My workouts are pretty weird. I’ve never seen anyone else work train in a similar style, but it’s been working out pretty well for me. For a long time, I kept trying new workouts to try and spur new progress. I tried a Westside-style conjugate program, based on everything I could read about it online. Maintained strength fine, but didn’t increase at all, disappointingly. I’ve bought several of Charles Poliquin’s books, and used to browse his website all the time for tips and programs to follow. In my younger years, I used to buy some of the bodybuilding magazines, I have Arnold’s Encyclopedia for Modern Bodybuilding, I’ve tried workouts based on what I could read about Mike Mentzer, Dorian Yates, and Arthur Jones. I’ve tried tons of crap.
What I’ve found best for my progress is pushing big ass weights all the time. Like I mentioned, I tried doing a conjugate style program, but the mix of dynamic effort didn’t improve gains at all. I deload every once in a while because everyone always says you can’t go hard 100% of the time, but I’ve never come back stronger like so many people say. Maybe I just do everything wrong, but I’ve been getting the best results doing heavy squats and benches week in and week out. I do very little variation in exercise selection. I’ve swapped out flat bench for inclines, declines, dips, etc, but then bench press strength goes down and takes me a while to build back up. Same happened from a hypertrophy standpoint. In Charles Poliquin’s arm training book, one of his suggestions is that it’s possible some people are overtraining their arms, and would benefit from taking a break from direct arm training. I tried that, lost about a quarter inch off my arms, and it took me like two months to get that back.
Just want to clarify all of this, so everyone knows I’m not training like a complete idiot, there’s a reason I’ve ended up doing what I do. I’ve ended up with what I think is a pretty unique blend of several different training styles, hopefully taking advantage of the various benefits of each. Basically, each workout I work up to a max, not necessarily 1RM, but I do end up doing lots of singles. I use the heavy sets to take advantage of post activation potentiation. This is a concept I learned from Charles Poliquin, where a muscle is able to contract with greater force following maximal activation. It’s really interesting if you’ve never tried it, but if you lift an extremely heavy weight, then drop the weight, you can typically do significantly more reps than you would normally be able to. Also, working up to big weights will also help with strength gains, naturally. And I use the ramping up sets and max effort sets to increase the volume a little. Beyond that, it ends up looking like a sort of Dorian Yates style workout, with one all-out set to total failure. Preceding this set with the heavy sets has improved my progress beyond what I was getting in the past using Mentzer/Yates/Jones type of high intensity training.
Honestly, that’s pretty much it. I typically do two, or sometimes only one exercise for the muscle group. With the type of exhaustion I get, I don’t see myself getting any real benefit from doing a few half-ass sets of another exercise.