Ray Mentzer, Casey Viator, Larry Pacifico, Albert Busek, Mike Mentzer
This is about a workout to get strong.
Simply strong in two or three lifts, nothing fancy, nothing extra.
Strength is often a matter of practice. The better and more fluent you get at a motion, the more force your nervous system allows you to produce. This is a protective mechanism where your brain will try not to allow you to produce more force than it thinks you can competently handle.
The solution is simply to practice with reasonably heavy weight (but not excessive) as much as you can without wearing yourself out.
In the workout below what you are doing for that hour is simply practicing the lift. Start with a weight you can do a double with easily and work up as you can. If the last set was too easy, add more weight. If the last set was too hard, especially if you had to break form to get the lift then take weight off till you are doing a perfect two reps again.
The idea is to practice doing perfect lifts for an hour. The idea is not to turn this into a marathon of pain, or a test of any kind. You should feel better when you are done than you felt when you started. If you feel tired or exhausted, you are using too much weight of packing your sets too tightly together.
For example, walk in, load up 315 pounds. You know your maximum is 405, so good to start low. Do your first set and it's easy, add 20 pounds and do the next set at 335. This is easy too so you add another 20 and when you re ready a few minutes later you do the 355. This one is slower so you add 10 pounds more and right at the sticking point on the second rep it stalls you and you have to break form to get it up. On the next set use less, maybe back to 335 again. Do that for a set or two . . . if that starts feeling easy then take the weight up again. Who knows, you might go up to 385 or more for that day but don't get greedy, just practice doing perfect lifts.
You want to keep the weights between 60-85% of your max generally for these doubles. If you practice perfection, performance will always be there if you need it.
The Basic Workout
Monday Morning - Squat practice, one hour, sets of two.
Tuesday Morning - Pull practice, one hour, sets of two.
Tuesday Evening - Bench practice, one hour, sets of two.
Wednesday - Rest.
Thursday Morning - Squat practice, one hour, sets of two.
Friday Morning - Pull practice, one hour, sets of two.
Friday Evening - Bench practice, one hour, sets of two.
Saturday and Sunday - Rest.
One important part is to vary things a bit, but not too much between weeks. Sometimes if you do things precisely the same way too much over several weeks, you wind up going backwards. Some people are like this, some are not. If you are, then try something like this three week rotation below. If you are not, then just keep working away.
Variation Example
Week 1 - Regular stance squat, clean grip pull, regular grip bench.
Week 2 - Wide stance squat, snatch grip pull, narrow grip bench.
Week 3 - Narrow stance squat, fast deadlift, wide grip bench.
You will find that your lifts tend to creep up well past your expectations, pretty quickly without burning you out. It's counterintuitive that you can get strong so quick without just busting your butt every time you go into the gym; however, this sort of thing has been around a long time and has a great track record.
This is also a fine way to put a peak on your strength before a contest if you already have a good base under you.
There are several ways to arrange this besides the way I wrote.
You can use the basic idea with Olympic lifting also.
Feel free to try other ideas as long as you keep to the basic principle of
"as much practice with heavy weights as possible
with as little fatigue as possible."
Enjoy Your Lifting!
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