Workouts for Saturday 30 August to Friday 4 September

Workout plan

As you’ll see from the workout plan below, I tend to do four sessions per week, two upper and two lower.  I divide those sessions into maximum effort and repetitive effort workouts. 

My goals

For what it is worth, my current goals are a double bodyweight dip, a double bodyweight chin up and a pistol plus half bodyweight.  I currently weigh 75kg but should be down at 72.5kg by the end of October after my cutting cycle.

My dip and chin up are at 57.5kg and my pistol is at 30kg.  So I need to find 15kg on my dip and chin up and 10kg on my pistol, which is approximately a 10% improvement in both cases. 

Warm ups

My first two exercises of each workout are the main exercises and I warm up for these in the usual way – working up from an empty bar or bodyweight move up to about 10kg less than the working weight in 10kg jumps for a few reps.  I usually do about 4 or 5 warm up sets for a total of about 15-20 reps.

I also do a circuit of about 5-6 mobility and activation exercises for improving my shoulder and hip mobility, along with some foam rolling and rolling using a hockey ball.  This usually takes about 10 minutes.

Maximum effort

For my maximum effort workouts, I will generally rotate the exercise in homage to the style of Louis Simmons’ conjugate periodisation.  Additionally, I usually move from an easy movement to a harder movement.

For example, when I am training a vertical pulling movement, I will move through wide-grip chin ups to narrow-grip chin ups to pull ups to elbow flexor pull ups (getting progressively harder) while trying to keep the weight as high as possible.

Repetitive effort

For my repetitive workouts, I try to keep to the “real deal” exercises, which for me are the pull up (palms facing the bar) and the dip for the upper body, the pistol for the lower body and the hanging leg raise for the abs.  I don’t rotate these exercises since I am looking to practice the movement and get more efficient at it.  I do rotate the sets and reps though.

Recently, I have been working with higher repetitions and most of my sessions have included supersets of 5 sets of 10 reps.  For the next couple of cycles, I have decided to try more sets of lower reps, starting with 10 sets of 3 reps.

Back off sets

I am a recent convert to back off sets after my maximum effort workouts.  I started doing 3 sets of 3 at 75% of the 3 rep max not long after I read a couple of articles on T-Nation about the benefits of burn out sets (most recently in a workout devised by Christian Thibadeau but also by Joe DeFranco).  I realise that back off sets aren’t exactly the same thing as burn out sets but the articles got me thinking that a bit more volume probably wouldn’t hurt…

Without further ado, here is my workout plan for the week

Saturday – Lower (Repetition)

Sunday – Upper (Max)

Tuesday – Lower (Max)

Wednesday – Upper (Repetition)

Notes

• “Work capacity” is the ability to do more work in less time.
• “ASLR” stands for Active Straight Leg Raise and I  learned about it from Brett Jones’s blog, Applied Strength.
• I’ll do a blog post about Elbow Flexor pull ups in due course as I don’t think many people have come across them.

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