If you are in week 2 and find yourself unable to face the 80% x 6 x 2 light session because you “feel tired” then you can go back to reading Men’s Health magazine cause you are not destined to be strong. Feeling tired is just a fact of life to an athlete, not an alarm bell that you need to take a week off and stay in bed playing with your pee-pee. You judge how well you are recovering by whether or not you made your lifts. If you are making your lifts you are recovering just fine, whether you feel like shit or not.
The remaining exercises can be organised throughout the week at any set and rep scheme you like. Let’s take you doing overhead press as your speciality, well you may choose to squat + press on Monday, chin + press on Wednesday and bench + press on Friday. What works for me best is keeping the poundages for the remaining lifts at around 80 - 90% of maximums, regardless of the rep range I am using.
For example say you can bench 100Kg for 12 reps, you would do sets of 80-90Kg for 10-12 reps in the bench. It is also worth rotating what days you do your assistance work on so that you never perform similar assistance to your main lift on a “heavy” day.
Let’s say that your specialisation lift were the overhead press, well then make your bench press so that it always falls on one of the 6 x 2 days, and not on a more intense day. This way your heavy overhead pressing allows benching to be possible. It would be exactly the same as if squats happened to be your main lift and you should then do deadlifting as assistance work. That means that you just couldn’t squat heavy and deadlift on the same day as you just wouldn’t get anything out of your deadlift. The only way forward for other lifts is by maintenance only.
After 6 weeks you can change the specialisation lift and start again, or move back to a more typical bodybuilding routine and use your newfound strength to pack on even more muscle with slightly higher rep ranges. Or if you’re like most people you will totally disregard the outstanding strength gains you just made and go back to training leg extensions once a month because training my way was “too tough”.
I don’t like to sound pretentious but it’s a fact. Great methods are too quickly rejected by people who just can’t reach outside or their own comfort zone for more. It is quite clear to see around us that not everyone has got massive muscles and that’s cause it takes big commitment big time.
A few guys have asked me what kind of results they can expect on a routine like this in terms of strength gains. I get a guaranteed 7.5 - 10% on a lift every time I put myself through this torture, with bigger increases on repetition work following the program.
I shall also like to reveal some interesting proven results from this very program with a deadlift going from 200Kg to 220Kg and reps with 180kg from 6 to an easy 11 at a bodyweight of 93Kg. It’s excellent for a six week program and I actually plan to shoot for 180Kg x 20 reps by the end of this year and achieve this by increasing my limit strength repetition so the lifting increases automatically.
Everyone is different and I am far from a genetic mutant so I suspect that a majority of athletes could expect equal or better results from such a routine. If your cajones hang low enough and you give the routine a try, please do let me know how you get on. Just Email me your results though, not your pitiful bitching about how sore you are… I get enough of that after I roll off the lady friend and try to fall asleep.