Grease the Groove (GtG) is a methodology for improving your strength with specific movements written by Pavel Tsatsouline.
GtG can be used both for gaining endurance in a movement you’re already strong in; or gaining strength in a movement that you’re struggling with.
In this article we’re going to focus on improving an exercise that you’re struggling with.
Muscle fibres work in a binary fashion; they’re either contracting or they’re not.
A muscle has many muscle fibres (the bicep brachii has over 250,000).
How strong we are depends on how big these muscle fibres are, but also how many of them we can get to contract.
Focusing on specific movements means that we’re going to train our neurological pathways for that movement.
The more familiar your brain is with that movement, the better the neurological pathways, meaning we can get more muscle fibres to contract.
Pavel’s GtG follows a simple plan.
Test your max reps for a particular movement.
Perform 60-80% of your max every hour throughout the day.
Leave this movement pattern out of your regular training.
Stay fresh, if you’re feeling tired and form starts to suffer, then stop GtG or take a rest day.
Done correctly you can do this for weeks at a time.
Retest your max every week, if it stops improving then it’s time to stop using GtG and switch back to regular training.
I’ve been doing a modified version of Pavel’s GtG for a number of years to help myself and my students get past plateaus.
It involves compressing the GtG into a single session.
Choose 2-3 exercises to work on.
For each pick a progression (or weight) that you can do 6-10 reps of.
Perform 2-3 reps of each with a 30s gap before moving onto the next exercise; once you’ve done all exercises come back to the first one.
If you start to feel like you’re going to fail then reduce the reps or increase your rest periods.
This works well for people who can’t GtG throughout the day, for example if you want to work on pull-ups but don’t have access to a pull-up bar at the office.
It also has the advantage of being able to do a proper warm-up and cool down.
As with traditional GtG, only do this when you are feeling fresh.
This can take it’s toll on the joints if overdone, so make sure you include a high rep workout or two a week to get the blood flowing to the joints and warm-up well; never do this for a 1 rep max exercise.
For someone who can do one dead-hanging, but is struggling to add a second rep to this.
Do 2 reps of this.
Add another exercise that isn’t a pulling movement, I’d suggest either a push-up variation or even a leg exercise. Avoid ab work as the chin-up uses your abs.
Take 30s rest after this one and repeat.
Increase the rest periods if required.
Work up to 50 assisted chin-ups over time.
Follow this protocol when fresh and they’ll be repping out dead-hanging chin-ups in no time!
Start at 2, once this is becoming too easy with 30s rest then up it to 3.
Again add another non-ab or pulling exercise.
Work up to 50 pull-ups.
To go beyond 10 pull-ups, keep adding more reps when it becomes too easy; work your way up to 100+ pull-ups!
Do holds of about a 3rd of your max, so if you can hold an L-Sit for 15 secs, just do 5 sec.
Add in a leg exercise such as a pistol squat.
Building this up to 5 minutes total L-Sit time, wouldn’t be an unreasonable goal.
I want to improve my reps on pullups, dips and pushups. Should I stop from doing these exercises in my regular training if I decide to grease the groove with these 3 exercises?
Yeah so if you’re doing regular grease the groove (on the hour dips and pull-ups), then certainly don’t include them in your training on the days that you’re doing GtG. Any day you’re not, then listen to your body and if you feel okay to do them then go ahead.