| My Guide/Review For The most effective muscle gain training/Nutrition Protocol I have followed: 5/3/1 BBB Beefcake-Building the monolith-Deep Water Posted: 09 Aug 2021 05:38 AM PDT INTRO About a year ago, I proposed an idea for a weight gaining training block that was effectively stringing together the most effective weight gaining blocks I had used in an ascending order of difficulty. It went 5/3/1 BBB Beefcake, 5/3/1 Building the Monolith, Deep Water Beginner and Deep Water Intermediate, with deloads as appropriate. It was a bit uncharacteristic of me, as I tend to only vouch for approaches I've personally used, and though I had run all these programs individually, I had never run them in this order as a training block. I figured it would work well enough, but then my schedule opened up and I found myself with the opportunity to actually run the full 26 week program…and discovered it was even MORE effective than I could have possibly imagined. What I intend to do here is document my experience in running the whole programming block, takeaways and lessons learned. THE PROTOCOL AND INDIVIDUAL PROGRAM REVIEW For the full layout of all 26 weeks of programming, go here For my review of BBB Beefcake, go here For my review of Building the Monolith on this protocol, go here For my review of Deep Water Beginner on this protocol, go here For my review of Deep Water Intermediate on this protocol, go here RESULTS? It's going to upset quite a few people that I never weighed myself for this weight gain program, but if you read through any of my program reviews you'll most likely understand why: shift work makes my lifestyle pretty crazy. Getting a pre-breakfast/post bowel movement weigh in was a luxury I simply couldn't afford in most cases, which meant weigh ins that I COULD get would be wildly inconsistent with too many variables in play. In full disclosure, I was concerned that the data would screw with my head and make me compromise my nutrition, so I just skipped the scale and focused on the mirror and the weights moved in the weightroom. So with that, I've got some not great before and after photos of the whole process, and I ended up deadlifting 405lbs for 100 reps in 8 sets, which is something I've literally never done in my life before. I am legitimately the strongest I've ever been while being significantly leaner than I ever was at previous strength levels. START OF PROGRAM END OF PROGRAM THOUGHTS ON HOW THE PROGRAMS ALL FIT TOGETHER These programs just feed incredibly well into each other. Starting off with BBB Beefcake does a great job of getting you acclimatized to higher volume work if you've been staying low volume. 5x10 is an excellent wake up call, and the heavier percentages of Beefcake compared to traditional BBB absolutely push the trainee hard enough that they're gonna need to eat big to recover. I actually found the 5s progression on the main work to be one of the more challenging aspects of the program, specifically on the final weeks of the cycle, and often found myself dreading THAT part the most. Going into Building the Monolith from BBB Beefcake, things transform a little. BtM by itself seems like it's really high volume, but when you run it after Beefcake it ACTUALLY feels more like an intensification block. You're lifting higher percentages for lower reps across multiple sets for most of your barbell work. Suddenly, those 5s pro top sets you were doing in BBB Beefcake have become 3-5x5 sets. It's INTENSE. I found it helpful to set my training max for BtM as the same lifts I used for the final cycle of BBB Beefcake (so repeating my previous TMs) vs advancing them between the two programs, as it meant I'd be ending week 3 doing 3-5x5 with a weight I had previously only managed 1 set with. Again: that sort of foreboding presence puts the fear in you so that you NEED to eat to be able to succeed. Meanwhile, the growing volume is in the assistance work, which will actually be a pretty nice break for you. BBB can beat you up, as it's a LOT of barbell work and fairly heavy, whereas now we're doing dips, chins, pull aparts, etc. Make the most of it. On the above, BtM is going to be the program that beats you down the most by TOTALLY owning your life, ASSUMING you are running it correctly. Anyone that tells me it's a 3 day program earns a special place on my list of ire. BtM is a SIX day program. You lift weights 3 days, and then you do CONDITIONING 3 days. The conditioning is KEY. If you do not do it, you are only doing half the program, and if you're doing the full diet of a dozen eggs and 1.5lbs of ground beef a day, you're going to get fat. But if you do the conditioning, that diet will be enough to help you survive. Every time I've run BtM, I've developed some sort of scheduling anxiety, because there is so little wiggle room with 6 day a week training. Also, you really SHOULD get a prowler for this program. Prowlers are just plain awesome in general, but they're especially awesome for recovering from squat soreness, as they have no eccentric movement. An Aidryne would be cool too, but I sold mine because I don't care to have it for home workout equipment. I think it's a GREAT piece of cardio equipment, but I train in the VERY early AM, and an airdyne sounds like you're mowing your lawn inside your house. Going from Monolith into Deep Water Beginner is, once again, a system shock, and I feel like that's actually what makes this training block so effective. These programs already work in isolation, but the whole way that periodization works is to basically introduce a stimulus to the body until it's no longer effective and then to change the stimulus. If we stay with the same method/approach for too long, we get stale. So many folks "try" to do this, but are so afraid to venture away from their comfort zones that it's just paying lip service. "Instead of 5x5, I'll do THREE sets of 5!" Instead, we bounced from 5x10 to 5x5 to 10x10, and now the weight never changes but the rest times DO. This is why you wanna make sure you've absolutely blasted the conditioning work up to this point, because if you didn't, it will show and you will be hurting. Your ability to recover between sets is crucial. Also on that note, weeks 1 and 2 should NOT be a nutkick. You should NOT be going into Deep Water on those weeks. I saw a lot of people dork up this program by not feeling like these weeks were challenging enough and upping the weights. Then they got to weeks 5 and 6 and couldn't complete them. You're going to be resting HALF as long between sets when this is all done: weeks 1 and 2 SHOULD feel a little easy. I shouldn't need to write this, but apparently I do: don't skip out on the clean pulls on back day, don't swap out the barbell rows, and do the shrugs with a barbell. That entire day is prepping you for the intermediate program, wherein you will be doing 100 power cleans. The clean pulls are teaching you how to get power from the starting position, the rows are about keeping a strong torso during the transition, and the shrug is for the final pull. There is a method to the madness. For picking weights on this program, I didn't want to bother testing 1rms, nor did I want to use my training maxes. Since I had done sets of 10 on BBB Beefcake, I figure I had a pretty good idea of what a challenging set of 10 would be, so I took the weights I used on the final week of BBB Beefcake, took 5-10lbs off of them, and used those for my Deep Water workout weights. This proved REALLY effective. I knew I could get 5x10 of these done with about 2-3 minutes of rest between sets, so, once again, I had the fear in me necessary to know I was gonna need to eat BIG if I wanted to get twice as many sets done with only 2 minutes of rest. Intermediate feeds logically from beginner because these programs were actually meant to be run like that, but it's still cool how awesome Deep Water is set up. I, once again, did no 1rm testing nor did I use any calculators. At this point, my conditioning was so through the roof that I was stupidly "10 rep adapted", and trying to run the Deep Water calculator in reverse was having it spit out insane 1rms (like a 750lb deadlift), so I employed some "Kentucky windage" and added 20-30lbs to everything and went from there. Something that's really cool when all of this is done: if you did it right, you end up moving for 10x10 MORE weight than what you were doing for 5x10 at the end of BBB Beefcake. That's a GREAT feeling. HELPFUL MODIFICATIONS For Beefcake, I ran it 3/5/1 vs 5/3/1, meaning that the middle week was the lightest week. I like doing this because it gives you something like a mini deload before the heaviest week. I also took to changing the challenge level without playing with the weights. For dealifts, I'd do the 3s week with a powerlifting bar, the 5s week with an axle, and the 1s week with a deadlift bar. The weights were all as prescribed, but challenge still shifted. For the press, I would clean the first rep of each set on the 3s week, clean every rep on the 5s week, and take the weight out of the rack on the 1s week. I ended up appreciating the effect of cleaning the weight from the floor for presses that I did it through all the other programs. For BtM, once again I played around such that I clean only the first rep on the heaviest week. For the 3s week, I'd clean every rep. For the 5s week, I used a log and did viper presses. This all creates a great metabolic demand on the body, which will compel you to eat more. For the widowmakers on BtM, I ended up taking them until I couldn't do any more reps, rather than stop at 20. I felt like this was better prep for Deep Water. Not a modification, but just a helpful tip: get decent straps for deadlifting. You'll want them for Deep Water. NUTRITION When I threw together the training block, I included the associated nutritional recommendations by author. For BBB Beefcake, I took the diet Jim included with the 3 month BBB challenge, as they're honestly the same thing: Beefcake just takes that challenge and turns it into a 3 WEEK challenge, and runs it twice. Monolith was the dozen eggs and 1.5lbs of ground beef, Deep Water was Deep Water. As for what I PERSONALLY did, I ran what I deemed "Deep Mountain", which was effectively the Deep Water diet BUT, if I deviated, it was a Mountain Dog approved deviation ala John Meadows (RIP John, you'll be missed). Ultimately all this boiled down to was adding some VERY dark chocolate to my diet (92-100%) and including a small amount of grassfed butter with my breakfast, along with focusing on ensuring my fat sources were organic and, if animal, came from an animal fed it's natural diet. I actually tried adding in some more diverse foods, to include wild blueberries, but found that they were upsetting my digestion. I also had to stop eating walnuts for similar reasons. I'm 35 now, and finding, as I get older, my body develops intolerances and sensitivities rather easily. I still try to get diversity in my diet, but when you're eating a TON of food ALL the time to support growth, you eventually have to settle on a "greatest hits" playlist of foods that DON'T cause issues. One bad bit of digestion can really throw off the plan. Big takeaway is that the whole reason you are doing this is to gain weight. The training is INSANELY difficult, and if you are too afraid to eat, you'll get crushed. I was able to prove to myself that you don't need to eat junk to get there. And, something kind of interesting: when you are absolutely stuffing yourself with GOOD food (don't be coy and stupid: you know what good food is), you have no craving for junk. My only craving was for NO food. Missing meals sounded awesome. CONDITIONING As stated, BtM has its own pre-defined conditioning. BBB Beefcake just says to balance it against the supplemental work, and Deep Water has the active recovery day built in and that's about it. If it's your first time running these programs, that should all be fine. For myself, I wanted to really push the envelope and took it upon myself to do some form of conditioning every day (as in 7 days a week), and often multiple conditioning sessions in a day. The intent was two fold here. One: when I started this training block, I was the leanest I had ever been and got there with a diet that had me SIGNIFICANLTY slash my dietary fats, and I was concerned my hormones were suffering as a result. I wanted to intake a LOT of dietary fats as a means of course correction, and doing so much conditioning was a way to ensure that all this energy I was taking in got put to good use. The second reason was that I find conditioning work, when done correctly, has a tonic effect on the body and can promote recovery between workouts. The first time I ran Deep Water, I would walk like a toy soldier 6 days out of every week because my legs were so sore. In my experience, crossfit style barbell WODs and prowler pushing were both VERY helpful for recovery. To get rid of quad soreness, I'd use WODs that were thruster focused. For whole body soreness, things like Grace of WODs with some manner of floor to overhead were awesome. I found burpees a good way to recover from deadlifts, as they didn't place any load on the body but still required the whole body to move through space. I also included a front squat based conditioning workout that I kept the entire time I ran all the programs. For the majority of the 26 week block it was the "Juarez Valley" workout, where I'd open with a high rep topset (something along the realm of 8-16 reps), do 5 burpees, then do 1 rep, 5 burpees, then 1 rep less than the highest rep of the topset (so if I opened with 8, this would be 7 reps), 5 burpees, 2 reps, etc, meet in the middle. For the final few weeks of Deep Water Intermediate, I used something I deemed "Tower of Babel", which operated in a similar manner. For this one, you started with 1 rep, did the buprees, then 2 reps, burpees, 3 reps, etc, building to a point where you can't do any more reps, and then you work BACKWARDS to 1. Both are absolutely brutal. I'd chase the workout with a belt squat stripset and just absolutely nuke my quads. This was my "active recovery" workout on Deep Water, and replaced the airdyne workout for Building the Monolith. For BBB Beefcake, it was done typically after the deadlift day. The real benefit of all this focus on conditioning shone through during Deep Water. The very first time I ran that program, I had to legit lay on the floor between sets once I got to about the 6th or 7th set. I was just EXHAUSTED. This time around, it certainly wasn't a FUN experience, but I never had to go to the floor. I stayed standing during all of my rests. I was draped over my reverse hyper, sure, but that's about my standing resting position. And being able to recover so well between sets meant I absolutely crushed the workouts. All of that said: keep the goal the goal. If your conditioning is taxing your recovery to the point you can't succeed in training, back it off. If you cannot eat enough to recover from conditioning, back it off. WHAT IF I'M NOT READY? - Just by happenstance, I had run 2 cycles of 5/3/1 SVR II before this training block, and I think that was about the best thing I could have done. SVR II has Widowmakers, BBB and Second Set Last 5x5 all built into it, which will give you a sampling of things to come over the next 6 months. A few cycles of it will do you good.
CONCLUSION - 26 weeks is a LONG time to spend gaining weight, so make sure you have a clear schedule, a reliable source of steady nutrition, and a lot of fortitude. If you are prepared, this could very well be the most effective training protocol you ever employ. It was for me.
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