I am reading deadlift dynamite by Andy Bolton. In it he says for the first year beginners should warm up and do one top set of five, add five to ten pounds every week and cycle in eight weeks. Of course he has some accesory moves. I am curious if one top set is enough? This is for the three powerlifts of course.
[quote]HUNTER13 wrote:
I am reading deadlift dynamite by Andy Bolton. In it he says for the first year beginners should warm up and do one top set of five, add five to ten pounds every week and cycle in eight weeks. Of course he has some accesory moves. I am curious if one top set is enough? This is for the three powerlifts of course.[/quote]
I cannot speak to bench/squat, as I did 3 top sets of 5 in my first year of lifting for those two movements.
One top set of 5 worked great for my deadlift, and I pulled 500 using nothing but a single top set of five (plus the sets that lead up to it) for my first several months of deadlifting. The only exception to that were the occasional heavy single to test the waters past my work set weight. I did maybe four or five of these heavy singles as I worked up to five plates, otherwise it was one top set of 5 for all of the real work.
A typical deadlift workout for me at the time might have looked like this.
135x5
225x5
275x5
315x5
355x5
When I was first able to pull 500 my DL workout was something like this.
135x5
225x5
315x5
365x5
405x5
I still use the general protocol of one top set of 5, although I have been tinkering with heavy triples and singles lately.
My buddy has experienced great results following the same protocol. It doesn’t necessarily take a lot of deadlifting for a beginner to get better at deadlifting.
Good luck to you!
Yes 1 top set is plenty. Hell it basically the entire basis of The Lillibridge Method. It is low volume and some people do not like that but I think it is very effective. I have done this essentially for my training the passed 2 years. For example.
Squat:
45 for 10
135 for 5
185 for 5
225 for 3
275 for 3
315 for 3
365 for 3
405 for 1
455 for 1
500 for 2 sets of 3
500 for 10
GHR: 4 sets of 10-20
Sled Drag: 4 trips 100 ft
Ab Rollouts: 3 sets of 10
This coming Saturday is 520 for 1 top set following pretty much exactly the same. I really like this for Squats and Deadlifts not so much for Bench. I also do a different Squat day later in the week that follows a more traditional 5x5 or type of training. For my Squat.
Later on in the book and later on in your training he does mention two top sets of five. So maybe do the two top sets for bench?. And it was add ten pounds for deadlift and five pounds for squat and bench. I was thinking of doing 50% and 75% of top sets as a warm up. Obviously as the weights increase muscle gain comes with it to an extent right?
Or is the volume just low enough? What I like about this method is theres not much calculating and plate changing. Just go in warm up and bang out your set.
[quote]HUNTER13 wrote:
Later on in the book and later on in your training he does mention two top sets of five. So maybe do the two top sets for bench?. And it was add ten pounds for deadlift and five pounds for squat and bench. I was thinking of doing 50% and 75% of top sets as a warm up. Obviously as the weights increase muscle gain comes with it to an extent right? Or is the volume just low enough? What I like about this method is theres not much calculating and plate changing. Just go in warm up and bang out your set.[/quote]
I think with this and with any other program designed by obscenely strong men you can do one of two things.
- Run their program
- Don’t run their program
As soon as you start tinkering, you are in category 2. Maybe that gets you stronger, maybe it doesn’t. When in doubt, I would just do what the guy who can do what you see in this picture says. That didn’t happen by accident.
[quote]HUNTER13 wrote:
I am reading deadlift dynamite by Andy Bolton. In it he says for the first year beginners should warm up and do one top set of five, add five to ten pounds every week and cycle in eight weeks. Of course he has some accesory moves. I am curious if one top set is enough? This is for the three powerlifts of course.[/quote]
This is how my father used to train. He would always say he did one set. Basically warm up until you hit the percentage you want to for the day, and rep that weight out.
So if his goal was a 500 pound dl and this week called for 85% for 3 reps, he would warm up to about 75% (375lb). The next set was his “only” set 85% (425) for as many reps as possible. The target was 3 reps, but depending on how many he got, he could adjust the next dl session accordingly.
A lot of the old timers I know trained in a very similar way.
This is fine for a beginner because half of initial gains come from neuromuscular coordination, e.g. Learning to contract as many motor units as possible at once and generating maximum force.
It’s still kind of stupid though. Of course it will work, just like any other program works for a beginner. Why not practice the lift more with lighter volume sets, induce more muscle damage, and maximize muscular growth while also maximizing neuromuscular gains?
This is what I did for deadlift. I still remember hitting my first set of 405x5. I did +10lbs per work, and it started getting hard around 365 or so. I kept plugging away and eventually I hit that number.
All of my heavy training is based around 1 heavy top set followed by assistance work. I have found it pretty effective.
I was reading an article where instead of one top set of 5 you do descending reps of top set. You do your 5 reps followed by a set of 3 and then a set of two. All with the same top set weight. It would be a little more volume, but would allow a little more practice of the lift without too much extra burden.
For a beginner it sounds fine