We’ve been talking about endurance a lot lately at Ways to Throw Up, partly because endurance routines usually make for the most grueling workouts. The steadily-growing voice that tells you to quit and watch HBO doesn’t have much opportunity to get louder in strength training, where the line between what you can lift and what you can’t is pretty clearly drawn. When you push yourself lifting weights, you tend to fail early.
Fortunately, weightlifters have figured a way around this problem, so that they can subject themselves to the same grueling psychological torture in strength training that the rest of us enjoy in cardio and endurance. Modern hypertrophy experts call it superaccumulation, but the old-school guys call it the Grow or Die Principle.
Arnold Schwarzenegger deciding whether to grow or die.
Like most horrific things you can do to your traps/psyche, the Grow or Die Principle is simple: push your body to the point where it can either exceed its previous limitations or fail, then use your brain to make it choose the first one. Grow or Die exercises max out your muscles early, then keep them working at a barely sustainable level when a sane person would let them rest.
The results can be startling. Putting your body into Grow or Die scenarios is a great way to pack on mass and encourage your muscles to develop past natural plateaus. It’s also a good way to throw up, which means it will increase your psychological endurance. Ultimately, that will help you not just fill out a t-shirt but get more out of your other, non-vomitous workouts.
The Grow or Die exercises described below are intended for people who already do strength training, and some of them—particularly the leg presses—can make your blood pressure skyrocket. That shouldn’t be a problem for a healthy adult, but you should check with your doctor before embarking on any sort of muscular hypertrophy exercise. If he looks skeptical, maybe try a couple months of regular weightlifting first.
The 20-rep breathing squat
This is perhaps the simplest of all Grow or Die sets, and captures the emphases on compound exercises and psychological torture that are GoD’s operating principles. First, load up the bar with as much weight as you can squat comfortably for 10 reps. Second, do 20 reps.
Don’t put down the bar, but take as much time to breathe between the last ten reps as you want. You’ll find that there is a point of equilibrium between the moment you’ve caught your breath and the moment you realize that you’re wasting energy just holding up the bar. That’s when it’s time to do another squat.
The strip-set leg press
The leg muscles are tough, and bodybuilding experts believe they need more time under tension to hypertrophy. With the potential to keep you straining for minutes, the strip-set leg press certainly takes care of that.
Start with a set of ten leg presses at the maximum weight you can lift before failure. Without lowering the sled, have a buddy strip some weight off until you can do another ten reps. Repeat until you’re down to zero weight, or you throw up. The power of the strip-set leg press is eerie; you’ll sometimes see serious bodybuilders straining to push an empty sled.
The 1-10 system
Arnold Schwarzenegger loved this Grow or Die technique, and he was a barbarian. You can do it with almost any exercise, but it works best with bench presses and curls. Start with the maximum weight you can lift once without failing. Now lower the weight until you can do two reps, then take a little weight off and do three, and so forth until you get to ten or you run out of weight.
As with the strip-set leg press, you’ll be surprised at how heavy ten pounds can be. Don’t worry, though—you’re about to lose at least that much to the waste basket.
Dan Brooks writes about politics, consumer culture and lying at Combat!
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