Stuck? Try This Small Change To Your Strength Program
This almost sounds like clickbait, and if that's how you got here, thanks for reading. I'm not trying to deceive you or sell you anything…I just want to share a tactic that most of us have never tried and that works well to help people break plateaus in strength.
In strength training, whether it's the big muscles of the legs and back, the fingers, or a combination of a few muscle groups, almost all of us first try to add resistance to try and make them stronger. If I can do 3 sets of 5 repetitions at a given weight, I come back to the gym next workout and add a couple of pounds to the bar, and try again. When I can lift that one for three sets of five, I add more, and so on. This works really well for a long time.
Eventually, the progress stops. Lots of times it's because we moved on to other things or got derailed in some other way. But if we stayed at it and kept psyched, we'd still plateau.
What is holding you back?
What tends to hold us back is a bad training habit. It might be chasing the weight too aggressively. It might be not resting enough. It might be a lack of consistency. Whatever the cause, it's showing up in today's training, and we need to break away from it. Instead of making a lateral move, such as picking a new exercise, workout structure, or even changing the type of training we do, we have options.
A simple fix is to move that primary exercise to a timed set arrangement. I'll give you all the details in a second, but the idea is that you do just a couple of reps, then force an adequate rest, and do a whole lot of this over and over.
Let's say you can do 3 sets of 5 pull-ups with a load of 10# added to your weight belt. You've been stuck here for a while, so we make a change. With a timed strength set-up, we'd aim to do a set of 2 repetitions at the same load (bodyweight + 10#). Easy! But here's the trick: you have to do a lot of sets.
Since we're using 3x5 as our example, we'll stay with that idea. In that session you're doing 15 total reps at somewhere around the 5RM (rep max) load. This is probably around 85% of what you could do for a single.
Using Timed Sets
When we move to timed sets, two things need to happen:
- Sets done on the minute should be completed in under ten seconds. This means sticking to 2 or else 3 reps.
- We need to increase the number of reps by 20% to start, and be willing to go up to a 2x increase.
Thus, our first session would be around 18 reps. We'd aim for 2 reps each minute, so that would be 9 total sets.
I like to start with a load that is even less than the 5RM we're moving away from. This makes the first OTM session quite easy, but it's a safe place to start.
Let's say you were doing 3x5 in the pull-up, at a bodyweight of 150 pounds and an additional load of 50 pounds. Your total load would be 200#, and we'd back off a bit from there. Thus, your new set-up would be 2 reps on the minute of pull-ups at bodyweight + 30#, or 10% less than your 5RM.
In 9 sets, you'd hardly think it was tiring at all.
In the next session, I recommend adding more sets. Go to 11, then 13, then 15 sets, for a total of 30 reps per workout.
Volume then Load
Once you've built out the volume, I then like to add load. This happens only when all 30 reps are perfect, rep 30 indistinguishable from rep 1. Go slowly. Add just one or two pounds, and only advance if you're perfect. Over the course of six or eight weeks, you're going to keep adding more and more load, and really shouldn't quite "hit a wall."
I like to do these sessions only 2x per week. Thus in 8 weeks, you're only really going to do 16 workouts with these timed sets. Once you do workout 16, your next workout should either be a max pull-ups at bodyweight test or else a standard 3x5, but with loads that are heavier than your best 3x5 in the past.
Chances are you're going to really blow the doors off this one. If you do the 3x5 option, do the first set at your best-ever load. You'll do it easily. Add 5# and try again. I suspect this will go well, too. Third set, add another 5#. Boom. 9 out of 10 people who follow the workout carefully will now have a working 5RM load that is 5-8% higher than ever…which is huge in the strength world.
A few things to keep in mind:
- It's not magic, just different. We aren't going to see some otherworldly results with all of our exercises by changing to timed sets. We're really just addressing volume deficiencies and poor resting habits. If you're already good on these frontiers, obviously your results won't be jaw dropping.
- It's best to stick to one exercise. We've had success with attempting this in pairs of exercises, or in different sessions on back-to-back days, but let's keep it simple at first.
- After 16 sessions, do something else. Change exercises, go back to normal set-rep schemes, or even move to higher reps for a while.
Not sure where to begin?
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ABOUT STEVE BECHTEL
Steve is the founder of Climb Strong, and is proud to be the worst coach on the Climb Strong team. A climber for nearly 40 years, he has traveled the globe bouldering, sport climbing, and doing first ascents of some of the world's biggest walls.
He lives in Lander, Wyoming, with his wife Ellen, and children Sam and Anabel.