Summertime Weight Lifting

Like many people my summertime schedule is much different then my spring, fall, and winter schedule. Some people have vacations, some people are on summer break from high school or college, others are doing sports. For me I always changed my summer lifting schedule so I could free up more time to ride BMX. Regardless of your reason here is a plan that I used effectively for a number of years to free up time in the summer but also to still get in a good amount of training.

During the summers I would switch to a full body, 3 days a week routine. Oddly enough years later I came to see that a lot of popular 5×5 style programs use a very similar template. I was rather proud to discover this as I seemed to be right on track with many of the proven methods.

Now, onto the program. This program is going to focus on the bench, deadlift and the squat as the core lifts. You will be lifting heavy on these core lifts once per week. On the other days you will be doing a light and medium exercise for each of these muscle groups as well.  It’s going to revolve around the idea of light, medium, heavy and will focus on all the core lifts and assistance exercises that will strengthen the core lifts. You will never have two heavy lifts in one training day. For example on heavy squat day you will be doing medium difficulty deadlift work, in this case you will be doing rack pulls. On heavy deadlift day you will be doing a light leg movement and a medium difficulty pressing movement. Every movement I have chosen will help add to the main three lifts, and will hit the most muscle mass as possible.

The program goes as follows:

monday

squats 5 sets of 5

rack pulls: 3 sets of 5

overhead press: 3 sets of 6

barbell curls: 3 sets of 6

Wednesday

bench press: 5 sets of 5

barbell rows: 3 sets of 8

front squats: 3 sets of 6

dumbell hammer curls: 3 sets of 8

Friday

deadlift: 3 sets of 5

weighted pullups: 3 sets of 6

light squat: 2 sets of 10

dips: 3 sets of 8

All work sets will be done at the same weight. Warm up sets can be pyramided but they don’t count towards your work sets. As far as loading goes you will want to add 5 pounds a week to the lower body lifts and 2.5 pounds per week on the upper body lifts. If you have to use a fixed barbell for the curls then once you can hit all the required reps in all sets then move up to the next heaviest barbell and repeat until you can get all the reps for all the sets and continue this way as long as you decide to do this program.

This is a very simple plan that I used very effectively for a number of years to free up some time spent training but still drive improvement in strength and muscle mass. Give it a try and stick with it for the whole summer and I think you will be very pleased.