I continue to struggle with the desire to train the entire body every day and to increase the intensity of my work at the same time. I realize that up to a point they cannot coexist. If you've read this blog you know that I sing the praises of whole body every day, all the time. But over the last few months I've become a combination of bored and daunted by the same reps and exercises every day. Five hundred push ups a day would make you very strong. But who has time and patience? Especially if you can become strong with twelve every five days.
I've also realized, so very slowly, that my 4x/wk bike commuting combined with daily calisthenics of increasing intensity are unsustainable. So, again reluctantly, I'm forcing myself into splits and days off. We must progress, no? And I see that we must rest to progress.
I generally ride (15 relatively hilly miles each way) on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday. My legs are spent those days, as is the rest of me. So I switched to calisthenics only on Wednesday, Saturday and Sunday rather than every day. Wednesday is something like a high intensity whole body day and Saturday is upper body and Sunday is legs. Those days I am focusing on volume.
I have a few workout "schemes" to play with and keep it interesting: volume, reverse pyramid, "body builder", 5x5, and my latest, the "Mike Mentzer High Intensity (sort of)".
Mentzer was a bodybuilder from the golden era and was a very interesting guy. He broke from the Schwarzenegger high volume dogma with his notion that intensity and brevity could get the job done better and with much less time. There's a whole back story here that is interesting to research. In a nutshell it's one set to failure and beyond followed by lots of rest.
His workouts became simplified through his books as well. They started with a fairly typical but greatly abbreviated body builder type of workout and ended with one set of weighted dips, one set of pull-ups, one set of squats, and one set of dead-lift in various combinations and with lots of rest. It's the workout scheme between these two that I find most interesting for present purposes.
The idea is that for a given muscle group, you "pre exhaust" the muscle with something like an isolation movement in a low rep range (6-8) and then you super-set that with a compound movement for the same muscle group, thereby pushing the muscle beyond failure. One set. So, for chest for example, you would do a set of heavy Pec Deck (isolating the chest) and then when you reach failure you immediately get as many reps as you can of a pressing exercise like bench press or dumbbell press.
Yesterday I tried this for whole body with calisthenics. I did one set of "ring flys" followed immediately by pushups. I think I got about 10 flys and about 8 to 10 pushups. And I was SPENT.
Pulling is tougher. It's difficult to isolate the back or lats without machines. In the free weight world Mentzer recommended stiff arm pullovers to isolate the lats. I never liked any kind of pullover but it's all I really had to work with, so I attempted to mimic this on the rings. It was a very difficult move and I think it got the job done. I followed this immediately by rows.
This was killer. I meant to do legs yesterday but I was too tired. (And it's raining torrents today, so I drove to work and will do legs today.)
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