There's Something About Mary...and Fives

"Hey, you want to go upstairs and watch SportsCenter?" into my garage and front squat?



Why do I advocate fives for basic barbell movements, like squats, presses, and pulls?  Because they work.  Plain and simple.  To paraphrase Burton Malkiel, an economist at Princeton University, strength training should not constitute a random walk down the training hall floor. Instead, athletes' training should be modeled on the successful protocols of those who came before them.  And what former lifters/coaches advocated the use of fives?  The list is impressive, to say the least (listed in alphabetical order): Aita, Furnas, Gallagher, Karwaski, Koan, McCallum, Pendlay, Rippetoe, Starr, and many others I missed.  They all used fives to some degree or another.

Mark Rippetoe put it best when he said, "Fives are almost too powerful.  They should be reserved only for those who want brutal strength."  Fives can indeed be used for a wide range of barbell movements -- back, front, and overhead squats; presses; bench presses; and Pendlay rows.  Not many people use fives for the front squat, but Starr recommends using fives until an athlete can front squat 300# for a set of five, aka until they are damn strong.  Starr also calls for fives in the power clean, a recommendation some in the weightlifting community would consider a cardinal sin.  I, myself, donned weightlifting's scarlet letter by performing fives in the power clean and front squat during my last training cycle (For reference, my 5rm front squat was significantly more than 137 kgs prior to this training block  My best was 164 kgs for three sets of three).

Having never performed front squats or power cleans for fives before, I started my progression at 80 percent of my best triple in both exercises.  I figured this would afford me at least a month to adapt to the increased training volume.  The lighter weights of the first few weeks also provided me an opportunity to work on positions and speed, two points that should never be far from an athlete's mind.  Fast forward six weeks, and the fives are starting to pay dividends.  The musculature in my back has never been more pronounced, particularly through my spinal erectors, and my "yoke" is...well more "yoke-ish," albeit I'm still a ways away from Jim Wender level. A second benefit I overlooked originally was cardiovascular conditioning. Fives in the power clean can definitely get an athlete conditioned as well as help them shed some bodyfat, assuming their diet is locked down.  My rest heart rate, taken first thing in the morning, fell from an average of 43 beats/minute in Week One, to 39 beats/minute in Week Six, an almost 10 percent reduction in the absence of traditional “aerobic” conditioning.

In conclusion, I would encourage athletes to use fives in a wide range of barbell movements, including the front squat and power clean (I would, however, restrict the use of fives in the power clean to intermediate athletes who understand positions, speed, tempo and proper lifting technique, in general). Who knows, an athlete might even grow a pair...of spinal erectors that is.