What & Why Of Dense Strength

I looked at people training in Globo gyms and thought...

“How can we do this better?”

More results.

More self-confidence.

Help more people realise that strength training can be fun.

Everyone likes getting better.

Most people don’t like doing the same thing over and over not seeing change.

In the information age, sometimes we have too many questions and too many options.

Less questions can lead to more success.

Wearing the same coloured clothes or having the same food daily is a success strategy.

By minimising "Question fatigue" you can focus on other tasks that have more importance.

Mark Zuckerberg apparently took this habit from Steve Jobs.

Dense Strength is a similar simplification of training.

Apple made phones with less and less buttons.

Less edges.

There is beauty in simplicity.

No prescribed rest: This can work when training with 1-3 others and the tempo is fast but generally when training alone with no prescribed rest it’s easy to get distracted and wait too long between sets.

Rest is too long: Long rest periods cause loss of focus, missed training sessions because of not enough time and many more problems.

Rest is prescribed separate to set time: Starting and stopping a clock between sets is tedious and unnecessary.

No clear feeling of progress means people give up.

Strength training is difficult.

Life is busy.

Making each session a winning session is a huge motivation to continue.

The truth is that most modern strength education is driven by research done for Olympic athletes.

While LONG rest periods might make sense for the 0.01% looking to win Olympic medals there is no need for them for those looking to build families and businesses alongside their training.

Truth is most of the strongest men in history trained predominantly with short rest periods.

Watch the workouts from Westside Barbell & Chinese Weightlifters and you will see.

Simplicity: It’s easy to remember what you did or to write it down.

Sense of achievement: that addictive feeling that gets you back in the gym each day

Compatible & Comparable: know what you’re doing compared to yourself in the past and others.

Customisable: you can make changes to the program within a session without feeling like you failed the program or that the training cycle hasn’t worked eg. take an extra minute rest or decrease the repetitions and still finish the block.

Nobody likes timing rest periods.

Starting a new set each minute is simple.

Allows for creativity

More fresh repetitions = more better learning and more motor recruitment.

Increased metabolic efficiency because more works is completed in less time.

Pure and simple if we can get some progress from day to day and week to week. Over a lifetime we're going to end up in a great place!

When we have too many moving variables around load, rest period, reps and total volume it can become very difficult to track improvement.

What if  we simplified?

Dense strength is that simplification.

But don't be fooled.

It's works.

It can be adjusted to meet many objectives.

1. A full block is 10 minutes. (A half block is 5 minutes and a double block is 20 minutes.)

2. The new set always starts at the start of the next minute.

3. Progress logically and clearly from session to session.

4. Reset the cycle when needed.

Other people who've used reduced rest periods for world class strength & body composition:

1. CrossFit - on the minute training is a staple of CrossFit, the problem is there is often a random nature programmed in to keep things "constantly variable" or because the programming is being sold online and choosing odd schemes disguises the method.

2. Josh Bryant - one of the worlds leading strength coaches uses various "rest-pause" styles of training to helps produce some of the strongest bench pressers in the world. Charles Poliquin recommended Josh's work.

3. Paul Wade - again someone Charles Poliquin recognised and someone that has had great results with density based protocols.

4. Paul McIlroy - Paul has been popular in the Kettlebell world and has been connected with Pavel Tsatsouline through Easy Strength and Strong First. Paul is a world-class athlete and coach who has used short rest periods and extended sets with great results.

5. Rich Sadiv - Rich "The human crane" Sadiv has recommended his 20 reps in 12 minutes protocol as a fast track to better deadlifting.

6. Bud Jeffries - Bud is a world class strength performer and has been known to perform 20 minute sets, railroading