A friend of mine is a cop in Oregon. He and I went to college together and trained together. Over the years he and I have maintained a love for fitness and recently he suggested I try this:

Train 3-6 times per week, but train at 50% of your maximum intensity, performing 4-6 exercises per session, performing 3 sets per exercise at 50% of your maximum effort.

This requires that you do some strength testing in order to determine what your 50% intensity level would look like. You also need to decide what rep scheme you are comfortable with, i.e. whether you intend to perform doubles, triples, or sets of 10, 12, 15 etc.

So, let’s say that one of the exercises you enjoy performing is the bench press, and let’s say that you enjoy training sets of 10 reps.

In that case, select a weight that you could actually perform 20 perfect-form reps with, and then use that weight to perform HALF of the 20 reps, or in this case 10 reps, for three sets – which would constitute a 50% intensity effort.

In the above example, let’s say that you determine you can pump out 20 solid reps with 135 pounds. OK, so in this case you would do 3 Sets of 10 Reps with 135 pounds.

Use this approach to calculate the weights for each of your exercises. Remember, you are looking for 4-6 exercises per workout session. Divide your workouts into an a-b structure and alternate the workouts. a) might be lower body and b) might be upper body. Alternate these two workouts back and forth.

Take rest days when you need to. Make sure you keep a journal by the way.

At the end of the first 30 days, do more strength testing with your max weights to see what your progress is like.

A personal example for me is body weight dips.

My illness and related hospital stays in 2008 killed my strength and conditioning, so when I began my dip program 4 weeks ago I was not surprised to see that I was only able to perform 6 perfect reps with my body weight. After all, it had been 2 years since I had done dips and I am in the middle of a long road to recovery. So…….

For Dips I started performing sets of 3 reps for 3 sets four weeks ago. At first it was easy. I thought there is no way I will make gains with this. Mind you, I was doing 3 sets of 3 reps every other day for a month. What were the results?

Well, yesterday I did a strength test and was able to perform 40 steady reps to failure!!!

If you ask me, that is amazing! And I had similar results with all my exercises, such as Chins, Barbell Curls, Squats, Shrugs, etc.

I am using this program as long as it continues to give me such results.

Give it a try and see how you do. If you have questions get back to me.

Thanks
David