I spent the last 2 months running Dan Jon and Pavel Tsatsouline’s Easy Strength Program. It’s a fundamentally very simple program that Dan still managed to write a huge ~200 page book about. The high level goal is to pick 5 exercises and to run them every workout for 40 workouts without doing more than 10 reps on any of the individual exercises. The idea is that it is a minimalist program thats run before your “other activity”, a sport or walking for fat loss.
Dan recommends running it 5x a week so that it takes 2 months total, and allows for some variation in exercise throughout the month. I ran it that way, while focusing on walking 8500 - 12000 steps a day (sometimes but not always doing a long walk immediately after the workout). My goals were fat loss, improving pullups, and improving my pressing.
I switched my exercises at the halfway point. For the first half I ran:
- Push Press (Inexperienced, goal was to help my press where I was having lockout trouble)
- Pullups / Chinups (Lots of variations, didn’t always stick to the 10 rep limit)
- High Bar Squat
- Ab Wheel
- Curls (Probably not a great rep scheme but I’ve neglected curls and wanted to support the chins/pullups)
Halfway through I returned to a normal work schedule after being on delayed parental leave the first month and made 2 switches
- Push Press -> Bench Press
- Squat -> Hang Cleans
Squats 5x a week proved to be too tiring while I was working, even at “easy” weights, so I switched to hang cleans (a “learning” movement for me that wasn’t overly challenging)
I’ve avoided heavy bench pressing for almost a year due to shoulder troubles that I had mostly overcome in the spring but still felt on pushups and bench. So I started very light here and worked my way up.
Results
P and DL numbers are from testing the last week.
Body Weight: 248 -> 237lb Squat 355 1RM -> 375 1RM (early in cycle – saw some strength loss after not squatting the last 2 weeks) BP 250 1RM -> 255 1RM (more importantly, I hadn’t benched over 200 without pain in > a year, but benched 2x5@230 without pain this week) P 155 4RM -> 155 3RM (Small loss here but I think pretty good given weight loss and lack of practice) DL 435 1RM -> 395 1RM (Not overly concerned about this, I think this is mostly lack of practice this year, but probably some real strength loss from neglecting lower body the last month) Chinup 6RM -> 10RM (10 chins was one of my goals for this year, very happy with that one)
Overall I was very pleased with this. I think I likely did lose some real lower body strength the last month from neglecting those lifts, but my upper body pressing strength seems to be somewhere between gain and maintenance despite losing 11 pounds, and I hit two of my big goals for the year (10 chins and benching heavy without pain). Even better I felt great throughout the program, other than when I tried to push the squatting a bit at the end of the first month.
I definitely will run easy strength again next time I want to lean out a bit and focus on 1 or 2 specific lifts. I will likely program a bit differently though. At least at my current place in life, I seem to have capacity to give my best to at most 2 lifts, and then can fill in solid work with 3 more. I probably don’t want to completely neglect lower body for 2 months, so in the future I’d probably go with a more “classic” split where I incorporate deadlifts along with a pressing movement and put them first, and then do 3 “easy/fun” filler exercises along them.
