Got it
but I can’t seem to find the link to the article
Thanks!
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So I have 10 days left in my cut, and I’m starting to want to plan what to do next.
A small note first. Yesterday I was scrolling through the very first posts of this log, two years ago, just to realize that I currently weigh just a couple pounds more then I did back in 2017! This had me panic a bit, because doesn’t this mean that I basically built little to no muscle over the last two years? Looking at the pics, I think I look a little better now, but I’m convinced that my progress could have been much more impressive in two years.
I get stuck in the same cycle over and over again, and after gaining weight and cutting, I wind up weighing (and looking?) the same. Right now I’m weighing in at 165 lbs, and I want to try and push the weight to the neighborhood of 200 lb over the next year. My fear is that I’ll end up fat, but if I work hard enough and keep a sensible approach, I think I will manage to shake things this time. I need to stay committed. To go from 165 to 200 in a year I would have to gain 3 lb a month, so between 1 and 1.5 lb a week. It’s doable (I could gain double that if I ate uncontrollably just following my enormous appetite), but I need to train hard enough for it to not just be fat.
Training wise, I’m thinking about planning the next 6 months’ training like this:
W1-6 Cycles 1-2: 5’s PRO + BBB @ 50% (two leaders)
Week 7: deload
W8-10 Cycle 3: 5/3/1 + jokers + FSL (one anchor)
Week 11: deload
W12-17 Cycles 4-5: Building the Monolith (two leaders)
Week 18: deload
W19-21 Cycle 6: 5/3/1 + jokers + FSL (one anchor)
Week 22: deload
(Then repeat from cycle one?)
This’ll wrap up 5.5 months of training and will hopefully get me some results. I have yet to define a couple of details about this plan, but how does it look to you guys that have experience with the program?
I’m going to follow this path for building muscle because it’s been proven to work and apparently there are big guys that can vouch for it, despite it flying in the face of what has been recently said by guys like Paul Carter about training with lower volume and higher effort (BBB seems like the opposite). But maybe I can apply some of those principles to assistance work, which I still have to define in this plan?
@T3hPwnisher what do you think about all of this?
Would also love insights from @danteism, @flipcollar, @flappinit, and anyone else that has previously participated in this thread or that has experience.
If you bulk for a year straight you will gain a lot of fat for sure. After bulking for a few months your body starts to store more fat and build muscle at a slower rate. Just bulk slowly for 3-4 months at a time. When you cut you are going to lose muscle, how much will vary from person to person and the only way to prevent that is with drugs. So with that in mind, it would be better to gain a significant amount of muscle before you cut or you will be right back where you started.
Be careful giving training advice to people with medical issues, you don’t want to be responsible for killing someone.
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Yeah, and since the body can only synthesize so much muscle in a given amount of time, the only way to build more muscle would be to bulk for longer, wouldn’t it?
The approach of bulking for only a few months at a time has taken me nowhere so far apparently.
No, you don’t have to be either bulking of cutting all the time. You can take a break from hypertrophy work and bulking and keep calories at maintenanace for a couple months while focusing more on strength with lower rep work, then go back to bulking and higher reps with bigger weights because you will be stronger.
Agreed.
So @anna_5588 be wary of what you do in the gym if you follow the routine I posted. I don’t know your medical condition as well as you and your doctor do, and I’m not to be held responsible should anything bad happen due to your training program. The one I posted was just an example of how I would train if I were in your shoes.
Seems like a solid enough choice. I wanna give BBB Beefcake (from Jim’s blog) a go at some point, as it’s sorta like a half Deep Water program and I think would be a good primer. You might run that instead of BBB @ 50% if you really want some challenging sets. Or you could do BBB @ 50% for the first go round and then, when you do your repeat, do BBB Beefcake.
I wouldn’t try to apply Paul’s principles to the assistance work here. You shouldn’t be grinding yourself out on the assistance work: it’s more about getting blood flowing and hitting weak spots. On these hard leaders, you’re supposed to be pushing hard on the supplemental work. If you try doing that AND the assistance, it may be a bit too much.
And again, that’s all when working within the confines of 5/3/1. What Paul has written absolutely works and makes sense, and so has what Jim has written, but they work within their own confines. I’ve gained size and strength doing one tough set, but I also am a huge advocate for Deep Water, which spends a lot of time with 10x10, and it works super well. I feel like Paul is more championing against the idea of doing a lot of sub-max sets to accumulate volume, which BBB doesn’t do. Those sets SHOULD be pretty tough.
So if I understand this correctly, the difference between beefcake and vanilla BBB is that you perform upper body assistance on lower body lifts days and vice versa, and also that your 5x10 work is done @ FSL instead of a fixed percentage, and superset with rows. Right?
I think I can try that, and like you said I could do the first cycle with BBB @ 50% and then second cycle using BBB beefcake. One thing that puzzles me though, is that I remember in Forever, under the BBB @ FSL template Jim says that it’s a very demanding program and one that “requires you plan 10-12 cycles in advance.” What do you think he means by that? Does it apply to this one as well?
Also, what’s your take on what I said about my weight, bulking and everything? I know your approach is generally “if you wanna be bigger, eat more; if you wanna be smaller, eat less,” but maybe I’ve been missing something as per what I said in my previous post. What would you do if you were me?
And, along with that, you are to get all of the supplemental and assistance work done in under 20 minutes.
I’ve packed my copy of Forever, so I can’t quite reference that quote to know/understand the context, but BBB at FSL weights appears in SVR II as well. It’s not entirely uncommon.
I never had abs as a teenager. I did try for them a few times, but my training focus was always on lifting more weight and getting stronger. In turn, I ate big (stayed lower carb back then too) and put on 30lbs of bodyweight in about 2 years of hard/focused training. The transformation to my physique was pretty radical, and I was known as a “big guy” throughout my college years. I look back now and think I was tiny, but it was a dramatic change then.
I wouldn’t change that. These are great years to grow, and your ability to lose fat after gaining it is going to be amazing right now. You just have to be at peace with the fact that you’re not always going to look your best ALL the time. Settle for a flat stomach, rather than fully visible abdominals. Aim for “not fat” rather than ripped.
If I were to undertake the plan here, I’d go 5/3/1 BtM OR 5/3/1 BBB Beefcake, deload, Deep Water Beginner, Deep Water Intermediate, assess. That will be about 19 weeks of training (almost 5 months) and would give a lot of opportunities for growth. Or, if you want to go Paul’s route, look into DoggCrapp training.
The big thing is, I’d want to make sure I was training hard enough to justify how much food I was eating. I’d want to train hard enough that I’d NEED that food to recover. Nutritional “guilt” arises when we overeat because we’re trying to gain muscle and we notice that we’re putting on fat. However, when you’re training in such a manner that your 2 choices are overeat and get fat OR die from the training, you have no room left for that guilt. You get a little fat and you go “f**k it: at least I’ll survive the squat workout tomorrow”
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Just curious–didn’t you at some point feel that you had gained too much fat? At some point after some months of “bulking” I always feel like I’ve only gotten fatter. But maybe that was me, in my first two years of training, simply not training hard enough. And it’s now time to change that.
Funnily enough, I am known as a big guy as well in real life, haha. Everybody seems to instantly notice I train, without me mentioning it. One could say that if my goal was to “look like I lift,” then by practical evidence I’m already there lol. Of course I’m still a long way.
Sounds interesting. I made a promise to myself that I would do 5/3/1 for one year straight when I started, and it should wrap up around the time I finish my last cycle in the plan that I outlined in my post. Do you think it can work well too if I go BBB, BBB beefcake, deload, BTM, deload, and then I start the Deepwater program? Would you keep the anchor in between BBB and BTM as well?
On page 53, under “boring but big with FSL weights”:
“We’ve done this quite a bit at my gym, but it requires one to be very conservative with the training maxes. I’m hesitant to recommend this, as I know people have a huge problem putting their ego aside and using the correct training max for the correct program. At the very most, we startwith 85% training max. If we use this BBB variation, we are usually looking very long term and making sure the training max fits within the program. So many times, I won’t base it on a % of the training max, rather on what numbers I know will work for the supplemental work. From there, we can plan very long in advance and still come out farther along then most. When I use the phrase “long term” we generally are thinking about 10-12 cycles in advance. So if you use this variation, I’d advise you to look farther down the line than just a few cycles. In other words, this is a small part of a bigger plan, and it’s fine if you just want to play it by ear. But if you do that, disregard this template.”
That part always got me a little confused.
Kinda the benefit of starting without abs: you don’t really notice increased bodfat. Thibs referred to this as the “bodyfat deadzone”. When you start at like 10% bodyfat and go up to 15%, you notice your abs vanish. When you go from 14% to 19%, there’s no a whole lot of indicators. You just look bigger all over.
In my case, I wasn’t “bulking”, as I wasn’t aware of that concept. I was just lifting weights and eating according to appetite. I have a voracious appetite, and was just pushing the weights hard (not even any sort of programming. Just bodypart splits and working hard), and just added the weight organically.
These days, starting out leaner, I can tell when I’m starting to get sloppy, but at the same time I’m already fairly muscular so I don’t expect such huge gains.
The only issue I foresee with this is that it will be a LOT of eating, and it’s easy to get burnt out on that part, and you’d be burning out on it during the absolute hardest programs. If you think you can manage it, it’s worth giving a try. Anchors aren’t bad, but I honestly didn’t use them much in 5/3/1. The leaders were where the growth happened. Anchors seemed suited for periods of weight loss. However, it might be helpful for getting a break from all the big eating.
I promise you this’ll be the easiest part. I have no limits when it comes to appetite, and I spent last summer eating 4k calories a day (tracking every day) of relatively “clean” food. It was hard but definitely doable. But I got fat… Anyway, if I allow myself some more freedom as for food choices, eating will be a piece of cake.
When I first read about leaders and anchors, I pictured those in my mind as accumulation and realization phases respectively. I was under the impression that anchors is where the body actually gets a break from the higher volume and gains realize themselves? But maybe this isn’t true when one is going for mass gains?
Also, out of curiosity, what did your eating look like at that time? I can’t imagine getting in a whole lot of calories without carbs. I actually can, but that’d basically be veggies, meat, fish, eggs, cheese, butters, and that’s it. I’m not going to be giving up on carbs anytime soon because I love them and I feel better when eating a lot, but I’m curious about a different perspective.
I have a voracious appetite as well, but this drains even on me.
Keep in mind, eating is just a fraction of it. Along with the eating (which can get inconvenient), there is the cooking of the food, the cleaning of the stuff you used to cook all that food, and the elimination of all of that food you ate. The more you have to eat, the more time you have to spend doing all of that stuff. I got pretty burnt out of my life revolving around food after 18 weeks of Deep Water, and appreciated being able to eat less frequently/amounts.
That’s how I see it as well. But, in turn, that means that the gains occurred during the leader: they just got realized during the anchor.
During those teenager years, it was a lot of easy prep stuff. Microwaved frozen chicken wings, PB sandwiches, fast food, etc, and then, when I had the dinning facility in college, whatever they served.
For Deep Water, I’d train in the morning and Jon said, if you’re going to eat carbs, do it around training, so I’d have something quick and light (you don’t want a full stomach before training on Deep Water) like 2 cookies or some toast, train, and then eat a meal of 1 cup of skim milk, 2 scoops of protein powder, 2 scoops of PB fit, 1 serving of non-fat greek yogurt and 1 cup of breakfast cereal all mixed into a bowl.
About 1.5 hours later, I’d have what was most likely around 12oz of some sort of meat. Usually whatever was left over from the dinner before, but sometimes I’d make a whole batch of something specifically for this meal.
An hour after that, I’d have a serving of some sort of nut, or more meat.
About 1-2 hours after that I’d have a lunch, that was another 12ish ounce of meat with some veggies.
Around 1.5 hours after that, a low carb protein bar most likely.
3 hours after that, dinner of 12ish ounce of meat and some veggies.
About 2 hours after that, 3/4 cup of full fat cottage cheese mixed with 2 scoops of PBfit powder.
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Bench
58 kg x 5
67 kg x 5
76 kg x 9
58 kg x 5 x 5
Machine chest press 75 kg x 10, 10-5 (50% set)
Low to high cable fly 15 kg x 15, 11-8 (dropset)
Rope pushdown 30 kg x 20 + partials, 25 kg x 15-10-8 (R/P)
EZ bar overhead ext 2x10
Once again I won over the agonizingly hot weather. Can’t wait for summer to be over honestly.
Committing to a longer gaining phase may be a good idea, but I’d use 10-20 day mini-cuts to keep from getting too fat. (Think one every 3-4 months or when needed). Also, do not become obsessed with wanting to be, say 200 pounds on a certain day. You may be 192, 200 or 185 pounds a year from now, but really it doesn’t matter. If you get obsessed with a particular weight goal you’ll soon find yourself just stuffing yourself and making the weight by getting fat.
What I’m saying is, sure you can bulk but be smart about it.
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Squat
82 kg x 5
95 kg x 5
108 kg x 11
82 kg x 20
Single leg curl 2 x 10
Forgive me if I bring this up again but I’ve been thinking about this for a while.
How can sets of 10 done at 50% of TM be challenging? For how tough it is, for the past 2 weeks I’ve done windowmakers for squat at FSL weights, and I’m trying to imagine how using a weight that is 15-20% lighter than that for half the reps could be challenging. During my first cycles on the program, I was also doing sets of 8 instead of 5 on the FSL for the bench and press (I remember Jim said that you can up the reps on your FSL work for upper body lifts).
I don’t want to do what some guys who haven’t even done the program yet do and start questioning what has already worked for others. I’m just trying to wrap my head around the fact that none of those sets would probably be anywhere close to failure. Maybe I’m using too light a TM?
This is why I have been pushing you more towards Beefcake. If you have a 800lb tm, 5x10 of 400 in 20 minutes is going to be exhausting. Dave Tate wrote about how percentage values differ with differing levels of training in this regard.
Keep the TM: just use a higher percentage.