A MADMAN’S NOTEBOOK

I’ve had a few wild ideas for training circling around in my head a bit, so I thought I’d share them for anyone crazy enough to actually undertake them.  None of these have been personally tested by me, and they’re on my radar as things I’d try, but I definitely can’t vouch for them.  If nothing else, I’m letting you peek behind the curtain to see the kind of things my diseased brain comes up with when left to idle.

 

 

ALPHABET WORKOUT

Hard to beat this training menu!  And yes: I HAVE eaten here before.

* 13 workouts, 2 movements per day, 2 week cycle. Train M-Sat for the first week, Sunday off, then 7 days on.

* Pick movements or muscles based off letter of the alphabet, in order.

Example

Day 1:
Arm-Back

Day 2:
Chest-Deltoids

Day 3:
Erectors-Front Squats

Day 4:
Glutes-hamstrings

Day 5:
Isometrics-Jumps

Etc etc.

* PAIR IT WITH THE ABCDE DIET!

For those unfamiliar with that particular diet, here is a great discussion on it

https://physicalculturestudy.com/2016/11/30/gaining-muscle-and-losing-fat-the-abcde-diet-experiment/

* Basically, it was 2 weeks of controlled undereating followed by 2 weeks of overfeeding, operating under the premise that the undereating would prime the body for growth during the overfeeding.  We see a similar approach in Jamie Lewis’ “Feast, Famine and Ferocity” diet, wherein he employs a 2 week protein sparing modified fast followed by 4 weeks of overeating (with the option to fudge those numbers around based on the physique of the trainee).

 

* If you do the traditional 2 week underfeed/2 week overfeed approach, it would mean each alphabet cycle would map directly onto the nutritional phase.

* In THAT regard, you could make hardfast rules, like, during underfeeding we focus on movements, and during overfeeding we focus on muscles.

 

DAN JOHN PROGRAM CYCLING

I've earned many eye rolls from this man

 

BACKGROUND DATA

 

* Mass Made Simple is a 6 traditionally a 6 week program with a heavy emphasis on complexes and high rep squats, with no particular emphasis on the hip hinge. 

* Dan John’s 10k swing challenge is the opposite: 4 weeks/20 days (5 days a week of training), getting in 500 swings a day, for a total of 10k swings.  HEAVY hip hinge emphasis, with squatting typically relegated to goblet squatting done between swings, if at all.

* Dan’s “Armor Building Formula” book includes 2 specific workouts: a kettlebell workout and a barbell workout.  I’ve written a review of this very recently, but to summarize, the KB workout is based around alternating workouts of the Armor Building Complex (2 KB cleans, 1 press, 3 front squats) and the KB clean and press away (1 clean, press from there, vs 1 clean per press).  The barbell workout is based around the continuous clean and press (clean each rep before the press), the barbell curl, and the barbell front squat.  The kettlebell program is 8 weeks long, and the barbell program tends to run a bit longer.

* His “Easy Strength” workout is 40 workouts (8 weeks of training if done 5x a week) of the same movements (an upper body push and pull, a hinge, ab wheel/similar exercise, and a loaded carry) each workout, no more than 10 reps per exercise, no struggling on any reps, the intent to gradually nudge up one’s baseline ability, rather than their maximal ability.  Basically, make our “easy” work stronger.  You’ll observe there is no squat in this workout.  Dan has said on multiple occasions that he’s been unable to get the squat to work for Easy Strength.

TOO LATE!

 

Understanding this, it becomes too easy to chain these programs together.  Especially if we also apply Dan’s “Bus bench-park bench” philosophy.  10k swing and Mass Made Simple are very much “bus bench” programs.  Easy Strength is very much a “park bench” program.  The ABF somewhat straddles the middle: it’s bodybuilding for “REAL people”, intending to be a less harsh program than Mass Made Simple.

 

In that regard, one could start off with Mass Made Simple, run it the traditional 6 weeks and really focus hard on the heavy complexes and high rep squats.  From there, 8 weeks of Easy Strength to recover, nudge up poundages, and bring back the hip hinge that wasn’t present before (outside of the bits in the complexes).  This time away from squatting will be helpful for recovery.  From here, you could go to the Armor Building Formula KB workout for 8 weeks, which will bring back the squats via KB front squats, then finish off with the 10k swing challenge for 4 weeks to re-emphasize the hip hinge.  So we’re looking at 6 weeks-8 weeks-8 weeks-4 weeks, for a total of 26 weeks of programming: half a year. 

 

You could keep it even simpler, and just always use Easy Strength as a “palate cleanser” between the harder workouts.  MMS-ES-10K-ES-ABF-ES, etc.  In theory, every time you finish a run of Easy Strength, you’ll be stronger than you were at the start, which will mean you’ll be even more capable of producing changes on these “bus bench” workouts, plus you’ll be in a great state of recovery after the time away from the hard grinding workouts.

 

OR, we could get REALLY wild. 

Just leave it up to these 3 maniacs...props if you get this reference

 

Dan has said that, in Mass Made Simple, the REAL magic is the complexes and the squats.  He’s played around a lot with the upper body work, going so far as to replace everything with just the handstand push up.  This lets us know we have some room to play around.  You already remember my experiment combining Mass Made Simple with Easy Strength, and it went quite well.  We can do something similar here, combining MMS with the Armor Building Formula.  Specifically, we take Dan’s advice to make MMS a 7 week program by splitting up the upper body and complexes/squat workouts, so now we train 4x a week (squat on Mon/Thurs, Upper body Tues/Fri).  We keep the complexes and squats as laid out in MMS, but for the upper body work, we do the KB press workouts from ABF.  We won’t do the ABC portions because we’re already squatting on the squat days, and don’t want to add KB front squats to the mix, but we can certainly use that press workout for our upper body. 

 

Another way to combine programs that I’ve observed is to run the 10k swing challenge alongside Mass Made Simple.  In this instance, you’d do the 10k swing workouts on the non-lifting days of MMS, which will mean NOT doing 5 days a week of swings, which allows you to stretch out the 10k swing workout long enough to fit within the 6 weeks of MMS.  What this also does is give you an avenue to train the hip hinge ALONGSIDE the squats in MMS.  That was similar to my solution of running Easy Strength alongside MMS, giving me opportunities to hinge while still playing hard on the squats.

 

A NEW WEIGHTGAINING BLOCK

Hopefully it gets you as jacked as Zangief!

Once again, going back to Dan John’s fantastic “Mass Made Simple” book, one of the many reasons I’m a big fan of it is Dan includes an entire starter section on it teaching the new trainee HOW to squat.  Specifically, how to avoid running into your own legs at the bottom of the squat: learning how to squat BETWEEN your knees.  He provides a program dedicate to just this feat, and THEN, when you actually run Mass Made Simple, he walks you through every workout, telling you exactly what to lift and for how many reps.  It’s incredibly prescriptive and leaves no doubt for the trainee.

 

In that regard, I feel like it’s an EXCELLENT starting program for a new trainee focused on gaining mass.  After they finish running the program for those 7 weeks, where do they go on from there?

 

You won’t like this answer, but…SUPER SQUATS.  Now we transition from 50 rep squats to 20 rep squats…but they’re BREATHING squats.  We’ll be conditioned and prepared for this demand from all the hard work in MMS and definitely have an improved squatting ability.  And after 6 weeks of the traditional Super Squats program, where do we go?  Into the 5x5 program that’s ALSO in Super Squats, so that we can FINALLY stop doing high rep squats for a minute, regroup, and focus on getting stronger.

And then what?  Why, then back to Mass Made Simple.  Why?  Because Dan designed the workouts to be done by weight class, and at this point, we’re SURE to be up a weight class, so we can run THOSE numbers and continue to progress. 

7 weeks MMS-6 weeks Super Squats-6 weeks 5x5-7 Weeks MMS gets us 28 weeks of training, and we can really just keep running this until the wheels fall off…perhaps quite literally with all those damn squats!

 

DOGGCRAPP AND SUPER SQUATS

 

Dog squats...been going 90s a LOT here

It’s not as though DoggCrapp necessarily needs improving, but I have an idea for morphing these two programs together in order to make Super Squats more sustainable.  I always found, toward the end of the 6 weeks, I tended to be pretty broken down from the frequency of Super Squats.  DoggCrapp resolves this issue by rotating exercises, and I figured we could employ the same principle here.

 

Super Squats is traditionally run 3 days a week.  It’s usually the same movements each time, specifically with the squat as the focus, adding 5lbs each workout, resulting in 90lbs added from start to finish.  What we could do, instead, is pick 3 different exercises for each body part (which the Super Squats book actually DOES lay out as far as suitable replacements go) and train them in a rotation: 1 set of movements on day 1, 1 on day 2, one on day 3.  Start a new week and restart the process.  This would INCLUDE the focused squat movement of the program: we’re going to rotate that one as well.  In doing so, we can slow down the progression rate, only adding 5lbs once a week rather than every workout, OR we could feel braver and go for 10lbs, but still reduce the frequency of progress AND the frequency of the exercise itself, meaning a reduced change of experiencing some form of repetitive motion trauma.  In turn, we COULD run Super Squats for LONGER than the traditional 6 weeks…which sounds absolutely HORRIBLE, but is at least something different.

 

 

This is tip of the iceberg stuff here, but hopefully ya’ll found it interesting and it got you thinking about ways you can play around with your own training.