Woke at 254.4 lbs, looking the same as usual. Not sure what’s going on but I’ll figure it out. Eventually.
What sort of change are you expecting day to day Mark and what are you doing to make the change?
Good questions. What I’m looking for is more a gradual increase over time even with daily fluctuations. What’s confusing me a little is the larger (over 500 grams) fluctuations day to day when as far as I’m aware I’m doing much the same every day.
So right now it seems like I’m sitting around 115.5 kg when taking into account the daily ups and downs. That’s pretty much where I’ve been for the last month, so I’m trying to figure out what the spikes are caused by and why I drop the day after.
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@simo74 you got me thinking so I went and looked at the actual numbers from the past month. I averaged out the weights for each week and it came out as
Week 1 252.9 lbs
Week 2 253.9 lbs
Week 3 253.9 lbs
Week 4 255.3 lbs
So there’s actually a reasonable increase and I’m whinging about nothing. I just need to keep track of the numbers a little better. An average gain of 2.4 lbs in a month is decent.
Thanks for that. Wouldn’t have done it without you asking.
500g at your weight is a small change day to day. Could be water, could be you’ve been to the toilet more one day to the next.
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Pleasure Mark. Sometimes we just need a different point of view. You’ve done that for me many times so always glad to return a good deed. 
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Woke at 258.8 lbs, looking much the same. Win.
This popped up on my Facebook feed. It’s gold
I think this is where Greg’s system works wonders. Per session, we don’t spend so much time on the main lift. I mean, generally we’ll do maybe 20-25 reps of the main lift in a session. Then we spend most of the time on supplemental and assistance work. I think it also ties into what Paul Carter says about the big lifts not being so good for building mass. We do just enough work on them to improve technique and then switch to more effective methods to build mass.
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I like that. I’ve been focusing most of my stuff around the main lifts and most of the other stuff could probably not be considered supplemental to the main lifts.
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How so @wanna_be
I bench, deadlift, OHP, and usually squat but am taking a sabbatical while I workout some issues.
I don’t really do anything that benefits those? After the main lifts I do most of the bro stuff. I mean I guess leg extensions and curls could help with dead’s and squats but I’m sure there are more exercises that are more beneficial to adding weight on the bar.
I’ve never really stopped and thought “what am I doing to improve those lifts”. I just do those lifts and hope I can continue adding weight over time. Maybe it’s time I start actively trying to improve those lifts other than just doing them?
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Got you. Well, try thinking of each main lift as a structure and then break down that structure into its components. That’s how you build anything. Bear in mind that the better the component, the better the structure. In this case, a better component is a bigger component.
Your technique is how well you use the entire structure.
So you can have a great structure, but use it poorly and get poor results; or have a poor structure and use it very well, and have poor results.
Squat components
Quads, hamstrings, glutes, hips, abs, lower back, middle back, upper back
Bench components
Pecs, tris, biceps, delts, upper back, middle back, grip/forearms
Deadlift components
Quads, hamstrings, glutes, abs, lower back, middle back, upper back, grip/forearms
Press
Delts, tris, biceps, upper back, middle back, lower back, abs, grip
Now you have your components, and you can see there’s a lot of overlap. This is good. Your technique is covered by your main lift work, so all you need to worry about is making good components to build your structure.
How do we build? By forcing adaptation. The more regularly we do something, the less we need to adapt to it. So we don’t want to do the same thing the same way very often. That makes sure we keep having to adapt. So we will try to use lots of different ways to build our components. That means instead of doing some specific exercises for particular loads, sets and reps over and over, we use lots of different exercises for different loads, sets and reps.
In application, it looks like this:
Quads, hamstrings, glutes, hips
Wide stance squat, narrow stance squat, box squat, squat with/without elevated heels, front squat, goblet squat, leg press, split squats, lunges, step ups, hack squat
Hamstrings, glutes, hips, lower back
Stiff legged deadlift, Romanian deadlift, deadlift without touching the floor, snatch grip deadlift, opposite stance deadlift, deadlift off blocks, deadlift off pins, back extension, good morning
Lower back, middle back, upper back
Barbell rows, good morning, Pendlay row
Middle and upper back, some biceps
Barbell row, dumbbell row, chest support row, machine rows, lat pulldown, pullups, inverted row
Upper back, delts
Rear delt flys, plate raises, pull aparts, facepulls, lateral raises, shrugs
Delts, triceps
Dumbbell press, Arnold press, seated press, Z press, kb bottoms up press
Triceps, pecs, some delts
Incline press, floor press, pushups, dips, board press, paused bench, dead bench, pin press, close grip bench, close grip incline, close grip board press
Triceps
JM press, skull crushers, tricep extensions, PJR pullovers, tricep rollbacks, Tate press, overhead tricep extension, tricep pushdowns, diamond pushups, bench dips
Biceps
Barbell curls, dumbbell curls, preacher curls
Abs
Lying leg raise, situps, crunches, cable crunches, planks, ab wheel
Then you need to think about recoverability of respective components. Some recover very quickly or can take a lot of stress. They get trained most frequently (up to four times a week). Some are the opposite, and recover very slowly or cannot take so much stress. They get trained less frequently (once or twice a week). Some exercises induce more stress than others too. All this will impact how often you train a component or use an exercise.
As a general rule of thumb
Can take a hell of a beating
Middle back, upper back - it’s hard to hit these with too much. So train them three to four times week. Just be aware of which exercises might impact other components. For example, barbell rows should be used much more sparingly than dumbbell rows because they use the lower back too. Pullups can put a lot of strain on the elbows, so they also are used sparingly
Can take quite a beating
Quads, glutes, hamstrings, pecs, triceps, delts, biceps - they can be trained twice to thrice a week. Be careful in exercise selection so that you don’t accidentally hit the lower back (applies more to lower body work) and be aware that most pressing exercises do hit the pecs, tris and delts to some extent and can also aggravate elbow issues
Requires more recovery
Lower back, hips - train at absolute most twice a week, and if so make sure they’re separated by a couple of days.
Abs are kind of to the side. Depending what you do, they can be trained often or need to be trained along the lines of lower back and hips because of how some exercises for the abs hit those too (lying leg raises and ab wheel spring to mind).
All of this applies to assistance only, assuming you’re training three to four times a week centred around three to four times a week.
The last piece is just rotating the exercises as well as sets and reps so you reduce adaptation.
You can split the exercises into supplemental (which Swede Burns refers to as muscularly similar movements or MSMs) and assistance exercises. You may find it unnecessary but I think it’s useful because it can better inform how you program them.
MSMs are essentially main lift variations and done immediately after the main lift using a percentage of the main lift according to Prilepin’s chart. The volume and load is similar to the main lift and you will usually only do one or two MSMs per session .
Assistance exercises are what we think of as bodybuilding or fluff work. The load, sets and reps don’t really matter at all provided that you get a good pump, focus on feeling the muscle and vary the load, sets and reps each time you do them to avoid adapting. They will take up around two thirds to three quarters of your volume like the image says, and are probably the main driver of continued progress.
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Holy crap. Post of the freaking century. I hope you don’t mind but I will be making a “note” in my phone of that whole post. I have a feeling it will come in handy! Thank you for taking the time to put that together. I really need to absorb all that information and probably put together a little well more thought out program.
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Please do. I’m glad you find it helpful. It’s good for me to sort it out in my head periodically and put it down on paper as it were. It helps cement my own understanding.
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Mark that post must have taken a lot of thought and a lot of time to get down. Thankyou for sharing some great information and giving me yet more to think about.
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Great info Mark, thanks for sharing. You must have put a lot of thinking in to it. Well done.
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Bookmarked this post, just gold.
This is what I’ve been doing with my coach as well, and it has been great.
Training time and frequency are down right now and working out at a home gym with limited equipment so I’m no longer following these principles at the moment (much higher % of my work is on the main lifts) but will be back to this once I’m able to devote some more time to training.
Thanks for posting.
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You’re all very kind but I’m just repeating what I’ve read from the big names and learned applying it. It took a few years though, and probably didn’t click until I started with Greg. I’m just glad it’s useful to someone.
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Would you recommend purchasing and running Greg’s hypertrophy program as a stand-alone program?
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I feel like this would be a good time to suffer with @MarkKO and do his hypertrophy program. It’s low stress and will have you ready for the bigger weights once you’re cleared and have the time to hit it hard again.
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