The New High Frequency Training

Here’s what you need to know… Training more often is better for building muscle than cramming more and more into a long workout. Ideal High Frequency Training (HFT) exercises include pull-ups, push-ups, dips, lunges, single-leg squats, and single-leg deadlifts. Do one of these exercises every day outside of your normal workout, adding a rep each day. Use HFT for the long haul. The best gains come in the last two months. You may find yourself being the most muscular you’ve ever been. Long Workouts vs. More Frequent, Short Workouts There’s a mind-numbing array of training programs out there. But most modern programs fail to provide faster muscle growth than lifters achieved in 1969. True, today’s bodybuilders are much bigger than they were then, but that difference is largely due to drugs. Why so little progress? There are two possible conclusions. Maybe we’ve already tapped out our ability to grow muscle as fast as our physiology allows. Maybe we can’t achieve hypertrophy at a faster clip because our genes have a limit set. There’s still a better way that no one has figured out yet. From a training perspective, there are only two possible angles for cracking the hypertrophy conundrum: Stimulate more growth in a single workout. Train more often. If we consider option #1 and put our energy into figuring out a way to get more growth out of a single workout, we quickly run into a wall. How can I say this? Because if 100 sets of curls over the course of two hours could add an inch to our biceps, we’d all find time to do it. Furthermore, this hypothesis is easiest to test. Every guy who’s tried a four-hour training session ultimately realized how futile and impractical that approach was for muscle growth. I’m not saying that option #1 is unequivocally a dead-end. But if the answer is that we need significantly more volume in a single workout, I have no idea how to approach it without inducing severe stress to your immune system and joints. So that leaves us with option #2: train more often. If there’s one irrefutable truth about training for hypertrophy, it’s that twenty workouts can build more muscle than four workouts. The question then becomes one of fatigue and recovery. How can you manage them? Most lifters train a muscle group three times per week or less, so I categorize training four or more times a week as High Frequency Training (HFT). I’ve been experimenting with all sorts of HFT programs since 2001. If your primary goal is muscle growth, this new version was built for you. HFT Overview Choose one exercise that you’ll train every day, like pull-ups or push-ups. Follow your usual training plan at the gym, but hit this extra exercise every single day following the rules and progression plan below. 1 – Start with Less Than You Think You Need If you forget everything else about HFT, remember rule #1 because it’s the key element – you’re much better off feeling like the first few weeks of a targeted HFT plan are too easy. On January 5, 2011, I embarked upon a six-month long daily pull-up journey. The day I started, I did five pull-ups from the bar I had hanging in my doorway. The next day I did six reps. I could have easily done 20 reps at a time, but I didn’t. I was in it for the long haul and I had already learned my lesson by doing too much too soon. On July 1 of that year I did 182 pull-ups spread throughout the day. The day before I did 181 reps. The day before that it was 180 reps. Yet I had absolutely no soreness or joint pain during those final days. The reason was because I spent six months slowly building up to that volume. When you look at my new rules of a targeted HFT plan, I know you’ll think you can start with more reps, but as my Russian gymnastics coach likes to say in his thick accent, “Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.” Here’s what to do: Start with an exercise that you can do for 12-22 reps while fresh. Let’s say you can do 13 straight pull-ups. Split that total into two sets, as evenly as possible: in this case, 1×7 and 1×6. That’s how many reps you should do on day 1. The next day add an extra rep. So you’ll do two sets of 7 reps. Spread those sets out as far as possible. It’s best to do one set in the morning and one in the evening. This won’t seem necessary in the early days when the volume is low, but once you keep adding reps day after day and reach 60 reps or more it becomes invaluable and necessary to spread the sets throughout the day. 2 – Choose the Right Exercises and Use Perfect Technique Perform every rep with perfect form. There’s no excuse for sloppy technique when you’re doing half as many reps per set as you actually could be doing. Here’s a list of some of the top exercises to use for the HFT methodology explained in Rule #1. Whatever exercise you choose should be removed from your current training program (the one you do in the gym). Pull-up: Ideally, perform them from rings. If rings aren’t an option, use a hammer grip (palms facing
Origin: The New High Frequency Training