I found that once I got into a rhythm, I could usually tell how certain days were going to go. When I first went through this system, I was training in the morning on Monday through Thursday. Friday’s workout was at night, which meant that I’d get an extra 12 hours for my body to settle down (and eat) before I trained again, and I always felt stronger in that workout.
It wasn’t long before Friday became my regular “P R night”. Not to say I actually did P R every Friday, but since I felt more energetic, more attempts happened there, and I was more aggressive with back-off work.
I was inspired by Glenn Pendlay’s weightlifting team, who were using a similar frequent-training schedule at one point, and they always reserved one day each week for hitting squat P Rs and rep-maxes. It might be a top single, double, or triple, or a set of 5-6, or even 8-10 reps.
When you train like this, some days will feel like “intensity” days, when you want to push the top weights. Others will be more “volume” days, where you stay easy on the top weights but hammer out the back-off work. If you find you’ve got a day that consistently pops up as a “high energy” day, you might want to anchor it and leave it as your P R day. It doesn’t matter what you do; pick something on the day that feels right, and try to beat your previous record.
‘Reps’, by which I mean anything more than singles, doubles, or triples, can be hard to slot in to every-day lifting. Singles are amazingly forgiving on a daily basis, but I always found the thought of tens and even fives to be more intimidating. I know I wouldn’t be too motivated to hit a 10R M on a squat multiple times a week, even autoregulated, and there’s good reason for that.
Things change on a split routine. You might find that aiming for a 5-6R M or 8-10R M works well three times a week, giving you that extra day in between for mind and muscle restoration. Something much like this has been the basis for many useful bodybuilding workouts, from Bryan Haycock’s Hypertrophy Specific Training to the six-day routine used by former IFBB Pro Phil Hernon.64
An interesting option would be throwing in rest-pause and cluster-rep methods. The type of hard-out rest-pause training made famous by Dante Trudel’s DC Training might be a bit much, but cluster-reps, like Borge Fagerli’s Myo-Reps, would be a good fit as you can tinker with both the initial weight and the total amount of reps.65
Using rest-paused clusters, you’d work to a high R P E, maybe an 8 or 9, and then set your timer for 30 second rests between ‘mini-sets’. You might hit 8-10 reps on the initial set, then drop back to triples for the mini-sets, stopping when you reach a point of fatigue or a target rep-count.
I think you can bring in any of these ‘rep methods’ for your back-off sets if you keep the volume low. You might want to see about hitting say 2-3 sets of 5-6 reps or even 8-10
reps after a daily max, just for something different. I tried this from time to time and it was a decent change of pace.
If you’re brave, you could even bring in a higher-volume day. You’d leave the daily max at the daily minimum, mainly using it as a warmup, and then knock out some hard back-off sets ― eight sets of triples, five sets of five, something like that. Yes, this will make the next day or two feel horrible, but that’s okay. Remember: the whole point is to take the emphasis off any single workout. You had a bad day? So what? You’re coming back tomorrow. Mistakes cost you nothing.
After a few weeks, you’ll get used to the higher volume anyway, and once that happens, you will start to understand why this is such a powerful setup.
Once you start anchoring days like this, you may notice something like a “real program” taking shape. That is also okay, because you arrived at it by tinkering and figuring it out yourself by actually training, rather than trying to organize it all from a manager’s top-down point of view. Pay attention to these lessons.
Of course, none of this means you can’t use a structured workout if it hits your fancy.
In the latest edition of 5/3/1, Jim Wendler lays out a version of his program that incorporates some daily-training magic while still sticking to the core of his method. One day is set aside for squatting with the bread-and-butter 5/3/1 cycle, which in my experience is also a great way to make use of higher reps. There are also four other squat workouts which have you working up to ‘easy’ singles at a percentage of your training max for the cycle. I think that would be a great compromise for anyone not so keen on free-styling it with auto-regulation. You’re getting the advantages of self-adjusting training within a reasonable structure.
If you aren’t totally sold on squatting and pressing every single day, the easiest change you can make that will still keep you in the ballpark is a two-way split. Popular choices would be upper and lower body, hitting bench and overheads and then squats and pulls, or pushing and pulling, hitting squats and pressing followed by pulling and back assistance.
You could train six days each week, so that each one day is repeated three times, or if you don’t care about days off, just alternate back and forth until you need or want a day off.
I haven’t toyed with either long enough to say which I like best, although the push-pull type of split is similar to what I wound up doing anyway. The main difference is that you’d get more pulling, since you’d have three ‘pull’ workouts instead of throwing them in as subs for squats, and less overhead pressing, since it would have to work with benching.
Honestly, nothing would stop you from using a simple squat/bench and overhead/pull split, and I think that would be a good choice.
Rotating exercises is another option that can be split-like. Instead of sticking to the same lift, you’d pick something similar but different. I’ve already mentioned rotating front and back squats, but you could throw in box squats, safety-bar squats, squats with chains or bands, pretty much anything that your creativity and equipment allows. You
could do the same with overhead work, benching, pulls, all of it. Use fat bars, use dumbbells, throw in odd lifts and strongman events and old-time circus lifting like the bent press. Don’t be afraid to tinker around and see what suits you – and if you feel like hitting a different lift, hit that lift. Be volatile.