The Useful Strong Stuff Journal Vol. 34 Doing Stuff That Doesn’t Work, Again, On Purpose

Right now like a lot of other people I am looking ahead to 2022 and thinking about what this year could hold for me. I have some goals for the year and have started moving forward on them. I am starting at the beginning with a lot of things. It is good for me to be a beginner again. I am trying a lot of new things to get things moving. I am also retrying a lot of things that didn’t work the first time I tried them.

To repeat what works and toss out the rest is wise. Doing things over and over that do not work is insanity. I am thinking however for me it’s time to revisit things that didn’t work the last time I did them.

In the last couple years I have become a different kind of person. I am now a personal trainer. I am now a writer. I am vastly different than I used to be. I have come to believe that it might be time to do some things that didn’t work for me last time around.

In the next year I’ll be looking to jump back into networking events. Networking events haven’t worked for me in a while but I’m jumping back in with a new profession and outlook on life.

I’m looking to build up an online business. This time around though its providing real services I know how to perform well. There are no hopes and dreams with this plan. It’s all about doing the things I’ve been doing well all my life.

I’m looking to try a bunch of things again, and trying to be open minded. I think when we fundamentally change, we have good reason to retry things again. The things that didn’t work for an old version might work for the new version of ourselves. If we don’t retry we might be missing out on something that might just work today.

2022 will be a year of trying new things. It is also will be a year of retrying some things that didn’t go well the first time around. It only takes a little courage to retry those things. What will you be retrying?

Big Conjugate Article Drop

In recent years I have been using a conjugate training system for my workouts. I enjoy the flexibility I am afforded by training this way. I have also been using it as a framework to have a lot of random fun workouts in the gym. With a little creativity you can make this system fit all sorts of goals. Recently I published an article laying out how I organize all my training and the system I like to use. You can read all about it here https://nehemiah.co/funconjugate/.

I have also released several workouts that fit into this framework. I will be releasing many more workouts that fit into the system into the future as well. Here are a couple routines that I’ve launched, if you need a new workout challenge I hope you give them a look.

Intro To Glute Training Program: https://nehemiah.co/workout-routines/intro-to-glute-training-program/

Old School Chest Program: https://nehemiah.co/workout-routines/the-old-school-chest-program/

Useful Links

I am constantly on the search for new ways to get stronger, healthier and more awesome. Here are some of the best things I have found lately.

Strength And Conditioning

This is a good article with some exercises for serratus strength. This is something a lot of people are lacking in the gym. https://meghancallawayfitness.com/my-blog/5-exercises-for-a-stronger-serratus-muscle/

A nice intro to the Hatfield Squat, which might be a fun variation to add to your program. https://zacheven-esh.com/hatfield-squats-lower-body-workout/

Nice summary of common weak points in the squat and potential solutions. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qz9FYFwcm5g

Mindset

This is a nice video from Jujimufu about peak performance. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SRgRNyll-m8

The Old School Chest Program

Author’s Note: This routine was written as part of a conjugate training system, if you are not doing conjugate training that is cool too. There is an option below of how to make it work as a standalone workout outside any conjugate framework. If you are not super familiar with that kind of training I recommend reading this page for more information. Article: How I Do Conjugate Training.

This is the kind of chest workout we used to do a lot. It’s all about the basics and really building the chest. With all the pressing work you will also get a lot of work for your triceps.

This is a hypertrophy program and not concerned about working in the strength range. Your main lifts for the day should cover the strength range if you are concerned with that right now.

When To Do It

This is to be done once per week for either upper body day if you are conjugate training. This routine would couple well with a back specific program on the other upper body day. This would maintain some balance. If you are doing a conjugate program, this would probably work a bit better on a max effort day than a dynamic effort day. You can try it with either type of day though and see what you like best.

If you are not doing conjugate this would be done as your primary bench press or chest day. I would advise against doing it twice per week. If you wanted to do a less intense second chest or bench press day that would be acceptable.

Main Lift

If you are doing conjugate training follow the conjugate recommendations, otherwise you can bounce down to the non-conjugate recommendations for main exercises.

Conjugate

Do your max effort or dynamic effort pressing as normal with this program. Stick to doing a flat movement while running this for your main lift. You’ll be getting incline and decline work later on.

This is a good program to run if you are dropping out dynamic effort work in favor of repetition effort work for a while. In such a case, 4-5 sets of 10 repetitions for bench press would be a good main lift.

Non-conjugate

Perform 4-5 sets of bench press in a 10-12 rep range if you are focused on hypertrophy. If you want to do strength work you could bench press for 3 sets of 5 reps.

Supplemental Movement

You will not be doing a true supplemental movement in this program because all the pressing will serve this purpose.

Program

Do a comprehensive warm up as you normally would before beginning the main lift for the day.

Exercise	Sets/reps
Main Lift of Bench Pressing as outlined above	Whatever you normally do.
Incline Barbell Bench Press	4 sets x 10-12 reps
Dips (weighted if strong enough)	4 x 10-12
DB Flyes	3 x 10-12
Pushups	2-3 sets, as many as you can do without getting fired up. Just pump some out to finish your chest off.
Free Time (Keep Limited and no more chest you did enough of that.) A few rows if you want.Lateral Raises would be ok.Hammer Curls would be ok.A few sets of abs is good idea.	Keep the reps high and weight low. Anything you do here is just to keep a little balance in things. Don’t try and push other lifts after all this chest work.

Picking Weights

Start on the light side with the weight and build up if you have not been doing a lot of training volume already. It is best to start too light if you don’t know where to start and add weight each week.

You can pyramid the weight up or use the same weight for all sets of an exercise.

Progression

Each week you can try and add more weight or more reps to the lifts.

On the dumbbell flyes you might just stay with the same weight across the whole cycle. These do not improve as fast as other lifts do.

Length

Run this program as listed above for 3 weeks. After 3 weeks if you want to do another 3 week run at it that is good. During the second 3 weeks start adding in things like drop sets, forced reps, and other intensity principles. This is when you can start doing all that bodybuilder type stuff. Only use those methods for a couple sets per workout.

If you were feeling good after 6 weeks of running the program you could try it for another 3 weeks. If you are having good progress then you can just keep running with things indefinitely.

Program Tips

Make sure you are doing lots of back training on another day of the week. Otherwise you risk becoming out of balance.

Adventures in Glute Training

At the end of 2021 I got it into my head to do some glute specific training. I had never really trained my glutes specifically before. I had always gotten some glute stimulation from doing squats, deadlifts, and back raises. I had a client ask a bit about glute training and I realized I had never gone down that particular rabbit hole myself. This led me to start researching and write up a glute program. What resulted was a glute program that can be run alongside your typical conjugate lower body days.

When I set out to do this, I looked up a lot of what Bret Contreras had to say about glute training. Everyone says he is the expert on glute training, so I decided to just run with his recommendations on things. This was a good starting point.

These are key takeaways I got from watching a whole bunch of his videos.

Simple answer on frequency is 3 times a week.
- Bikini competitors with best glutes on average do glutes 3 times a week.
Can train glutes 2-6 times a week.
Glutes biggest muscles in the body. (I knew this, but its good to be reminded.)
Eccentric phases of hip thrusts not as rough on body as eccentric from squats/deads/lunges.
36 sets per week.
He had a fair bit of single leg work going on.
His Rule of thirds – do a third of each type of movement.
- Vertical hip extension
  - Squats, deadlifts, step ups, lunges
- Horizontal
  - Cable pull throughs, hip thrust, back raises, etc.
- Lateral rotary
  - Seated hip abduction, lateral band walks, etc.
His rule of thirds for intensity.
- 1 third low reps and heavy.
- 1 third moderate.
- 1 third higher reps.

Those were the high points of what I found from him on glute training. He had a lot of other useful information and recommendations, but those recommendations were the most relevant to me trying to build a glute program.

I wanted to make this fit into what I was already doing. I settled on doing 2 days of glute training per week. I was already doing 2 days per week of lower body training. I decided to swap out my accessories for things that would drive the glute development. Since I was already doing a good amount of squats and deadlifts

I decided that following the rule of thirds for movements would be easy to some degree. I did make sure to put some from each category into the program. I ended up doing more work with the vertical hip extension movements since I was doing a lot of squatting and deadlifting. The horizontal movements ended up being the easiest to do. Hip thrusts, pull throughs and back raises were the exercises I chose for this experiment. I was just worried about good movement and not pushing hard loads. I did apply load as it felt good on those movements, the weight was adjusted depending on fatigue levels.

When it came to following the rule of thirds for intensity, I didn’t worry about that too much. I did do low reps as part of the system since I was doing heavy deadlifts and squats in the program. I figured that covered the low reps. Most of the rest of the work was moderate reps, some things got pushed up into the 20 rep range. This is mostly because I’m lazy and I would rather do 10 reps than 20. Since this was all new to me I knew I would get good mileage out of whatever rep range I did. In the future I would be inclined to do some more high rep stuff since I am more adapted to the glute training and would benefit by being more well rounded with my programming.

The following is the glute program I did. It is spread across both dynamic and max effort lower body days. I ran the program for 4 weeks. I think it is a good program for people that want an introduction to glute training. There is nothing too crazy in the program and it scales up and down nicely.

Dynamic Day:

Speed squats and speed deadlifts were performed before the following work. In general I would do around 24 squat lifts, and around 10 speed pulls on these days. I autoregulate these, so what actually happens on a given day is a chaotic mess.

Glute Specific:

Reverse Lunges 2 sets
1. Increase reps every workout
1. Add weight if reps get super high
Back raises 3 sets weighted. Add weight each workout.
Hip Thrusts 3 sets (weighted or unweighted, your choice)
Hip Abduction 3 sets

ME Day

On these days I performed a max effort lift of a variation of deadlift, squat or good morning. If you’re doing this good mornings should be done for sets of 3 or 5, and everything else should be a single rep.

Supplemental Lift:

Romanian Deadlift 3 x 5-10 increase weight and/or reps each week.
Switch up when and if burning out. (I never got to the point where I burnt out)

Glute Specific:

Step ups 2 sets just increase reps
Back Raises Higher Reps, 3 sets unweighted.
Cable Pull throughs 3 sets
1. Increase weight each week if you can, but make sure you are feeling the movement.
Hip Abduction 3 sets

Both Days:

Finish with light sets of:

Leg curls
Calves
Leg extensions or Leg press if quads needing more stimulus or feeling energetic.
Abs

*Part way through the program the gym where I workout bought a reverse hyper machine so I started doing those after the above work too. That introduced a bit of a chaotic element to things, as those gave me more glute stimulus. I think the reverse hypers pushed me to a bad place with the fatigue and were overkill. Overall I still think the glute work did work and got me some benefits.

The Results

My hips feel better in general now than when I started the program. Before I ran the program my hips felt slightly beat up. They feel 100% good now.
My hips feel slightly better while squatting. This is marginal, but still a slight benefit.
Strength levels were maintained or slightly improved. My lifts did not go down. (4 weeks isn’t a long enough time to see huge strength gains)
My glutes definitely grew. I have never prioritized any glute training so my body was ready to respond to this stimulus.
It was fun to do. It was all easy stuff to be honest, and I saw stuff grow. Easy growth is kind of fun.
I did get a bit of fatigue while running this program. I would start lighter next time and grow into it. I also think some of that was jumping into the reverse hyper in the middle of all this. I think adding the reverse hypers was just adding one too many things.

Concluding Thoughts

This is a program I would definitely run again. I think for me it would be best to run it in a 3-6 week block. Anything more than that and I start to get bored with exercises. With 25 years under my belt of training I adapt pretty fast to things, you might be able to run things longer. I think doing this kind of program would definitely help with deadlift and squatting strength over time. Overall, this was a fun experiment and gave me the chance to train something I had not done before. It is fun to do new things after all.

You can read up my full recommendations and glute program I did on its workout routine page https://nehemiah.co/workout-routines/intro-to-glute-training-program/

Intro To Glute Training Program

This program is for people that want an introduction to glute training. A lot of people workout their lower body a lot but don’t specifically target the glutes. This program will do that while still training the lower body in a comprehensive way.

The exercises selected in this program scale nicely so you can take it very easy and ramp up over time.

This program can bring a host of benefits to you depending where your training is at. It can help make your hips feel better. It can improve glute strength and size. It can help with speed for sports. It can also help some with low back pain if your glutes are the cause of this.

When To Do It

This program is meant to be done on two days of lifting per week. You should squat and or deadlift before doing this work. There are Romanian deadlifts on the one day, you do not need to do conventional deadlifting before those unless you are running a conjugate system and using that as a max effort movement for the day. Squatting and deadlifting protocols to perform here are up totally up to you.

Main Lift

Conjugate

On dynamic days make sure you are doing both squats and deadlifts. 20-25 squats and around 10 deadlifts seem to work well here. On max effort days, do whatever you want.

Non-conjugate

I would recommend using deadlifts as the main lift of day one of the program. Then you can use squats as the main lift on day two. You can also perform squats as a main lift each day. If you like squatting and deadlifting on the same days, then you can do squats and deadlifts as main lifts on day 1. I would not do both squats and deadlifts before day 2. You are pushing the Romanian deadlifts hard on day 2, and doing squats, deadlifts and Romanian deadlifts all in one workout would be overkill.

Whatever you choose it is important to squat and deadlift hard while doing this program. It is where the bulk of your glute benefit will come from. The rest of the exercises supplement these bigger heavier movements. Any rep ranges you like for squats and deadlifts can be used, just make sure you are doing work here.

Supplemental Movement

On day 2 you will do Romanian Deadlifts as a supplemental movement to your main lift. These should be pushed hard.

Program

Day 1

Exercise	Sets/reps
Main Lift of squats and deadlifts as outlined above	Whatever you normally do.
Reverse Lunges	2 sets, Start with bodyweight, when the reps get high start adding weight.
Back raises (hyperextensions) -Weighted	3 sets, 10+ reps, add weight weekly.
Hip Thrusts	3 sets, 10+ reps, do weighted on unweighted, up to you.
Seated Hip Abduction Machine	3 sets of 10-20 reps each.
Accessories- Do the following as desired Leg curlsQuad work (take it easy here, but a little is ok.CalvesAbs	Do whatever you want of these, just don’t take away from your recovery since you have already done a lot of work here.

Day 2

Exercise	Sets/reps
Main Lift of squats and deadlifts as outlined above	Whatever you normally do.
Romanian Deadlifts	3 sets 5-10 reps. Add weight or reps weekly.
Step Ups	2 sets, Start with bodyweight, when the reps get high start adding weight.
Back raises(hyperextensions)	3 sets, higher reps, no weight.
Cable Pull Throughs	3 sets, 10+ reps
Seated Hip Abduction Machine	3 sets of 10-20 reps each.
Accessories- Do the following as desired Leg curlsQuad work (take it easy here, but a little is ok.CalvesAbs	Do whatever you want of these, just don’t take away from your recovery since you have already done a lot of work here.

Picking Weights

You should start very light on these movements and progress slowly. The point of this program is an introduction to glute specific training. This program is all about building up some workload for the glutes as a base. With this base you can stay at this level or build to more extreme workouts in the future.

Do whatever you would normally do for progressions regarding your main lifts.

Length

This program can be run in 3 week blocks with as many blocks back to back as you feel is useful. As you get up to speed you will likely want to add more intensity to the workouts because these movements can get easy fast if you don’t load up the weight on them. This could be ran a very long time provided you are properly cycling your main movements and their intensity.

The Old School Leg Program

This is the kind of leg program we used to do back in the day. It would start with regular squats and was followed by the exercises below. This program is good for building some good quad mass and building up the lower body in general. It is light on posterior chain work, so having another leg day each week to address that would be wise.

This program would be good for anyone looking to pump up their quads and do a lot of basic leg training.

When To Do It

This workout can follow your max effort or dynamic effort work or as standalone leg day if you’re not on conjugate. This is best done for 1 day a week. It would pair well with a more glute or hamstring focused day on the other lower body day.

Main Lift

Conjugate

If this is done on dynamic days just do what you normally do for your speed squats and speed pulls. If done on a max effort day, stick to squat and deadlift variations for you main movements. It would be best to avoid good mornings and rack pulls as your max effort movements while running this.

Non-conjugate

I would perform 3 sets of 5 repetitions of traditional squats as your main lift. If you have a squat protocol you like you can use that. Just make sure you are not going too high on the volume. Any more than 3-5 sets of squats as a main lift would start to be overkill.

Program

Exercise	Sets/reps
Main Lift, Use a Squat or Deadlift Variation, Not a front squat you’re doing those later.	Whatever you normally do.
Front Squat	3 sets of 10-12 reps.
Leg Press	3 sets of 10-12 reps.
Romanian Deadlifts	3 sets of 8 reps.
Leg Extensions	3 sets of 10-12 reps.
Leg Curls (whatever variation you have available)	3 sets of 10-12 reps.
Standing Calf Raise (can substitute if you don’t have this machine)	3 sets of 10-12 reps.
Abs (whatever abs you like doing.)	2-3 sets, around 20 reps.

Picking Weights

You can pyramid the weight up or use the same weight for all sets.

Progression

Each week you can try and add more weight or more reps to the lifts.

Length

This can be ran 3, 6, 9, or even longer numbers of week. As long as you are not getting too fatigued and are seeing progress in both weight lifted and leg size you can go far with this program. If you increase weights slowly you can run this program for a good long time if you start light and just improve each time.