re: The Greyskull Methods- A Primer

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Didn't all the dudes in the golden age of bodybuilding lift 5-6 days a week though?

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Absolutely. However, geared professional BBers would train multiple times a day. They would hit a muscle group multiple times a week.

Look into undulating periodization training. It's pretty much you train different ways in a week. This can be hypertrophic, strength, or power.

Edit undulating with nonlinear.

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I'll post you up a program either this weekend or Monday that is much better suited for 5-6 days a week and is based on double unandated periodization that a guy I know wrote. Great program that is much much better suited for hthe higher frequency.

How we looking hulk? Lifts still climbing or what?

Bump, how is everyone doing on this.

i see you got jokes today lol.

LSU777,

I'm about a month in, and I'd say I'm a fan at this point. I've done both Stronglifts and 5-3-1, and I'd say I'm a fan of Greyskull more at this point. I always found Stronglifts' progressions to be too fast, and once you made it past one plateau by dropping down and restarting I was never ever to break through again. I prefer Greyskull's slower progression and multiple rep dropdown method. I never liked 531 splitting leg and upper so that you work each 2 days a week. I'd much rather work full-body upper and lower 3 days a week like on Greyskull.

The biggest thing for me, though, is the incorporation of the bodyweight exercises. I'm a fairly toned person already so I wasn't using it to lose weight, but I've been doing the pushup frequency every day (except my one off-day), and I do burpee sprints on the 3 days inbetween that I do cardio and stretching on. I have to say that from a pure physique standpoint they've already made a difference. As mentioned, I'm a thin guy so I was worried these might make me look too thin, but they really haven't. If anything my upper body, mainly my shoulders, looks a good bit thicker.

I'm currently at 52 pushups an hour throughout the day and adding one rep per day. Everyone at my office thought I was a weirdo for a while, but now they just chuckle at it and think nothing of it. For burpees I'm at 5 sets of 20 burpees per minute. I have to take breaks in between, but I'm hoping to have the 100 burpees in 5 minutes by the end of the year!

Appreciate the heads-up on this! I've made some tweaks, but for the most part I'm following the Linebacker program. I'll update every month or so .

Questions about the chins:

1. I've always been a subscriber of the "if they ain't wide grip pull-ups they don't count" theory. Are they saying chins for short or do they really want us to do chin-ups over pull-ups?

2. How do you do multiple sets throughout the day? It's easy to drop down and bust-out push-ups every hour but I have no clue how I'd do multiple chin-up sets.

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1. I've always been a subscriber of the "if they ain't wide grip pull-ups they don't count" theory. Are they saying chins for short or do they really want us to do chin-ups over pull-ups?

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Wide grip pullups are a great exercise but your lats almost exclusively do the work. With chins you get the same level of lat involvement and muscle recruitment(proven through emg readings LINK) plus you get the activation of the biceps. ALso chins tend to be easier to add weight and reps to do to the bicep involvement.

As far as real world, I have found and seen with others that freely rotating handles tend to help with elbow issues that frequent vertical pulling can cause.

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How do you do multiple sets throughout the day? It's easy to drop down and bust-out push-ups every hour but I have no clue how I'd do multiple chin-up sets.

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I work in an office with a shop and we hung a bar in the shop. As far as your situation, I would suggest doing the ladder method or total work methods instead. In the book he talks about this starting on page 61. Get these in either in the morning or afternoon and you will see growth. Split the sessions up if you can.

as far as FM pushups go read this article and you can see how you should progress on the pushups. He talks in the book that after you can complete the 100 rep pushup villian challenge you can move onto dips then handstand pushups when you can do 40-50 no bullshite dips.

From talking to him on his forum and mutiple hour long phone consults I can tell you he prefers people to follow the path in the article and being able to do sets of fifty 45* incline pushups before moving to dips. He doesnt say why in the book, but we have talked about it on the phone and its because he believes dips require much more from a stability standpoint and from the ligaments. He prefers to strengthen them using pushup progressions first then moving to the dips as he has seen far less injuries that away and has seen great improvements in basic barbell strength.

Now in his books he doesnt talk about gymnastic rings, but he is a huge fan of them and told me they should actually be worked into the pushup progressions(after incline pushups, then moving to incline ring pushups and ring flyes) before moving to dips. I know it sounds like he doesn't like dips, he does but he also understands its with many exercises, sure you can do them, still doesnt make it smart until the smaller muscles and ligaments are ready to do so. He is not a huge fan of handstand pushups and considers them more of a party trick unless you are really advanced and have the ability to do them on parrellette bars for full range of motion for many reps.

He also is a big fan of using ring rows or fat man rows and DC Trainings "Racked Chins" for added volume.