0:00 what's up guys we're back for method Mondays we decided on the name it's locked in this is going to be a weekly feature and I could do this like once a week for the next 10 years there's so many different protocols and methods that we can pick apart in dissect and hopefully this will all help you guys understand how all this stuff fits together give you some options when it comes time to solve a particular problem I got a ton of requests for Doug Hepburn's programs this has been around for quite a while I mean Doug Hepburn's biggest lifts were clocked in like the early 1950s so we're talking about 70 years ago and A lot's been written about the man because he was incredibly strong in a way that still holds up today he was credited as being the first band of bench press 500 pounds Doug was a very strong man so I want to pick apart
0:45 exactly uh what his program entailed some of the Alternatives that existed and how this kind of fits in with everything how this might be viable to you some considerations to take in why you may want to incorporate features of this progression because this is a specific style that you can Implement in other set and rep ranges for other lifts and why you would or would not want to commit to something as Bare Bones as this so let's get into it this is his a program now he had an A B and C program I'm going to go over the variations after this but it's not that important to know because the method of progression like the structure is the same so you just started tweaking sets and Reps a little bit very subtle differences you're going to notice everything's heavy in the one two or three rep range to start out with
1:30 progressing to more reps as time goes on and he also followed it up with what he called a pump face there's there's power and pump it's basically doing your heavy work first in the workout and doing your lighter hypertrophy work towards the end of the workout so that it's pretty straightforward the method of progression for his a program uh starting with the power phase the first part of the workout eight doubles starting out with eight doubles nothing grindy nothing difficult something that you're very confident with because you want to give yourself room to improve now the mission is every single session in a painstakingly slow fashion to add just one rep to one set at the end until you've worked up to eight full sets of three so that's a good amount of work especially if the weight does get
2:15 challenging if it does get a little bit difficult as time goes on you might need to take a little longer in between sets but that's a lot of time spent with the same movement so what are we getting with that we're getting a lot of neurological recruitment we're getting a lot of skill work and this is something I mean skill you think okay these movements have skill that's something you don't really understand until you've gotten a little strong and you've spent a good amount of time more time than you're used to working with one lift this is something that people experience when they do these really high set training protocols take German volumizing for instance 10 by 10. super fatiguing especially if you're doing it on the minute people will report as their performance drops halfway through that about set number seven or eight it pops back up and that's some Wizardry that's going on in
3:02 your nervous system when you look at protocols that increase frequency where you're now training a lift much more often throughout the week than you're used to people report feeling stronger feeling more efficient feeling dialed in some of that is actual coordination some of it's deep deep inner muscular and intramuscular coordination actually the way that your body is recruiting muscle fibers which is a very subconscious you could even call it a non-conscious feature and all of that ties together into better timing getting a better hand on the lift so you can't really sleep on the skill component of developing strength and power getting good with a lift is a main feature there's a time to do something weird and different to disadvantage yourself but getting good with the big lifts can't emphasize enough this this does that in Spades and
3:47 over time you're talking about you know increasing your total workload by 50 going from eight doubles to eight triples that's a big increase in work with a relatively heavy weight now to get to the painstakingly slow aspect of it which might put people off understand that this is not supposed to be a quick uh quick and dirty fix for your lagging numbers this is not supposed to be something that's going to break you through your plateau in three or four weeks this is supposed to be a sustainable method of training so I actually like it for that reason you're going to see a lot of modifications of this on the internet where people are trying to adapt it saying well the gains are too slow um that it's it's not substantial substantial enough work early on that
4:33 they want to modify so it packs a bigger punch and I think that's a mistake I think that works directly against what it's supposed to be there's a situation where you can run over a long period of time a program that works in these thresholds with this many working sets and have really aggressive jumps in strength the idea of this is to train it twice a week so it's not that painstaking it's four weeks to get from eight doubles date triples which is a big Improvement in workload in a pretty reasonable amount of time so so I would say stick with the slow progression I've heard of people just adding reps when they can and that might that might work more aggressively on the front end but it's going to limit your ability to do anything like this very long term and uh then we follow up the power phase now one of the things I like this is an example of a workout you would Squat and
5:18 bench or squat for eight doubles bench for eight doubles then you go to the power phase so you go back to squatting for your three sets and then back to benching for three set to six so I kind of like that jumping back and forth really there aren't a ton of programs that I've seen feature that Shaco is notorious for it for uh you know having people do all of this squat work and then go do a bunch of bench psychologically you've kind of given up on squatting and then oh [ __ ] I gotta go back and do more squatting so I kind of like that for a few reasons but it is a good way to get fresh work on some other [ __ ] it's not that different than doing antagonist super sets right you're working something while these other features are recovering and then you're going back when you're fresh getting the extra work in so that's very important especially on a progression like this the pump phase is what we might consider just general hypertrophy work you're in
6:04 uh more reps uh fewer sets just three sets of six same exact method every session just add a rep you get to three sets of seven and then from there you progress over to eight so you're three sets of eight so twice a week this whole thing lands pretty evenly right at about four weeks so it's not as painstakingly slow as it looks and guys I'm super proud to have Boost Camp as a primary sponsor of this channel not only is Boost Camp the easiest most intuitive way to track your training and your progress not only is it absolutely free to use not only does it feature in immense library of some of your favorite programs but it features an exclusive library of programs you will not find anywhere else in fact there's so much content there I'm actually doing a series specifically dedicated to the programs that you only find on Boost
6:50 Camp stop what you're doing right now click the link below download boost Cam and guys as I film this this channel just hit a hundred thousand Subs like five minutes ago and that number would not have been possible without the support of sponsors like boost Cam and again you're talking about a big increase in work now the type of progression we're talking about this is a good example of Step loading this is a deliberate method of increasing the amount of work you're doing while keeping the weight exactly the same so the fact that you're going four weeks with the same weight that is a it's like when I berate you guys for um not taking the time to understand how to make lighter weights work for you right that you don't always have to um you don't always want to have everything revolve around going as heavy as possible you don't want to have
7:35 everything revolve around training balls to the wall with absolute failure you need to know how to get stronger how to adapt how to progress when you don't have uh you don't have the ability to push the engine as hard and as fast as you can this is a good example of that you are keeping the weight exactly the same for four weeks and you are figuring out how to eke out strengthenings by manipulating the other variables we all understand Progressive overload we all know the importance of increasing stress over time so many people hear that and the only thing that they interpret from it is go heavy add weight add weight that's viable adding weight across a program is very damn effective but it takes some trickery uh when you're in a more complex program like when you're in
8:21 a periodic program to figure out when and how that happens and it takes some trickery if you're in a more General strength program to figure out how to do that when strength gains aren't coming easy especially of your if you're of the mind which most people are where they start making jumps ahead of time oh I feel good for a jump so I'm going to jump without thinking about how that's just going to put you up against that brick wall a couple weeks ahead of schedule and then you're gonna have to figure out what the [ __ ] do I do now because I jumped weight early now I have no more room to improve weight so being able to stay with the same weight being able to take these little jumps and Reps which is easy to do if you're starting out appropriately you should have no problem doing those triples on the back end same thing with the pump work if you're starting out at an appropriate weight getting three sets of eight should be guaranteed it's the amount of
9:06 work that you're adapting to in that time so it's the progression of of work it's not that you're training to failure it's not that you're killing yourself with the total amount of work it's just progression and that's a big Point I've talked a lot about this there's a difference between saying what's optimal to get me strong or bigger right now what's the the exact right amount of uh working sets what's the exact uh right amount of effort to put in to optimize hypertrophy that's very different than looking at the progression overall and I maintain that the way you progress is exponentially more important than what you do in any one particular workout and that's something that misses a lot of people so one of the reasons I like something like this so you're hitting everything from both ends power work more endurance hypertrophy type work you're working through the big movements
9:52 I checked probably half a dozen videos along with two dozen different websites because this program's plastered all over the place I did see versions of this that included accessory movements in the form of bent rows another exercise I want to say kettlebell swings I can't tell if that came directly from Doug Hepburn uh it was spoken as if somebody was narrating Doug Hepburn's story which made it sound like it was written by somebody else so I don't know if that's somebody taking this and attaching it to a more fully fleshed out workout or I don't know if that actually did come from Doug Hepburn himself it stands to reason that you can go through this and still add in a little bit of accessory work maybe not so much in the way of direct arm work or legwork but upper back stuff midsection stuff there's some stuff you can you can add
10:38 in to make this a little more fully well-rounded and that's about it it's funny that this came on the back end of the five by one 5x5 that I covered last week it's a very similar principle I just didn't outline this very specific method of adding weight slowly and meticulously over time but it's the same idea a lot of sets with the main movement building the skill building power and backing off and doing some volume work on the back end it is a very potent one-two punch as far as his B and C programs the B program started uh with singles the C program started with triples and the program it's essentially the exact same it's just niching down into these little variations of well am I doing singles working up to twos am I doing twos working up to threes so I I wouldn't obsess too much over that those
11:23 details do not matter it appeared that this was Doug heparin's primary method of training long term so for someone that loves this method this is the only way they want to train they're going to do this for years to develop all of their strength it makes sense to have those little variations to to switch it up but for you guys that are trying this is kind of a one-off you want to go through you know a couple cycles of really focused strength work really get your Technique and comfort dialed in with these movements so you can express more power I think this is a very viable short-term block of training try this out for a couple of cycles and in that growth that you experience you can take that back to a more long-term sustainable method of training that might be a little more in line with some of the varied goals some of you might have because a lot of you over time are
12:10 going to want to focus on hypertrophy as opposed to just improving these four lifts also some things to note Doug Hepburn very very large man his his dietary intake was legendary said he liked to sleep 10 hours a day to try to maximize growth so this guy was really emphasizing getting his big and as strong as possible by any means possible that meant optimize your recovery that meant unrelenting caloric Surplus with a [ __ ] ton of sleep and probably not a lot of work besides the main stuff so when you look at things like squatting twice a week deadlifting twice a week think about doing that together so for lower body days a week it also makes sense why this rolls forward so slowly because you don't want to be grinding any of these
12:55 or it's gonna you're not gonna have a really good time going into any of your other workouts so again really focus the amount of work is increasing that's what you're adapting to you're not going in trying to bash your head against the wall also some interesting things Doug Hepburn talked about this as if uh he wouldn't recommend it for beginners because it can burn you out he talked about getting to the four weeks and needing to cycle through to one of his other programs and intuitively to me it seems that the opposite would be true uh new lifters can uh handle really intense amounts of work they can progress really aggressively they don't tend to be able to beat themselves up too much because they can't work hard enough they can't Redline it hard enough to really do that whereas a really Elite athlete is going to really have to walk a tightrope once these singles doubles triples start to
13:42 get taxing so if you are especially strong I might hesitate to recommend this I feel like conditioning to something is very different right so on the one hand Advanced athletes they burn out a lot quicker but on the other hand you have someone like Hepburn who trained this way for a very long time so he was able to actually adapt to it even though it might be a very difficult thing for your average strong lifter to hang with so I would actually be quicker to recommend this to somebody with a bit less experience who needs to go through that period of really attaching themselves to these lifts to really get them dialed in because that's skill that you can carry over to like the rest of your training career so just be mindful of recovery three but if you're making a training decisions if you're eating a lot this was Doug's long-term preferred way of training I'm pretty sure it takes
14:27 a lot of time to adapt to it and there's a lot of uh there's gonna be a lot of trial and error with the pacing selecting the right weight making sure that enough of the sessions are actually difficult enough without being so difficult that you overreach so I'm not entirely sure I recommend that anybody go and jump into this four day a week program running through these lifts twice a week trying to get this out in four weeks I would recommend you learn from this type of progression to think about how you can apply it to other exercises I would probably limit the number of exercise you apply it to for most people I think picking an upper and lower body exercise for something like this will probably be sufficient maybe being a bit a bit lighter a bit more measured with your other list putting those on the back burner or in maintenance mode while you focus on these but if you do take this type of a
15:14 high set approach low rep periods focusing on Power and strength and if you do apply this kind of slow steady methodical method of progressing that doesn't try to get the biggest weight jump as possible as fast as possible I think you're going to be very pleased with the results and you're going to come out of it knowing that you can keep the amount of work in this really manageable range and as long as the numbers are going up in the sense of the amount of work is going up as long as you can look at the total sets and Reps increasing over time that's going to represent something that creates an Adaptive response is going to be very viable and you have a lot of flexibility with where you put that in so so take this learn from it implement it into one of your exercises if you're looking for a strength specific more neurologically focused block of training and you know
16:02 take notes see how it goes adjust as you go along so let me know what you think guys if you ran through programs like this that do a lot of repeating sets with very very low reps if so how have you progressed them have you found them to be very productive have you had to switch over to other things leave your experience in the comments or better yet take it to patreon that's where I upload my training and answer questions weekly so that is the easiest way to get in touch with me leave your recommendations also for other programs protocols that you'd like me to cover and go over I have a bunch lined up but I'm going to be doing this at least for now every Monday so look forward to Method Mondays thanks so much for watching guys until next time this is Bromley I'll see you
