The Best Damn Strength Plan For Natural Lifters

But what about maximal strength? That’s what THIS plan is all about (size being the second objective). We’ll dive into the details in just a bit, but first, let’s recap a few essentials.

What All Natural Lifters Should Know
If you’re a natural lifter you’ve probably tried many advanced training programs and noticed that pretty much nothing came out of it. Here are a few reasons why that may have happened:

1. The Main Enemy of Natural Lifters is Excessive Cortisol.
This is especially true if it’s chronically elevated. Cortisol can greatly limit muscle growth by increasing protein/muscle breakdown and decreasing protein synthesis. It can also slow growth by increasing myostatin activation.

Myostatin is the gene that limits how much muscle you can build. The more activated it is, the less muscle your body will allow you to carry. This means, excess cortisol limits your muscle growth potential.

2. Training Volume is What Triggers Cortisol Release the Most.
Cortisol’s main function during physical activity is the mobilization of stored energy to fuel the session. The more fuel you need, the more cortisol you’ll release. And of course you’ll need more fuel when volume is higher. The moral of the story? Natural lifters can’t do as much volume as enhanced lifters and expect to grow optimally.

3. Natural Lifters can’t Artificially Increase Protein Synthesis.
They don’t have the benefit of anabolic drugs, so their bodies rely almost exclusively on the training session (and nutrition) to trigger protein synthesis. Under normal circumstances, protein synthesis is elevated in a trained muscle for up to 24 hours after a workout. But after that, it comes back down to normal levels.

If a natural lifter trains a muscle only once per week, muscle growth will be fairly slow because the period where protein synthesis is significantly elevated in a muscle is short. A natural lifter will get more muscle growth training a muscle twice per week and even more if he or she can hit a muscle three times in the week.

4. Volume and Frequency are Inversely Related.
The more frequently you train, the less volume you should do at each workout… that is, if you want to build muscle or strength. So the basic principles for natural lifters are:

Train each muscle frequently, ideally 3 times per week to trigger protein synthesis more often.
Keep volume low to allow for the greater frequency.
Since the number of work sets will be low, push them extremely hard.
Make use of several different training methods to stimulate growth via several different mechanisms.
With all this in mind, let’s dive into the plan.

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Week 1

Week 2

Week 3

Week 4

Week 5

Week 6

Week 7

Week 8

Week 9

Week 10

Week 11

Week 12

Squat (Barbell)

Zercher Squat (Barbell)

Bench Press (Dumbbell)

Tricep Rope Push Down (Cable)

Lateral Raise (Cable)

Push/Squat

Pendlay Row

Romanian Deadlift (Dumbbell)

Straight Arm Pulldown

Rear Delt Fly (Cable)

Incline Curl (Dumbbell)

Pull

Bench Press (Barbell)

Floor Press (Dumbbell)

Hack Squat

Seated Shoulder Press (Dumbbell)

French Press

Push/Bench Press

Deadlift (Barbell)

T-Bar Row

Face Pull

Bicep Curl (Barbell)

Pull/Deadlift

Military Press (Barbell)

Incline Bench Press (Dumbbell)

Pec Deck (Machine)

Leg Press

JM Press (Smith Machine)

Push/Military Press

Chin-Up (Bodyweight)

Lying Leg Curl

Lat Pulldown

Shrug (Dumbbell)

Pull/Chin-Up

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