I did the 10k swing challenge in a week as a deload, and my most recent run of Super Squats almost broke me, to say nothing of just how horrible all those squats LOOKED while I was doing them.  I have no upper torso and am all limbs.  I’m built to hinge and NOT built to squat.  And, in turn, the programs that forced me to grow the most are the programs that have been built around squats.  Whenever I dedicate time to squatting, I grow.  And my longtime readers will know that I’ve even observed that focusing on the front squat in particular REALLY triggers a hypertrophy response for me: the SQUATTIEST of squats.  Meanwhile, the Safety Squat Bar does NOT create this effect in me, primarily because I can absolutely hinge squat that squat and play to my strengths rather than my weaknesses.  Heck, this is why I use a buffalo bar: it forces me to hold the bar slightly higher up on my back than I can with a straight bar with sharp knurling.

And since I’m such a bad squatter, it’s not something I’ll naturally pick to do, which means programs that make me do a LOT of squatting make me grow, because, again, I’m bad at it.  Super Squats might be “just 20 reps”, but, of course, they’re 20 HARD reps, and they’re done 3 times a week, so now we’re looking at 60 reps in a week, and 120 in 2 weeks.  Deep Water is obvious in just how much squatting you do with it being 10x10, and even though the frequency of it is once every 2 weeks…it’s a LOT of squatting.  I hate it, it’s not what I’m good at…and it makes me grow.

Also true

Know how I squat when I wanna get strong?  Zeno squats.  I’ve written about that before, but for the unfamiliar: Zeno Squats are named after Zeno of Elea, who had a paradox of motion that described how motion was impossible, because for an arrow to travel from point to point, it must first travel half the distance between those two points, and to get there it must first travel half the distance between THOSE two points, etc etc, going on forever, proving the arrow could never move in the first place.  I made it cute by taking a weight I could squat for 8 reps, doing it for 6, racking the bar, taking 12 deep breaths, then doing 3 reps, rack, breathe, 2 reps (half rounding up), rack, breathe, 1 rep, strip weight off, repeat until death.  I do Zeno squats ONCE a week, and when it’s all said and done, I’m looking at something along the lines of 24 reps at the first week.  The next week, I add ONE rep to that first set and let the waterfall effect occur, but even still, it takes SEVERAL weeks before I accumulate any meaningful volume on the lift, but my strength goes up leaps and bounds whenever I do it…and I don’t ever grow particularly big from it.

A similar effect when it comes to deadlifts: my most effective deadlift strength protocol has been ROM progression deads.  There, I don’t even pull a full ROM deadlift until week 7, and leading up to that we’re looking at a total of 15-25 reps a week on the pull.  Stupid low volume, doesn’t make me grow, DOES make me strong…and it’s what I’m GOOD at.

Some of us are just gifted

And, in turn, this is ALSO why, when I want to grow, I follow someone ELSE’s program.  Primarily because someone else is going to make me do something I don’t want to do.  And when I want to get stronger, I do my OWN programming, because I know what I’m good at, and it’s what I’ll do.  Every strongman competition and powerlifting meet I’ve won, I’ve done so with my own programming.  When trying to use someone else’s, I fell flat.  Meanwhile, whenever I’ve tried to design a “hypertrophy program”, it was a bust.  Yes, I’ve co-opted lessons learned into other programs to modify them, but ultimately the base and foundation had to come from outside in order to me to actually grow.  

Continuing on this theory, here’s my thought: the body grows muscle as a necessary adaptation to a threat to its existence.  The body does not like to change, and will only do so if the consequence of NOT changing is more significant than the consequence of changing.  When the body feels that its very safety is in jeopardy unless it changes: it will change.  In turn, we must subject it to a consistent dosage of what it is BAD at in order for it to create that catalyst for change.  The body will encounter the dissonance inherent in constantly attempting to perform a task it is poorly suited for and will continue trying to force some sort of adaptation in the hopes of remedying this situation.  And we use this knowledge to our advantage: we find what our body is weak at and we play to our weaknesses.  It’s downright cruel.

"This never would've happened to Samson!"

The above is an example of SURVIVAL.  The body is doing the things it needs in order to survive.  The opposite of surviving is THRIVING, and when we thrive, the body no longer is attempting to adapt but, instead, it settles in and fully realizes itself.  When the body wants to survive, it enters a state of “fight or flight”, and it does some pretty cool things from a biological perspective to maximize our chances of survival in that instance.  Digestion shuts down, pupils get smaller, cortisol raises, etc etc.  All cool things from a survival standpoint…and absolutely terrible and destructive in the long term. Looking at people that have SURVIVED harsh, prolonged experiences (like POWs) demonstrates just how capable the body is at adapting to prolonged survival AND how destructive it can be.  Without even meaning to, I’ve just brought up the value of periodization in training, but my real intention here was to demonstrate the differing biological processes the body undergoes when it’s allowed to SURVIVE rather than thrive.  But let’s talk to that now.

A body that is thriving is geared toward consistent self-improvement and self-actualization.  We go to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs there.  The body wants security, food, shelter, etc etc, and once it has all of that, it gets to start thriving.  When we transition the body AWAY from the things it’s bad at and allow it to consistently perform the things it is GOOD at, it responds by getting better and better at what it is good at.  It’s not adapting: it’s THRIVING.  This is why these gains can be reached in a caloric deficit: the body is in such a natural state of excellence that it no longer requires excessive fuel to perform its functions, but can instead “effortlessly” execute its mission.  It responds to being tasked with its strengths by getting stronger.   

I still think Juggernaut is cooler though

The common wisdom is to ALWAYS do the things you’re bad at so that you have no weaknesses, but I feel like this speaks to the duality of needing time to play to your strengths and time to shore up your weaknesses.  Someone that ONLY brings their weaknesses up to their strengths is simply mediocre.  We can always make our strengths equal our weaknesses by making our strengths weaker…but that’s silly.  When I ruptured my ACL, I trained my other leg as hard as I could, and people asked me if I was worried about imbalances, to which I said “I’d rather have one strong leg than two weak ones”.  So know what you’re good at and what you’re bad at so that you can know when to train which!      

RORSCHACH TEST

I took exactly 1 class of psychology in my undergrad (which would be, of course, psych 101) and learned enough to know that the human mind is fascinating and I am well out of my depth trying to discuss it, so anyone who actually knows anything about the subject: forgive my cultural appropriatism here, but I’m going to talk about the Rorschach test.  For those unfamiliar, this test, also known as the “ink-blot” test, involved showing the patient a series of ink blots, asking them the first thing that came to their mind upon seeing them, and using their responses as a method of psychological evaluation.  I’m not going to pretend to understand the nuances of such a process, but if I show one person an ink-blot and that person says “ice cream” and the second person says “arson”, I’m watching that second person a little closer.  But even without the requisite education in psychology, we can learn from this test, primarily in the sense that YOUR first response when presented with an idea can be quite informing of how YOU perceive the world.

Check it out: philosophy, psychology AND chaos all in one shot...and a corndog!

Case in point?  Hard training.  Boom: what did you think?  It’s so amazing how, when I say “hard training”, trainees either stare blankly at me, or ask if I mean “train 6 days a week” or “take every set to failure”.  Right away, your initial response is telling ME that you don’t know how to train hard.  Because, right away, you’re trying to make “hard training” a mechanical process rather than a human one.  You’re trying to set up the parameters OF the training the CREATE hard training, and that’s an artificial construct that simply will not gel with the humanity element at play when we discuss training.  Hard training is training wherein you pour every fiber of your being INTO the training.  “Every set to failure” doesn’t mean that, because I’ve seen how some of you cats “fail” a lift: you had at LEAST 6 more reps in you if you were actually willing to push through the pain.  To say nothing of how, whenever someone says they take “every set to failure”, I know I’ve found a liar.  You mean to tell me that, on 3 sets of squats, for every set, you let the bar crash into the pins, unload all the plates, rack the bar, re-load all the plates, and then do that again for the next set?  No: stop.  And train 6 days a week?  How do I know you’re not training hard?  You can do it SIX DAYS A WEEK.  By the end of Super Squats, I was good for ONE hard workout that week.  But I get people REAL mad when I say this, so let’s move on to nutrition to further alienate my readers.

Ah yes, nutrition.  Did your mind immediately jump to supplements?  Did you think protein powder, weightgainer and creatine?  Notice how these are SUPPLEMENTS?  They’re supposed to augment what is missing from your diet.  What FOOD are you eating?  When you read “food”, did you think “Uber Eats?”  McDonalds?  Did you think frozen dinners?  Did you think of 1500 calorie shakes?  Did you think of ANYTHING that requires actual cooking?  Have you thought of a single vegetable yet?  It baffles me how much time and energy we invest in trying to get trainees to eat like a human.  Cooking doesn’t need to be a 4 hour affair: it can be done quickly, efficiently and effectively, especially with all the modern amenities available these days.  And with the impact of inflation as of the time I’m writing this, there’s no way you can tell me that eating out is cheaper than making something at home.  Nor is it faster.  And this is the stuff you are putting IN YOUR BODY to achieve physical transformation.  Why WOULDN’T you pick stuff that is the closest to real, human food as possible?  Why would you want to transform off of something with an ingredient list that reads like a chemistry paper?  

Oh f**k me: just make a grilled cheese sandwich

And that’s just “food”.  Now what if I say “eating”?  Right away, the calorie and macro calculators come out.  You go about this whole process backwards.  You decide you’re going to eat a certain amount of stuff and that THIS is going to transform you.  The body transforms from demands placed upon it: that’s TRAINING.  That’s the HARD training we just talked about.  The body doesn’t transform from fuel: the fuel FUELS the transformation.  It doesn’t matter if I put premium fuel or canola oil in my truck, nor does it matter if I put in 1 gallon or 50 if I never TURN IT ON.  It’s the same with eating: the eating is there to FUEL the transformation process: not vector it.  When I think “eating”, I think “to recover”.  I just did my write-up of Super Squats and I wrote about how there was literally not a moment of the day I wasn’t eating, because I was CONSTANTLY recovering from the training.  As of this moment, I’m in a deload.  I’m focusing on running and bodyweight work.  I am going hours between meals, and the meals themselves are sparse.  My recovery demand is low.  Yes: I will lose fat as a result of this.  No: this is not a fat loss phase of training.  The training is light because it is necessary to have a lighter training phase after such an INTENSE phase of training.  Oh my goodness, periodization once again.  Let training drive the bus here and you’ll be good: do it backwards and…well…you go backwards.

You can keep going on these tests.  When you hear “strength”, do you think total on the big 3?  Or do you think “ability to impose will”?  Or heck, do you hear strength and think “size”?  When you hear hypertrophy, do you think “bodybuilding”, or do you think “accumulation?”  When you hear “strongman training”, do you think anything, or do you come back with “for WHAT competition?”  You don’t need to be a psychologist to be able to appreciate what these tests reveal to ourselves.  We may end up learning more than we thought we knew.    

DO YOU WANT THE KIND OF BODY THAT WAS BUILT BY MILK DUDS?

I owe the topic title to u/CommonKings over on reddit, who is an absolute psychopath regrading all matters of training and is absolutely on my kickball team for Ragnarok (dude ran a version of Deep Water where he STARTED at 2 minutes rest and went down from there, f--k me).  Predictably, I was slumming it on the internet and came across a (hopefully) young trainee that was wanting to know if they could make use of Milk Duds (a confection of chocolate coated caramel, wherein 3 of the first 4 ingredients are simply different ways to say sugar [corn syrup, sugar, and dextrose] and the “milk” finally shows up as skim milk on ingredient 5) as a means of achieving their goal of physical transformation.  They assured us all that they would, of course, be following a diet that hit ALL the necessary macro AND micro nutrients: the Milk Duds were simply going to be utilized as a “necessary evil” in order to achieve their caloric goal of the day to promote muscular growth.  What a dandy idea: candy for gains!  To which I asked the eponymous topic title: “do you want the kind of body that was built by Milk Duds?”

At least go with the Peanut M&M... for the protein

 

I’m gonna go full Aristotle here folks: your body is a reflection of your habits.  There is no greater truth teller than your physical appearance.  Now, I’m not going to go full Greek here to present the idea that beautiful people are more virtuous than ugly people, because we can only get so jacked but no one can fix our face, but as far as what our BODY presents: it’s telling ALL of our secrets.  There is no hiding behind a screen or an alias or some e-stats: our body presents to the world a sum of our habits.  And that’s the thing: it’s HABITS.  It’s the things we’re ALWAYS doing that the body shares with the world.  If you absolutely crushed your last workout, and the 24 workouts prior to that were phoned in, your body is going to display those 24 workouts, not your last one.  And expand that out to the micro level: if the ONLY physical greatness you achieve daily is a 1-2 hour workout, and you spend the next 22 hours being a slob, what do you imagine your body will present?

 

This is such common sense thing that NO ONE wants to acknowledge because it’s “unfair”, but your body doesn’t care about fair: it shares your secrets with the world.  This is “being that which does”.  A body that constants experience toil, suffering, and overcoming is going to outwardly reflect a being that suffers, toils and overcomes…and those beings are physically awesome.  A body that constantly experiences leisure, comfort, and pleasure is going to reflect a being of leisure, comfort and pleasure.  From there, it’s a question of ratios: the greater the time spent overcoming, the more the body reflects an overcomer.  And, for those of us pursuing physical transformation, we seek to be an overcomer.

The body, seen here, overcoming

 

Your “body by Milk Duds” is not the body of an overcomer.  It is the body of a schemer.  Of a trickster.  Of someone who relies on guile vs brutality to resolve a difficulty.  I am sure your cranium will enlarge to accommodate your big brain that came up with this foolproof plan to almost quite literally “have your cake and eat it”, but your body will reflect that OF a cake-eater vs an overcomer.  Just from a very basic common sense perspective I ask you the question “do you want the kind of body that was built by Milk Duds?”  I ask this question and it upsets you because you don’t WANT the answer to be “no”, but we already know that, by asking for the permission to do it in the first place, we KNEW it wasn’t right: we just hoped we were wrong about BEING wrong.

 

“But Dave Tate lived off of Oreos and Little Debbies when he was in his prime!”  And what did Dave eat ON THE WAY to those confectionary treats?  Have you, gentle reader, gained up to 275lbs of bodyweight on chicken, rice and broccoli before you finally hit a gastrointestinal wall that necessitated having to overcome THROUGH comfort?  Can you imagine the sort of twisted Faustian deal wherein one must actually force the intake of the very foods people consider “treats” because they are so nutritionally dense that they can finally bridge the gap necessary to create FURTHER growth in the pursuit of physical transformation?  To have to totally warp your own reality such that the very thing that people use to experience transient dopamine-releasing joy through simulation of simple pleasure centers is instead utilized as a tool to create even further discomfort, agony and toil in the pursuit of physical transformation?  The cenobites couldn’t devise such insanity…and, meanwhile, Dave would be the first to tell you that he looked physically awful during that time as well, because the body will STILL tell all of our secrets: we’re eating more candy than we’re not eating.  Yeah, we may be squatting 900lbs and benching 600…but we are still candy eaters.

Shirtless, not to show off physique, but because you're ALWAYS sweating when you're this big

 

BUT, the tyranny and cruelty of the body can absolutely be played against itself, because it is nothing but transparent in its evil.  We know EXACTLY what the body is going to do: it’s going to share our secrets with the world.  In turn, all WE need to do is control the secrets.  If we do not create gossip, if we live on the straight and narrow, if we exist AS overcomers, the body will have no choice but to share THAT secret.  Do you realize how empowering it is to have so predictable of an enemy?  To know, before the battle starts, EXACTLY what they are going to do?  This is playing rock-paper-scissors with Bart Simpson: I can lament the fact that I can never play scissors, OR I can celebrate the fact that victory is assured because my opponent ALWAYS chooses rock and I merely need to pick paper. 

 

All we need to do to succeed is have boring secrets to share.  When we are consistently overcoming, in the realm of training and nutrition, we will have a body built by overcoming.  When are consistently eating Milk Duds, we will have a body build by Milk Duds.  Which one do you want?  

THE YAWGMOTH DEMON: GET STRONG NOW, HAVE NO PLAN FOR FAILURE

I honestly get giddy when I get to write a nerd post like this, because I can’t hide my roots, nor should I.  Though I don’t play these days (aside from an occasional game with my kid when they’ll tolerate me), I played a LOT of Magic the Gathering in the late 90s, and those of you who have no knowledge of that game are going to hate this post.  When I first started playing, I didn’t have any cards of my own, so I had to borrow from my older brother.  In turn, I had no idea what was IN the deck of cards I was playing with: it was just whatever my brother had slapped together and gave to me.  This made games pretty exciting, because each time I drew a card I legit had no idea what it COULD possibly be.  I was discovering my brother’s library of cards AS I played.

 

That becomes important to this story.  While playing against a neighborhood friend, I was putting on a typical underwhelming performance employing a variety of the low level/inexpensive cards my brother let me use.  I quit playing Magic in 7th grade because I figured out it was basically a game of “whoever spends the most money on cards wins”, and it was like a heroin habit draining whatever funds I had to “get my fix”.  I share that with you so that you understand how underpowered this deck was when the majority of the cards in I were worth about 30 cents.  But then, on one draw, I saw it: the Yawgmoth Demon.

 

Trust me: this was 90s cool

If you have NO background in this game, that photo means nothing.  If you have a background in this game, it probably ALSO means nothing, because these days that card is vastly overpowered by so much modern stuff.  But for little late 90s me, playing against my friend, at that moment in time, it was the most powerful thing I’d ever seen in the game. 

 

In the bottom right hand corner, you see the numbers “6/6”.  For a quick lesson in MtG: the first number is power, the second is toughness, the latter like “hit points” in a traditional RPG. Basically, when this demon hits another creature, it does 6 HP worth of damage, and it can also take 6 points of damage.  Up until this point, the strongest creature I had encountered in my deck was 2/2. 

 

This was unfathomably strong.  I could not wrap my brain around it.  How could this even exist?!  That flying and first strike thing was cool too, but I was locked into the 6/6. 

If you read the rest of the card, you’ll see something else: you have to sacrifice an artifact each turn, or else the Demon becomes “tapped”, which means it’s unable to fight AND it does 2 damage to you.  How very Faustian: an actual deal with a demon.  You have a contract that you have to abide by to get it to play right.

Pretty much like this

Here’s the thing.  I had NO artifacts at that time.

 

Here’s the other thing: since it was my brother’s random deck, I had no idea if I’d EVER have an artifact.

 

Here’s the other other thing: I did not care IN THE SLIGHTEST.  I played the Yawgmoth Demon right away.

This before this was this...and same outcome

 

And over the course of the game, it killed me.  I never drew a single artifact, and each turn, it kept dealing 2 damage to me until I died.

And as soon as I could scrap together enough cash, I went out and bought 4 of those cards: the max you could have in any deck.

  

Folks: I LOVE how late 90s me thought that day, at that moment, for that game.  THAT was the mentality I needed for SO much of my life.  I saw an opportunity for strength and I leap after it FIRST thing without question with NO plan whatsoever for failure.  There was no strategy, no trepidation, no hemming and hawing, no “wait and see”: I could NOT play that card fast enough.  I was gonna get strong now and figure out the rest later.

Solid plan

 

And yeah, it’d be easy to say that me losing that game that day was proof of how POOR a mentality that is, how it has no self-preservation behind it, how the outcome is being gradually killed by your own strength, etc etc, but we exist BEYOND just one game.  There was a follow-on: I went out and bought 4 more of those demons.  But even moreso: I also made sure I had a deck with some goddamn artifacts in it so I could USE those demons.  I LEARNED from the failure.  And the lesson wasn’t “this card sucks, I’ll never play it again”.  It was “This card is AWESOME: how can I make it work?”

 

And the big part of THAT is being able to not take defeat and failure so personally.  Failure is THE time to learn, so long as we drop our ego, admit our mistakes, and grow from it.  It’s totally fine to admit when you’ve been stupid.  In fact, “I’m stupid” is the common operating picture I try to approach ALL problem solving from.  Whenever I come up with a “brilliant idea”, I go back to the baseline of “I’m stupid” and then go “If I’m stupid and I came up with this, and no one ELSE has come up with it, and everyone else is smarter than me, why is this a BAD idea even though I think it’s a good one?”  In turn, if I take a program that has worked for everyone else and it doesn’t work for me, I immediately go back to “I’m stupid” and try to figure out what I’ve done wrong before I go “I’m perfect, it must be the program that’s wrong”. 

Yup: here we are

 

THAT is the real “failure plan”.  It’s not “what do I do when I fail”, but “what do I do to LEARN from the failure?”  The people that want to know how to fail a squat absolutely blow my mind: trust me, when the time comes to fail, your body will figure it out.  The people that want to know how to respond to failure in a program BEFORE it happens blow my mind.  What do you do if you don’t get all 20 reps of Super Squats?  I don’t know the answer, because we don’t know WHY you didn’t get all 20 reps UNTIL the moment happens.  The way forward from failure due to a pre-mature rack of the bar is going to be different from one that happened from true failure, vs one that happened because the bar slipped off the bar, vs one that happened because we blacked out at the top of the rep, etc etc.  We can’t prematurely plan for failure: we have to EXPERIENCE the failure first such that we can actually learn from the process.   And we don’t get to experience failure UNLESS we take risks.  And sometimes, risks pay off and we actually get the reward, so how cool is that?  But other times, the pay off of the risks IS the failure, and that’s cool too, so long as we learn from that failure.  Everything is a learning opportunity: we just have to allow ourselves TO learn.

 

I’ve played a thousand games since that day.  I even won a few of them.  I’ve gotten more powerful cards.  But, to this day, the Yawgmoth Demon STILL gives me chills.  It’s still what I think of whenever I think “strength”.  I still channel its spirit.  Because along with being a big strong scary demon, it’s a testament to the mentality of getting strong now and figuring out the rest later.   

SUPER SQUATS 3: THE REVENGE

Folks, as of my writing of this, I am one workout away from finishing my third run of Super Squats.  What makes this one unique is that this run of Super Squats comes on the tail of a prior run, with a 6 week break in between: an idea proposed by the very author of Super Squats, Randall Strossen.  I wrote in a previous blog entry regarding Duality via Periodization on how I trained in between the two runs of Super Squats, effectively trying to UNDO Super Squats and prep for another run, and found that to be ultimately beneficial.   What was also unique about this run compared to the previous run is that I did NOT contract RSV at the start of it, nor did I tear my hamstring in the 2nd week, so I got to have my revenge and really give Super Squats the full “Mythical Strength” treatment.

There is that side of the equation too

I wanted to document how this run went and what lessons I learned from it, because that’s why we do these things.

 

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HOW I SET UP THE TRAINING

You knew this was coming

I stuck with my 2 different training day approach, alternated in an A-B-A, B-A-B style approach.  Day A was a superset of axle clean once and strict press away with pull aparts, weighted dips w/axle rows, squats with pull overs, axle SLDLs, and poundstone curls, day B was a superset of incline DB bench and weighted chins, behind the neck press and pull aparts, squats and pull overs, and then an unbroken circuit of single set work of kroc rows into axle shrugs against bands into reverse hypers.  Each day also included standing ab wheel, glute ham raises, pushdowns, and some form of short conditioning work to end the training day.

 

Around the 5 week mark, I started cutting stuff out of the training days.  Biggest issue was my forearms/elbows from the frequent squatting.  They were in a significant degree of pain, and started limiting movement.  I removed weighted dips entirely, replacing them with a burnout set of flat benching with 20lb DBs (worked up to a max of 160 unbroken reps), and I’d play the Day A workout by ear on if I’d do the SLDLs or not. 

 

Week 5 was also unique in that it’s when I broke from the standard “Single set of 20, add weight next time” approach to one where I rotated between reps and different movements, once again in an attempt to spare my forearms.  I adopted an approach that had me do my heavy squat day on the first day of the week, then a lighter squat with 30+ reps for the middle workout, and then a Safety Squat Bar squat for 20 rep workout on Friday.  I’ll speak more to that later.

 

On the days between Super Squats workouts, I’d do 30 minute fasted conditioning workouts.  I almost never did the same one twice, and usually based it around what hurt the least to train and what could promote recovery for workouts.  On weekends, I found myself doing the Grace WOD from Crossfit with an axle pretty frequently, and would do some wild variations of it, like hitting it 3 times in a row with some burpee chins and swings in between or doing one every 10 minutes.  Pretty much just winging it.  I also practiced Tang Soo Do twice a week and had various other stints of physical activity.

Some examples

HOW IT WENT

 

About this good

If you care to watch the full run of the program, here is the playlist

With me starting at 335 for 23 reps, lighter weight allowing for higher reps as I broke into the program.

Without question, this was my most successful run of Super Squats, and one of my most successful runs of any program in general.  I hit some amazing lifts.  I feel the crowning achievement was 20x400lbs

 

 

Yes, I did in fact manage 20x405 later in the program

 

 

And it had quite a dramatic finish, but I absolutely dominated the set of 400 and felt the rep quality was high, whereas 405 was barely there, and I know I went short on the final rep just for the sake of getting the 20 in. Will I still count it?  F- -k yeah I will, but I also intend to come back sometime and get it clean.

 

Also got 35x315, which was gnarly

 

 

And in an attempt to top it, I did 33x315, then, after feeling sorry for myself for 20 seconds, got back up and got in 7 more reps for a total of 40

 

 

On top of all that, my incline dumbbell benching went from 3x12x95 to 110lbs, Behind the neck press from 3x10x120 to 145 and weighted dips capped out from 3x12x90 to 115 before I had to tap out from elbow pain.

 

My chins, rows and SLDLs also progressed incredibly well, but in that regard I entered the program recovering from a torn lat/tricep which had it so that I couldn’t do a single unweighted chin to start the program, and rows and SLDLs were stupidly light.  By the end of the program, I could do 2x15x25lb weighted chins, axle rows with 230lbs and axle SLDLs with 301lbs.

 

Oh yeah, and I didn’t weigh myself at the start of the program, but the day before the final workout I stepped on the scale after my post-workout shower and saw 201.0.  I still have ab veins.  I’ve never been this heavy and lean before, so that’s cool.

 

HOW IT WENT AWRY

Story of my life

 

As I’ve mentioned a few times now: elbow pain became the variable.  And I write “elbow”, but really, it’s more like forearm flexor/extenders.  It’s a byproduct of the stupidly low bar style of squat I employ, and I know it’s playing with fire whenever I do prolonged frequent squat workouts like this.  I experienced a similar issue on a run of Building the Monolith a while back.  It’s most likely why I tend to gravitate toward programs where I squat only once a week.

 

But I was also stupid in my conditioning exercise selection at the start.  I was doing a LOT of kettlebell cleans and snatches, and those TOO tend to jack up my elbows pretty badly.  Pairing them together on such an intense training program was a recipe for disaster, and once I crossed the point of no return on pain there was no course correction available aside from “drastic measures”.  Pain was beginning to influence training decisions, I was cutting movements out of the program or re-arranging things so that I wouldn’t go into the squat with so much pain that it distracted me from the set, and my conditioning became based around “what will hurt the least”.  I had to stop my daily ABCs or TABEARTAs for similar reasons. 

 

Eventually, after failing my first attempt at 405lbs, I had to make a change.  Now, that failure happened on an off-day as it was, since it was the president’s day holiday, so I trained in the afternoon rather than the morning, after a morning of “Top Golf” and different food than I normally have, but it was also the first workout of the program where I approached the bar with trepidation rather than an assurance that I was going to succeed, and it was due to the sheer pain I’d endure in simply UNRACKING the bar.

 

So I took a lesson learned from my previous run of Super Squats and decided to go for a set of 30+ reps.  That’s where the set of 35x315 happened, which was awesome, and I walked away feeling BETTER but not fully healed.  The next course of action was to use the Safety Squat Bar and completely remove the elbows from the equation.  That worked, and it was a challenging workout, but much like I wrote previously: the SSB just doesn’t create the same effect.  When you breathe at the top of the squat with the SSB, you can really rest.  You aren’t being crushed, you’re in a peaceful state, you can regather and recompose.  With a bar on your back, that time is murder.  I can’t see running a full cycle of Super Squats with a SSB being successful, but I can definitely see benefits of rotating it in as part of the program.  And in that regard…

 

LESSONS LEARNED AND FUTURE IDEAS

Don't listen to this heretic!

 

* Running a cycle of Super Squats where I worked up to 30 reps prior to this one was brilliant and totally unintended.  It legit made 20 reps feel mundane.  I was so used to the work STARTING at the 20 rep mark that I’d often not realize I was “done” with my set until around rep 18 or 19.  And they were STILL hard sets of 20, no question, but, mentally, there was no battle whatsoever.  I was conditioned to not even think about those first 15 reps, since they were “halfway” to the end and I didn’t want to get into my own head before that time.

 

* There’s nothing wrong with some short conditioning sessions between Super Squats workouts to keep appetite high and recover from training, but movement selection is crucial.  Death by a thousand cuts can happen, and once you’re on the wrong side of it, it’s too late to fix.

 

* I didn’t write about nutrition, because mine is so stupidly nuanced and insane that it’s cumbersome to do so, but I once again did not do the gallon of milk a day, and I once again say that, if you CAN, you should.  I was pretty much eating non-stop through the program.  If I had to work late, my whole evening got compromised and I would end up literally spending the time I got home to the time I went to sleep eating (I say without hyperbole, I’d eat my last meal, go upstairs, brush my teeth and go to bed.  All the people worried about eating before bed messing with their sleep can f- -k right off.)  I had a lunchbox full of food that I’d bring to work and eat something at least once an hour out of it, to say nothing of the snacks I kept in my desk, to say nothing of the gigantic breakfast I had BEFORE work.  And after I ate breakfast, I would do the dishes, have a snack, get my kid in the car, drop them off at school and then eat my CAR SNACK on my way to work, where I’d eat my “I got to work snack” as soon as I sat down.  People: a gallon of milk a day is so much simpler.  Also, I need to get sponsored by Nuts ‘n More, because I was going through a container a week, easily.

 

* At one point, squatting around 400lbs every other day for 20 reps just takes a toll on the body that cannot be recovered from if one is not drinking a gallon of milk a day (still gonna keep plugging that).  Next time I run Super Squats, I want to try an approach where I have 3 distinct approaches to the squat.  The first day of the week will be a traditional 20 reps.  The next day will be a lighter weight for 30+ reps.  The final day will be the Safety Squat Bar for 20 reps.  This is the layout I used for the last 2 weeks of this run of Super Squats, and I think it has a TON of merit.  Primarily, that heavy set is the first one of the week, so I effectively have 6 days to recover from it before I have to do it again.  Yeah, the middle workout is still a barbell squat workout, but the lighter weight is far less taxing on my elbows, and the SSB is completely forgiving of it, so I get to spend a lot of time healing/recovering.  As far as progression goes, I’m thinking 10lb jumps each week for the sets of 20, and going up a rep or so a week for the high rep work.  I’ve considered making the workout 1 and 2 weight the same at the start of the program and going from there as well: hitting 20 reps with it on workout 1, 21 on workout 2, and then when workout 4 rolls around go up 10lbs, then going up 1 rep on workout 5.  Lots of ways to succeed.  There’s also the possibility of swapping out the SSB day with a trap bar day too.    

 

* Randall Strossen’s idea of “6 weeks of Super Squats, then 6 weeks of a 5x5 bulk and power program, then 6 weeks of Super Squats” is right on the money.  I really overlooked that gem the first time I read the book, and even the second time, but after enough re-reads it really clicked, and this was a fantastic experiment in that regard.  You don’t need to run the exact 5x5 bulk and power program, but take the lesson it’s presenting: do a program with 1 set of a lot of reps, then do a program of a lot of sets of few reps.  It was stupid simple periodization and it was there all along.  And keep reading the rest of the book, where Randall talks about doing 2x15 or 3x10 or 1x30 and you see all the ways you can keep making Super Squats “work”.  That book, no joke, should be the first book any serious trainee reads regarding training.  It gives you a plan you can follow for life and imparts SO much knowledge.