OBSERVATIONS FROM BEING HALFWAY THROUGH EASY STRENGTH/MASS MADE SIMPLE

About a month ago, I had finished up another run of Jamie Lewis’ “Famine” training protocol and found myself in a situation wherein I had a pretty chaotic summer schedule ahead due to travel and family obligations, and could not, realistically, commit to a structured, rigid and involved training program like what “Feast” would entail.  So I needed to take on a new approach.  I had read the “Easy Strength Omnibook” over Christmas (reviewed on this blog. Spoilers: it’s amazing: read it!), and finally found myself in a position wherein I could run it…

Yeah that's pretty much me

…buuuut…I had JUST finished Famine.  I needed to do something that was going to make me GROW!  Easy Strength, in and of itself, was NOT going to accomplish that…which begged the question of what I would do for the “everything else” portion of the program in order to force some growth.  I, of course, instinctively dove toward Super Squats, and considered how it’d answer the “what do you do for squats on Easy Strength” question…but then it got me thinking about ANOTHER hard squatting program I hadn’t run yet…which was ALSO a Dan John program.  

Enter “Mass Made Simple”, a program that had LONG since been on my list of programs to run…but, in truth, I could not wrap my brain around the upper body portion of the program.  Having read through the book a few times, it seemed to violate the “simple” portion of “Mass Made Simple”, because it required a LOT of tracking, planning and tinkering…while “Easy Strength” actually seemed simple…

…LIGHT BULB!  Combine them!  Let Easy Strength take care of the strength and Mass Made Simple take care of the mass.  From reading Dan’s work and listening to his podcasts, the upper body training portion of MMS was really just boilerplate stuff that was thrown in to get in SOME upper body work, whereas the real “magic” of the program was in the complexes and the high rep squats.  That sounds JUST like the “whatever else” of Easy Strength.  Do the Easy Strength workout, and THEN do complexes and high rep squats for “whatever else”…the goal being hypertrophy vs athletic performance (the latter being the more typical goal/”whatever else” of Easy Strength).

With that, I had a way forward, and decided to be cute and call the whole thing “MESS”, standing for “Mass-Easy, Strength-Simple”, and fully capturing just what this adventure is. And after 20 Easy Strength workouts I’m halfway through Easy Strength, and after 9 Mass Made Simple workouts I’m over half-way through MMS, so I felt like laying down some observations NOW before too much time passes and I forget any of this.  And now I’ll have the intro knocked out when it’s time to do a full-up review.

That said, let’s bulletpoint this up and get some observations down.

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"MESS" IN GENERAL

Props if you get this reference...and it would HAVE to be a PBJ to fit the program

* As far as making the schedule “work”, my situation forced me to get creative.  I don’t lift weights on weekends.  That’s my time with my family.  I will wake up before everyone on the weekdays to get in a lift, but on weekends I sleep in with the Mrs and spend time with the kiddo as much as I can.  This meant all my Easy Strength workouts were Mon-Fri, and I would have to find a way to get in 14 Mass Made Simple workouts in 6 weeks with that approach (Dan DOES permit one to stretch MMS out to 7 weeks, but that wasn’t something I was interested in doing).  In order to make the 14 MMS workouts fit, it required a schedule of effectively 2-3-2-3-2-2 MMS workouts over the corresponding weeks (2 on week 1, 3 on week 2, etc). 

* On the above, my preferred structure was to have MMS workouts be on Mon and Fri, with the 3rd one being Wed if applicable.  The reasoning for this was how my nutrition was structured, which I wrote about recently in my “nutritional alchemy” post, but, ultimately, on weekends I tend to eat more food than on weekdays.  So a Friday MMS workout meant I’d have the entire weekend to eat to recover from the training and force muscle to grow, and then I’d have my Rampage/carb up meal on Sunday and have that to train off of on Monday to really drive hard.  I’d go through my “fasting” meal on Monday, which had enough protein in it to recover and, combined with the HARD MMS workout, did a great job of causing some distress on my body to recover.

Like squatting 25lbs over bodyweight for 50 reps, for example

* The above schedule ALSO helps fit MMS’ intent of following up the hard squatting workouts with a “recharge” workout followed by a “rest” workout.  For me, these would be 20 minute hard conditioning workouts and long walks, while still including Jamie Lewis’ RX of 300 squats and 300 push ups daily.  I’d use the weekends to be generally physically active, but not engage in Easy Strength style workouts or anything that was stressful for long durations.

EASY STRENGTH IN GENERAL

Seriously: buy it.  It's Dan's Best work

* It’s EASY strength: it needs to be treated easy!  I’m a “grinder”, as Derek Poundstone would put it, and super mega slow-twitch, so I move 135 and 405 at the same speed.  But when the weights are easy, they should be moved fast and explosively.  Jim Wendler has spoken about this as well.  We get faster and more explosive by moving that way: grinding light weights just makes us even worse at moving light weights.

* That’s not to way that rep quality should be poor: the opposite.  Reps need to be owned.  This is an opportunity to master these movements, because the weight is light and we have a chance to really nail stuff.  My continental has grown in leaps and bounds because of the frequent practice and mastery.

* The parallels between Easy Strength and 5/3/1 become more and more apparent as I experience the program and review the lessons from Dan and Jim.  The difference is primarily that Jim is more prescriptive than Dan, which is funny because people comment on how Jim doesn’t spell out enough of the program, so they’ll REALLY dislike Easy Strength.  But, ultimately, the main work of 5/3/1 IS Easy Strength, especially when using 5s pro: it’s a small number of reps with light weight performed with the intent of owning the weight and crushing the rep.  From there, Jim lays out the “everything else” that Dan leaves up to the reader via prescribed supplemental, assistance, conditioning, jumps and throws.  Your “everything else” is hypertrophy?  Cool, do BBB or Building the Monolith.  It’s conditioning?  Great: prowler challenge.  Jim also spells out what weights to use, whereas Dan leaves it up to the trainee, and Jim forces you to use light weights whereas Dan tells you to do so.   So perhaps 5/3/1 is Easy Strength training wheels.

* Yes, there is a difference in that 5/3/1 doesn’t have you do the same movements everyday for 40 workouts, and instead tends to focus on 1-2 lifts a day, but that’s getting into nuance and preference.  One of the big takeaways here is how easily one can blend the methods as a result.  If you want to use Easy Strength AND build muscle without using my MESS approach, you could do Easy Strength and chase it with BBB, Monolith or Hardgainer supplemental/assistance/jumps throws and conditioning.  And hey: Easy Strength for Fat Loss is EXACTLY the “light conditioning” days of 5/3/1.

* In that regard, other places to steal for “everything else” would include the 10k swing challenge, Tactical Barbell (especially volume 2), Crossfit (do the Easy Strength program, then the WOD), Neversate/Brian Alsruhe programs (I’d skip Brian’s mainwork and just steal the assistance/conditioning to make this work) and, of course, Mass Made Simple.

Not really the go to for "Easy"

* Meanwhile, for contrasting programs to run AFTER Easy Strength is done, Dan’s 1 lift a day program is pretty much the total opposite of Easy Strength (focus on 1 lift a day, train that lift once a week, do it for a higher volume of total work), Deep Water (some lifts are trained once every 14 days, and you absolutely smash that lift), and possibly DoggCrapp (you’re rotating through so many movements that it’s a long while before you come back to it).  Conjugate would also strike a similar chord in that regard.

* The next time I run Easy Strength (which will most likely be very soon), I plan to use dips or incline bench vs overhead pressing for the press work.  I get in a good amount of overhead work with my conditioning, and with MESS it happens during the complexes as well, whereas my horizontal press these days is primarily the 300 push ups a day I do per Jamie Lewis’ mandate.  

* What I have found the most interesting thing about this is how my physique actually seems to be IMPROVING with Easy Strength, if not at least maintaining.  I felt like I would see a decline from the “lack of work”, but when you lift the same lifts 5 days a week, you DO get in a substantial amount of volume with high quality reps, vs a bunch of garbage sets.  

* Another theory I have about this is that I have “earned” this minimalist approach, as Dan writes about.  I had been going VERY hard and with lots of volume leading up to Easy Strength, and now this minimalist approach has allowed me to realize a lot of the potential I’ve been building up to as the fatigue dissipates and the body rebuilds.  Perhaps this also speaks to the “hormonal cascade” that Dan speaks of occurring once the lifting is done.

* On top of all of that, I can’t ignore how important my shift in nutrition has been as well.  I’m taking in SO much protein and quality fats these days and finally eliminated the ketojunk for good.

Keto...bread.  How was I this stupid?

* Short burstfire thoughts: Easy Strength works: I’m halfway through and already seeing results.  It IS easy, which is a good thing.  I dig these short workouts BECAUSE it allows me time to do other stuff.  In that regard, it’s good to cycle through the “whatever else” portion of Easy Strength and build other qualities.  Periodization, yet again.  Strength isn’t everything, and hypertrophy is a fine goal, so use Easy Strength to build your strength and use your “whatever else” to build your size.  That’s totally fine.

* A good approach to taking on Easy Strength at the start is to pick “new” movements to you so you can reap the benefits that come with improved mastery ALONGSIDE the benefits of Easy Strength as well.  You’ll observe rapid progression.  So go beltless if you’ve been using a belt, use chains or bands, go double overhand on your pulls, or use an axle, or use different foot/bar/hand placement, etc etc.

* Remember that a loaded carry is a LOADED carry.  If you just carry something: that’s a carry.  A loaded carry is a carry UNDER LOAD.  It took me a while to appreciate that.  It’s why I’m wearing weight vests and chains during most of mine.  Other alternatives are to pull a sled while you do it.  If you look at the cover of “Never Let Go”, you’ll see Dan really personifying this by carrying a sandbag while wearing a loaded backpack and pulling a sled.

Also a fantastic read

* For this particular run of Easy Strength, I kept it easy AND simple.  Dan said, if he could do it all over again, he’d just do 3x3, so that’s exactly what I did.  I also am keeping all the lifts the same throughout, minus the carries of course, since Dan said specifically to never repeat that workout.  The next time, though, I plan to play around with reps and sets and the movements as well.  Specifically, if I were to do another run like MESS or something similar with a hard lifting workout thrown in, I’d most likely make that particular Easy Strength day the 1x10 variant OR use the 1x10 variant for the follow-on day as a means to recover from the workout.  The 5-3-2 day would be a good realization day, and then 2x5 would be a good “punch the clock” sort of workout.  So, again, if this was MESS, you could do 5-3-2 on the MSS day, then do 2x5 as your recharge and 1x10 as your rest.

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With that, there’s my halfway report.  I’m excited to see where this second half leads.