We're not mind readers, but we know why youโre here. Youโre here because you want to get bigger and stronger. Youโre looking for a routine thatโs easy to stick to and easy to understand. Maybe youโre just starting out and youโre looking for a foundation to build your routine on, or youโre stuck in intermediate purgatory and searching for a way to crack that ceiling.ย
If that sounds like you, the the Greyskull Linear Progression Program may be exactly what you need right now.
Itโs not quite like raising a sword and invoking the mysterious magic of Greyskull, but the Greyskull LP (GSLP) is an excellent starting point and powerful tool for lifters looking to push past their novice stages.
John Sheaffer aka Johnny Pain has been living and writing about bodybuilding, lifting, and fitness in some form since, at least 2007 when he was blogging about training clients and giving birth to monsters in the Greyskull Barbell club. The desire to train folks into the best versions of themselves morphed from a hobby to a career, and from a career in the gym to the shelves of bookstores as he published a few tomes on dropping fat, conditioning, and, most famously, The Greyskull LP.
Like many of the greats, Johnny Pain and his Gladiator Academy came from humble beginnings. The Gladiator Academy was a backyard gym where John Sheaffer and a select few were put through the paces. They trained hard and tracked their progression until eventually a pair of 12-week programs were born.
These were eventually published into the books Gladiator: Stage One, and Gladiator: Stage Two.
However, despite this, the thing that really put him on the map was publishing the Greyskull LP.
He calls โquite simple, and the most flexible and user-friendly system for anyone interested in building strength and muscle,โ and itโs hard to argue with that. At its most basic level, the Greyskull LP is about starting with the basics, marginal increases, and adding on โplug-ins.โ Itโs less like a set of rigid rules and more like a Lego set. The pieces are there, you have a manual, but it really shines when you move the parts around for yourself.
When John Scheaffer was getting started on a training program, he started with the Starting Strength program, where a lot of novices did at the time.ย
The Starting Strength program is similar to the Greyskull LP routine in one aspect, itโs simple. Itโs your standard overload method. The Starting Strength program was a thrice-weekly program, and you would alternate an A and B day back and forth. Each week you would add more weight, and thatโs about as far as it went.
Your โAโ day you would include:
On the โBโ day you would:
The alternation would roll over from week to week so youโre never doubling up on one set of exercises.ย
Let's say you had a Monday, Wednesday, Friday routine, your first week would look like this:
Then your second week would look like this:
Then week three youโd be back where you started. Pretty simple, all you need to remember is what you did the last day you were in the gym and how much weight you lifted the week before.ย
Thereโs nothing really wrong with this. Itโs great for novices looking to start lifting. Itโs not overly complicated, and theyโre all exercises that are easy to pull off without injuring yourself. No terribly tricky forms required, no steep learning curve, or any huge pitfalls. All of these positives can also be the downfall of the Starting Strength program.
The Starting Strength really is just that. Itโs for starters and doesnโt really give you anywhere to go. Eventually, you hit a wall, because you canโt just keep throwing on five pounds and doing the exact same number of reps and sets forever and ever. You start to run up against the limits of what your body can do. Try as you might, you wonโt be lifting four hundred pounds in a few months with simple linear progression and targeting the same few muscle groupsย week after week.ย
The Greyskull LP workout takes the pitfalls of the Starting Strength program and hammers them away into something much more helpful for lifters of all skill levels.
Right off the bat, the Greyskull LP differentiates itself from the Starting Strength program with variables. Theyโre all over the place. Youโre not just doing different exercises on different days. Youโre varying intensity and volume, which will trigger hypertrophy and allow you to buildย mass and strengthย at the same time. Larger muscles arenโt just for show, with proper training, youโll be able to utilize the mass youโre packing on and youโll find yourself lifting more and more weight seemingly in no time at all.
The Greyskull LP program focuses on upper and lower body exercises, much like the Starting Strength program, but it tosses in a piece of advice. Since your intense lower body exercise can affect your upper body performance it asks you to do your upper body first. This little tweak means that youโll always be getting the best performance out of your routine when you hit the gym. Better performance means better results, and better results mean quicker gains.
The increments are also a little different in the GLSP. The use of microplates for your upper body exercises means that youโre going to be able to hit those targets more effectively. This means youโre not going to be running face-first into an early plateau. Your goals are spread out over a more manageable timeline.ย
There are also plug-ins for the Greyskull LP program.
The program realizes the shortcomings of focusing only on a select set of exercises. During each one of your workouts, youโre encouraged to supplement your growth with these plugins. Do you find your core failing you when your arms are still ready to go? Do you feel like you could hit your legs a little harder? These plug-ins mean youโre constantly working on any of your weak spots.
A huge part of the Greyskull LP program is the AMRAP set. AMRAP stands for โas many reps as possibleโ. This is a brilliant addition to a workout because it doesnโt require you to push so far past your limits that your form suffers. Youโre also not failing a set by not hitting a fifth or sixth rep when youโve packed on more weight than you could have realistically handled. However, this doesnโt just get you off of the hook. You still have to, you know, do the reps. So youโre always pushing your body, youโre getting that microtrauma in and building muscle each and every single day you get underneath that bar.ย
Letโs break this down. What does your week look like with the Greyskull LP? As we mentioned earlier thereโs a base program.ย
That base Greyskull program consists of an alternating upper body exercise followed by a lower-body exercise.
ย Your upper body will always be trained first in order to squeeze out your maximum performance every session. Youโll be doing three sets every time. First two sets of five, and youโll top off with an AMRAP set.
Those upper body exercises are:ย
Bench Press:
Overhead Press:
Your lower body is similar setwise. On squat days youโll be doing the same two sets capped with an AMRAP set, and your deadlifts are always just an AMRAP day. The relative intensity of deadlifts more than make up for the seemingly low number of reps.
In case you want some review:
Squat: Thereโs a lot to learn about squats if youโre unfamiliar. Maybe youโre worried about the impact theyโll have on your knees, or youโre worried about screwing up your back.ย No worries, weโve got you covered
Deadlift:
You canโt just scrawl a bunch of exercises onto a piece of paper and expect to cover every single personโs needs. The Greyskull LP solves this with a number of plug-ins designed to be added onto the template. These can be slotted into your routine anywhere. It might be best to do them after your upper body exercise to preserve your efficiency, but you can make them part of your warmup or slap them on as a cool down. Theyโre there to serve you. If you find the Greyskull LP lacking, then you might want to look into the appropriate plug-in.ย
You may have also seen a variant on the Greyskull LP program by somebody named Phrak that sprang out of Reddit. This is mostly just the Greyskull with some plug-ins already built in like pullups. They also include a provision for deloading. If you find yourself unable to crest five reps in your AMRAPS then Phrakโs Greyskull LP asks that you reduce your weight by ten percent and work yourself back up. This variant is a good place to start because of the inclusion of a pull exercise for your back from the beginning. You donโt need to remember to add them on or find out that youโve overtrained your chest the hard way.
The Greyskull LP program is one of those strength training programs that comes along and totally reworks the way you approach your gym experience. The focus on efficiency and meticulous tracking of your progress pays off in spades. Youโll find yourself packing on more weight than you ever thought possible in no time. The flexibility of the program means you wonโt have to abandon it halfway through when you find an aspect of it isnโt working for your personal needs and the solid foundation it builds for you means youโll never have to dismantle your progress.
Dedication to the Greyskull LP program is all you really need to harness your bodyโs potential, and carving out the muscle definition youโve been really wanting.
