Divide and Conquer

In the dark ages of strength training there was a magazine called IRON MAN published by a man named Perry Rader. It was a simple publication that was chalked full of great and practical weight training info. It didn't glamorize the athletes like some of the other publications but relied on providing tons of result producing information in every issue.

In the 50s Rader was a huge proponent of a training system called REST PAUSE training in which you took a heavy weight that you could only lift two or three times and you did one repetition then took a short rest then another followed by another short rest and so on until you reached your limit. By using those short rest periods you were able to do far more total work with that weight than you could do if you did one continuous set. This method was a very productive one that garnered great results in both strength and muscle size for anyone who gave it a fair try.

I recently adapted this method to bodyweight training first for a new client who was unable to do more than 2 or 3 pushups. Then I applied it to my own training. Here's how I did it. I have always sucked at pull-ups. No matter how strong I got on every other movement I just could never do enough pull-ups to use them as an effective part of my training. I made excuses in my mind and pretty much ignored them until recently.

Last summer I had to take a month off from training to recuperate from hernia surgery. During that time I occupied my mind by planning my training for the next several months. I set some goals for myself, amongst them finally mastering pull-ups. No more ignoring them. My goal was to be able to do my age in pull-ups on my next birthday. I will be 55 on may 21st of 2014.

I started by establishing that I could squeeze out one ugly set of five and I was done. I had a long way to go but like any well prepared person about to go on a long journey I had a map to follow. The first step was the "greasing the groove" technique in which you take an exercise and do many easy sets throughout the day every day more practicing and perfecting the form of the movement than working out. So I set up a bar in the doorway of my office and I started by just doing one perfect rep every time I went in or out. I increased it to two reps and after two weeks I found myself getting burned out. I was up to 15-16 reps in a day but was starting to feel like I wasn't recovering and soreness was setting in.

It was time to take a different path and that’s where this little version of rest pause training came into play. I cut back to just training the pull-ups twice a week to allow for proper recovery. I set a timer on my phone for 30 second intervals for a total of 20 sets or 10 minutes. I did one rep on the 30 second mark until I reached failure. I defined failure as not being able to do another clean rep rather than resorting to going for an extra ugly rep or two.

It took several weeks for me to complete the 20 sets then I upped it to 30 sets and worked my way up to that. One morning I completed my 30 pull-ups and felt surprisingly good and squeezed out an extra 10 for a mind blowing 40 pull-ups! Something I had never came close to. It didn't matter that they were one rep every 30 seconds I had totaled 40 pull-ups!

The next step was to start cutting the rest periods. I reduced the total reps back to my original 20 and every workout cut one second off the rest period. I know one second doesn't seem like anything but do the math. After 10 workouts I had cut my total time back by more than 3 minutes!
I was now able to complete my 20 in under 7 minutes and it was time for another change so I bumped the time back up to 30 seconds and started doing 2 reps per set. At first I couldn't complete all the doubles so I took them as far as I could and finished with singles.

Once that phase was completed rather than starting to decrease the rest period once again I increased to doing sets of 3 but this time I increased the intervals to 45 seconds. Yes I was still doing the same number of reps in the same time but the intensity was increased greatly as I had increased the volume of each individual set by 50%. You also have to take into consideration that performing three reps takes longer than one or two so the rest period was not increased that much.
I worked the triples until I could complete 8 good sets then I hit the wall.

I felt like I had gotten as much out of this approach as I could and changed to a more conventional set and rep scheme. I started alternating my pull-ups with military presses for sets of 4-6 reps with a comfortable amount of rest. I was finally able to do pull-ups in an effective way in my workout.

But what about that birthday goal? Well my birthday is one month away and the last time I tested my pull-ups I got 49 in just under 19 minutes so I am feeling pretty good about hitting that 55 in a couple weeks.
Give this effective little program a try with any exercise you really feel you are way behind at and let me know about your results. It works great for just about any compound movement: deadlifts, military presses, bench press, pushups, pull-ups, hanging leg raises, you name it.