Category: fitness

This is the first article where I explain my 5/5/8/12 system in detail. Enjoy!

by Dave Chesser

Getting strong should be the main thing you work on at the gym. It’s what the gym used to be about back in the golden days of weight training. All the old-time strongmen (notice the name we use to describe them) were famous for their feats of strength. Sure they might have looked good, but the look was the result of their hard strength training. They trained for strength and aesthetics followed, a distinction that was lost on later generations. Now people that go to the gym look like Tarzan but perform like Jane.

Why do people go to the gym and immediately get on the treadmill and stay there? Because they aren’t being told the importance of strength training and because endurance training is over-hyped. You could obviously jog down the street in front of your house but do you have a power rack at home? I doubt it. So the cardio/endurance work can be down outside and nearly anywhere. But only a well-equipped gym can allow you to train for consistent strength gains. So warmup on the treadmill if you must use it for anything and then after 5:00, get started with this strength program.

Getting started with strength training will involve a time commitment of at least twice a week, with three times a week being ideal. The reasons are that you need to hit the weights consistently in order to drive the weight gains, otherwise you’ll constantly be reviewing the lifting techniques without making any significant progress. That’s why I tell people who only want to train once a week that they are mostly wasting their time and mine. If you’re going to train for something then put effort into it!

Three times a week is ideal because your body needs time to recover from the training and this normally takes about 48 hours for most people. Protein synthesis is the breakdown of protein that you eat and then using those amino acids to rebuild the muscle tissue that you’re broken down through training. Protein synthesis normally stops after about 48 hours, meaning you need to hit the major muscle groups about every three days to drive the fastest adaptations. You could still make progress on twice a week training but I’m writing this program based on the idea that you want to strong as fast as possible.

One last word on why you want to get strong first – no matter what your fitness goal is, strength will drive it. Want fat loss? Strength training will allow you swing a heavier kettlebell, lunge with heavier dumbbells, and allow you to burn many more calories in the same amount of time than simple endurance training. Many fat loss clients miss this point and get stuck in their fat loss plans because they aren’t getting stronger. Want bigger muscles? Like top bodybuilder Ronnie Coleman says in a famous video,”Everyone want to be a bodybuilder, but don’t nobody want to lift these heavy a__ weights.” He’s talking about the fact that to get bigger, you eventually need to get stronger even if people don’t want to do that. Doing light pump sets with light dumbbells doesn’t work for very long. Look at the people in your gym that have been doing that for years. How big are they? I rest my case.

So now that you’ve been given the reasons why you should strength train, let’s look at one way to do it.

Day 1 and 3
warmup
pullups 25 any way you want to do them
barbell back or front squat 5, 5, 8, 12
barbell bench 5, 5, 8, 12
back/hip extensions 5×10
chinup 25 any way you want to do them

Day 2
warmup
pullups 25 any way you want to do them
barbell deadlift 5, 5, 8, 12
barbell overhead press 5, 5, 8, 12
heavy kettlebell or dumbbell swings 5×20
chinups 25 any way you want to do them

We start with pullups since this is one of the most neglected movements in modern fitness. Done correctly, pullups will undo the upper back roundedness nearly everyone these days suffers from. Without adequate upper back strength, nearly all the strength lifts like squats, deadlifts, and bench will fail eventually. I’ve seen upper back weakness hamper so many lifters development that I started making everyone does pullups first. They’re that important.

The big four movements of barbell squat, bench, deadlift, and over head press form the core of the program because the barbell allows for consistent, progressive overload in the way that dumbbells, kettlebells, sandbags, etc. do not. At gyms like Formosa Fitness, we have plates as small as 0.5kg that allow for small jumps in weight that will allow you to make continuous progress. Kettlebells normally jump in 4kg increments and dumbbells often jump in 2.5kg increments – both are too large for pure strength gains beyond a certain point. Barbell training remains king for strength gains and you should use each tool for what it does best.

Barbell squats, deadlifts, etc. work the whole body systematically instead of isolating body parts the way that most bodybuilding exercises do. When we talk about getting strong, you’re only as strong as your weakest link. Therefore, exercising the whole body through whole body lifts will allow you strengthen weak areas and train the entire movement at one time. This type of training takes much less time, as well.

Start the major lifts like this for the first time you try the program – using bench as an example, got on the bench and press the bar for five reps. Then add 5kg and repeat for five more reps. Continue this process until you find a weight that is heavy enough that you can complete 5 reps but you can’t successfully go up in weight using 5kg increments and complete another set of five reps. This is your 5RM (rep max) for now.

Now let me say this set should feel heavy towards the end of the set on rep 4 and 5 but you should be able to complete the set with no assistance from a lifting partner. I’ve seen too many people have their gym friends helping them by basically doing a barbell row while saying “it’s all you buddy!” when it clearly is not. And if you’re struggling so much on that last rep that your form is way off, then you’re going too heavy. You’ll need to back off by 10% to get your 5RM.

Once you have your 5RM, this is what you’ll use to determine your lifts. As part of the warmup after pullups, take 50% of your 5RM and do 5 reps as your first warmup set. If you’re just using the bar with no weights on it, that’s fine. Then take 75% of your 5RM and do a second set of 5 as your second warmup set and you should be ready to go if you’re not lifting anywhere near body weight on the lift. If you are, then a third set of perhaps three at 85% of your 5RM will usually complete your warmup. Not your ready for your work sets.

Work sets of five are ideal for strength training so we start with those. Do your initial 5RM for one set and rest for 1-2:00 but no more. At the beginning of your weight training journey, you aren’t using a high enough amount of weight to really fatigue the body that much so you will bounce back and be ready for the next set before you know it. The longer rests of 3:00 or more you hear about in the magazines are for more advanced lifters that are lifting heavier weights, meaning they need more time to recover.

After you rest, do another work set with the same weight and see how you feel after your second rest period. Are you feeling strong? If so, you’ll do a third set at the same weight to see how many you can get. As a beginner, that third set might feel very heavy and this is normal. If you get seven or less, you will repeat the next workout with the same weight you have on the bar right now for your first three sets. If you got eight on that third set, congratulations! You’re ready to move up 2.5kg on an upper body lift or 5kg on a lower body lift the next time you work out.

However, if you’re not feeling strong on that third set, drop the weight by 10% and go for a set of eight. This allows you to build strength in the first two sets and some in the third set without grinding out a weight that might feel too heavy for you today. This can happen due to lack of sleep, not eating enough, or just from a bad day. Rather than grinding through a bad third set, I’d rather you drop weight and have a hard, but doable set.

Regardless of the number of reps you got on the third set, on the fourth set you will drop the weight used on the third set by 10-15% and give me a set of 12 or so. The exact number isn’t that important. What you want is to end that fourth set feeling that you’ve given the lift everything you’ve got. This set also allows you to build some functional muscle that will assist with the lift later. Twelve is inside what we call the hypertrophy range and a little muscle size doesn’t hurt when trying to get strong. I also added this set to give beginners some practice with the lift. Using the 5, 5, 8, 12 plan gives 30 total reps with the bar, improving your technique faster than some other weight training schemes that use three sets of five, for example.

Use the 5, 5, 8, 12 rep scheme for the major lifts of barbell squat, deadlift, bench, and overhead press.

The back/hip extensions and heavy kettlebell swings give folks the extra hamstring and glute work that nearly everyone needs. The back/hip extension chair is a piece of equipment that everyone that goes to the gym should attempt to master. Hip and low back strength are so neglected that most people can not do enough work on this area. Heavy kettlebell swings build the hamstrings and glutes through explosive work making this exercise a great alternative to the harder to learn power clean exercise.

Finally, I added chinups at the end because: a. they are easier to do than pullups and you’re at the end of the workout, b. 50 reps of total pulling (25 pullups and 25 chinups) are ideal for developing the back since we should be doing nearly twice as much pulling as pushing, and c. they allow for excellent bicep building, something nearly every guy wants. Doing chins three times a week will build the biceps to assist with lifts like the deadlift and bench press much better than any curls you could do. Leave the hundred variations of curling to the guys that cover themselves in orange and go on stage in their underwear. Beginners will do better with chinups.

Make sure you use strict form on all these exercises! Don’t use half reps – go all the way down and all the way up. Don’t use momentum by bouncing out of the hole at the bottom of the squat or by bouncing the barbell off your chest on the bench. Control the bar 100% of the time to get everything you can out of the lift. The idea is to use this program to get strong, not to see how much weight you can lift by cheating.

Followed correctly, this program will probably work well for at least six months and then you’ll need to change up what you’re doing. That’s assuming you’re working hard three times a week and moving up in weight fairly often.

Enjoy the program and go get strong!

Here’s a picture of me using one of my favorite kettlebell weights – the 12kg. Yeah, I can swing the 48kg for reps but that doesn’t mean I don’t use the lighter weights. In fact, the kettlebells I use the most outside the gym are the 12 and 16kg. I know many people are confused by this because I constantly tell people to use heavier kettlebells. The reason is most people are still not lifting barbells so they aren’t getting any heavy lifting in their training. But I am using barbells so I often switch to lighter kettlebell work for recovery workouts, cardio training, and conditioning.

Today I did the Kettlebell Quest DVD Basic workout #4. It looked like this:
10 swings left, 10 right
10 sumo pull
10 goblet squats
10 rows left, 10 right
10 marching planks (I hate regular planks, way too easy!)

This also shows the usefulness of a beginner workout. Now I can do harder workouts, after all, I filmed the advanced double kettlebell workouts for the DVD, right? But that doesn’t mean the other workouts stop being useful. Even for someone more advanced like myself, I can use the beginner workouts productively. I don’t always want to “kill it” in every workout.

It worked in the old days, it works now, and it will always work in the future. People have been getting strong since they first picked up stones and logs. The story of Milo of Croton is over 2,000 years old. Milo’s father gave him a baby calf and asked him how big it was each day. Milo picked it up everyday and showed his father how big it was, getting Milo super strong over the years. Now that’s just a story but it just goes to show that people have known abot progressive strength training for thousands of years.
Theory is wonderful and people that like to read books more than they like to train love it. But while studies are great and all that, the application of real strength training, especially at the beginning and intermediate levels which 99.9% of the population is at, is bizarrely simple. Elaborate studies, endless debates about muscle fibers, discussions over what’s good for Olympic athletes, etc. has no bearing whatsoever on what 99% of the population (including “high level” athletes that have never picked up a barbell in their entire lives) need to get strong.
Reading is fine and staying informed is fine. But practicing what has been shown to work for many years is better than any reading you can do.

I find it hard to believe that this post even needs to be written but it just goes to show how far behind we are in nearly everything. It’s extremely simple – if you don’t have strength, you can’t have power. In fitness, power = strength x speed. No strength, no power. No speed, no power. Now how difficult is it to understand that strength and speed need to be worked on as independent variables BEFORE you attempt power training? If I need flour and eggs to make a cake, can I just start with the cake without getting flour and eggs first? Doesn’t that just make common sense?

Well apparently not when discussing basketball players. Barbell squatting is the only way to progressively strength train athletes to get stronger in the legs for sports. No amount of leg press, leg extensions, etc. is going to do it because the movement pattern is different. No basketball player lays or sits down and then pushes something away with their legs. The squat is basically a jump with a weight on your back and you don’t leave the ground due to the resistance. But the pattern is virtually the same.

But the minute you suggest that someone interested in jumping high might want to squat a barbell for weight, you run into “but our basketball players are unique little snowflakes and we can’t break them” or “they have to save their energy for the games.” Apparently off-season training doesn’t exist. I wasn’t aware that basketball season was 12 months of the year.

Once a foundation of strength has been built, explosiveness can then be developed and that’s what box jumps are for. Now we’ve posted many clips of our gymgoers doing good box jumps but I don’t think most of the people watching those videos understand what they’re seeing — a box jump develops and displays leg power in the vertical plane.

When we show you our people doing big box jumps, that shows you we know how to develop leg power in our gymgoers. That power comes from barbell squatting not on a Smith machine but out of a real power rack, the one thing that apparently must never be done.

If you want a big jump, then work the movements that build a big jump.

Here we have a showdown of epic porportions — who will win? The bodybuilder? The powerlifter? The strongman? How about the Olympic lifter? I won’t spoil the fun for you but it is quite a showdown. What did you think? Did you see what happened to the bodybuilder? That’s why we have power racks!

I would have liked to have seen the powerlifter lock out his squats at the hip. Seems like he’s doing a bodybuilding squat, instead. And the Olympic lifter is doing textbook perfect squats! Good job!

Looking at the result makes me think of how much strength relative to body weight needs to be taken into account. Having a high ratio of strength at a leaner weight is an advantage.

So how about a new fitness challenge/test? Here it is: squats with your bodyweight on the barbell, AMRAP for 5:00. Test yourself every now and again, count your reps, and try to beat your score next time.

Spoiler alert!! Notice how well the two guys that squat for 1RM did in the challenge! Getting your 1RM up can increase what you can squat for reps if you do it right! Just think — 1-3RM work for strength and bodyweight x5:00 for muscle growth and fat loss…..hmm……..:)