The biggest and most pervasive training idea out there is that you have to FORCE your body to adapt to get stronger and build muscle.
This is not true.
Your body adapts to what you do regardless of whether force is used or not. This is the idea behind biofeedback training, greasing the groove, practicing strength as a skill and other methods.
But that doesn’t mean you can’t force your body to grow either.
Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.
There’s a time and a place for everything.
If you’ve been doing one thing for a long time, going in the opposite direction, can be very useful.
So when I read about the 5 Day Structural Attack my eyes and ears perked up.
As Nick told me, while this program is about muscle gaining, the strength gains on it are pretty insane too. And this phase of the program, done in week 2 of 4, is probably the most important.
The idea behind this is to pick a single big movement. Back squats or deadlifts are recommended.
Trap bar deadlifts are an excellent option for the 5 day structural attack as Nick is doing here with 585 lbs.
Then you train it hard and heavy every single day for five days straight.
And the idea is to increase the weight on the bar each workout.
While it’s a brutal workout you want to avoid failure at all times.
But aren’t you going to overtrain?
Won’t you be sore as hell?
Here’s Nick’s response himself:
“My thought in training with soreness (provided it’s not so sore that you just can’t train and have so much pain that it really affects your lifting form) is that it causes even more of an emergency response in the body, further stimulating the body to accelerate the repair processes and metabolism. This actually a CRITICAL component of the 5 Day Structural Attack where we want to massively break down the target muscle. While it is technically true that if you’re still sore, the muscle hasn’t yet completely recovered from the stress of the previous workout, think of it this way… our goal with this program is to accelerate your metabolism. If we wait until your muscles are completely recovered and not sore at all, that metabolic drive in your body to accelerate your recovery will fizzle out. Training with some soreness actually sends your body the message that it needs to speed up it’s recovery processes to cope with the demands your putting on it.”
So as I said before, this isn’t something you could or would want to do all the time.
But done smartly, targeted overtraining like in this training plan can actually accelerate your gains.
I’m still a big proponent of keeping your training easy…
And at times you have to break that rule.
There’s tons of other cool stuff in this ebook. If you want to get bigger and/or stronger this is for you. Check it out here.