The Chairman's Fitness Challenge Blog

I took a look through my "program" last night, the Men's Health Hard-Body Plan, and was somewhat shocked to see how far from it I have strayed from it over the past several months. I have been happy with the gains in strength, but I'm wondering if I'm getting the best results for the amount of effort going in.

The "plan" allows (even encourages) substitutions of exercises as long as all the right body parts are being worked, but I'm not doing a great job on hitting a lot of the secondary muscles as recommended. It's been months since I did a curl, for example, and the plan calls for three variants on them during arms-and-shoulders day. I haven't been ratcheting up the weight as frequently either - i've been hitting three sets of ten regularly on some exercises, long pst when I should be increasing. So, as of today, I'm going to be following the "plan", letter-for-letter, lift-to-lift, from this point foward. I'm planning to stick strictly with it for twelve weeks, to see what happens.

Almost.

I'm going to skip the "beginner" phase and jump right to the three sets/round intermediate routine, and I'm not sure I can hit the resting days exactly, but I will still ensure at least 2 days rest between workouts for any given body part, and I'm switching to the three-way split so each part gets hit once per week. It's weird that the beginner and intermediate workouts are almost exactly the same, except for reps.

One thing about the workouts is the liberal inclusion of hack squats, almost every week. I've never really done them, and have primarily been using front squats recently to combat my tendency to lean forward. Even using what I would consider reasonably light weight (usually 135 lbs) I still find myself struggling to stay vertical and underneath the bar. We'll see if the hack squat makes it any easier to maintain great form; I am considering doing very light-weight overhead squats (unloaded bar, maybe?) before my working sets to emphasize the strong, vertical form that is crucial when squatting. Overhead squats are another new thing for me; we'll see how it goes. Tonight is probably going to be arms and shoulders, as per week 1, day 1 of the "plan", so the report on the new squat forms will have to wait a few days.