THIS LIFTER BROKE ALL THE RULES—AND IT PAID OFF

THIS LIFTER BROKE ALL THE RULES—AND IT PAID OFF

By Shane Robert

I recently went to a child’s birthday party. The small talk, as one has no choice but to engage in when facing 2-3 hours of standing around watching children play, inevitably works its way to the topic of exercise. I’m sure this isn’t the case for everyone, but when you’ve spent two decades lifting heavy things, it tends to leave clues to the outside world that you lift heavy things. “So, do you, like, work out a lot?” comes the inevitable question to start us down the new conversational path now that we’ve established that the weather is good/bad and that parking is, indeed, tough around these parts. It’s challenging to answer a question like that as it is all relative. If you don’t train at all, then, yes, it would seem like I do. For others, even those who do exercise, they often don’t believe it when I tell them that I generally spend a max of 4-5 total hours per week lifting.

In this particular case, I was speaking with someone who had, indeed, been going to the gym and had made some decent progress. By no means were they competition, or even “gym” strong, but they were putting up numbers that, for that average person on the street, are not achievable without some time and effort. As our chat continued, I started to get the sense that this person wasn’t enjoying the training that they were doing. It wasn’t the effort that they disliked, quite the contrary. The effort, and the feeling that it leaves you with, was the only thing that kept them going to the gym.

“Do you ever get bored with the gym? Following the same plans and doing movements that you don’t really like?” I was asked after a short lull in the conversation. For the record, I rarely get bored of movements, but I am certainly guilty of getting bored with programs and have to fight the urge not to program hop.

“Sure, I struggle to follow some programs for more than 4-6 weeks. I need variety in my training and things need to change frequently. For me, that means sets, reps, and intensity, not necessarily the exercises, and if things are too static, I don’t really enjoy that.” I said, trying to sound sympathetic. “But I either write my own programs or modify prefabricated programs so I can build that variety in.”

“That’s smart but I don’t think I can do that. It sounds complicated. Sometimes I wish I could just go in and do what I feel like doing that day.”

This is when I felt myself getting fully invested and impassioned with the conversation. One of the things that I feel has been missed in a lot of media, be it podcasts, YouTube videos, or blogs and articles, is the idea that exercise should befun. We exercise constantly as kids, except we call it play and we enjoy it. At some point, we lose that and it somehow becomes a punishment.

I proceeded to tell the tale of a lifter I knew from my gym named Darrell. Darrell was late 40’s and would come to train in fits and starts, sometimes staying consistent for months on end, other times a mere few weeks. As I understand it, he had a sick mother that he was the sole caregiver for, on top of working a full time job. Whatever her infirmity, it seemed to ebb and flow in severity, commanding more or less of Darrell’s time. When he had time to train, he would come at 6 am, when the gym opened, walk on the treadmill for 10 minutes, then commence lifting. As far as I could tell, his lifting consisted of the following:

BENCH PRESS
95x reps to failure

135x reps to failure

185x reps to failure

225x reps to failure

245x reps to failure

265x reps to failure

285x reps to failure

305x reps to failure

He would continue in this fashion until he was using a weight he could only get 1 rep with, usually around 325, at which point he would take 20ish pounds off the bar and do 2 reps for as many sets as he could, then take another 20ish pounds off for as many sets as he could, then take another 2ish pounds off the bar and do 5 reps for as many sets as he could. He would continue in this fashion until he was back to 95 pounds for sets. Darrell’s rest periods were short, averaging probably 30 seconds. This was essentially a giant pyramid up and down, accumulating Arkham Asylum levels of volume, hitting lots of failure, and handling a TON of heavy reps. Then, as if that wasn’t enough, he would do arms for whatever remaining amount of time he had that day. Sometimes, this was 2 hours on top of that insane bench workout.

Darrell would do this 5 days per week. 

Read that again. That’s right. That is pretty much all he did except one day per week, a sixth day, when he would do the following, all to total failure:

3x10 leg press

3x10 leg curls

3x10 leg extensions

8x10 behind-the-neck pulldowns

If you’re reading this and thinking that it is the dumbest training you’ve ever seen, you are not alone. My initial reaction was very similar. So much so that, one day, curiosity got the better of me and I asked Darrell to tell me about his training. He was confused about what I was asking so I clarified that I wanted to knowwhyhe trained the way he did. “I like to bench and I want big arms. So I bench and do arms,” was Darrell’s response.

The thing is, despite not being “researched based,” or following some accepted prefabricated program, it sure seemed to work for Darrell; his bench was close to 380 and his arms were probably close to 19 inches at a bodyweight of probably 165 pounds. That, for the uninformed, is spectacular.

I finished telling my birthday party acquaintance this story about Darrell. Though bewildered by the facts of the story, they seemed a little confused by the point of it. The point, if you, dear reader, didn’t catch it, is simply this:

Have fun and work hard. You’ll make more progress doing that than trying to force yourself to do something you don’t enjoy, even if it may not be “ideal.”