Efficiency

Lessons from the Garage and the Gym

Mark Brown

March 22, 2022

Powerlifting has taught me a lot over the last year. Among the most important lessons over that time period is how to be more efficient in the gym. The things I learned in the garage during the last half of last year has bore fruit the first 9 weeks of 2022 at the commercial gym I am a member of. In past years, the gym has slowed down my lifting sessions or changed them in ways I didn’t like because of the chaotic nature of dozens of people trying to use dozens of pieces of equipment simultaneously in a nigh endless loop. It can be a nightmare to get done what I want to get done, especially on a self imposed time limit. Using the lifting session breakdown of main lift – supplemental lifts – accessory lifts as the core of tenant of any lifting session has helped prioritize lifts in not only what should be done but also in what order. This has the capability of making lifting sessions far more efficient than they might otherwise be for any number of reasons. The first part of this entry will talk about about the efficiency lessons I have learned from powerlifting and second will be ways those lessons can be implemented.

I started lifting with more powerlifting principles in place than bodybuilding towards the summer of 2021. The further into the year I went, the heavier and harder my sessions got. I adopted the breakdown of lifting sessions written above as a main part of programming. By week 9 of my Fall 2021 program, last week of October into November, accessory lifts disappeared altogether in order to get more important lifts in. This was first lesson of efficiency that I learned in the garage from powerlifting. When prioritizing strength development over muscular development, I found that training movements was more important than muscle growth. As a result, major compound lifts became main and supplemental lifts and took up all of my training. During the summer, I had worked those isolation-based accessory lifts into the session between main and supplemental lifts as super sets to get them in as efficiently as possible. That was successful for gaining strength and muscle growth, but working that way meant I was using energy at the beginning of the workout for lifts that didn’t need to be. That made supplemental lifts at the end of the session harder and required more muscle recruitment to get them done, which is a bodybuilding principle. The trade-off was those extra sets of accessories between main and supplemental sets made the session longer by an hour or so on upper body days. I don’t have enough equipment in the garage to really do accessories for lower body. I wouldn’t trade the program in the summer for what I did in the fall of am doing now because it was the bridge that was necessary to cross to learn lift prioritization.

Accessory lifts are still important and need to be done. That has been drilled into me though the various ways I have consumed Dave Tate’s teachings though his podcast or his company’s, EliteFTS, Youtube channel and gym experience. The lesson is where those lifts fit during the lifting week. Muscular development cannot be ignored but if it isn’t the overarching goal, then it needs to be placed on its own day. This was initially learned though those podcasts and videos but I found a lot of value in it when I started doing it after coming back from illness the second week of December 2021. The way the last 4 weeks of the fall program went it made me question how I could get accessories in at all if I kept doing what I was doing during that time period. Obviously, peak phases don’t happen all the time but the concept remained the same. The concept of an “off day” changed from being a day that lifting wasn’t done at all to a day where power lifts weren’t done. That changed my thought process of how to get accessories in. I have used Tuesdays to get that day in as a bridge between Day 1 of legs/back and Day 1 of chest/shoulder since December. That had multiple effects during the week. The first is that it allows me to get all of the isolation work I do during the week done. All tricep, bicep and lat isolation lifts get completed on Tuesdays. That leads to the second thing. My first chest/shoulder day on Wednesday took a shorter amount of time to complete as a result of that hour accessories done the day before. Tuesday took about an hour to complete because those lifts require very little rest time between sets and Wednesday took about an hour and a half. Third is the effect of doing arm lifts a day ahead of heavy presses made me very particular about what accessories I did. The result of programming a lifting week this way led to results in both strength development and muscular development.

What I just wrote is relatively easy to pull off in a garage or basement gym space where competition for equipment is either non-existent or barely an issue. For those who have a garage set up like I do (full power rack, a nearly full dumbbell set up to 120 pounds, 6 specialty bars not including a power bar, lat pull down, t-bar row, preacher bench, and accessories), one can be as efficient as they want to be. Commercial gyms are another breed of workout space entirely. When they get busy, being efficient while getting the session done the way I want it done is a daunting challenge. This would be harder to do if I had a bodybuilding type approach to programming because training muscles is different than training movements. I would be isolating muscles in a much more specific manner rather than using big compound movements such as a bench press. That tends to lead me to use more equipment. The more different pieces of equipment I need means more potential conflict with another lifter. What powerlifting has taught me is to limit the equipment I need to use by focusing my session into 1 main lift and 3 or 4 supplemental lifts. I get my work load in by doing a lot of sets in with brief rest times. This is not necessarily efficient in terms of time because my big days still take 2.5 hours or so, but I don’t think of efficiency in the gym in that way. An efficient workout is one in which I get what I needed done without anything getting in the way. Time just isn’t that big a factor in the grand scheme of things.

Powerlifting has helped me understand a lot more about why I do the things that I do in the garage and at the gym. Using a program that funnels the higher energy requiring lifts to the front end of the session ensures that I will getting the most out of it. Eliminating accessory lifts on power days has helped simplify the goal on those particular days. Using an off day to focus all of my efforts on those accessory isolation-based lifts helps to build muscular development, which is necessary to gain absolute strength. Programming the lifting session to include the least amount of equipment necessary has helped get the most amount of work done in a decent time frame. These three lessons that I have learned since summer last year have helped me get more work done in the gym or in the garage can I did before. I feel stronger, I move more weight, and I have better muscular development using these principles. I believe they would help you as well.