WHAT'S OLD IS STILL RELEVANT

WHAT'S OLD IS STILL RELEVANT

By Shane Robert

It is my daughter's spring break this week. We decided to visit my in-laws since they are a driveable distance away, albeit quite a long distance for someone who hates to be in the car for very long, and we don’t get to see them very often. I enjoy visiting them and count myself lucky that I get along with them, unlike the too-common trope seen in just about every movie and TV show. What I don’t like is how it interrupts my training. There are gyms I can go to, but they aren’t really suited to Olympic lifting or are too far or too expensive. I usually just take a pivot week and do some bodybuilding or treat it as a mess-around week, but I don’t want to do that this time. My training has been feeling really good, and I don’t want to lose the momentum.

After weighing all of my options, I opted to bring some weights and a rack with me. Of course, the Agile Rack makes this incredibly easy. I can just fold it down and put it in my car. Unfortunately, my car isn’t big enough to carry a barbell. After pricing out what a week pass at a gym costs, I decided to buy a barbell and was able to find one for a mere $80. This is $20 less than the week pass would have cost. It isn’t the best barbell in the world, by any stretch, but the knurling is sharp and the sleeves spin pretty well, the two things that I need the most at the moment. Considering I will have it at their house for every future visit, I consider it worth the investment.

When I opened the tube that the bar came in, a rolled up, laminated poster fell out. The poster features a series of exercises that can be done with the barbell and has an illustration showing the start and midpoint of each movement. There is nothing else. No technique points. No sets. No reps. Nothing telling you how many exercises to do. Just the pictures. As silly, or even useless, as this may seem to us now, it reminds me of how many generations of lifters would have trained.

If you pick up old training books from somewhere in the mid-1960s or earlier, you will find a number of different “courses,” which were different series of exercises, listed in the order that you are meant to do them, with the most minimal description of technique. Descriptions like the following for the clean and press:

“Bend down, grasp the bar. Lift to the shoulders. Press overhead until straight arms. Lower and repeat for desired reps.”

The desired number of reps was usually somewhere between 6 and 12, with the lifter starting off with 6 reps and adding 1 rep each workout until they did 12, then dropping back to 6 and adding some weight. I’ve written about this style of training in the past, known as double progression, and I think it still has a lot of validity. The plan is to go through the whole list of exercises for 1 set. Each set should be pretty challenging and somewhere between an 8-10 RPE in modern parlance. If the lifter feels like doing more, they can repeat going through the list as many times as they see fit.

By modern standards, a training plan like this would never be acceptable. It is too vague, and lifters would have too many questions. Despite that, I still love this idea and think that there is a lot of utility and relevance to it. As much as I love programming (something which I have made clear many times in the past), I also love having very loose guidelines to my training. If a lifter plans to compete, having a plan is essential. If someone just wants to get bigger, stronger, fitter, etc, they absolutely can get away with a little less structure.

I have drawn inspiration from those old programs and created a table that follows a similar pattern to the old courses. The idea is to follow the sequence of exercises listed, working from the top to the bottom, picking one exercise from each row. The simplest method would be to simply go down the columns, one whole column for each workout, but that is up to the individual to decide.

As for reps, I think it’s pretty hard to beat the double progression standard of starting with 6 reps and striking with it until you can do 12, though I wouldn’t necessarily say that you have to systematically increase by 1 each session. Rather, increase when you can by whatever amount you can. Though I would love to say that you should go through each exercise before repeating the sequence any number of times (as the old-time lifters would have done), I also know that isn’t practical. Instead, let’s just say 1-6 sets as energy that day allows.

For the general population, this style of plan has a lot of benefits. Firstly, it makes each workout fun and interesting. Doing the same exercises all the time can get quite dull. Secondly, it represents a long progression of training time. Aside from the 5 listed columns, there are literally dozens of different combinations that can be made by picking from different columns for each workout. Doing this while working on adding reps over time might represent YEARS of training.

As humans, we tend to overcomplicate things. There is no need for that when it comes to building a great body and superhuman strength. A simple exercise table and general set/rep guidelines are, often, all we need to succeed.