Dan John's Mass Made Simple is probably the best book ever written on strength training, and it costs like $10. It literally has everything you need for the rest of your life, everything else is commentary.
It does contain a program, Mass Made Simple, but the bulk of the book's value is in explaining the basic shit you need for things to work, describing what does and does not matter.
After reading it and doing it, you will *know how things work*. You'll stop spinning your wheels.
In Dan John's Mass Made Simple program, each workout is in 3 sections:
- upper body/core
- Extremely high rep squat sets
- barbell complex
Each with its own specified progression system in sets/reps/weight
It's an interesting setup, he basically gives you a foolproof program, each workout for 6 weeks you know exactly what you are supposed to do.
It's a pain in the ass to spreadsheet or prepopulate the routine into a log as is, though.
The progression system is simple: increase reps, or sets, or weight, but only one at a time. You are told "on this day you add X more reps" or "add Y pounds" etc.
It's a quirky, idiosyncratic routine, it's designed specifically to introduce people to understand both what training is, and that "shut the fuck up and do this program" is vastly more useful than homebrewing one of their own.
What I like about high rep squat routines like this, is that they are minimal and fast, they are meant to be done 2-3 days a week.
You literally will not be able, or want, to do them more frequently. Or add your own random shit to them.
High rep squat routines like Mass Made Simple or Super Squats, show a beginner how badly they are fucking up by doing a ton of random stuff at zero intensity 6 days a week.
"Do literally a quarter of all that shit, less often, and you'll get better results."
Like, the average beginner thinks they need 2 hour a day, 6 day a week routines full of every single exercise they've ever heard of.
Dan John and Randall Strossen: just shut the fuck up and do 5 minutes of squatting 3 days a week.
It's such a corrective to that beginner urge to throw everything at the wall to see what sticks.
Dan John has a whole thing about eating your vegetables first. Want to add your homebrew stuff? Go right head, but do it right after your 30 rep squat sets buddy.
After doing a high rep squat set, or two, it becomes extremely easy to understand whether it's important to add a third variation of bicep curl or perhaps add 22.5 seconds of rest etc.
After doing 3 high rep squat sets in a week, it becomes very easy to understand whether you really need to add 3 more days full of a dozen different elbow exercises.
A whole lot of things beginners tend to worry about and freak out and spam pubmed abstracts at each other over, simply dissolve after doing a handful of high rep squats.
It becomes a *hell* of a lot harder to justify adding whatever bullshit one weird trick for elbows you saw on youtube, after one or two of these high rep squats.
Odds are, you won't even be able to think about doing that one weird trick, or want to even if you do.
