A Real Human

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.

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.

I ran a mix of 5/3/1 and Easy Strength from January to June and while I continued to work through a shoulder injury in Q1 I did set some new PRs:

Squat: 350 -> 375 1RM DL: 400 -> 435 1(and 2)RM Chins: Max of 3 with poor ROM -> 8 clean

Shoulder health is significantly improved but still bothering me on bench press and pushups. Overall made minimal pressing progress so far this year even though improving my press was a primary goal.

I also focused more on “easy conditioning” with a decent amount of walking and easy runs, and that’s been a positive change. I’m down 12lbs from the beginning of the year.

Overall I’m happy with the progress even if the pressing is frustrating. If I make similar progress in shoulder health / conditioning and the lower body lifts the back half of the year I will be very pleased.

2022 was the year I began lifting at home, and it was a year of consistent progress and wins. 2023 was… different. I switched from a Starting Strength based Linear Progression to a 5/3/1 based program , and was also fully self-programming with no coach, and it was a year of ups and downs. In the end I learned that I had a lot to learn, and feel ready to get better in 2024. My quantifiable lifting improvements for the year are minimal compared to 2023 though.

What I did

At a high level I used 4 5/3/1 templates throughout the year.

Jan-April: “Classic 5/3/1 Boring But Big”

This was the first thing I saw with 5/3/1 and what most people seemed to do so I tried it. This is a lot of sets of 1-5 reps and even more with 10 reps with lower weights than I got used to from starting strength.

April-Early June: “Krypteia (aborted early)"

Krypteia is a heavily super-set focus variant of 5/3/1. It’s intended to be a conditioning focused program without sacrificing strength and size (too good to be true?). I quickly got injured doing this, though it was related to longer term problems not just Krypteia. I switched to Morning Star at that point

June - September: “Morning Star”

After I picked up a shoulder injury that was making benching dicey, I decided I wanted to shift to focus on strength and specifically Squat and Press. Morning Star was a way to do that which felt a bit more familiar to me. Overall these were the cycles I made the most progress in terms of strength numbers, and felt the healthiest.

September-December: Squat/Push/Pull Full Body / 1000% Awesome

I’d liked the full body feel from the summer with Morning Star, so I decided to move back to that, continuing to keep emphasis on the Press and Squat but reincorporate Bench Press and Deadlift.

What I learned

5/3/1 and Starting Strength have very different philosophies:

Starting Strength: Focus ~exclusively on 5 big compound lifts (Bench Press, Deadlift, Press, Squat, Power Clean)¹ and try to make progress as quickly as possible on a 5 rep max

5/3/1: Focus on overall strength and conditioning with a goal of slower maintainable progress across a wider range of fitness indicators (multiple RM targets and general preparedness / conditioning)

I started 5/3/1 programs like they were Starting Strength (started with weights that were in retrospect too aggressive, didn’t do the accessory work, and ignored conditioning recommendations) and ultimately it led to a path of feeling like I’d stopped making progress and then getting injured.

The lessons for me:

Understand your program’s philosophy if you’re coaching yourself

5/3/1 was initially not effective for me because I wasn’t really doing the full program, I wasn’t really thinking of progress in the way the program encourages, and I wasn’t disciplined in how I progressed.

Slow progress without injuries > fast progress followed by injuries

That’s obvious in retrospect but I set up myself for injury specifically by pushing for heavier weights without focusing on discipline of having good quality reps, and by over focusing on push-style exercises (Press + Bench Press) without corresponding pull / shoulder health exercises to provide balance. The net result was I tore up both shoulders at points in the year, and have had to spend a few months on PT/rehab to get them back to feeling ~normal.

Progress Made

My 5RM numbers made embarrassingly little progress in 2023 relative to where I was in January.

Bench: 240 -> 240 Press: 145 -> 150 DL: 385 -> 400 Squat: 320 (low bar) -> 335 (high bar)

That said, I did hit PRs at a number of other rep ranges, I can do a lot more reps at high intensity during a workout without feeling aches and pains the next day and the quality of my reps is much higher both in high intensity low rep ranges like the above and at moderately lower weights with more reps. And while I only really started taking the conditioning portion seriously in December, I’m seeing some progress there as well as I’ve started running again.

Looking Ahead to 2024

I’m starting off 2024 with a major focus on conditioning, and also on keeping my workouts efficient as I’m going back to work after parental leave and continuing to spend time on PT recovering from my shoulder injury. In that vein, I’m mixing 3x a week of Krypteia Redux with 2 running days a week from now till the end of April. Still deciding what I want to do after that, but currently thinking that I’m going to return to “Boring But Big” and do it right this time.

I picked up a new hobby this year ¹! For years I viewed weightlifting as a form of benefial drudgery that I occasionally tolerated but one I have mostly avoided post-college. Then last November I joined a cross-fit style gym and was introduced to Olympic/Powerlifting style barbell lifting. The gym didn’t stick for reasons that had more to do with schedule than anything else, but I pulled my favorite part of it out and have been consistently doing barbell lifting at home since May.

This has been an unexpectedly rewarding experience for me. It’s allowed me to develop a consistent exercise routine with 2 kids in the house (something thats eluded me since Elena was born 4 years ago), reminded me that I can still learn new things at 35, and helped me feel physically the best I’ve felt in a decade. My original goal was to help myself have energy for my kids, and I definitely think I’ve achieved that.

I’ve been running through the Starting Strength program, unmodified for 3 months and then shifting to a 4 day schedule for the last 4 months. In practice this meant primarily focusing on 5 exercises: the Squat, Bench Press, Overhead Press, Deadlift and Power Clean ². Initially the schedule looked like this, alternating between A & B 3 days a week

Doing that much squatting became exhausting around the summer, the workouts became long as I needed longer breaks between sets and I decided I wanted a bit more upper body focus (and better legs for when I was playing basketball and going for walks). So I switched to a 4x a week schedule:

Those are the core lifts – this doesn’t include warmups (I usually did a Peloton strectch workout and worked my way up to heavy weights) or accessory exercises (I tried to do rows / ab workouts / pushups on days I was feeling good and having time in the 4xweek schedule)

Because I had effectively never trained for any of these lifts in a serious way before, I got to see a lot of relatively easy progress just from staying consistent in lifting. The chart below shows the change in my 5 rep max #s throughout the year (these are training numbers – I haven’t been trying to set up for specific max attempts).

Other than a lag in August / September when I traveled and then got sick, I’ve been able to make fairly consistent progress on all of the lifts throughout the year, with some exceptions where I was reworking my form/technique (for DL in June and Squat/Powerclean recently). Overall I’m really pleased with my progress.

I do think I’m reaching the end of my “linear progression”, and going heavy on legs also wears me out for basketball, which is still my favorite form of exercise. So going into the new year I’m going to be switching to 5/3/1 with a goal of slower but steady progress while also keeping my legs a bit more intact for basketball and exploring other goals rather than just moving numbers for the core lifts.