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A power rack, weights and a good bar are all you really need to get strong as hell. Jim Wendler covers the essentials—and the extras—for building your home gym.

The following is an excerpt from the new book, 5/3/1 Forever.  This book outlines how to program all areas of your training including assistance work. Yes, that's right; no more questions about assistance work. Everything is tied up, nice and tight AND allows for a lot of personal choices.  Each and every program detailed in the book has a specific assistance profile which allows you to plug in a variety of different movements; all customized to you.

Hard conditioning should build work capacity without leaving you two breaths short of Valhalla. Jim Wendler explains how to train hard, recover and stay consistent.

Jim Wendler revisits WALRUS Training with practical weight-vest challenges using squats, push-ups, pull-ups, kettlebells and dumbbells.

5/3/1 Forum member Josh shares a detailed two-part review of Jim Wendler’s Krypteia program, covering setup, training time, conditioning, fat loss, strength, recovery, and who it suits.

Most 5/3/1 PDFs online are outdated scans missing entire chapters. Here's what's actually in the official paperbacks — and why the details matter for getting the program right.

For those of you who live in the cold and the snow, conditioning can become a chore in the winter.  But if you have access to a treadmill and a weight vest here are two very simple, but not easy, conditioning challenges.

It's not an attack on your work ethic or your manhood to repeat cycles (or back up). In fact, if you do have to lighten your Training Max, I'd recommend staying at that lighter TM for one cycle longer than you think. 

 

If you've been on the forum for a few minutes, you've heard the term "Raise the floor, not the ceiling". This is a folksy way of reminding you to build a base of training before you worry about your 1RM or anything similar. Too many of us don't spend enough time training consistently and yet we believe we are "owed" strength. Your current effort level affords you exactly what you've earned.  Here's a couple ideas/examples that will support the idea 

At this point, I realized that Weak Point training is for for people who were strong.  A “weak point” meant that I had a “strong point.” And because I had no strong points, I had ZERO weak points.  EVERYTHING was weak.   I made the ultimate mistake – I thought I was too good for basic training.

A more blatant and obvious example is someone who is very overweight and out of shape - his program can't be what Sammy SixPack has been doing for the past 5 years.

There is no "ONE WAY" to condition; every couple of years, a new study/fad comes out. First it was jogging, then H.I.I.T., then all Zone 1 and then it was all about Zone 2.

Jim Wendler lays out a flexible strength program for busy schedules: one main lift per day, pulling work and scalable assistance based on available time.

As always, there is a balance between strength and building size. But if you aren't eating/training to build muscle - and your bench/press is in the dumper and has been for awhile - maybe it's time to build some muscle on the body and see if that gets you over the hump.