SQUAT EVERY DAY – My Daily Max Squat Experience

THE DAILY MAX SQUAT PLAN

• I worked up to either a top squat or front squat every training day, which was five to six days per week.

• I set a timer for fifteen minutes to work to a daily minimum, or a weight that I could hit even on my worst day. If it felt alright, I’d keep going to a max.

• Maxes were calm, crisp, and adrenaline-free. I gave up my loud music, black coffee and psyching up.

• The goal was not to hit a grinder or a true competition max; the intensity level was usually around an eight on a scale of one through ten. Any change in bar speed or technique meant it was time to stop, assess, and instill the correction with back-off work.

• Back-offs were not set in stone. A few doubles or triples felt right on some days. On other days, I would just hit a max for the day and be done.

Five weeks in, I took my first light week. I came out of it feeling incredibly refreshed (and curious), so I decided to test the waters.

RESULTS

FRONT SQUAT – 40lb PR – 185lbs to 225lbs

SQUAT – 25lb PR – 275lbs to 300lbs

VIDEOS OR IT DIDN’T HAPPEN

WHAT LEAD TO THIS

I had an elite powerlifting total but my squat’s contribution to that was paltry. Leverages aside, there were some mental malfunctions going on in my squat in the form of anxiety under heavy weight. Each rep felt like that thing you get when you are falling in your sleep, then jerk yourself awake in a panic. It seemed that I had tried just about everything but my squat progress had stagnated.

I desperately needed to spend more time desensitizing myself to heavy singles. But where they are so “taxing”, how would I be able to fit them in?

WHY I THOUGHT THIS WOULD WORK

Old School Lifters Squatted Frequently

Frequent, heavy squatting wasn’t a totally new concept. Lifters like Paul Anderson and Bob Peoples opted for very simple training plans where they lifted very heavy stuff almost every day. It is worth noting that these guys were naturally big and strong. Some of them were able to lift between three to five hundred pounds the first time that their fingers touched a barbell. However, their approach to training had a similar theme that was very appealing.

I Had Success With ‘Greasing the Groove (GTG)’

Greasing the groove is a concept that was popularized by Pavel. It involves taking a load that you can easily manage and lifting it several times throughout the day. It works wonderfully on pull-ups and bodyweight movements.

I had greased the groove on both bench press and deadlift (not at the same time), by leaving the bar loaded at 135 and 225, respectively, and hitting singles a few times each day. Both of those experiments were incredibly successful and preceded a big break-through in performance on those lifts.

I do believe that well-balanced programs are key in the early stages. Beyond that, any lift that I have ever reached any respectable strength level on was from a very specialized approach.  

Chinese Weightlifters Have Great Squats

Chinese weightlifters have great squats, and I don’t believe that it is solely due to their favorable leverages. They treat their lifts as a practice, and they practice frequently. Their system typically entails working to a max, zeroing in on weak points, then adjusting the rest of the session according to their performance on that particular day.

Per the Chinese system, weak points can be either physical or mental. Freaking out under a near-max lift is a mental weakness, which is often remedied by repeated exposure to near-max lifts.

I loved so much of what the Chinese system had to offer that I had adopted a less frequent version of it for powerlifting. It was more successful than anything else that I had tried at this stage of the game, and I was ready to go deeper on that theme.

In addition, the calm and balanced approach that is promoted in weightlifting helped to coax my squat out of a years-long spell of technique malfunctions and hip pain where the standard powerlifting technique protocols had failed me.

HOW I FOUND MY STRATEGY

I devoured all of the information I could find on John Broz’s lifters and Bulgarian training. Exciting stuff – until I got the part about their squat sessions spanning several hours and training twice per day. As a 35+ mom with three toddlers trying to get a workout in her basement during baby naps…

Ain’t nobody got time for that.

Luckily, there are options for people with normal lives who want to apply the basic principles of daily maxing. I drew the most inspiration from Matt Perryman’s Myosynthesis blog and his book, Squat Everyday. After spending some time picking through everything he had written, I was able to jot down my ‘program’ in about twenty seconds.

WHAT HAPPENED?

I got really good at heavy singles.

My technique became more consistent. I always felt mobile and ready to squat. Then, I stopped freaking out under a heavy bar. I could approach it as though I were simply picking up a rock in the yard, or moving a couch across the room.

I did go through what appeared to be the ‘dark times’. By the second week (yes, it happened quickly – but bear in mind that I had toddlers), I felt like absolute garbage – tired, groggy, and like my body was falling apart. Had I not done my research ahead of time and known to expect it, I probably would have taken that as a sign to abort the mission. I kept training through it and ended up on the other side of the rainbow. My cranky postpartum hips felt brand new and my whole body felt resilient.

After many years of hating squats, I began to look forward to them.

I enjoyed this venture so much that I stuck with daily maxing on my squat for two years. Why so long? Because after twenty years of lifting, it was the first time that I had really hit my stride with my squat, I loved training this way, and I was feeling enlightened from the (lack of) programming.

WHY WAS THIS SUCCESSFUL?

You get better at things when you do them more often. Frequency works.

I wanted to raise my max single. I also needed to practice heavy singles – which is exactly what this system is. Specificity works. That’s a given.

On that note – specificity does work but it can be hard on the body, especially for a seasoned lifter. Switching between squats and front squats served me well, as well as cycling through small variations in foot position.

Some might argue that by default, there would also be a volume increase from squatting daily. For myself, this was not the case. Heeding the warning to ‘do as little as possible for as long as possible’, I calculated the volume on my current program prior to daily maxing. I was very careful to stay within the confines that I had set. (Later on, I got bold with volume and it did turn around and bite me – but that is a story for another post.)

Mainly, this was a successful experiment because it gave me new insight on how to train intuitively, which I don’t think could have been taught (to this extent) in any other format. It rooted me to my body’s natural ebbs and flows, gave me a fresh perspective on programming, and removed any emotional attachments I had related to daily performance.

THE OTHER LIFTS

Also worth mentioning is that my deadlift went up. I trained my deadlift using other methods. I was not crazy enough to try daily max deadlifts alongside the squats (though I have ‘greased the groove’ successfully with them before). But I do believe that the squatting helped it along.

My bench also went up. I used the same daily maxing strategy on my bench press, but with a lot more variety.

I have used this strategy on many other lifts since then, and continue to do so.

WILL THIS WORK FOR YOU?

Your results could be more or less dramatic than mine, depending on a number of things.

CONSIDERATIONS

This isn’t a beginner-friendly option.

Maxes should be calm and focused.  The more psyched up you get, the more time you will need to recover.  If you choose to use stimulants, pre-workouts, or any artificial means of boosting your daily performance in the interest of short term, inflated gains – you might have a drastically different experience.

If you are coming from a higher volume phase, there will probably be some realization of the gains from the previous cycle when you switch to heavy singles.

From a health standpoint, even if the squatting is being done primarily for the mental aspect, it still counts as daily loaded hip flexion. Eventually, there may be other work that needs to be done to counteract the squatting and keep things in harmony.

As far as working this into an annual training plan, there are plenty of options. I think that alternating this style of training with periods of ‘normal’ work (whatever that means to you) can be a nice contrast.

If you switch your focus lift from time to time, I see no reason why this can’t be a year-round thing. Push hard on a lift for a period, let yourself come up for air, reap the reward, then move on to the next.

On the other hand, if you are a terrible squatter as I am and just want to stick a low-maintenance squat placeholder into your program, a semi-extended run of daily max squats might fit the bill. It doesn’t take much to just maintain a daily max while working on other lifts. Prior to daily maxing, I would find that my ability to squat heavy would slip away very easily, leaving me scrambling to rebuild it before meet time. Daily maxing allowed me to keep it simmering on the back burner, stress-free.

THIS DOESN’T HAVE TO BE ‘EXTREME‘

If someone is looking for an ‘insane’ way to train, they could certainly find it in this. However, you could say the same for any method. It isn’t hard to bury yourself with large and drastic increases in volume, frequency, or intensity.

Though it does take some degree of mental fortitude to do something every day, it isn’t nearly as extreme as it sounds. Not if you ease your way in, anyway.

THIS ISN’T JUST ABOUT SQUATS

When you do something everyday, you not only learn the intricacies of whatever it is that you’re doing, but every detail surrounding it.   The experience is very different than what you get when you do something occasionally. You can apply that to just about anything.

FINAL THOUGHTS

I got exactly what I wanted out of this experiment along with a huge PR on my squat. Beyond that, the experience has drastically changed the way I program and think about training.

Squat Every Day by Matt Perryman is one of the best books that I have ever read. He has abandoned his Myosynthesis blog but you can still get his book at his site, and get on his email list where he shares insightful stuff every day.