My Current Plan

Updating my Winter Plan

Mark Brown

February 25, 2022

Since the second week of the new year, I have been working on a program of my own design in the gym. I wrote about my winter plan around the the turn of the year and I have followed what I said I was going to do. This entry is all about the specifics of that plan now that I am 6 weeks in to it. In my weekly logs, I share what lifts I have done in terms of load, reps and sets but they are not necessarily in the order of how they were done while at the gym. So my readers see only about 70% of the full plan. That changes today.

Lifting in a commercial gym is a pain in the ass if one lifts in the afternoons. One never really gets a sense of how a lifting session is going to go until they have lifted in that gym for at least few weeks. I know certain things about the Merle Hay location of Genesis Health Club in Des Moines, Iowa. I have a good feel for what other people are doing based on my observing everyone at the gym while I am lifting. That is an important thing to understand when I lay out the order of lifts. How other people lift will have a big impact on your personal lifting session. I have taken into account that Monday and Tuesday are major chest and shoulder days for most of the consistent gym goers. The goal is to have as little competition for the equipment I want to use when I need to use it so my first chest/shoulder day lands on Wednesday for that reason. Limiting exercises to only the most effective ones also helps achieve this goal. When I get off work, the open rack area almost always has a spot available for squats regardless of the day of the week. I remember Eddie Hall calling Mondays “International Leg Day” and laughed because I’d always heard it be called “International Chest Day” instead. I can see why it would be both. The consequence of my first upper body day landing so “late” in the week is that it pushes the second to a weekend day, which is fine because that second one is the more physically demanding of the two.

This video does a great job of explaining the basis of how I think about it.

This is the ideal lifting order for my plan:
Monday: Low bar straight bar squat, traditional deadlift, barbell row, barbell good morning, standing one leg curl, seated calf raise, abductor/adductor.
Tuesday: Pronated grip tricep pushdowns, cable two hand curls, lat pulldowns, seated overhead tricep press superset with curls, straight arm lat pulldowns, preacher dumbbell curls, conditioning work.
Wednesday: Flat dumbbell press, narrow grip incline press, seated overhead dumbbell press, floor press, rear deltoid fly, side lateral raises.
Friday: High bar straight bar squat, sumo deadlift, leg press, cable rows, prone leg curls, leg extensions, seated calf raise, abductor, adductor.
Saturday: Incline dumbbell press, bench press, pin press, standing overhead barbell press, Arnold press.

Most of what I do is done to build more absolute strength so I can lift more on the main lifts. That is reflected in what lifts I choose and total workload, which is load x reps x sets. Tuesday is an exception to that training structure because it is more hypertrophy than anything else. If someone has been following my logs, they will see that I have lifted a lot of sets for low reps at 70% or above. What the logs don’t show is that rest periods between the sets is about 2 minutes. That means a couple different things. First, that means that my lifting sessions take between 2 and 2.5 hours, especially the leg days. I have made strides in being more time efficient on chest and shoulder days but still about 2 hours there. Second, the clock truly is ruthless. I don’t lift till I am physically annihilated but the intensity in terms of effort is higher than I have done before. It is having the effect I intended it to have.

I’m guessing there are some questions about why some lifts come before others in my plan:

Why dumbbell press before bench press? This lift is done for as many reps as I can do in a set, unlike the other lifts, to push my chest and triceps to recruit more muscle at the beginning of the session. Yes, what I just described is muscular development but at the weights I am using for the lift, it really is about strength development. Dumbbells don’t translate over to bench press fully because of hand placement on the bar but they are a great tool for overall strength development. It’s especially useful for what I want out of them because of way I treat bench press sets under this plan. Wearing my chest out to a big degree helps the strain on the chest become greater over the series of 8-10 sets done with barely any rest.

Why squat and deadlift on the same day right after each other? Splitting up squats and deadlifts would make it harder to plan 2 of each in a given week. They are both hip hinge movements that are leg dominant so it makes sense to me to do them both on the same day. The 2 minute rest switch has really impacted these two lifts the most. It’s brought the intensity up on them to an extreme level. It helps keep the session on track in terms of time because squat alone is at least 50 minutes.

Why sumo as the second deadlift of the week? When I am in the garage, my primary hamstring builder is a Romanian deadlift, which is a straight leg deadlift started from a higher position. The point is raise the bar’s starting position off the floor so that I can be physically closer to the bar at the start of the pull. I have 3/4” thick mats, 8 of them, that accomplish this task. I have no such mats at the gym so I can accomplish a similar effect by using the sumo set up (hands gripped inside the knees on the inner most part of the knurling). By widening my feet, I make the pull shorter without raising the bar off the floor. It also makes the pull different because it feels more back heavy at the start with the way the hand placement leads the muscle contraction up the back. In essence, the bar “feels” heavier when I sumo deadlift at loads that wouldn’t be the case.

Why is standing overhead press not a main lift? It could very well become a main lift at some point in the future. It is the primary reason why the second upper body day is the harder of the two. The first reason is a powerlifting reason. Overhead press is a supplemental lift for powerlifting because it’s not part of the competition. The second is the fact that it is a very hard lift and I would rathe not do it after work. Third, I would rather devote the bulk of my energy into chest and bench press development. If I want to emphasize shoulder strength and development, it goes straight to the first exercise. Last, it’s an exercise done with a a healthy amount of space because of the consequences of a failed lift and busy gym days aren’t the time and place for it.

Why floor press Wednesday and pin press Saturday? This is fairly simple. I’m not a dick. There are 2 squat racks, which are half racks, and the place is relatively empty on the weekends when I lift so the half racks are more available for doing pin presses than on Wednesday. This isn’t the equivalent of doing curls in the squat rack but it is a cousin of that so I get it done fairly quickly to not hold up the half racks for squatters. Floor presses are the harder of the two lifts but both are all about power output. That’s why they are last in terms of strength development focused lifts as supplementals. I have noticed that sometimes the open rack area gets crowded about the time I want to do them so I do have to make a choice to switch up the order.

Why is there an ideal list for accessory work on Tuesday or leg accessories? I like to do pushdowns first and quickly to get blood into the arms but outside of that there isn’t one. The free weight area of the gym on Tuesdays is kind of a free-for-all equipment wise because the people who didn’t do upper body on Monday tend to do it on Tuesday so I can’t really be picky. That day only really takes about an hour or so to complete because of the lack of rest time between sets and that just adds another reason not to be picky. The accessory day on Tuesday definitely has an effect on Wednesday’s chest/shoulder session so I am careful to not overdo it. There’s no need to prioritize how the leg accessories get done in terms of order because Genesis has only 1 each of prone leg curl, leg extension, seated leg curl, and single leg leg curl machines. Someone can easily hop onto the next machine on the list while I am on the one I chose to do.

Using this plan, I have made quite a bit of progress in overall strength so far mainly due to the workload being higher. That is how I have progressively overloaded the last 6-7 weeks of training compared to the the prior weeks. The lack of rest time between my main lift and supplemental sets has let me scrunch the sheer number of reps into the same amount of time I was using before or less to get my session done. It has also kept me more active during my lifting sessions so they are more cardio friendly.