[Basil Ransom]

The most popular bodybuilding and strength training regimes typically have you targeting a muscle group 1-3 times a week with using maximum or near maximum weight for the given number of reps.

I've experimented with another method that I've benefited from. I've heard it called the frequency method* as well as the 'greasing the groove' method.

The Method:

• Rep Scheme: You do 50-75% of your maximum reps for a given weight or difficulty. After each set you finish, you should feel a pump, but also like you could crank out several more reps with ease, and that you could four more of an identical set without issue.
  
  Rest Period: You do the sets scattered throughout the day, or with a couple minutes of rest between them - enough to rest to ensure you never quite feel fatigued at all. You can take a day off each week if you like. If you've been increasing the rep count or difficulty aggressively, and start to feel overtrained, consider taking a couple days off and reducing the difficulty a bit.
  
  Exercise Selection: Typically you'd use bodyweight exercises, which are very effective at enhancing your natural motor patterns. You also incorporate your local environment, and whatever tools you may have there. It could be jug shrugs at the water cooler, or tree branch pullups. The point is not to get a perfect maximal workout, but to use your muscles frequently and adequately.
  
  The most important thing to know is you don't go to failure. When training a muscle six or seven times a week, you'd end up overtraining it if you were going to failure daily.

The advantage of this approach:

• 1. You can do it whenever you have a minute free.
  2. You're doing a high volume of a lift without ever compromising your form. Usually, bad form only creeps in when muscular failure is near, and you stay far from failure. So you get really familiar with doing the lift and doing it well, which will enhance your strength and your 'mind-muscle connection.'
  3. You don't have to add yet another exercise to your gym workout.
  4. You may have more energy throughout the day thanks to the light resistance and plentiful rest.
  

The frequency method lets you target muscles outside of your regular workout, at a leisurely pace. It's not something to replace your workout, but to supplement it when you have a spare minute here and there during the day.

Take pushups - say you can do a maximum of 20. Then you might do 10-15 in a set, three or four times a day. As the days pass, you add a rep to each set. You don't increase the number of reps every day, because then your sets would have so many reps then you'd be getting close to reps to failure, which is *not* what you want. It's far more important to do the sets week in, week out then to increase the difficulty. Your prime concern is doing the sets without overtraining, and increasing the difficulty when you're ready for it. You're going to be doing this for months or years, and your gains will accumulate over time. It's about having a habit for life, and not getting big quick.

Once you get up to 15 or 20 reps in an exercise, you switch to a more difficult variation, load more weight onto it, or superset it with another exercise that works the same muscle group. For pushups, that could mean you go slower, do diamond pushups, incline pushups, dive bombers, shoulder pushups (where your torso is perpendicular to your legs and your feet are closer to your hands), jumping pushups, band pushups, etc.

Because you're not doing these in a gym, keep an eye out for places in your daily life where you can do these lifts. Install a pullup bar. Get familiar with all the many pushup variations. Look into resistance bands (I'm not there yet). Look for more obscure exercises, eg:

You can do those against the edge of a desk, either on their own or right after a set of diamond pushups.

On the recommendation of the Greyskull training program, I started doing pushups daily. I was already benching bodyweight and change for reps, but in conjunction with the Greyskull lifting program, I added about 25-30 lbs to my bench. Doing the pushups daily refined my motor patterns, and also taught me how to contract my lats and 'absorb' the weight of the barbell into them, and then spring it back up.

Doing an exercise *daily,* as opposed to once or twice a week, will teach you a movement much quicker - even if you had been doing that movement for a while, as I had with the bench press.

I'm looking into doing these to hit the more ancillary muscle groups, instead of trying to squeeze them into a workout where I'm already consumed with big barbell lifts. Or just getting familiar with the more difficult pushup variations.

Has anyone else used these to great effect?

This method is closer to how a manual laborer exercises - there's more frequency at lower intensity. It's also a common technique for boosting your pullup count, but it's not used nearly as much for other lifts. A lot of the bodyweight fanatics only do bodyweight, instead of offering a way to incorporate bodyweight exercises as a supplement to a barbell training program.

Cliffs: Hit your muscles daily with a couple exercises at a low intensity, far from failure. An addition to, not replacement of, your gym workout.

*heard that from John Sheaffer aka Johnny Pain