Part 5 in our series “Tao of the Lazy Badass.” Find the first four installments here, here, here, and here.
You already know the First Law of the Lazy Badass: “Do a lot of volume while minimizing fatigue.” Today we teach you how to minimize fatigue.
When you accumulate volume (i.e. total reps), you’re depositing money in the bank. The deposits seem small and insignificant, but you make them often and with no sense of sacrifice. That’s important: we want you refreshed by your workouts and recovered quickly. That way you’ll crave your next bout of exercise—you dirty endorphin junky!—and you’ll be fresh and ready to hit the iron or the trail again ASAP. That is why the lazy badass minimizes fatigue.
Sounds great in theory. But how do you maximize volume without also building up fatigue? Get ready, because here comes the second big secret …
Fragment the load
“That’s pretty gnomic,” you might be saying. “WTF does that mean?” It means that you should space out the work. Chop it into bite-sized pieces.
Let me start with an example of the WRONG way to do a lot of volume.
In popular muscle media, there’s a renaissance in people writing about “German Volume Training,” the (in)famous bodybuilding protocol that, despite its name, probably originated in Hollywood with Vince Gironda, preceptor to the young Arnold Schwartznegger and “Iron Guru” of bodybuilding in the 1950s and ‘60s.
Vince taught trainees to rack up a lot of volume—so far so good!—but he made them hurry through that at a breakneck pace with very little rest. He prescribed a whopping 100 total reps per exercise, done in 10 sets of 10 with just 30-60 seconds of rest in between. That’s massively fatiguing. And you have to settle for using wimpy weights, because you can’t complete that protocol with even moderate poundages. And you will need days to recover from it. And it’s the opposite of fun and refreshing. It takes great willpower to do it even one time, and you will NOT look forward to doing it again.
Fatigue sucks, and that’s why it is contrary to the Tao of the lazy badass to rush through volume with little rest, a thundering pulse, and buckets of sweat. To delay fatigue and accomplish more total work, the lazy badass fragments the load by breaking it up into many short sets. Instead of completing your sets and reps quickly, space them out. For example, instead of blowtorching the muscles with high-fatigue sets of 10 reps, an aspiring lazy badass could do the following:
Set up a clock near your kettlebell / barbell / whatever. At the top of every minute, do an easy 4 reps. That might only take you 10-20 seconds, and that’s fine. Rest for the remainder of the minute. At the top of the next minute, do your next four reps. Keep repeating, making haste slowly. While your friend attempts the German Volume protocol with his trachea on fire, you’ll be happy as a clam. As the minutes tick by, not only won’t you tire out, you might actually feel stronger and zestier than when you started.
Your friend will be very lucky to complete his 100 reps at all; but you’ll cruise along contentedly, til after 25 minutes you’ve cranked out your 100 reps and gotten high on endorphins too. And if you start to tire before then and your heart rate starts to climb, no problem! Just drop down to 3 reps per minute. Or even 2 reps. There is no time limit here! Your only job is to accumulate volume, and there’s no penalty for doing it slowly.
This “on the minute” protocol is only one of the many proven ways for a lazy badass to fragment the load. In our next installment or two, we’ll talk about some of the other techniques. You can pick the one that suits your schedule and your pace the best. It makes little difference. They all follow the Tao of the Lazy Badass (which, once again, is to maximize volume and minimize fatigue) by breaking up the work into small, enjoyable packets with lots of rest smeared all over, like butter on pancakes.