Incorporating Dan John's 3x8 Rep Scheme into My Workout

A few months ago I began to incorporate Dan John’s 3x8 rep scheme into my home gym workouts, and I thought I’d share my thoughts about my experiences with it.  If you’re not familiar with the 3x8 rep scheme from Dan John, it’s basically three sets of eight reps of a given exercise with a one minute rest.  The weight should be heavy enough that by the last rep of the last set you are struggling to complete the rep, but light enough that you never miss a rep.  Coach John often recommends this rep scheme on his podcast.

I incorporated this rep scheme into my current workout program, see my previous post Garage Gym Workout: Barbells and Kettlebells for the workout. I had previously been doing sets of five for all my barbell lifts and needed a change of pace.  And I was curious if I could maintain or even gain strength using lighter weight using a 3x8 rep scheme.  Also, I was curious if I would enjoy it?  Let’s be honest, we all like to crush some heavy weights when we go to the gym, and I wasn’t sure that 3x8 would give me the same feeling of satisfaction since you have to lighten up the bar quite a bit because of the one minute rest.  Well, here was what I found out:

You get through your workout quickly - This is a huge one for a busy working parent like me.  When you’re doing heavy sets of 5’s or 3’s you need a lot of time to first work up to that weight, second have long rest periods to recover, and third perform more sets to get sufficient volume.  With the 3x8 you're only doing three sets, the weight is lighter so warm ups are shorter, and a 1 min rest period means you're done in about 4 minutes.  It’s pretty amazing how fast you can get through a workout hitting multiple barbell lifts.  This alone was pretty game changing.  

You can make strength gains - I was a little skeptical that I could actually gain any strength with this lighter weight at a pretty low volume.  To be honest, I was really just hoping to maintain without back sliding.  However, to my surprise whenever I changed it up and went back to doing sets of 5’s I actually would go up in weight on those sets.  I also was able to increase the weight on my 3x8 sets.  This could be attributed to just a change in stimulus.  As Coach John would say everything works until it doesn’t or everything works for 6-10 weeks.  I’m sure someone out there reading this might say “this guy just doesn’t understand programming or periodization” or something. Yes, I do understand programmimg and concepts such as linear and undulating periodization, and all that.  Personally, I don’t really care about over analyzing a workout.  Workouts have two criteria, for me anyway: 1) Is it fun?  2) Does it work?  That’s it.  Point being is you can gain strength using this rep scheme.

This was better than expected for hypertrophy - I didn’t really expect to gain much in the way of increased muscle size, but I have to admit I did see a change in that as well. This rep range with the short rest period on a full body workout combined with the kettlebell conditioning and a couple of isolation exercises seems to hit a sweet spot, for me anyway.  I’m getting a nice little pump without wearing my muscles down into the ground.

A little more of cardiovascular hit - Ok, this one is a little bit of a stretch, but I thought I should at least mention it.  I did notice my heart rate would get a little more elevated doing 3x8 than it would with only doing 5’s with a longer rest period.  This is due to the one minute rest period, but it in no way takes the place of regular cardio work.

The gains won’t last forever - I already touched on this, but you’ll only get results for so long before you have to change it up again.  That’s the whole point of periodization anyway, or as Coach John says everything works until it doesn’t.  That’s fine I keep my workouts varied anyway with sets of 5’s or sometimes 20’s, calisthenics, different variations of lifts, and bike rides.  So I don’t really worry about programming so much as long as I’m enjoying my workouts and making progress on something.   

This truly is a less is more workout.  You can gain strength, get in a little hypertrophy, and get out of the gym quickly.  I hope this little blog provides some insight to anyone thinking of checking out Dan John’s the 3x8 rep scheme, and incorporating into a workout routine.

Thanks for reading.