Resistance Regime
For the past four months or so I’ve been doing push, pull, and leg days with my Harambe System. This differs from the push and pull days of the standard Harambe and X3 programs (both of which are mostly the same) that I had been doing previously.
- Push: Bench press, overhead press, tricep extension (standing, seated, or lying depending on my mood)
- Pull: Deadlift, bent-over row, bicep curl (Ferro and drag)
- Leg: static lunge, front squat, back squat, calf raises
I cycle through the days over the course of the week.
- Monday: Push
- Tuesday: Pull
- Wednesday: Leg
- Thursday: Push
- Friday: Pull
- Saturday: Rest
- Sunday: Rest
For a time I did a second leg day on Saturday, but I found this negatively impacted my riding. I ride a bike seven days a week, and usually I’ll end up doing a longer ride on Saturday or Sunday. I don’t consider riding a bike to be exercise – its just how I get around – so I count both Saturday and Sunday as “rest” days, even though really every day is leg day. But when I did a focused leg day with the bands over the weekend, my legs would never get a chance to recover.
I don’t intentionally vary the resistance from day to day. Mostly I’ve been doing two sets to fatigue. I generally aim for 12-15 full reps, and 3-6 at diminishing range. If I can do more than 20 reps in a set, I take it to mean I need more resistance. The exception is for calf raises, where I prefer to go lighter and do around 30 reps in a set. If I am pressed for time I’ll go back to the standard one set to fatigue. Sometimes, just to mix things up, I’ll do three sets of 10-10-max (as in Harambe’s PPL program). In that case, I aim for my max on that last set to be 10 to 12 reps. If I can do more than that it means I should be stacking more bands.
Two months ago I bought the discontinued Travel Plate when Harambe was blowing it out on sale. I now stack this on top of the Cyberplate when doing bench press and deadlift. This effectively shortens the length of the bands. When bench pressing, it allows me to have resistance as soon as the bar leaves my chest (actually there’s a little resistance even with the bar just lying on my chest). When deadlifting, it means I’m pulling resistance as soon as the bar leaves the foam block. It makes both movements more difficult. I had to step down to a lighter band configuration for both. I don’t find it useful for any of the other movements, but I like it for those two. (And it should be mentioned that in both cases, the bands do not contact the upper plate at all, so the fact that I’m using an actual UHMW plate is irrelevant – one could accomplish the same thing with a piece of plywood or a cutting board.)
