Time-Warp TRAINING

Bill Starr
A Workout Plan for the Busy Man (and Woman)

This is a sequel to my recent discussion on consistency of training, which appeared in the

April ’09 IRON MAN. Knowing how to adjust your training to fit your changing schedule
throughout the year is essential if you’re serious about staying strong.

For those who participates in one or more sports in high school, that means learning how to
continue training even when after-school practices and competitions are taking up a great deal
of time and energy. For those who are older and far past the days of participating in active
games, it usually means trying to juggle your regular workouts with the multitude of
obligations involved in earning a living and raising a family.

In some cases there are certain times during the year when people are very much pressed for
time and have to make some changes if they want to continue to train. Tax accountants, for
example, have to gear up and work outrageous hours for only a couple of months prior to
April 15th, and those in certain retail businesses, such as jewelers, basically make their yearly
nut in the month of December.

Of course, bringing in bucks is just one part of our lives. We all have a great many other
reasons that pop up and prevent us from following our well-planned schedule—visits from
friends and relatives, deaths and births, weddings and reunions and family crises, for example.
Even nature sticks in its two cents every so often and can really mess up a normal routine.
Those who have been through wildfires, earthquakes, mud slides (it sounds like I’m picking
on California, but I’m not), tornadoes, hurricanes, floods and blizzards understand what I’m
talking about. Even if the weather isn’t of a catastrophic nature, it can have an influence on
your training. Severe hot or cold can cause you to train less frequently or not at all. A heavy
snowfall may cause everything to shut down, so you have no place to train.

Then there are the inevitable illnesses and injuries that have a direct bearing on whether you
train. What it boils down to is that there are a whole lot of barriers in your path when you set a
course to train consistently. The good news, however, is that those situations, which we all
encounter, can be dealt with if the desire to stay strong and healthy is sincere.

Training year-round is absolutely necessary if you want to get strong or maintain the high
level of strength fitness that you’ve achieved. Then there’s the added bonus of having a more
pleasing physique when you train on a regular basis, which is a great motivator to stick with it
through thick and thin.

The reason you’ve got to keep training is that the body doesn’t retain strength and associated
benefits such as endurance and flexibility for very long once you stop. I realize that there are a
few folks out there who have been given the gift of being able to hold their strength for quite a
long time after they stop lifting, but they are rare animals. The majority do not, and I put
myself in that group. The fact that I lose strength so fast never seemed fair to me. I believed
that years of hard training should build up a great reserve of strength that could be called on
for a long time, like putting money in the bank for future use. Build up enough collateral with
stocks and bonds in the strength department and I’d be good for many months without doing
any type of exercising. Sadly, at least for me, that isn’t how it works. Strength goes extremely
fast, which I learned in my usual way—through experience.

Only once since I started weight training have I voluntarily stopped lifting weights. The other
times were because of medical problems I couldn’t avoid. I had decided to stop competing in
Olympic meets and give my body, especially my abused joints, a well-deserved rest. No
lifting, just some form of aerobics along with flexibility exercises and maybe some freehand
stuff like chins and pushups. In less than a month I discovered I had taken a wrong turn.
Before I left California, I was squatting 400 for 10 reps. After I determined how weak I was
getting in Hawaii, I returned to the weight room and got terribly sore after doing only three
sets of squats for five reps, the last one with 205.

My strength was half what it had been just over three weeks before. That staggered me, and to
add insult to injury, it took me six months to get back to where I’d been before I laid off. I
never took another break, except for those medical interruptions, and I realize all too fully that
as I grow older, training regularly is all the more important if I want to hold on to what I have.
If I took three weeks off now, I’d guess that it would take me 18 months to regain my current
fitness level.

To avoid such backsliding, don’t stop training altogether. Some strength work is enough to
keep you from slipping back down the ladder. And surprisingly, it doesn’t take all that much
time. I’m talking about learning how to continue training when free time is extremely short
for whatever reason—when it seems as if every minute is accounted for from the moment you
hit the floor in the morning to when you finally crawl back into bed at night. For athletes who
participate in scholastic or collegiate sports, that translates to in-season training. For people
whose professions keep them extremely busy during certain periods of the year, it’s hectic-
season training. The following programs are for both groups as well as for those unplanned
interruptions that pop up no matter how hard you try to keep your affairs in order.

In some cases time isn’t as much of a factor as energy. You have only so much to tap into
during a day and night. Some sports practice sessions are physically and mentally grueling.
When the mind and body are fatigued, trying to get in a hard session in the weight room is not
a good idea.

Of course, this comes down to individual differences. Some people can handle a great deal of
work and still have a bit of gas left, while others will end up having a crappy workout or
injuring themselves. Plus, those who have been strength training for several years have an
advantage over those who have just started working out.

That means the strength training has to be flexible enough that you can do it during the week.
Too much is as bad as too little. The two hectic-season routines outlined below were
formulated with football in mind. That was the first sport that really embraced strength
training wholeheartedly. It seems rather strange in today’s sports climate that just a few years
back most coaches discouraged their players from using weights in or out of season. Now
coaches in every sport imaginable, from fencing to swimming, include some sort of strength
work in their yearly schedule. Coaches understand that a properly administered strength
program will enhance performance because strength is always an asset—just as speed,
quickness and endurance are.
Which of the two programs you choose depends to a large extent on how much time you have
during the week for lifting weights and how much of a workload you can handle at each
session.

In program one you go to the weight room five or even six days a week. You do just one
primary exercise and then leave. Your total workout time should be only 15 to 20 minutes.
You can do it after practice, at noon, when you have a break during the day or even early in
the morning. Stick with primary exercises and change them at each workout. For example,
Monday, squats; Tuesday, inclines; Wednesday, power cleans—then repeat the rotation again
so all the major muscle groups get equal attention.

In your first week on the program you do only three sets. In the second week you move the
sets to four and then the next week to five, all done for five reps. You do no auxiliary work at
all until after you’re handling five sets of five and able to recover from the workload. Over a
period of a few months you’ll find that you can handle more and more work and still be fresh
for in-season practices and games or busy-season work. At that point you can either insert
exercises for the smaller muscles or add another primary exercise. So you might be able to do
squats and power cleans on Monday and inclines and calf work on the next day, and so on.

All the while, it’s imperative that you listen to your body. Should you stagger into the weight
room really beat, back off on the numbers and sets. Less is generally smarter than more with
this routine. The total workload for the week is what’s most important, rather than what you
do at one session. Another alternative is to switch to higher reps for a couple of sets on one or
two exercises. The higher reps are not nearly as demanding, but they still flush blood and
nutrients to the muscles. They also flush blood to the brain so you leave the weight room
feeling much better physically and mentally.

Train quickly. No hanging around visiting with teammates or friends. Get in, do the work, and
then get out. Many in-season routines are draining, not so much from the lifting but from the
time spent unnecessarily hanging around. Keep it to 20 minutes, tops. Any longer, and the
sessions will start to have a negative effect instead of a positive one.

Program one fits those who enjoy training. It’s something they look forward to because it’s
quite therapeutic. They like moving heavy iron and enjoy the way they feel at the end of a
workout. It also provides a great deal of variety in exercise selection. In three days you hit the
three major muscle groups: shoulder girdle, back, and hips and legs. You can alternate back
and front squats for the legs and hips, and there are a host of exercises for the back and
shoulder girdle. Back: power cleans, power snatches, snatch and clean high-pulls, bent-over
rows, deadlifts, shrugs, good mornings and even full cleans and snatches. Shoulder girdle:
overhead presses, jerks, flat-bench presses, inclines and weighted dips. You can either stay
with just three basic exercises, such as back squats, bench presses and power cleans—the Big
Three—or mix and match over a two-week cycle.

Weight selection for the condensed workouts depends on how much energy you bring to the
weight room on that day. A particularly grueling day means light weights and an easy one,
heavier poundages. If you know that the next day will be lighter out of the weight room, load
up and lift a bit more. What it amounts to is paying attention to your body, especially the
morning after training. A bit of soreness is okay, even desirable. What you don’t want is a
tired body that is unable to perform well anywhere.
Two things you can do to help your cause. Get plenty of rest. Try to get to bed an hour earlier
than usual when you’re dealing with a hectic-season routine. And be sure to take in plenty of
protein, either from foods or supplements. The very best thing you can do to assist the
recovery process is to drink a couple of protein milk shakes a day, one right after you finish
training and another at bedtime. A simple formula is a packet of dried milk, a half cup of
yogurt, milk and ice cream. It goes down easily and provides 50 grams of highly assimilable
protein. That’s all the protein your body can digest at one time. Getting sufficient rest and
drinking those shakes regularly is just as important to getting stronger as what you do in the
weight room.

Program two is much more popular simply because you don’t have to train as often, just twice
a week. There is one heavy day and one light day. That’s it. Many scoff at the idea, stating
that’s not enough work to promote any strength gains, but they are wrong. I know it works
and works well because I’ve seen it happen in countless cases. Keep in mind that in-season
athletes are already expending a great deal of energy in practice and at the games, so the
weight work doesn’t have to be as demanding as it is in the off-season. In order for the
program to get results, however, you have to do the two workouts diligently.

First, the heavy day. In many areas of the country, high school games are all played on week
days. That puts the athletes in the same position as those who work regular jobs—it leaves the
weekend open to get in the heavy day. If games are contested on Saturdays, or you have to
work on Saturdays, that still leaves Sundays free, and that really is the best day for the heavy
workout.

How heavy? It depends on how long it’s been since you stopped training. Most football
players usually stop working out with weights about a week before two-a-days and don’t pick
up another weight until the season is under way. So they must start out on the in-season
routine using rather light weights. Even so, I encourage them to lift during two-a-days.
Whenever I say that, coaches and players look at me like I’m nuts. Well, we won’t get into
that, but it can and has been done, and it brings surprising results. I’m not talking about full-
blown workouts but, rather, going to the weight room and knocking out three or four sets of
one primary exercise. That isn’t going to take much energy, and a smart coach will cut some
of the fluff from the two sessions on the field to make room for the weight work. The fluff is
wasted time anyway, but the strength work will be extremely valuable during the season.

Not only are the players able to hold the strength they’ve acquired from the past off-season
program and through the summer, but they come into the season a great deal stronger than if
they’d stop lifting completely. And as the season progresses, those who never stopped training
have a huge edge over their opponents. The same principle holds for busy-season
professionals.

Then there’s the overlooked advantage of attitude. If a coach has athletes train during two-a-
days, he must have confidence that they can handle the work. And when the gains start to
come, they’ll be willing to follow him into the pits of hell.

The heavy day consists of three exercises. They all should be basic movements—one each for
each major muscle group—and you need to work them to limit. If you’ve laid off for a few
months, that limit may be way below your previous best. If you didn’t lay off completely, the
numbers will be higher. Five sets of five with the final set being demanding is enough, and
from the very beginning you should attempt to increase the top-end weight at every heavy
session.

Don’t rush through the workouts, but don’t dawdle either. You need to finish the workout in
an hour, tops. Drink a shake, shower and, ideally, take a nap, and you’re good to go.

Again, mix and match the exercises for the three major groups or stick with the same ones.
You can alter the exercises in your routine after the busy season ends. Get a good workout in
on Saturday or Sunday, and you’ve pretty much got the rest of the week beat, since you only
need to lift one other day and it’s a light session. It’s an excellent way to start the week.

You can do the light day on Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday, for those playing a sport, or
any day for those who are short on time. Those three days are best, however, because they
spread out the workload better. Your light day should be short and done really quickly—five
sets of five once again. How light? A good deal lighter than what you did on the heavy day,
but if you want a definite formula, do this: The third set of any exercise on the heavy day
becomes the fifth set on the light day. For instance, if you did 155, 185, 225, 255 and 275 on
squats on your heavy workout, on your light day do 135, 175, 195, 215 and 225.

A way to get in a quality workout expeditiously is to set up a three-station circuit and move
through the lifts rapidly. It helps to have someone load the weights for you while you move
on to the next station. You can complete the entire circuit in less than 15 minutes—in many
cases even less than that. The last baseball team I worked with at Hopkins adopted that
concept and did it the day before a game. Sometimes that meant several times a week, as they
played lots of games.

If you prefer to move at a slower pace, however, that’s all right too. Just don’t make it too
slow. Get your work done, and leave. No auxiliary work at all, except for abs. Beach work
can wait until there is more time in which to train.

Another effective way to improve overall strength on the light day is to do pure isometrics. Of
course, you’ll need a rack, but most gyms have one. Work three positions each for pulls,
presses and squats. One max exertion for each position is sufficient if you put 100 percent
effort into every isometric contraction. Lock in, and hold for 12 seconds. You can run through
the entire workout in 15 minutes.

When isometrics first burst on the scene, Olympic lifters would often do pure isometrics on
their nonlifting days. It’s less fatiguing than a regular weight workout, so recovery is easier,
which makes it ideal for in-season athletes.

In-season strength training should not be voluntary. When coaches do that, they are in essence
saying that the weight work isn’t all that important. As a result only the diehards train, which
is a mistake. The entire team needs to get stronger in order for it to be successful. And
whenever athletes apply themselves to the in-season program, they’re less prone to being
injured and can greatly increase their strength and, therefore, their performance on the playing
field.

Whenever athletes start an in-season strength program early on and work hard, they will
surpass their best lifts on the basic exercises toward the end of the season—or perhaps before
that. That’s a tremendous advantage. It’s when they play the games that determine conference
and state championships. Imagine an entire team of athletes who are stronger than they were
at the end of the off-season strength program, and it’s easy to understand why in-season
training is so valuable.

Is that notion mere speculation on my part? Not at all. I have watched countless motivated
athletes exceed their previous best lifts during in-season training. Their bodies respond to the
workload, adjust and are able to handle more until they’re breaking personal records every
week. That isn’t a pipe dream. It’s fact. Put in the time, and you’ll reap the rewards.

It goes without saying that if you’ve got some equipment at home, you’re going to be able to
train more regularly than someone who does not. Even a bar and some plates or dumbbells are
enough to get in a good session. Whenever people train through in-season or when free time is
almost nonexistent, they’re way ahead when they do have time in which to train. Those who
stop training completely have to restart from scratch or, more correctly, lower than scratch.

It boils down to this: If you train when you’re extremely busy, you’ll get stronger. If you
don’t, you’ll get weaker. The choice is yours.

Editor’s note: Bill Starr was a strength and conditioning coach at Johns Hopkins University
from 1989 to 2000. He’s the author of The Strongest Shall Survive—Strength Training for
Football, which is available for $20 plus shipping
from Home Gym Warehouse. Call (800) 447-0008, or visit www.Home-Gym.com.