How I added 25kg to my Bench Press in 8 weeks

The ridiculous thing about the training program in this post, is that it came about from stumbling across something by accident - and turned out to be the best training decision I've ever made.

It's going to be a sore 8 weeks for you, but I promise that if you stick to the program, your results will speak for themselves.

1. The Backstory

A couple of years ago, I was working long hours in a busy office job, and my upper body strength and size was plateauing hard. My rep performance started to drop off during sessions, and I was actually regressing. Coming into the gym week-in, week-out only to get weaker is just a tad demoralising... I felt like this sedentary job would be the final nail in the coffin to lifetime progress.

So - long hours during the day, and my evenings were filled with prep for my med school applications. I didn't have the time or energy to be wasting hours in the gym with endless isolation exercises or doing 2-a-days, especially not long-term. But at the same time, I knew the reality is that minor tweaks won't suffice to bust through a plateau.

If your upper body progress is stagnating, then continuing to do the same thing and hoping you'll get a different outcome is literally the definition of insanity.

We're all gulty of this. We push on, hoping that eventually, by sheer attrition, we'll be repping 3 plates on the bench press and have a tasty V-taper. I present to you exhibit A: you. Look back on the last 6 months of your progress.. are things already headed in that direction? If not, and your progress has been stagnant, then an intervention may be required.

There is a military concept of 'overwhelming force': the idea that to conquer a task, undercommitting your resources could cost you MORE time and energy in the long run. The stubbornest target need activation energy: an overwhelming force. Dive in head first and you'll squash all resistance.

What happens to the martial artist that meekly toes the wooden block? He looks like a belson with a broken toe.

'Do it, you fanny'

A friend of mine came to visit during this lull, who happened to be doing the Armstrong pull-up program at the time. He suggested that I try it out.

Me: ‘Pfft. I’m above that. I only do weighted pull-ups now.. and 3 sets of pushups in the morning? That’s cute. Do you even lift?’

He berated me and wrote out the program on a scrap of paper… ‘do it, you fanny’.

You know what? Fuck you, I'll do your little program.

2. Results: Week 1 →Week 8:

I did the program as written. The result was adding 25kg to my bench press in 8 weeks, over an inch to my upper back & chest, and 125 reps on my pushups.

If you had told me that this was possible, (despite not even benching for 4 of those weeks) by doing pushups and pullups… I’d say you were living in lala land. Here’s what happened:

Pics or it didn’t happen:

Lats on tour: End of Armstrong Program

I held on to a lot more size in my subsequent diet as a result:

But it wasn't all lollipops and rainbows. Looking back, there were some hitches that needed ironing out if one were to do the program exactly as written, which I would not recommend. I was niggly, tight and had no plan for transitioning out of it.

Armstrong can be done straight out of the box if the goal is just to increase your pull-up numbers for an army test. However, without considering the context of your training, it's unlikely to produce results, or worse, cause injury. The progress I made was a result of fitting Amstrong into an appropriate training and diet setup.

This begged the question: How can we safely and predictably replicate these results with clients?

Turbo boost