What are some staple meals in your rotation that you’re eating to achieve your physique goals? As a foodie myself, I am always curious about how others approach their nutrition.

Trying to keep up with the youngsters!

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5’8 + 144.7lbs. Competing in OCB Women’s Figure

Started prep 11 weeks ago at 162.7lbs. Will probably be around 130lbs on stage.

Super excited to see the final package 👀

Edit: I phrased this poorly. I’m not trying to lose 2lbs a week. I’m losing around 1-1.5lbs per week at this point (slightly above the 1% recommended bodyweight guideline - yes, I’m aware).

My coach and I are focused on the overall look, not a number on the scale. The weight was just an estimate of what I’ll be on stage. (A question I’ve been answering for a lot of my non-bodybuilder friends)

I kinda like to dig into old lifting programs, and see how people trained before smartphones, modern gyms, equipment, etc. Today I want to sink into Super Squats.

The concept is simple - you take the weight you can squat 10 times - so 10RM. Squat it 20 times, and then add 5lb next session.

That is the whole core of the 20-rep squat program - also called "breathing squats" or "Super Squats". Since the 1930s, it has been promising skinny young men huge gains - in 1968 John McCallum wrote that "gains of twenty to thirty pounds in a month are not uncommon"! Over the years it passed through several influental people in weightlifting, and each of those claimed huge gains. So, let's take a closer look into it!

The program

The version most people run today comes from Randall Strossen's book "Super Squats: How to Gain 30 Pounds of Muscle in 6 Weeks", published in 1989. The idea is that you do one brutal set of squats. And everything else is kept small, so you can recover from that set and grow.

The workout

This is "The Basic Routine" from the book:

Seated Press Behind The Neck / 3x10 Bench Press / 3x12 Bent Over Row / 2x15 Standing Curl / 2x10 Parallel Squat / 1x20 Rader Chest Pull / 1x20 Stiff-Legged Deadlift / 1x15 Rader Chest Pull / 1x20 Toe Raises / 3x20 Crunches / 1x25

Surprisingly, the Squat comes fifth. It's nothing like the modern programs where the main exercise is the first one. The book also doesn't really explain the order. The author, Randall Strossen, says the list is an example and don't mind to swap exercises freely, e.g. military presses for presses behind the neck, or pullovers for chest pulls.

For people who have always struggled to gain weight, the book gives a shorter "Abbreviated Program":

Bench Press / 2x12 Parallel Squat / 1x20 Rader Chest Pull / 1x20 Bent Over Rowing / 2x15

We see a familiar trio :) - bench, squat and row! Randall takes this recommendation from Peary Rader - Peary was the founder and editor of "Iron Man" - a magazine about bodybuilding and strength. Randal points to the the issue of 1964 of that magazine, where Peary wrote that bench, squat and row give 'great results, both in the legs and the upper body'. Randall asks you to add weight to the benches and rows every workout too, "exactly as in the squats".

Randall prescribes you to train 3 times a week, e.g. Monday, Wednesday and Friday. If you do not recover, train twice a week, or squat only every fifth or sixth day.

The squat set

The set is the whole point of the program.

• Load with 10RM.
• Reps 1-10 - squat at a steady, normal pace
• Reps 11-20 - the set changes a bit - you need to stand with the bar on your back, take at least three big, deep breaths before each rep. After that - squat. Then up, and breathe again. Then squat, etc. By rep 15 it is "five to ten lung-bursting breaths in between each rep". The pauses give you a few seconds of recovery each time, which is how a 10-rep weight moves for 20. That's pretty much our modern rest-pause technique, just without racking the weight. Or like a cluster set.

The whole point is to not rack the bar until you finish all 20 reps. The last five may take a while - even minutes! That's pretty brutal stuff. One tip there in the book is from James Douglass - after your last full breath, take "one last gulp on top of your already full lungs" before you go down. Randall says not to wear a lifting belt, because it restricts the breathing. He says most of the men who pioneered the program never used one.

The chest pull or the pullover

Ok, squat is done! You can rack the squat and go straight to the ribcage exercise while you are still breathing hard. Those old lifters believed that heavy breathing after squats help you to stretch the ribcage from inside. So, you superset your squats with pullovers or chest pulls to add outside stretch. And over time, this would build bigger ribcage, and you have more room for chest and upper muscles.

The book suggests doing Rader chest pull. Grab something fixed at about the height of the top of your head, like a power rack upright, or the top of a fridge. Take a deep breath and pull down and in at the same time. Keep feet on the floor. Arms can be straight or slightly bent. Keep your abs relaxed. The post won't move! Instead, your ribcage would arch forward and up. You should feel a pulling feeling in the breastbone. Do 20 reps of this, keeping it for like 4-6 seconds.

Or if you want to do something more modern - you can just do e.g. a stiff-armed pullover. The weight should stay light though.

Progression

Strict linear progression only for squat. For the rest - bench press, row, etc - it's "try to add weight... every workout, exactly as in the squats".

The program lasts 6 weeks, so 18 sessions. At 5 pounds per session, that adds about 85 to 90 pounds to a weight that started as your 10RM. By the end your squat for 20 reps would be waaaay above your old 10-rep max. That is a damn big ask, and it explains why the eating rules are so strict.

Eating and recovery

The book says to drink two quarts (about 1.9 liters) of milk a day, on top of normal meals. Pretty much the modern GOMAD philosophy! :)

The history

This is the interesting part of this article, and it goes almost 100 years to the past.

Henry Steinborn

In the early 1920s the squat was a minor exercise. Squat racks did not exist yet. To squat a heavy bar, you first had to somehow get it onto your back by yourself. Most lifters didn't do that at all, and squats were generally rare.

There was a guy, Henry Steinborn. He was a German lifter, born in 1894 in Siegburg, near Bonn. He was a merchant sailor, and lived in Australia, when the World War I broke out. He got placed in a German internment camp there, where older German lifters taught him to squat with no rack and no helpers. He stood a loaded barbell on its end, stepped under it, and let it fall across his back.

The National Archives of Australia (NAA) still holds his internee photo: a young, thick-necked Heinrich Steinborn holding a card with his camp number, 5365. Out of funsies, I paid $25 to order the documents from NAA about him - but the waiting time is like 30 days - will report here once I receive them!

After releasing from the camp, in 1921 he immigrated to US. During the meets, in Philadelphia, he met Alan Calvert, the founder of the Milo Barbell Company. The company was selling barbells, but they also had a magazine "Strength", that Alan used to sell barbells. It became one of the main US strength magazines in 1920s.

Henry Steinborn did not invent the 20-rep squat. But he showed Americans that the squat could carry huge weights and it can be the center of a program.

Mark Berry

In the 1930s, the editor of its "Strength" magazine was Mark Berry. Born in Chicago in 1896, he was a small man who had been a featherweight lifting champion. He was very influental in American lifting, and coached the US Olympic weightlifting team in 1932 and 1936.

Mark trained at Siegmund Klein's gym in New York, where Steinborn was always squatting. Steinborn and Klein were all the proof he needed, so he started promoting Steinborn's heavy squat in the magazine. His big idea was that the legs drive the whole body: squat heavy, and your chest, shoulders and arms will grow too. His students worked up to 300–500 pound squats and gained weight fast. Berry wanted to build so called "husky" men: big, strong and a little soft. He did not care that much about looking defined.

But it was just the general principle. Another guy actually converted it into a program, a recipe.

Joseph Hise

Joseph Curtis Hise wrote to Mark Berry in 1932, in the worst years of the Great Depression. He was out of work and unhappy with his body, at around 180 pounds.

He took Berry's heavy squat and changed it: high reps, with forced deep breathing between them. He reported back with numbers that sounded just amazing. He said he had gained 29 pounds in one month. Berry did not believe it at first, and held the story back until local people confirmed it.

Hise trained outdoors, with a squat rack made from tree limbs braced against the wall of a shed. His formula, in Strossen's words, was "heavy, breathing squats + wholesome food + milk + rest". He did pullovers after the squats, thinking that this stretched the ribcage itself. He kept going until he weighed about 300 pounds, and in 1935 he deadlifted 700 pounds.

Berry published his letters, and later Hise wrote his own articles for Iron Man and Vim. Readers loved him, because he was proof that an ordinary, broke man could transform himself with a barbell and a lot of milk. But nobody could really check his numbers. Local folks vouched for him, but no one weighed him under supervision or measured his chest in front of witnesses. In the 1930s that did not matter, cuz the story was just too good.

Peary Rader

In western Nebraska, outside the small town of Alliance, lived Peary Rader. He was born in 1909, the oldest of four children, and worked as the maintenance man at a local school.

Rader has been a dedicated barbell man for several years. By 1936, (in his own words), he had "fallen under the sway of the high rep squat as taught by Joseph Curtis Hise.", and got some serious gainz.

In 1936 Peary found an old broken mimeograph machine in the trash, repaired it, and printed 50 copies of the first issue of a small magazine. After that, he mailed them to friends. The magazine became Iron Man - one of the most influential weightlifting magazines those years.

The early issues were full of Hise's program, and Hise himself wrote for them. During World War II, Rader worked for the railroad and kept the magazine going as his pet project. After the war, he and his wife Mabel bought an old army barracks and moved it onto their lot. They built a concrete basement under it with their own hands, Peary laying the blocks and Mabel mixing the cement. That basement became a gym, an office and a print shop.

Iron Man eventually grew to over 40,000 subscribers around the world. In 1946 Rader wrote the method down in The Rader Master Bodybuilding and Weight Gaining System. For a whole generation, the 20-rep squat became the first answer to any skinny teenager's letter.

John McCallum

In the 1960s the method started to look quite similar to the modern variation of the program. John McCallum wrote a monthly column called "Keys to Progress" for Strength & Health magazine from 1965 to 1972. His columns read like short stories, with characters, jokes and gym-floor advice.

So, McCallum split the method in two: heavy squats were for power, and lighter "breathing squats" (with big breaths and pullovers supersets), were for the chest and for gaining weight. His columns made the 20-rep squat feel like a rite of passage, something you did once to find out what you were made of.

Randall Strossen

In the summer of 1968, a young man named Randall Strossen was working as a construction laborer during his summer break. When he was going through the old issues of Iron Man - he noticed a pattern: almost every lifter who had made big gains had built his routine around the 20-rep squat.

So he decided to try it, and gained 30 pounds of muscle in six weeks (in his own words). He was so excited that he contacted Peary Rader, the author of Iron Man. Rader printed their conversation in Iron Man so other thin lifters could try it.

After that, Strossen went on to earn a PhD in psychology at Stanford and spent some years in market research. He was still an avid lifter though. Around 1988 he founded IronMind - a company for serious strength athletes. And in 1989 IronMind's first product was his book - Super Squats.

The book turned a loose magazine routine into a clear plan: a 10-rep max for 20 reps, one set, 5 more pounds every session, six weeks, two quarts of milk a day. It became a best seller in the strength world, and shaped the Super Squats program in the way we know it today.

So - from Steinborn's rackless squat to Berry's experiments, to Hise's letters, to Rader's copier, to McCallum's columns and to Strossen's book - the method passed through six men across sixty years. Each one claimed or reported huge gains. Of course none of those gains was ever measured independently. But one generation after another - thin young men tried it, suffered through it, and grew.

What research says

It's interesting to see what claims from the program got proven by the modern research, and which ones are debunked. The program makes six claims, some stated and some implied:

1. "One set of 20 reps builds muscle" - this is supported

• A 2017 meta-analysis by Schoenfeld et al in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research found that light loads (60% of 1RM or less) taken to failure grew muscle about as well as heavy loads.
• A 2021 meta-analysis by Lopez and colleagues in Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise found the same thing: growth did not depend on load.
• In a 2015 study by Schoenfeld and colleagues, trained men doing sets of 25 to 35 reps grew about as much as men doing 8 to 12 reps.

A 20-rep set with a 10-rep-max weight is about as close to failure as a set can get, so it definitely works.

1. "It makes you strong too" - this is partially supported

High-rep work builds strength, but less than heavy work. In the same 2015 Schoenfeld study, squat 1RM rose 19.6% in the heavy group and 8.8% in the light group. Lopez 2021 also found heavy loads beat light loads for 1RM.

1. "The breathing pauses let you do more" - that's plausible, but untested

The deep breaths turn the second half of the set into almost a rest-pause set (or cluster set): a few seconds of rest, then another rep - although without reracking. No study has tested the 20-rep breathing squat itself.

1. "Breathing pullovers expand the ribcage" - not supported at all

No controlled trial supports this. Rib cartilage tends to harden with age, so changing the shape of an adult's ribcage through exercise is very unlikely. Any increase in chest measurement on this program would come from bigger chest and back muscles and from added bodyweight, but not from ribcage growth.

The pullover or that Rader chest pull is just a stretch.

1. "Squats make your whole body grow" - also not supported

The idea is that heavy leg training releases growth hormones, and that make your arms and chest grow too. But research does not support it at all.

• In a 2010 study by West and colleagues in the Journal of Applied Physiology, men trained their arms for 15 weeks, either with or without heavy leg training in the same session. The hormone spike from the leg work did not add any arm size or strength.
• A smaller 2011 study by Rønnestad and colleagues found a small effect in the other direction, with 9 subjects.

On this program the upper body grows because of the press, bench and row, and because you eat a lot. Definitely not because of the squat.

1. "Milk drives the gains" - partially supported

Milk works because it delivers protein and calories. In a 2007 study by Hartman and colleagues in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, novice men who drank milk after training gained more lean mass than men drinking a soy or carbohydrate drink with the same calories.

But pretty much any food surplus with enough protein would have the same effect. Milk is just convenient, protein powder of the past.

The verdict

So - the program works because one set taken very close to failure, there's progressive overload, and a calorie surplus. All the theories the old-timers built around it though - about hormones, ribcage expansion - they of course do not hold up.

Modern versions

Few people run Super Squats exactly as written today. The 20-rep set lives on inside other programs, usually once a week and usually after heavier work.

• 5/3/1 Building the Monolith - every Friday, after three sets of 5, you do one set of 20 squats. Wendler allows a safety squat bar for this. The eating rule is - 1.5 pounds of ground beef and 12 eggs a day.
• DoggCrapp training. There's one brutally heavy set of 4 to 8 reps, and then - a widowmaker - a 20-rep set with less weight. It can be done on a squat, hack squat or leg press.
• Stuart McRobert's Brawn books. McRobert prescribed the "linchpin exercise" - it's his advice for "hardgainers" to do the 20-rep squat. You trains legs less often though, add weight in smaller steps, and you can also do a 20-rep trap-bar deadlift instead.
• Lyle McDonald's guide. Train 20s once or twice a week for 4 to 8 weeks, then you should take a few easy days. He calls breathing pullovers "meh" though :)
• MTI Super Squat. You do sets of 20 at a percentage of 1RM, with 2 or 3 breaths between reps, for squat and bench.

Also Mark Rippetoe himself revived 20-rep squats and a gallon of milk a day (separately though :)) for a new generation of beginners in the early 2000s.

Real world usage

I've got a lifting app, and did anonymized research based on the data there. Out of about 11000 people who logged squats, only 660 logged at least one squat set of 18 or more reps. And only 195 did it three or more times. Most of those sets came from light high-rep work in other programs, and not from breathing squats though.

Super Squats itself is suuuuuper rare. Only three people ran a program with that name.

Building the Monolith is where the 20-rep squat really lives today. About 100 people trained on it during the year. 32 logged its Friday 20-rep sets, and 15 logged six or more, which means they finished the block.

• Squat strength. Among the 32, estimated squat 1RM rose by a median of 6%, or about 6 kg. The middle half of users gained between 1.6% and 12% 1RM. 25 of the 32 ended stronger.
• Bodyweight. Seven of them logged bodyweight before and after a single block. The median was +1 kg, and the best was 3.5 kg in about 6 weeks.

DoggCrapp users who logged widowmaker sets (13 people) saw a similar median strength gain of 6.6% 1RM, although with a wider spread.

These are small groups with no control group, and I don't have data on nutrition or sleep, so take it with the grain of salt. Still, they are far from the "30 pounds in six weeks" promise. The best bodyweight gain we saw was 3.5 kg, or about 8lb. Real people who run a 20-rep squat block today get stronger and gain a little weight. Nobody in my data came close to the claims printed in the magazines.

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Thread for getting the word out about your amazingly awesome instagram or youtube page that everyone should follow, etc.

Another great video from Lyle. Although I feel that if someone did a few days per week of trail runs (no pavement) there really wouldn't be much interference. Would a stationary bike be more ideal? Probably. What are your thoughts on the video?

Welcome to the r/naturalbodybuilding Daily Discussion Thread. All are welcome to post here but please keep in mind that this sub is intended for intermediate to advanced level lifters so beginner level questions may not get answered.

In order to minimize repetitive questions/topics please use the search function prior to posting to see if it has already been discussed or answered. Since the reddit search function isn't that good you can also use Google to search r/naturalbodybuilding by using the string "site:reddit.com/r/naturalbodybuildling" after your search topic.

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currently sitting at 193lbs. since show is still a ways out, right now the focus is getting as lean as possible to put on a little more size before prep. definitely will keep you guys updated!

Curious how the rest of you deal with this:

1. How do you currently spot imbalances or weak points? Coach, photos, mirror, measurements?
2. Do you trust any of it, or is it mostly guesswork?
3. If something could point out where you’re lagging and give you a plan, would you use it, or would you not trust it? Why?

I’m trying to work out if this is a real gap or just me. Honest opinions welcome, including “this is a solved problem.”

Went from 202 -> 158.9 this prep at 5’8, been rough

Welcome to the r/naturalbodybuilding Daily Discussion Thread. All are welcome to post here but please keep in mind that this sub is intended for intermediate to advanced level lifters so beginner level questions may not get answered.

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I seriously might switch from OCB to WNBF for my next competition to get a real medal I'm beyond pissed.

I'm debuting in OCB and I'm really excited but this was super disappointing. I easily spent 700$ off my student minimum wage salary and they can't hire some art intern to design a proper medal.

i always heard of people (mostly begginers or some intermediates) being hesitant to cut because theyre afraid to lose overall size.

im not sure if its just me but i always thought I looked bigger when lean. when i gained a couple pounds back this month my mother literally asked if i was losing muscle.

just wanted to hear other opinions/thoughts

For all the memes and jokes about skipping leg day, I don't think I've actually seen someone with such an unbalanced physique that I thought they were definitely skipping leg day. Usually, people either look like they lift (which includes legs) or they don't. I've never seen someone with a massive jacked upper body and extremely thin legs. Does anyone have examples of physiques of real people who actually train upper body all the time but never train legs? And if you have a physique like this, could you please share your photos?

Show this weekend! 5'8 weighed in at 137.8 this AM. Avg 139 lbs - OCB Debut, ill be happy to make it to stage, this whole process has drained me. Desire to compete and train has faded, but Im doing the damn thing regardless.

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I always track my lifts, so that I can see in the long run how I progress with my training. What counts as progress to me is when I increase the weight in the 8-12 rep range.

However, my joints are really bad and I’m prone to injuries / joint discomfort. On some lifts, my muscles are ready to increase the weight but my joints (especially wrists and lower back) hurt when I do so. Or maybe it’s my tendons and ligaments that are weak, I don’t know.

I know that there are several methods to increase training intensity other than increasing the weight: improving form, slowing down the negative, increasing ROM, isometric holds, partials, drop sets, decreasing rest between sets etc…

But how do these methods compare to simply increasing the weight in terms of hypertrophy?