When you try to accomplish something, but it doesn’t work as well as you hoped it would, you have three choices:
1. Keep doing what you have been doing and accept the results.
2. Get discouraged and quit.
3. Try a new strategy.
The three options listed above apply to life in general, and they also apply to strength training. In this article, I want to focus on the third option, which is to try a new strategy when your current training isn’t working as well as you had hoped.
Forced To Try New Strategies
The two circumstances that have forced me to try new strategies with strength training are lack of success, and injuries. In my early years of training, I rarely suffered from injuries, but I certainly failed to succeed as much as I wanted to and it forced me to try new strategies in regard to my workouts. It took a lot of trial and error over the first two and one-half years of training to figure out that a specific basic workout provided better results than all of the fancy training that I had tried. I refer to the basic workout as the 6-15 workout.
The 6-15 workout consists of two to three warm-up sets in which weight is increased from set to set. Each warm-up set is performed for six reps. Upon reaching the third or fourth set, a heavy work-set is performed for six reps, followed by a final work-set performed for 15 reps. This amounts to two to three warm-up sets, followed by two work-sets for each exercise performed. The majority of the workout is limited to three to four exercises consisting of:
1. The bench press or a bench press variation such as incline or decline presses;
2. Either the squat, or deadlift, or leg-presses;
3. Lat pulldowns, or a rowing exercise such as seated pulley rows, T-bar rows, or bent-over barbell rows.
4. Overhead presses.
If you just do the exercises listed above, you are going to get pretty strong. You can supplement these exercises with one or two sets of the following exercises including: triceps extensions, curls for biceps, calf raises, and an ab exercise.
I will always be the type of lifter who likes to experiment, so over the years and decades I have tried oodles of training methods, but I always ended up coming back to the 6-15 workout for a while because it is the most dependable workout for getting strong without experiencing a lot of ups and downs in strength.
The first 30 Years
During the first 30 years of the intermittent use of the 6-15 workout, I experienced the best results when I trained my whole body three times per week. The first two workouts were spaced 48 hours apart and I used weights that allowed me to leave three to five reps in the tank for my work sets. In other words, I did not push to failure when doing the first two workouts of the week. The third workout of the week came 72 hours after the second workout, and I always pushed to failure on my work sets for the third workout. The basic strategy was to always do one high intensity workout per week while using the other two workouts as recovery workouts.
New Strategy: Use Training Thresholds
As I wrote earlier, I have always enjoyed experimenting with different types of workouts and training strategies, and at 50 years old, it finally hit me that the key to consistent progress is to use training thresholds. The first training threshold I used was based on rep speed. When using the rep speed threshold, I adjusted the weight according to my ability to maintain a steady even rep pace for the first five reps, but the weight was heavy enough to force me to slow down a little on my sixth rep. I simply used the same weight each workout until I gained enough strength to perform the sixth rep as fast as the first five reps. The second threshold I used was to only repeat sets of an exercise as long as I was at full strength. This limited me to two work sets per exercise, which was what I had generally been doing any way.
The Switch to High Frequency
Since I limited the amount of weight to my ability to maintain a steady even rep pace, I usually ended up stopping each work set two to three reps short of failure. I did this for every workout and no longer pushed to failure once per week as I had in the past. I found that stopping short of failure for two work sets per exercise made it possible to recover quickly and I could work out more frequently than three times per week. In fact, I often did five to six workouts per week for my whole body. This new strategy helped me to become as strong as I had ever been upon reaching 50 years old.
Unfortunately, a chronic neck problem that I experienced since 2002, and a reoccurring back problem that I experienced since 2008 forced me to give up the heavy lifting demanded by the 6-15 workout. This being the case, I have had to experiment with new strategies that are based on workouts consisting of lighter weights and body weight exercises for about the last seven years. At first, I perceived this to be a negative situation, but I have learned a lot about body weight exercises and using light weights to the greatest advantage. At 59 years of age, I feel the workouts I am doing now are more enjoyable than anything that I did in my earlier years of training, and I feel good.
Keep Going
The point of this is that we all run into dead-ends, roadblocks and detours when trying to make progress at anything in life. This is nothing more than an opportunity to try new strategies and methods until a better way is discovered. We can all learn from others, but we can also learn from our own successes, our own failures, and our own circumstances, even if they seem to be bad circumstances. Success rarely comes easy, so don’t take the easy way out by giving up. Keep going. May God bless you with the best of training.