This is the complete workout schedule (and rationale) that I used to prepare for deadlifting 500 lbs for 50 reps. Every year on my birthday, I challenge myself to lift my age times ten in weight in the trap bar deadlift, for the number of reps my age is.
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And I accomplished that! You can see the full rundown on that challenge here (opens in a new window).
Now, when it comes to strength challenges like this, the battle is won or lost BEFORE you actually fight it.
In other words, it's the PREPARATION and training that you put in before the battle that determines the outcome.
That's why I wanted to share exactly how I trained to accomplish this goal...targeting my entire workout regimen to this specific challenge for 5 weeks.
At some point, I'm going to put together a much more detailed training manual for this method (with pictures and video for the exercises and techniques) as I think the results were phenomenal.
Not only did I hit the 500 lbs for 50 reps, several weeks later, I was able to hit a lifetime PR of 605 lbs on the trap bar deadlift due to the training base that I developed from it.
If your goal is specific strength performance like this, you need to simplify your training, paring it down to only what moves you closer to your goal. Your body only has so much recovery available to it (this gets even more important as you get older) so you need to focus on getting the most bang for your buck.
I decided to use only three workouts that I rotated through in a very specific pattern, striving for progressive overload in the exercises in each one.
Below, I'll give you a rundown of why I used each one and the reasoning behind using them.
Compound Exercise Overload is THE single most effective strength-building method that I've ever used in my 30+ years of training.
The purpose of this workout is to massively overload training volume on one single compound exercise to specifically develop the muscles, connective tissue and nervous system efficiency of that one movement.
It's truly the "engine" of this entire training approach.
The human body is an amazingly adaptive machine and when you put a very specific demand on it, it responds by "becoming its function." My goal was to make my body a trap bar deadlift machine.
The balancing act is to accomplish this while not burning yourself out by putting in too much volume at too high of an intensity.
I've found CEO Training to be the perfect balance of this...it's demanding, for sure, and if you do too much of it you absolutely CAN burn yourself out on it.
But if you give your body enough time to recover from the training before you do it again, the results are, quite frankly, staggering.
I'm going to give you a quick rundown on it here, but if you want to read about it more in depth, you can click here for the full explanation of Compound Exercise Overload Training.
Essentially, you take a weight that you can do for 6 reps and you do 3 reps with it. Then you take 30 seconds rest. Then you do another 3 reps with it. Then take 30 seconds rest. Then repeat.
When you get to the point where fatigue catches up to you and it would be a struggle to get a full 3-rep set, you reduce the weight by 20 lbs then go again.
The key is to ALWAYS keep the do-or-die rep in the tank. We're working hard but never to failure.
You then repeat this pattern for a set block of time.
This massive, targeted overload creates an emergency situation that your body has no choice but to respond to.
The goal with this workout was to hit most of the muscle groups in the body in a way that improved strength in the weak points of my trap bar deadlift.
CEO Training is an excellent engine for driving the car forward...these workouts are about improving HOW the car is driving (kind of like putting on better tires, tuning the engine, etc.) so that the engine can do its job more effectively.
That's the full Weak Point Heavy workout... the goal is to use fairly heavy weight to actively strengthen the weak points associated with the trap bar deadlift.
These workouts were used more towards the beginning of the training cycle while I was still use less volume and weight on the CEO Training, which will be easier to see when I lay out the full schedule below.
The goal with this workout is similar to the heavier one but using exercises that are lighter and less demanding on the recovery systems of the body.
These workouts I incorporated in more as I to really progress up in volume and weight on the CEO Training. This was necessary to compensate for the systemic overload.
This was the Weak Point Light workout. It's more targeted for active recovery versus trying to build strength in anything. I hadn't originally planned on doing anything like this until I got a few weeks and realized I was going to need more recovery as the CEO Training ramped up.
It worked like a charm.
The reason I didn't include it in the grouping above is that I only did it once as a specific tune-up for the challenge that I was about to undertake. It was a CEO-style workout of single reps instead of 3-rep sets. This was done on a Monday, with the challege coming on Saturday, giving me enough time to recover and allow for overcompensation.
Doing singles would be easier on the recovery systems so that my body could come back stronger. It would tune my nervous system for single rep sets and fast recovery.
It also served as a marker to let me know what my strength levels were and how likely I was to be able to complete the challenge.
In that tune-up CEO workout, I ended up doing single reps with 475 lbs with 30 seconds rest for 25 minutes straight. I didn't have to decrease the weight by 20 lbs at any point.
That's when I knew I had a solid chance to achieve the full 50 reps.
Now that you've seen the pieces, here's how I fit it all together into a comprehensive program.
What you'll see is that I basically alternated CEO Training with Weak Point training on a 3 day a week schedule. This resulted in me doing CEO Training twice in some weeks and once in next weeks. I found this to be an ideal way to temper recovery with volume.
I'll include some short notes as well. Some of the notes will make more sense if you've used CEO Training yourself before.
| Monday | Tuesday | Wednesday | Thursday | Friday | Sat/Sun |
CEO Training 30 minutes |
Rest | Weak Point Heavy | Rest | CEO Training 30 minutes |
Rest |
315 lbs with no weight drops. This was a "base building" workout. |
This was a "baseline" workout...figuiring out working weights. | 375 lbs for 6 minutes, then finished at 315 for 15 minutes |
| Monday | Tuesday | Wednesday | Thursday | Friday | Sat/Sun |
Weak Point Heavy |
Rest | CEO Training 40 minutes |
Rest | Weak Point Heavy |
Rest |
Same weights as last week but more reps. |
405 lbs for 7 minutes, then finished at 285 for 17 minutes | Increased weights on every exercise |
| Monday | Tuesday | Wednesday | Thursday | Friday | Sat/Sun |
CEO Training 40 minutes |
Rest | Weak Point Light |
Rest | CEO Training 50 minutes |
Rest |
425 lbs for 3 minutes, then finished at 305 for 23 minutes |
Felt I needed a break from heavy spinal loading. | 445 lbs for 2.5 minutes, then finished at 285 for 21 minutes |
| Monday | Tuesday | Wednesday | Thursday | Friday | Sat/Sun |
Weak Point Light |
Rest | CEO Training 50 minutes |
Rest | Weak Point Heavy |
Rest |
| 455 lbs for 2.5 minutes, then finished at 295 for 20 minutes | Felt ready for heavier assistance work again. |
I won't go into the full breakdown of how I did the actual challenge workout here...if you'd like to see that, I posted a detailed rundown of it here.
I set the schedule up like this for very specific reasons. It actually turned out to be a very elegant and effective design.
1. CEO Training was alternated with assistance exercise work on a 3 times a week split. This resulted in more CEO workouts some weeks, less in others, balancing out the workload.
2. I did two CEO workouts at the same time interval before moving to the next (e.g. 2 workouts at 30 minutes, 2 at 40 minutes then 2 at 50 minutes). I knew the challenge performance was going to take me at least an hour, so I needed to build up to enough training duration to be able to perform at a high strength level for the entire time. But I knew that I needed to start with a shorter timeframe and build up to it or I would burn out. You need to give the body time to adapt.
3. I increased the starting weight on every CEO Workout. Based on past experience, I knew CEO Training would build strength fast, so pushing each workout to start heavier is necessary and highly productive. This method front-loads the heavier work so that you're doing more weight at the start, then tapering down as you fatigue, while still staying a "fatigue adjusted" near-max state.
4. After a few weeks of heavier weak point training, I could feel that I needed to back off on it and allow for more recovery. So created a more active-recovery type of workout to use. I was originally going to just do the heavier one but realized that I needed the recovery so I adjusted.
5. After a few of those, I was able to get in another heavy assistance workout. The light assistance workout was perfect for doing before the challenge itself.
6. The Single Rep CEO Training at the start of the final week was there to tune-up my nervous system into a more "challenge specific" state (doing singles). I purposely set the timeframe to HALF of the last CEO workout. That was 50 minutes, so I did 25 minutes of single rep CEO. This allowed for strength overcompensation to take place...like a car going up hill with the gas pedal floored, then you come over the top and keep it floored as you come over the top and go down the other side. You pick up speed FAST. This works for STRENGTH as well.
7. I took two full days off before the challenge to maximize recovery for peak performance.
I hope this was helpful to you in potentially planning a strength cycle for yourself. If you have any questions about it definitely let me know. I'm happy to help.
As an FYI, I'm going to be taking this roadmap and creating a complete plan for increasing your one-rep max deadlift.
After doing this challenge, I took advantage of the momentum and a few weeks later managed a lifetime PR of 605 lbs.
Since most people aren't going to do that single rep challenge like I did, but this template is so powerful, I know it has massive potential as a top-end strength program, done over a 6 or 7 week period. It just needs a few adjustments to target it for a one-rep max performance versus what I did.
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Flying in the face of conventional wisdom, he’s known around the world as the "Mad Scientist of Muscle” for a reason.
An expert in kinesiology, physiology and anatomy, Nick helps people just like YOU create the body you want, especially when nothing else seems to do the trick.
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