About this workout

Doggcrapp training, DC for short, is a high intensity, low volume, high frequency system built by Dante Trudel. Three sessions a week, one working set per body part, and every body part trained twice every eight days. The whole system is built around one rule: beat the number in your logbook or the session did not count.

Below is the full program written out session by session, plus the principles that make it work. Run it as a blast of six to twelve weeks, then cruise. It is not a program you live on year round.

Who This Program Is For

This is for late intermediate and advanced lifters with a solid strength base and at least two to three years of consistent training behind them. You should already know what a genuine set to failure feels like, and you should already be keeping a logbook, because this program is unusable without one.

It is not for beginners. If a straightforward three or four day program is still adding weight to the bar every week, stay there and keep taking the free progress. DC is a tool for restarting stalled progress, not for starting out.

Skip it for now if you are coming back from a layoff, working around an injury, sleeping badly, or dieting hard. Every set in this program is taken to failure, and failure training costs recovery you have to be able to pay for. If you are second-guessing whether you are ready, you are not.

What You'll Need

A full gym. Barbell and plates, dumbbells to a decent weight, a power rack, a dip station, a pulldown and cable station, a leg press or hack squat, and a calf machine.

A logbook, and this one is not optional. You are chasing specific rep and weight targets on every exercise every session, and you cannot do that from memory. Write down the weight and total reps for each movement, every session.

How Doggcrapp Training Works

Rest-pause sets

Warm up with three to five progressively heavier sets that stop short of failure. Then load your top set weight and go to genuine failure, usually seven to ten reps. Control the lowering portion and drive the lift explosively.

You are not done. Rack the weight, take ten to fifteen deep breaths, and go to failure again with the same weight. Breathe again for ten to fifteen breaths, and go to failure a third time. Those three sub-sets together are one rest-pause set.

Total the reps across all three. Hit the target range and you add weight next time. Come in under it and the weight was too heavy, so drop it. That total rep count is the number you are trying to beat.

Straight sets where they matter

Back thickness, quads, forearms and calves are trained with straight sets rather than rest-pause. Taking a heavy deadlift or squat to failure three times in a row is how form breaks down and people get hurt. Those four get one to two straight sets in the prescribed range instead.

Extreme stretching

After the last exercise for a body part, load a deep stretch on that muscle and hold it for 30 to 60 seconds while actively trying to flex the muscle. You can break the time into shorter intervals of five to ten seconds. It is uncomfortable, and it is one of the signature pieces of the system.

Blasting and cruising

Run the program hard for six to twelve weeks, which Dante calls a blast. Then cruise for ten to fourteen days of easy maintenance training, up to 21 days if your blast ran the full twelve weeks. The cruise is mandatory. Skip it, or turn it into more blasting, and you will burn out.

Carbohydrate cutoffs

Front-load your carbohydrates. Most of them in the morning, tapering through the afternoon, with little to none directly in the evening beyond vegetables. Simple carbohydrates go around training, before, during and after. This does not mean you cannot eat a lower carb lunch or a normal dinner, it means you do not save the whole day's carbohydrates for the evening.

Cardio

Low to moderate intensity, whether you are cutting, bulking or maintaining. Two to four sessions of 30 to 60 minutes, ideally in the morning. Jogging, cycling, skipping, the elliptical or swimming all work.

Skip HIIT while you are running this program. The lifting is already at the ceiling of what you can recover from, and high intensity conditioning on top of it eats into the progressive overload that makes the program work.

The Program

Three sessions a week, alternating Workout A and Workout B, with at least one rest day between sessions. Monday, Wednesday and Friday works, so does Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. Because you alternate, week one is A, B, A and week two is B, A, B. That is how each body part gets trained twice every eight days.

Each body part gets one exercise per session, not three. You pick three exercises per body part and rotate through them, so a full rotation takes six sessions. After session six you are back to your first exercise, and the goal is to beat the reps you logged for it last time.

Warm-up sets are not shown in the tables. Every listed exercise gets three to five progressively heavier warm-up sets first.

Exercise rotation menu

The six sessions above are one full rotation. If a movement does not suit you, or your gym does not have the machine, swap in another option from the same group. Keep three choices per body part and keep rotating them in the same order.

Chest: flat, incline or decline bench press with a barbell, dumbbells, Hammer Strength or the Smith machine; cable or dumbbell flyes at any angle; weighted chest dips; kneeling landmine press.

Shoulders: seated or standing overhead press with a barbell, dumbbells, Hammer Strength or the Smith machine; push press; upright row; lateral raises.

Triceps: close grip bench press; weighted bench dips; skull crushers at any angle; overhead extensions; pushdowns.

Back width: pull-ups or chin-ups, weighted if you can, varying the grip if you stall; narrow or wide grip pulldowns; Hammer Strength pulldowns.

Back thickness: conventional deadlifts; rack pulls; barbell or dumbbell rows; chest supported or T-bar rows; narrow or wide grip seated cable rows.

Biceps: seated or standing dumbbell curls; standing barbell curls; cable curls; preacher curls; spider curls.

Forearms: hammer curls; reverse grip curls with a barbell, dumbbells, preacher bench or cable; wrist curls; reverse wrist curls.

Calves: leg press calf raise; hack squat machine calf raise; Smith machine, barbell or dumbbell calf raise; seated or standing calf raise machine.

Hamstrings: Romanian or stiff-legged deadlifts; seated or lying leg curls; good mornings; glute-ham raises.

Quads: barbell back or front squat; leg press; hack squat; dumbbell or barbell lunges; step-ups; leg extensions, with an optional 20 rep widowmaker set on the last movement.

How to Progress

Every session: your only job is to beat the number you logged the last time you did that exercise. More total reps at the same weight, or the same reps at a heavier weight. Write it down immediately, not later.

On rest-pause movements: hit the top of the rep range and add weight next time, usually five to fifteen pounds depending on the lift. Come in below the bottom of the range and the weight was too heavy, so drop it next session and build back.

On straight-set movements: back thickness, quads, forearms and calves progress the ordinary way, by adding weight once you hit the top of the range for your prescribed sets.

Weeks 1 to 2: deliberately start ten to fifteen percent lighter than you think you need. You are learning what a real rest-pause set costs you, and starting too heavy in week one is the single most common way people blow this program up.

Weeks 3 to 10: this is the productive stretch. Small weight jumps, logged every session, no missed sessions.

Weeks 11 to 12: when your numbers stop moving on two or three exercises in the same week, the blast is finished. That is your signal, not the calendar.

Then cruise: ten to fourteen days of easy maintenance training, up to 21 days if you ran the full twelve weeks. Keep training, keep eating, drop the intensity. Then start a new blast with a fresh exercise rotation.

Warm-Up and Recovery Notes

Every exercise gets three to five progressively heavier warm-up sets that stop well short of failure, then one all-out working set. Five to ten minutes of general warm-up first, then work up in the movement itself. Do not treat warm-up sets as extra volume, because their only job is preparing you for the one set that counts.

Finish each body part with extreme stretching. Load a deep stretch on the muscle you just trained, hold it 30 to 60 seconds, and actively flex the muscle throughout. Break it into shorter intervals if you need to.

Sleep is the limiting factor on this program more than anything else. Every set is taken to failure, and failure training is recovery expensive. Seven to nine hours, and if you cannot get it, run something else until you can.

Take at least one full rest day between sessions. Never run two DC sessions back to back.

Nutrition and Supplementation

Protein first. Dante recommends up to two grams per pound of bodyweight, which is well above what the research says is required, and current evidence supports roughly one gram per pound of bodyweight or lean mass as sufficient for muscle growth. Somewhere in that range works. Get it from chicken, beef, fish, eggs and dairy, and use a shake to fill the gaps.

Front-load your carbohydrates, with the simple ones placed around training. Keep evening carbohydrates low beyond vegetables.

Eat in a modest surplus if you are blasting for size. Nothing about this program overcomes a calorie deficit if you are trying to add muscle.

On supplements, keep it simple and treat them as supplemental. Protein powder makes the daily target realistic. Creatine monohydrate at five grams a day supports the kind of repeated high effort sets this program is built on. A pre-workout helps on the sessions you have to drag yourself to, not on every session. None of it replaces the food or the sleep.

FAQ

Can a beginner run Doggcrapp training? No. You need two to three years of consistent training and a solid strength base first. Beginners make faster progress on a straightforward full body or upper lower program, and they make it without training to failure.

Why only one working set per exercise? Because that set is taken past failure three times. A rest-pause set at a genuine top weight produces far more stimulus than three ordinary sets, and it costs so much recovery that a second one would be counterproductive.

How long is a session? Around 45 to 60 minutes. Five exercises with full warm-ups and long rest periods fills the time, and there is no benefit to rushing the rest between heavy work.

What if I miss the rep target? Under the bottom of the range means the weight was too heavy, so drop it next session. Over the top of the range means add weight. That is the entire progression system.

Do I have to do the extreme stretching? It is a defining part of the system, and if you are running DC you should run the whole thing. Stop immediately if a stretch produces sharp joint pain rather than muscular discomfort.

How long before I switch off it? Six to twelve weeks, then a mandatory cruise of ten to fourteen days. Skipping the cruise is how people burn out on this program.

Related Programs

If DC is more than you want to take on right now, these will suit you better:

• 5 Day Muscle Building Split, a straightforward high volume bodybuilding split.
• Push Pull Legs Workout Plan, if you want each muscle trained twice a week without failure training.
• 4 Day Workout Routine for Impressive Gains, a solid intermediate option.

Reference

1) Trudel, Dante. "Forums." Intense Muscle. N.p., 2015.