In the spirit of not being OCD I’m gonna try and keep this article about being OCD short and to the point. This topic can easily get me off on a rambling tangent so maybe that’s ADD and not OCD….whatever.
The bottom line is this: a lot of the clients I’m working with and a lot of the trainees I’m talking to suffer from some degree of OCD about their training. And in many cases it is absolutely killing their progress. Killing their progress because they focus and obsess around the things that really don’t matter that much over time.
There is nothing wrong with analyzing and tracking the details of your training and programming – in fact you should be tracking key numbers – but you need to focus those OCD tendencies in the right places in order to get the results you want.
First you need to recognize a few things – there is no magical combination of volume, intensity, frequency, and exercise selection that is going to unlock the magical vault of gains. There is obviously a ballpark that you need to fall into, but the exact numbers are all a moving target week to week and month to month as our physical status changes. To simplify, we are basically in a continuous state of building up adaptations and resistance to the various stimulus in our program while at the same time compiling varying levels of fatigue while forming those adaptations. So our state of “fitness” and our state of “fatigue” are basically constantly moving up and down and this is not something that can easily be measured. Add to this the constant variable of outside the gym stresses such as sleep, nutrition, stress, or just the daily ebbs and flows of our body, and this makes finding what is “optimal” very difficult indeed.
The PR (personal record) set is the best measurement we have to figure out whether our training is in that ball park of optimality or not. If you never test anything – how do you know things are working? Now, with all things the devil is in the details. For guys that have been training more than a few years (consistently) you can’t go into the gym every week and try and PR your squat, bench, deadlift whether it be a 1-rep max or a 5-rep max or whatever “test” you assign value to. But this is where variety in exercise selection comes in.
The longer I program for clients the more I have come to believe in the utility of supplemental and assistance exercises for the intermediate and advanced lifter. You need to get stronger and better at a wider variety of exercises in the gym in order to drive progress on the main lifts that you may care about. This is even more true if your goals are mainly physique oriented and less power lifting oriented. Power lifters require some specificity in their training, but bodybuilders don’t (in terms of exercises you must retain in your program).
This doesn’t mean that you stop training the big lifts – especially as a power lifter – you have to train the big 3. It simply means that you can’t just use the big lifts as the main driver of progress for eternity. It works exceedingly well as a novice. It works pretty well as an early intermediate, and then those “magical” combinations of sets/reps/intensity/frequencies get harder and harder to nail with precision over time. When simple reorganization of sets, reps, and frequency starts to dry up lifters start to fall into the abyss of OCD trying to figure out that set-rep-frequency combo that will get them moving again. I think that magical combination probably exist for most lifters. It’s just really hard to pin point. This can lead to months of lost training time as lifters punch the clock repeating the same exercises over and over again with layers and layers of submaximal sets perhaps leading to some minimal strength gains, and very little change in physique.
I think the better way to channel your focus is on a new set of exercises that support and build the main lifts. And then get OCD about setting constant PRs on these exercises. With a wider variety of exercises you can train with a higher level of intensity (i.e. intensiveness / effort) day in and day out. When a lift fails to make progress after several weeks – drop it. Replace it with something else and come back to it in a few weeks. This type of mentality has been a hallmark of successful programs such as the Westside Method of training. Max Effort Lifts, supplemental lifts, and assistance exercises are rotated in and out of the program CONSTANTLY. The more advanced you are the more often you rotate your exercises. The main lifts are trained weekly or nearly weekly, but not maximally. You stay in the groove by accumulating lots of volume via speed work which is effective, but doesn’t wipe your system out.
Over the last several years, I’ve converted the power building track of my online coaching program over to a strictly conjugate style of training and the results have been fantastic.
With many of my lifters I have to get on their ass all the time about keeping focus and keeping track of PR SETS when they hit their assistance and max effort exercises. This system doesn’t work if you are a clock puncher. You cannot just Ho-Hum go knock out 3 x 10 nowhere near failure on a lying tricep extension and expect it to make your arms grow or carry over to the big lifts. You have to PR that mother fucker as often as you can and you need to be taking the smaller exercises to failure or even beyond. And then when progress stalls for a workout or two you switch over to a French press or dips or cable pressdowns or whatever else you want to use, and still focus on building up PRs on that new exercise as often as possible.
Track your PRs on every exercise at every rep range. Add weight, add reps, something. Don’t get caught up in obsessing about total volume and all that shit. In terms of HYPERTROPHY I have seen some of the best progress from myself and from my clients when going down to about 2 sets of each exercise. One big heavy set in like the 4-8 rep range focused on maximal loading, followed by an all-out set in the 10-20 range. In both rep ranges, we’re constantly chasing more weight or more reps.
This type of training was a hallmark of Dante Trudel in the 90s and 2000s who produced some insanely good bodybuilders with his DoggCrapp system of training. Dante changed the paradigm by getting bodybuilders away from thinking about just piling up set after set after set and instead got them OCD level focused on “beating their log books” on a very low training volume, chasing PRs over just 1-2 all out work sets. And just like Westside, Dante was a big believer in keeping up with a rotation of exercises for a period of time, and then intermittently dropping and replacing an exercise when it failed to produce a PR. He’d wait a few weeks or months and return to that exercise for new PRs.
Borge Fagerli’s system of Myo-Rep sets are extremely effective, but not new. Borge’s system can trace its origins back to Dante and his DC training. Dante’s rest-pause sets and Borge’s myo-rep sets are basically slight variations of each other but both feature a focus on setting small PRs on either weight or reps using effort and effective reps rather than total volume to drive adaptation. Even with the added rest-pause sets or myo-reps or whatever you want to call it, the total volume still winds up being relatively low, but there are multiple points of failure in every set and the reps you wind up doing wind up being more effective than compiling a bunch of submaximal work.
The argument I’m making here is not for low or high volume necessarily, nor am I arguing that everyone needs to start using DC training or myo-reps. It’s about effort, intensiveness, and obsessively “log booking” every exercise you do. Not just your squat, bench, and deadlift. Your RDLs, your Dips, your Rows – whatever exercise you do – do it with the express purpose of trying to beat a previous performance on that exercise – however small that increment might be. The additional rep you squeeze out or the additional 5 lbs you add to the bar all add up over time.
So instead of worrying so much about whether you should do 3×8 or 5×5 or 4×10, or WHATEVER……worry about whether you are PRing your lifts regularly. If your excessive training volume is preventing you from doing so – drop your training volume. Most of the programming I run is pretty middle of the road in terms of volume and frequency, whether it’s for strength or hypertrophy purposes.
It’s just weird talking to some lifters because they get super focused on things like what brand of shoes they should squat with? Ohio bar vs Texas bar? 4×5 or 5×4? Does their gym have calibrated plates? And don’t even get me started with the form stuff. Guys deloading by 10% because their big toe wiggled on the fifth set of squats yesterday. That kind of thing.
But then when it comes to THE ACTUAL TRAINING they seem to be unconcerned with the details that matter – like more weight or more reps on some sort of consistent basis.
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