Your Ultimate Home Gym: The comprehensive guide on how to make a personal strength training space you will love by Adam Michael Schenck

Author:Adam Michael Schenck [Schenck, Adam Michael]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Published: 2020-09-30T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 5: Track Your Progress and Stay Motivated

Setting up your programming should be simple, but the training sessions should be both simple and hard.

I use two formats for training sessions that I spread out by at least 48 hours. I perform 3 sets of 5 reps (3X5) for each of the lifts. Refer to Rippetoe’s Practical Programming for guidance and planning.

From one session to the next, I aspire to increase the weight by 2.5 pounds or 5 pounds, with two 1.25-pound plates and two 2.5-pound plates, respectively. If I can’t hit the 3X5 minimum, I’ll do the same weight the next session and try to hit 3X5.

This is similar to the standard linear progression program as described in the Starting Strength program.

A Session

Squat, deadlift, overhead press

B Session

Squat, row, bench press

I do the A session, then the B session, and then AB again. You might want to plan your week, like do ABA one week and then BAB, and so on. I just do AB ongoing and don’t worry about the week.

You can do a Monday/Wednesday/Friday split and take the weekend off, and there are other variations. If I feel like I need rest, I will wait a day, and instead do light cardio.

If you’ve been doing a bodybuilding-style program, this program won’t be very impressive. Each session only has 45 total “work set” repetitions. However, if you include a reasonable warmup for each lift and take video of yourself, it’s easy for these workouts to go well over an hour. That’s not something to brag about, though, because we want to perform the MED or minimum effective dose, and wasted time is time not spent recovering.

A warmup set goes up in weight from either the bar (45 pounds) or 135. I like to go up by 90 pounds for each warmup set. So, in a session, a squat or deadlift progression might look like this:

Warmup Sets

135X5. 1-minute rest (add plates).

225X5. 2-minute rest.

315X5. 4-minute rest.

Working Sets

365X5. 5-minute rest.

365X5. 6-minute rest.

365X5. Done.

If 365 sounds like a lot, remember that I started with 185 three years ago—and I thought I was strong then! This progression would take a total of roughly 24 minutes, and my heart rate gets high—like it’s pounding out of my chest.

The 3X5 program finds the sweet spot between intensity, volume, and your body’s ability to recover. It challenges your anaerobic system and aerobic system, too. Program for yourself, but do so in an informed way.

Minimum Effective Dose

The “minimum effective dose” (or MED) concept is the idea that the smallest dose of stress is best in order to produce a desired outcome. It’s similar to “progressive overload,” where in order for your muscle to grow, you need to force your body to adapt to a stress that is beyond what it has previously experienced.

Training should give you the right amount of stress from which to recover. You don’t want to under-dose, because your body won’t need to recover. You don’t want to overdose, because it will take too long to recover—so long that your body will just return to baseline without making an adaptation.

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