Gym Workout: 22nd Jan 2016

My Friday gym workout is often the biggest of the week – why?

There are three reasons for the Friday gym workout being the highest volume…

1. I have more time, therefore I can add more volume to the workout.
2. I know the weekend is likely to be higher calorie, so I like to offset some of that potential damage by getting an extra few calories burnt ahead of time!
3. I’ve often had a better sleep on Thursday night as Rachel does the overnight feeding with the baby!

On this particular day I was feeling really good so went for much more volume. I started with cleans as the Olympic lifts are forming a lot of my programming at the moment. That, plus they look awesome (apart from my snatch technique which I’m still learning!)

I also added in high volume lunges after listening to Cory Gregory on the Barbell Shrugged podcast. A large part of the discussion focussed on the volume of lifting he does, in particular with squats and lunges. He credited huge volume of squats and lunges for adding an extra 10+ lbs of muscle on top of a lean frame.

As well as the extra muscle, he mentioned the benefits in terms of strengthening his connective tissues and preventing injuries.

As a result, I’m doing a day or two of extra volume on my legs – I want the strength and hypertrophy benefits of the extra volume days. It started on the Friday.

I threw in some accessory work – the reverse hyperextensions, wide grip pull downs and the TRX suspended crunches were all variations of exercises I already do, but were thrown into the workout for the variety and change in stimulus.

Here was my gym workout on 22nd Jan 2016…

Cleans 5, 5, 5, 5, 5
Snatches 4, 5, 3
Lunges 22, 22, 22
Wide grip pull downs 7, 7, 7
Reverse Hyperextensions 10, 10
Pull ups 10, 9, 10
TRX suspended crunches 10, 10, 10

As ever, I recommend if you are going to include any kind of Olympic lifting or squatting patters in your training, you should wear the correct footwear. The shoes and wrist wraps I use are below….

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