I just think that no matter what lifting exercise you chose, you have to stick with it for awhile to continue to gain strength. Too many people have exercise ADD or believe in "shocking" the muscles and change exercises too much so that progression is thrown out the window.

If I could put 60lbs on my bench in a year I would be soooo happy. If you look at adding that much weight to my bench, that is "measly" 5lbs a month. It is grinding it out, week after week to make those gains. If I trained like most people, I would sub out flat bench after only making a 5lb gain in a month but subbing it out won't let me get better at it! I think even if your main goal isn't strength, you need to keep lifts in there much longer than people do in order to make progress on the lift, which will result in changing your body more so than switching exercises. Progression in weight or reps is what makes the body change (independent of exercise chosen), not constantly changing exercises which doesn't allow you to really push the body into new strength levels and have to adapt.

I love legs too! I hate bench. But I guess competing in Olympic lifting for a few years and doing snatches, cleans and squatting 4x a week will do that! Injured my hip and damn do I miss training like that. :(

You're clearly not a fan of Crossfit. ;)

Haha generally no. But it does have a somewhat different goal and I have seen some very good Crossfit places that do their ever changing workouts but also keep in progression on things like squats and deads. As long as a Crossfit program has consistent work with main lifts, I don't see a problem with their ever changing exercises. Not many run their Crossfit programs like this but I have seen a few and I totally don't hate Crossfit when it is run like that.

I know a competitive bb'er that said he would change up everything each time he came in. Sets, reps, excercise, rest, etc... I gave it a shot for about 2 weeks and hated it. I'm like you in that I enjoy the trying to progress on the same lifts so I change it up every 4-6 weeks.

Heavy squats on Monday and Friday, Lighter squats on Wednesday with heavy deads.

That's cool. I remember trying many many years ago trying to do both heavy on the same day. I did dead's first so my heavy on squats didn't end up so heavy. That routine got canned pretty quick.

Is that a Starting Strength routine?

For the longest I pulled and squatted heavy in the same workout. I have no idea why some pussies say they can't do it. I'm hardly the epitome of strength but doing 600 squats and 600 deads in the same workout isn't a big deal. If Andy Bolton can squat 800 and pull 1000 pound block deads in the same session surely everyone else can do it too.

"I'm hardly the epitome of strength"

and

"doing 600 squats and 600 deads"


These do not belong in the same sentence! Incredible stuff man.

But I agree. The body can be conditioned to do most things. I never though sqautting heavy 4x week for Olympic lifting was possible or made sense. But boy did my body condition itself to this workload and much faster than I expected.

I do, too, but I'd rather eat them with lots of beer and as much apple pie as I could shove down my throat :)

Sounds like Madcow 5x5.

:doh!: That is what I meant.

Sure is. I'm sticking by it as long as I'm seeing substantial gains from it. Quick routine that's worked wonders for me so far.

I ate a whole box of thin mints for desert on New Years Eve. 4,500 calories!