High frequency lifting on its own has offered up a few major benefits in the past 1.5 months.
1. Paralysis of decision making is a thing of the past
I have no reason to ever revisit set and rep schemes, order of exercises, and progression/failure models. Keeping things basic only requires me to focus on what I'm doing now and what I'm doing next. A cool side effect of this benefit is that I'm able to focus the energy that usually goes into reconfiguration elsewhere.
2. Strength is up. Perception of strength is up a fuck ton
Let me explain. In terms of putting up decent numbers with the movements I'm training, I am consistently outperforming my old approach. My improvements are not magical, but they are significant. I'm especially excited for when I revisit a movement to answer 'did my floor and ceiling strength increase.'
Perception of strength is how I feel day to day. I feel nigh fucking unstoppable. My energy is high, outlook is optimistic, and sex drive is over 9000. This by itself was worth the entire experiment. It is worth noting that these perceptions dropped off suddenly when I reached the apex of my last movement cycle (i.e. when I hit a 500 zercher squat).
Today I wanted to talk about the non-lifting aspects of high frequency training, and their role in what I'm doing.
1. Conditioning
Frequency: 3-6x a week
Optional: yes, but you really should be doing this
Lifting for short intense sessions daily will increase your work capacity, but only for lifting for short intense sets. While lifting will increase your Strength, conditioning is an umbrella term for staying in shape. This includes running, HIIT, pushing sleds, etc. A conditioning session should get your heart rate screaming and challenge your will power as opposed to your strength.
Although I'm sure my lifting has played a large part in how I operate day to day, I also feel like I would be reporting very different benefits to this style of training if I was also not conditioning to stay in shape.
2. Stretching
Frequency: every day
Optional: no
I don't care if you are lifting daily or not. From age 24 to 29, I was constantly feeling some sort of pain or was moving with some sort of disability. In my mind, this was either a part of getting older or a result of my hard core [sic] training. I wasn't 100% wrong...but from ages 30-32, I've moved better than I had during most of my 20s. The answer was keeping my body stretched and stretched often.
Get this done in 10min a day and feel the difference.
