Critique my Exercise Choice

Bigger Stronger Leaner
1

I’m going to be moving in a few weeks, which means I’ll be changing up gyms. I’ve been following a German Volume Training type program for 7 weeks and have been doing really well, but I think my exercise selection could be tweaked and this change in scenery is a good time to get some feedback.

I want to stress that I’m actually seeing improvements doing this, and this isn’t a “Help me, I’m so lost!” thread. I am, however, very open to suggestions from the esteemed assembly on how to get more out of this general program outline.

Below is: 1) my strengths/weaknesses, 2) current program, 3) what I think is good/bad about what I’m doing and 4) Original article/program linked at bottom

  1. Strengths and Weaknesses
    Relative Strengths:
    -Glutes, hams, calves
    -Back width

Relative Weaknesses:
-Chest
-Side/rear delts
-Tris
-Quads

  1. The Program - Last week’s #'s included. Only 60-75 seconds rest between all sets.

Sun: Back
A - Neutral Grip Pulldown - 10 x 10 @ 145
B1- Hammer Row - 4 x 12 @ 100
B2- DB Reverse Flye - 4 x 12 @ 15s
C - Decline DB Pullover - 4 x 12 @ 50

Mon: Legs/Arms
A - Back Squat - 10 x 10 @ 140
B1- Standing BB Curl - 4 x 12 @ 40
B2- French Press - 4 x 12 @ 40
B3- Bent Overhead Tri Pushdown - 4 x 12 @ 20
B4- Rope Tri Pushdown - 4 x 12 @ 20

Tue: Chest #1
A - Bench - 10 x 10 @ 135
B1- DB Bench - 6 x 12 @ 30s
B2- Bench Cable Flye - 6 x 12 @ 5s
C - Incline BB Bench - 4 x 12 @ 105

Wed: Deadlift/Back
A - Deadlift - 10 x 10 @ 170
B1- Pullups - 4 x 11
B2- Cable Rev Flye - 4 x 12 @ 5s
C - Hammer Pulldown - 4 x 12 @ 120

Thur: Shoulders (Taken from recent front-page article…)
A - Shoulder Press - 10 x 10 @ 80
B1- Heavy DB Lat Raise/Swing - 4 x 35 @ 25
B2- Machine Rev Flye - 4 x 35 @ 15
C - Supported Bent-Over DB Rev Flye - Drop Set 30/30/15 @ 30/15/5s

Fri: Rest

Saturday: Chest #2
-Same as Chest #1

  1. What I think is good/bad about the program:

The Good:
-High volume barbell work has visibly leaned me out in 2 months
-Straight sets, high volume, medium rest, medium weight seems to suit my training personality. I’d rather edge up to failure repeatedly than actually fail once, and it seems to get me results.
-4 exercises per workout is few enough that I don’t lose focus

What I’m considering changing:
-Shuffle my back movements to create separate vertical/horizontal pull days
-Taking arms out of squat day, no idea where to put them
-Moving Decline DB Pullovers to a chest day, or replacing them alltogether
-Anything to improve my side/rear delts is fair game
-Adding face pulls
-Alternating in front squats instead of back squats every other week
-Switching to a 14 day rotation to get more variety in on the assistance lifts

  1. The Return of German Volume Training
2

I think you should go with the program Lee wrote in the article you referenced. Much more balanced.

3

Interesting comment jskra. I went back and compared my routine to the original to see how different they really were. I noticed a few obvious things, but I’m interested in your opinion on exactly what I did to unbalance the original routine. Which changes were too much, and why?

4

Are those weights in lbs or kg?

5

I’m kind of embarrassed to say they are in pounds.

I’ve been lifting with a focus for 2 years now, which makes my numbers even more embarrassing. What I have learned from this is that taking more and more rest between sets and doing less volume in order to train with heavier weights will allow me to lift those heavier weights…for a while. But if I don’t keep up a high training volume overall, that strength just vanishes from underneath me.

It seems so weird to think that I deadlifted 320 at a weight of 150 back when I was doing Crossfit style training and can only pull about 245 at 165 now after a long time of supposedly focusing on strength. My PR in the back squat is 225 but some days 185 just feels way too heavy to take to parallel. Again, my lesson is that to stay strong, I have to check my ego, take some weight off the bar, and do a lot of reps.

Also, I keep my mind open and lurk these forums for info and inspiration. Not everything I’ve learned here has worked for me, but a lot has, and I just keep trying new things and keeping what appears to work.

What are your thoughts?

6

Well, personally, I think “Back Squat - 10 x 10 @ 140” is pretty impressive, considering the volume.

7

If your strength is that inconsistent, I’d look at diet and rest.

8

I just don’t understand why you think GVT is the answer.

You should be eating to grow and getting alot stronger if that’s important to you.

9

I could be mistaken but I always thought of GVT as some for more advanced lifters when they can actually move a decent amount of weight for a lot of volume.

10

@ LoRez: Thanks! I’ve worked hard to get from cross-country runner territory to “average” and now I’m shooting for that above-average performance. Always gotta be going up.

@ Spidey: Sorry, my writing was sloppy. I don’t mean that my strength fluctuates from day-to-day within programs, more like I’ll reach a PR, switch something up, and then go to try to break that PR weeks later and be weaker than I was before. Concur on the importance of sleep and nutrition though.

@ jskra: I don’t see how GVT and eating and growing are mutually exclusive. I have been eating and gaining weight over the winter, but like I mentioned, wasn’t really getting stronger to match. The reason I singled in on GVT for my new focus was that it somewhat resembled the better points of when I was my strongest…which was when I was working out at a Crossfit gym. I kept the high volume, low rest concept and discarded the excessive randomness in favor of progression and kept just enough rest to keep my sets productive as opposed to the long, slow, horrible slog of the 30+ minute conditioning workouts of the past. It seems to be a happy medium that is getting me results. I do agree that nutrition is very important and I have had to learn to eat more to keep my gains coming…but I also have to couple that with enough total work in the gym to turn it to muscle instead of fat.

@ Fletch: after your and J’s comments I wonder if I shouldn’t just change the label I put on my program from GVT to “Ryan’s High-Volume Workout Plan” or something similar. I admit that the weights aren’t impressive, and I’m not advanced, but either 3x8 is not enough volume for me to grow, or I don’t have the mental fortitude to make 3 sets of 8 count. Either way, it just seems like I need more.

11

Why don’t you just tell us what you ate yesterday, or the last day you trained?

12

[quote]rwhipple08 wrote:
@ jskra: I don’t see how GVT and eating and growing are mutually exclusive. I have been eating and gaining weight over the winter, but like I mentioned, wasn’t really getting stronger to match. The reason I singled in on GVT for my new focus was that it somewhat resembled the better points of when I was my strongest…which was when I was working out at a Crossfit gym. I kept the high volume, low rest concept and discarded the excessive randomness in favor of progression and kept just enough rest to keep my sets productive as opposed to the long, slow, horrible slog of the 30+ minute conditioning workouts of the past. It seems to be a happy medium that is getting me results. I do agree that nutrition is very important and I have had to learn to eat more to keep my gains coming…but I also have to couple that with enough total work in the gym to turn it to muscle instead of fat.

@ Fletch: after your and J’s comments I wonder if I shouldn’t just change the label I put on my program from GVT to “Ryan’s High-Volume Workout Plan” or something similar. I admit that the weights aren’t impressive, and I’m not advanced, but either 3x8 is not enough volume for me to grow, or I don’t have the mental fortitude to make 3 sets of 8 count. Either way, it just seems like I need more.[/quote]

My 2 cents on this.

Things like 6x6, 8x8, 10x10 (GVT and some of Gironda’s programs) have their place, but they’re not really going to get you what it sounds like you want.

Those programs are good for flushing nutrients into the muscles and increasing muscle tone. One of the results from this seems to be increased capillary development, so your body gets even better at providing those muscles with nutrients.

On a short timescale, they’re very good for things like “I have a company pool party in a week and I want to look good”. They’ll help you look bigger for that. Or, as Gironda used them, to get actors to look in decent shape for a movie being filmed in the next couple weeks.

But what they don’t seem to do very well is provide good training stimulus to the muscle fibers themselves; i.e., the fibers aren’t breaking down enough to be rebuilt to make the muscles themselves grow.

If that’s what you’re looking for… and it sounds like it is… I don’t think GVT is really what you should be doing right now.

On another front, you seem to want to do something that feels like hard work, that wears you down, and that not only actually gives you progress in the gym, but that makes you “feel” like you’re making progress in the gym. If you were a cross-country runner (guessing based on your comment about having had a cross-country physique), then I think I’m on the right track here. Well, that, plus the fact that you want something that feels like a CrossFit workout.

If that is the case, I think you’d be better served with something a bit more standard BB-wise… 3-4x8-12, compounds + isolations… but then throwing in a set of rest-pause 20+ rep squats into every workout (at the beginning or the end). Once you unrack the bar, you don’t rack it until you’ve completed all 20, but you can take as long as you want. And progress on the squats EVERY SINGLE workout, even if it’s just something as light as adding an extra collar to each side. Just be careful with your form and your low back.

I think this might help give you that psychological hard-work feeling you want, while also keeping you in a more productive muscle-building range for everything else.

I could be completely wrong here, but again, my 2 cents.

13

Well, this thread has certainly taken a different direction than I expected, but that’s cool. Lots of thoughts to keep in mind when I scope out my new gym and see what is available there.

@ Spidey: A typical day for me looks like:
0600 - Lift w/Anaconda
0730 - Protein shake w/milk. ~500 cals/60g protein
0900 - Snack on some combo of nuts, string cheese, raisins, pineapple or other fruit.
1100 - Lunch. Typically something like grilled chicken, rice, veggies.
1500 - Snack
1900 - Dinner. Meat-heavy stuff; chicken chili, tacos, grilled meat, etc.
2100 - Small protein shake before bed if I’m still hungry.

It’s an average of 3k cals and 190g protein per day.

I’ll admit that for a long time I was the “hardgainer” variety who simply didn’t eat enough because I didn’t have any idea how much as appropriate to eat. I eat more now, sleep more, and rarely ever drink. I think I have the “general health” part of fitness pretty well covered.

@ LoRez - I’m not following you on the lack of stimulus and muscles not breaking down. When I start missing reps around set 6 it’s not because I’m out of breath or tired…I’m pushing myself just like I’d be doing for heavier sets. The difference is that the weight is still light enough that I can strain the target muscle instead of shifting to a different stance/position/angle and “cheating” my way through the reps. I’d agree with you if I was flying through all my reps easily, but I carefully progress weight used in order to keep myself just barely able to do the 100 reps, or even miss a few.

Honestly, I wasn’t expecting such a response against higher volume training. Maybe I’m just too lacking in MMC to work my target muscles correctly without a larger than normal amount of warmup sets and reps than the normal trainee. If I were to drop down to a more conventional 3x4 per exercise, I’d probably also shift to whole-body routines to get a comparable amount of total work done per workout.

14

[quote]rwhipple08 wrote:

Honestly, I wasn’t expecting such a response against higher volume training. [/quote]

You’re missing the point. Alot of those posting in this thread incorporate very high volume in their own training.

The point is you need to get stronger before even thinking about more advanced training like GVT. You are missing out on a chance to make HYOOGE jumps in strength in not alot of time.

15

Overall, something is not adding up here. I don’t believe this to necessarily be a troll job, although I’m not ruling it out.

You seriously just need a basic strength program to get your numbers up. If you’re not growing, your diet is inadequate. You’re really not going to get any different advice than that on this forum. Sorry.

If you were happy and felt strong when you trained crossfit, why wouldn’t you just stick with it?

16

Well IMO, there’s a few things you could tweak. Diet is pretty variable, but if you’re training high volume, I’d make sure you’re getting a decent amount of carbs. Whether you’re eating enough is something you should be able to figure out, whether you’re growing, how sore you are, how well you’re progressing in adding weight to the bar.

Looking at your numbers, you don’t think it’s odd you’re using basically the same weight for pulldowns, Bench, AND Squat, and only 5 lbs over BW in DL?

This program isn’t making you all too strong I feel, and just getting you ‘in shape’. Like you just don’t lift heavy enough weights yet to really benefit from a more advanced program like GVT.

I would stay on a split similar to what you’re own, but focus on just adding weight to the bar in a reasonable rep range on your first lift. And make up the ‘volume’ from the 10x10 by adding some more assistance work. I suggest taking a program out of KingBeef’s “Don’t use the dumb split” thread if your goals are physique related.

EDIT: Second what Jake said, if CF got you strong and in better shape, why not do a strength-oriented CF routine?

17

[quote]jskrabac wrote:
You seriously just need a basic strength program to get your numbers up. [/quote]

This.