5 x 5 with a 4/0/1/0 tempo
For those of you who do not know the history of 5x5, it comes from a legend in Strength & Conditioning named Bill Starr. Why 5x5 was so impactful was because it touched on a really important aspect of having enough volume to stimulate muscle growth while at the same time having enough intensity to develop strength.
Why do we need strength? For one, as we get older we lose it. If we start to lose our ability to produce force we increase our chances of injury as well as our quality of life. Maintaining strength is foundational to having a quality of life that allows us to do what we love outside the gym.
On the end of the spectrum, maintaining muscle facilitates the same thing. A key attribute of health is we have leading indicators showing decline all around us. Building muscle is an expensive process for the body. It takes a ton of energy to build. If we are in a diseased or compromised health state, the body will not sacrifice that energy to build. We can say if we are building muscle from our programming we are in a net positive state of health. The longer we can maintain that, the higher quality of life we will have.
Starr’s vision was to do all primary exercises with a 5x5 set and rep scheme. Squat, bench, and deadlift were his primaries. We have included an upper-body pulling exercise like rowing to facilitate structural balance. Multi-joint, ground-based exercises are just more bang for your buck from how we recruit from it. Combine that with a set, rep, and tempo scheme you got a golden opportunity.
The other element of this block is we are introducing a new class, Practice 4. This is a new class that is going to take the best from Hypertrophy and Conditioning to facilitate a fourth day of our programming. Nothing changes in terms of getting Practice 1, 2, and 3. The only thing different is that you want to fit Practice 4 based on when you have availability.
Practice 4 (the new class) facilitates our fourth primary exercise: bench press. It is important we get to this class because we want to constantly encourage structural balance. We also want to expose all of our members to barbell-oriented movements that we feel are safe. We can get amazing results from all of our tools (DBs, KBs, MBs, Clubs, Maces, Cable, and Barbell), we just need to know how to and when to use them.
This will be a fun block. It’s the perfect blend of volume and intensity to really push yourself. It combines great exercise selection with really challenging programming.
Fight like hell to get all 16 workouts this month. The results will speak for themselves.