Experience of 4 months of D.U.P

[SuffolkPunch]

4 months of DUP has taught me:

1. It's about the volume. High intensity stuff, speed work etc. is useful but is just an adjunct to volume and you should not allow less important factors to get in the way of what is really doing the business.

2. I can do more volume than I thought. It takes a strict program to MAKE you do it sometimes - and also to prevent you overegging the weight used and burning out prematurely.

3. I can train a lift more frequently that I thought. Squatting or deadlifting everyday sounds like a receipe for extreme fatigue and problems but actually I've never felt in better condition in my lower body and core.

4. Neural training (low rep stuff) still matters but in the right proportions. Focusing on a handful of lifts and doing them HEAVY once a week or so matters - it enables you to get more total volume in the end by using more weight and by making heavier weights seem lighter.

5. Overreaching is very very hard. I worked my ass off increasing volume progressively for 12 weeks and still only touched on overreaching. This puts all the newbie worries about "overtraining" (which is OVER-overreaching) into context.

6. It doesn't take much to recover. A day off here and there can get you back on track - but the real benefit comes from allowing the overreaching to happen and then tapering and working your way back up, allowing mometum to carry you through to the next PR down the line...

7. Stimulate don't annihilate. You don't have to work all aspects (high and low reps) of a muscle group on one day. In particular, it's probably best to walk away from the platform with some reps in the tank on heavy days; it's about long term average volume. For higher rep stuff, failure/fatigue training is more acceptible.


I used to train "intuitively" having read lots of stuff by Jamie Lewis of Chaos and Pain. Everything I leared from DUP applies equally to his method and there is a surprising amount of overlap. But until you've done something like DUP which forces you down certain paths, you can't really appreciate the relative importance of each snippet of information he gave out in his blog. I'm going to try his method again, this time with (hopefully) a sharper set of tools in my box....

[Johnny778877]

Good stuff!

How heavy would you squat and deadlift if doing it everyday?

[Sader762]

Bump for a very insightful article.

[SuffolkPunch]

Good stuff!

How heavy would you squat and deadlift if doing it everyday?

Thanks, I used 3 different intensity ranges for squats and 2 for deads. I'm sure the weight used wouldn't have been any different if I did it less frequently. My log is linked in my sig.