A Minimalist Lifting Program for the Crazy Times in Life
Don't stop training - use this minimalist program to maintain most of your gains when life gets crazy
Why People Quit Training when Life Gets Crazy
The Mindset of an Athlete vs the General Population
Though I’ve coached some competitive lifters over the years, and coached Strength and Conditioning for D3 athletes for a few years as well, most of my time has been spent coaching general population. One of the biggest differences between coaching athletes and general pop, is that athletes organize their lives and schedules around their sport/training, whereas general pop squeezes training into the rest of their life.
This difference has profound ramifications when the shit hits the fan. Outside of being physically incapacitated, the athlete will figure out a way to train come hell or high water. Rare life emergencies necessitate missing a session, but even that is unusual. Whereas for general pop, it’s pretty common to first get a blank week of workouts with no updates, then when you ask what’s going on, to hear about how work has been so crazy and my kids have this and that going on, and my mother in law is having surgery etc… and so I won’t be able to train for the next couple months.
While this is obviously an issue of commitment and priorities, it is surprisingly NOT an issue of general dedication. It’s happened to me and coaches who I’m friends with, with clients who’ve been dedicated and rarely missed sessions for multiple years.
It’s just the different mindset that the general pop has, as opposed to competitive lifters - that distinction between those who organize life around training versus those who squeeze training into their life. The latter may be very dedicated in normal times, but when shit hits the fan, the thing you have to squeeze in, is the thing that first gets cut.
What’s the Big Deal with Missing a Few Months?
A lot of people might respond, ok sure it’s not ideal, but if someone’s trained consistently for a while, is it really that big a deal to miss a month or three? Don’t you always say that strength is resilient and doesn’t degrade as quickly as cardio? So who really cares?
In a vacuum there’s some truth to that, but in the real world, what usually happens is the person never picks training back up again. And that IS a big deal. I suspect this happens for two main reasons:
Habits - training is something you have to go out of your way to do, it takes extra effort and willpower to go to the gym instead of staying home and sleeping in, or going to the bar after work. Overcoming this inertia is tough at the start; so tough in fact, that most people never do it. It’s much easier to keep it going, to cruise on the momentum, once you’re in the habit, than it is to start in the first place. But if you get out of the habit, you have to overcome that initial inertia all over again, which is very hard. In fact it may even be harder the second time, because -
When you’ve put in a lot of time and effort to get stronger, years of dedication and hard workouts, it’s demoralizing to come back after months off and have to re-tackle weights you know you could easily do as warmups just a few months ago. While you will ramp back up a lot faster than it took to initially break those barriers, you still have to put in that work and ramp back up. Overcoming the inertia of re-starting a challenging habit - even a rewarding one - in the face of this disheartening reality, is doubly tough.
Whatever the reason, people who take an extended break almost always turn it into a permanent break. Across almost 20 years of doing this professionally, I can count on two hands the number of people who took such an extended break and then came back at all - and on one hand, came back as dedicated as they were before and stuck with it the second time for more than 6 months. I’m not talking about people who already wanted to stop training and just used a crazy life break as their excuse, to avoid telling me they wanted to stop. I’m talking about people who 100% had every intention to start back up again “when things calmed down.” Reality is, they almost never do.
Minimal Training for those Crazy Times
We need to have a way to keep people training through the crazy times in life, so they don’t stop altogether. Obviously, despite the outrageous headlines and silly exercise science research, you’re not going to do this in 3 seconds a day.
But for someone who’s been dedicatedly training 3-4x a week for 60-90 minutes, we can cut their training time in half or even by 75% and still do enough to maintain a very respectable amount of strength and work capacity for a few months. Two weekly sessions of about 40-45 minutes is all it takes, if we focus on the essentials, the biggest workout bang for your buck, and don’t waste any time lallygagging around.
This solves both of the two aforementioned problems that cause people not to come back. First, it maintains the habit. Sure it’s less often and for less time, but you still maintain the crucial habit of going to the gym and training. It’s infinitely easier to go from two weekly sessions back up to 3 or 4, than it is to go from 0 to anything.
Second, it allows you to keep most of your hard earned strength and work capacity, so that when you’re able to resume a normal training schedule, you don’t have to start nearly so far back. You’re not disheartened, but are excited to get after it again and quickly be back at your previous bests.
Solving these two problems increases the likelihood that you’ll continue training, and reaping the physical and mental benefits therefrom.
Cool Story Bro - What’s the Program?
OK, ok we can get to the actual program now.
Main Lifts
Split your Big 4 lifts into two days. Day 1 is squat and press, Day 2 bench and deadlift. You’ll do each “Day” once a week, ideally with at least 2 rest days between Days (i.e. Mon/Thurs, Tues/Fri, etc) but any 2 non-consecutive days can work if your schedule doesn’t allow for the ideal option.
For each main lift, do 1-2 empty bar warmup sets of 5-10 reps to start, then do 5 sets of 5 reps for each of the two main movements of the day, starting light and adding weight each set, such that the final (5th weighted) set is hard but not absolute max (RPE 8.5-9). The penultimate set should be hard enough that it counts as a work-set too, albeit an easier one.
Each week, take one of the four lifts and do the 5th set for only 3 reps, then add another 5-10% and do one more set of one rep, to maintain your ability to lift heavier weights.
Week 1: Squat
Week 2: Bench
Week 3: Deadlift
Week 4: Press
Week 5: Squat again
and so on, so you only do this heavy single for one main lift each week, and each main lift gets exposure to the single every 4 weeks.
You don’t have to go in with exact planned weights, but should have a range of what you expect to hit on the last set based on your previous training numbers, and the 5 ramping sets should be organized to make relatively even jumps on the way up. So if your best ever set of 5 in normal training was 325x5 and it was a true all out grind, 290-310 is a good estimated range for that heaviest 5th set on the first week. On weeks when you’re truly crushed, use the lower end of the range, and on weeks when you’re less crushed, use the higher. Warmups are then back-calculated, so your sets will be something like this:
2x5 at 45
1x5 at 135
1x5 at 185
1x5 at 225
1x5 at 265
1x5 at 300
Accessories
What about accessories? With such a time crunch, we have to keep them minimal too, so we want the most bang for our buck - and we’ll get that by doing chinups or lat pulldowns on Day 1 and rows on Day 2. You could reverse this every month or so to change things up, or keep it consistent if that’s easier. You can do dumbbell rows, barbell rows (strict, not Pendlay), cable rows, even machine rows. Just pick one and stick with it for 4-6 weeks, then rotate.
The idea here is that the main lifts train and hit basically every muscle in the body - but rows and chins/pulldowns hit the upper body musculature in ways that do not mimic the main lifts and that the main lifts don’t cover.
Do 3-4 sets of 8-10 reps with the same concept as the main lifts - start light, add weight each set, with the last set being the heaviest one. The difference here is that you can go to just about max on the last set (RPE 9-10), since these lifts induce less systemic stress and fatigue.
If you can do sets of 10+ chins, you can alternate between that and weighted chins for 3-4 sets of 5. If you can do chins but only a few reps, just do the pulldowns instead - we need to keep things simple. If you can do sets of chins for a max of 5-7 reps, you’re in a bit of the grey zone. You might do 2 sets of chins for max reps, then 2 sets of pulldowns for 8-10 to get enough volume in.
Rest Periods
How does this all fit into 40-45 minutes? You’re going to have to rest a little less than you’re used to, but that’s ok because only the last set is truly challenging. If you rest 30s between empty bar sets, and only the time it takes to change plates between the first 2 easy weighted ramping sets, you’ll have done 4 sets in about 7-8 minutes. Rest an extra minute after changing plates before the 3rd ramping set, then 2.5 minutes before the 4th ramping set, and 3.5 before the final ramping set. All told this is about 16-18 minutes. Multiply by 2 for your two main lifts of the day, and you’re about 35 minutes in when you finish your main lifts. This leaves about 10 minutes to complete your 3-4 sets of chins or rows. Since the first 2 sets are quite light, they don’t require much rest. 2-3 minutes rest before the final 2 sets, and you’re done in 45 mins. Reduce rest slightly to squish it into 40.
Recap
So broken all down, the program looks like this:
Day 1: Squat, press, chins/pulldowns.
Day 2: Bench, deadlift, rows.
Each day is performed once per week. Set, rep, and rest schemes detailed above. Don’t expect to make gains on this program, but it will preserve a surprisingly high % of your hard earned gains while you go through the month or three of craziness, and give you a much better chance of returning to full, normal training once that crazy period is over.