October, formally known around these parts as SQUATOBER, always gets me thinking differently and puts strength programming in perspective. Classically, many believe that if we perform the same exercises multiple times per week and never change our training program, we’re bound to dive headfirst off the cliff of staleness and boredom into the dark, treacherous, miserable sea of injury. While there is plenty truth to this, a case for higher frequency lifting can be made, which we’re going to discuss below!
There’s No Substitution for Reps
When looking to increase our performance in a specific lift, it’s easy to get lost in the minutia, losing sleep over the exact perfect set/rep schemes, percentages, rest periods, or bar speeds we feel we need to execute in order to continue making progress. It’s also equally as easy to forget that performing the big compound lifts requires skill and coordination which, like anything else, requires practice. It’s not all that different from our athletes looking to improve their free throw or golf swing: Quality repetition is the Mother of all learning!
This is one of the largest differences between using free weights vs. machines. There’s nothing inherently wrong with using machines for specific goals, and they certainly can be the best tool for the job in certain cases, but there is naturally a lot less skill required. You can essentially master the technique of using a machine on day one, where people may take years of training to truly feel like their squat, bench, or deadlift technique are optimal. I promise that the pursuit is worth the patience, though, as free weight exercises come with a host of benefits that machine training simply cannot replicate.
High Frequency in Practice
To put this theory into practice, let’s think about every meathead’s favourite month: SQUATOBER. October has become the international knee-bending month across the world, especially here at IPC. Every year we are fortunate and grateful that our man Aaron Ausmus puts his weight room genius to work and cooks up an awesome program for the world to follow that most often leads to PR’s at the end of a long, tough month. However, keeping in mind that the Squatober program looks slightly different every year, it becomes clear that maybe it’s not the EXACT recipe that makes the perfect meal in this case. While the recipe matters, a big factor is the frequent and consistent high-quality practice that leads to progress over time.
The program is well-thought-out with light days, heavy days, high volume days, low volume days, tempo days, fast days, variation days… you see where I’m going with this. The point is that thoughtful programming will get us to our goals most efficiently, and higher frequency may is one often-overlooked programming strategy we can use to periodically skyrocket our progress. While it would be crazy to squat 5 times per week year-round, Squatober is a great example that proves it can be an effective strategy to do a blitz program periodically to bring up any weak or lagging exercises we wish to improve.
A Caveat
Humans are creatures of excess; if some is good, more must be better… right? Not so fast! We would caution heavily against this mentality when it comes to training. We don’t need to go from 0-100 right away in this case as this could cause us to potentially run into issues like overuse injuries, an even bigger obstacle to our training progress than suboptimal frequency. All we’re suggesting is that if you’re currently only squatting, pressing, or hinging once per week, you can potentially try increasing your frequency on these lifts to two or three times per week each to see how your body responds.
This is why we’re not large proponents of the classic body-part “Bro Split” at Iron Performance Center. All the boring and nerdy scientific reasons aside, a big issue is that it simply doesn’t allow for frequent enough practice when we only train each main movement pattern once per week! It’s difficult to get everything out of an exercise we’re not good at, and it’s difficult to be good at an exercise we only perform once-per-week, all-year-round.
Like most things in life, there will come a point of diminishing returns; if squatting 3 times per week is good, 6 is not necessarily better! We still need to prioritize rest and regeneration as well. This is another reason why we program by movement pattern as opposed to body parts. Increased frequency doesn’t mean I have to perform the EXACT same exercise multiple times per week, but at least if I am using the same movement pattern multiple times per week, I will make progress and have quality practice that will carry over to each similar variation without overloading the tissues with one specific exercise.
Initially, instead of going from squatting once per week with Monday’s program including back squats to now having back squats on Monday Wednesday AND Friday, you could instead have Back Squats on Monday, Front Squats on Wednesday, and Goblet Squats to a Box on Friday. Your international chest day on Monday where you get after it on the Bench Press could now consist of Bench Press on Monday, Incline Press on Wednesday, and Decline Press on Friday. Program variation in this fashion can improve technique, allow ample opportunity to practice, and ensure that we are continually making progress while avoiding or reducing the risk of overuse injury.
Anecdotally, I know that my Olympic Lift numbers are at their best when I perform the lifts 3-4 times per week, and they suffer greatly when that frequency drops to 1-2 times per week. Being that these are some of the most high-skill exercises we can perform in the weight room, this should come as no surprise!
In Conclusion
While we’re certainly not suggesting you need to go completely overhaul your current program and train the same exercises eight days per week or you’ll never make progress, we’re simply suggesting that upping the frequency with which you perform a specific lift or pattern that you want to improve could be the key to unlocking your performance. The answer to breaking through a pesky plateau may be simpler than you think. Remember it’s not practice that makes perfect, but perfect practice that makes perfect.
Perfect Practice is the key to being successful with this higher frequency strategy. If you’re still unsure what this should look like or need more help with practicing your lifting skills, hit us up at the link below; we’d love to help!