Bonus newsletter: I did a 20-squat programme and it was horrible but also good

And you can do it too, you lunatic

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Me at the end of the 20-squat programme

I decided to do a 20-squat programme.

This is exactly what it sounds like: a weightlifting programme where you do one set of 20 squats, followed by whatever accessories (i.e. other exercises) you fancy. Simple! The hard part is that every time you go to the gym, you add more weight (the training jargon term for this is “progressive overload”). Simple, but punishing. Even at lower weights, there is something existential about passing the 12 rep mark with a barbell on your back. As you increase the load, reps 13 to 18 develop a strong purgatorial tang.

It’s one of the classic old-school weight training programmes — the kind of thing done by men in black and white photos with ferocious quads and a look of cheerfully wholesome masculinity. Its enduring popularity is, in part, down to its established reputation for bulking, especially the legs. Imagine the stereotypical cartoon transformation of a knock-kneed loser into a strapping Hercules: that’s what the 20-squat programme promises.

One storied variant of the programme dictates that you drink a gallon of milk a day while doing it. A gallon of milk is roughly 1,600 calories. For comparison, the NHS RDA is 2,000 for an average woman and 2,500 for a man. I mean, it is an offputting quantity of milk. The theory is that, because your body is being stimulated to hypertrophy by the relentless squatting, most of these calories will be turned into muscle. 

This probably does work, but I suspect that with the milk as with the squatting, the unpleasantness is partly the point: you must push through something that becomes horrible by sheer virtue of its volume. The 20-squat programme is all about putting yourself under duress — mental as well as physical. If you google the 20-squat programme, one of the first things you’ll see is this quote attributed to strength training icon Mark Rippetoe (I can’t find the source but it’s very much the kind of think Mark Rippetoe would say): 

“Trust me, if you do an honest 20-rep program, at some point Jesus will talk to you. On the last day of the program, he asked if he could work in…”

A question you may be asking now is: why, Sarah, did you decide to do this to yourself? The long answer is, I’d been working the same programme for a long time and wanted a change that promised to get me over a plateau, but the short answer is, I did it because of vanity. Not my aesthetic vanity. (Obviously, caring about how I look does play a part in my weightlifting, but the specific outcomes of the 20-squat programme are not that relevant to my needs — I already have pretty big quads and glutes because that’s how my genetics go.) I did it because of my physical pride. I wanted to do it because it sounded hard and nasty. I did not drink a gallon of milk a day, and I may or may not have heard Jesus, but this is how I did my twenty-squat programme and what I learned.

Before you start

First of all, I found there was a dearth of specific information for women about doing this programme. (Probably because, until recently, “getting bigger” was nowhere on the list of aspirations for most women when it came to exercise.) That’s not a major problem, but it also meant I felt like I was guessing, at least at the start.

There are two general approaches to figuring out where to begin. One is to start with a weight you can squat comfortably for eight to 12 reps, squat it for ten and then do ten more; increase the weight as you feel able, and do this workout once, twice or three times a week, depending on your experience with lifting. Follow this programme for six weeks.

The other, more rigid, version is to take your five rep max, then subtract 45kg: this will be your starting weight. On the first session, you add 2.5kg to your starting weight, then you increase the load by 2.5kg in every subsequent workout. The 45 is because you will be lifting three times a week for six weeks — so 3 x 6 x 2.5. I used this latter method, mostly because I was coming off that other jacked culture classic, the 5x5 workout, meaning I had a very clear idea of my 5rm. 

Before you start, obviously you’ll need to be confident about your form. The same applies here as any other time you do squats: it's only a rep if it's a full rep. If you can't get your thighs parallel with the floor, it's not a squat. Drop weight until you can get to — or, better, below — parallel. Drop all the way to bodyweight-only if you need to. There is no shame in an unweighted squat, there is only shame in a half-assed squat. (If this is where you’re starting from, a 20s programme is not the right one for you, but you can still use the principle of progressive overload to get stronger doing sets of dumbbell or goblet squats.) If you don't have the full range of motion, you aren't engaging all the relevant muscles. If you aren't engaging all the relevant muscles, you can't make them stronger. And if you're not getting stronger, you're wasting your time.¹ 

You’ll be squatting a lot for the next six weeks, often while fatigued, and if your form is weak, that will lead to injury. By the same token, you’ll also need to be comfortable with the idea of failing a rep and bailing (that is, pushing the bar back off your shoulders so it can’t squash you forwards) — this didn’t happen to me in my programme, but it’s a non-zero possibility when you’re doing this many squats, so best to feel OK with the idea. This is also why you should use the squat cage, not the platforms. It’s just safer if things go wrong. 

For my accessories, I figured out three routines of four or five exercises: day one targeting upper body, day two targeting lower body and day three targeting my back and posterior chain. At the end of each session, I did some abs/core stuff but this is really just from habit and it would be better to do some exhausting cardio or strongman stuff as a finisher — I let myself off that because I was doing cardio classes or runs on my rest days. I tended to go a little harder on the upper body and glute-targeting exercises, on the grounds that my quads would be getting plenty from the squats thank you. Each session took 45 minutes to an hour.

My last week of this programme

(There’s no warmup or cooldown in this. I don’t bother with a cooldown anymore — I figure the ten minute walk home from the gym covers that. For the warmup, just do whatever feels right for you to activate your glutes and quads, and to set your lats in a nicely retracted position ready to support the bar. For me, that’s a few quad stretches, some rounds of cat-cow, bodyweight squats and bodyweight glute bridges. Then I warmed up with the bar doing sets of five to reach my working weight.)

What happened when I did a 20-squat programme

Did the 20-squat programme work? I can’t tell you if it affected my weight, because I don’t weigh myself. And I can’t comment definitively on any changes to the way I look, because I didn’t take before and after pictures. But I can tell you that I got stronger — in my squat, at least. My 5rm was 77.5kg, so my starting weight for this programme was 32.5kg. On the last day of my 20s programme, I squatted 70kg. 

This is me on the last day of the programme:

And this is me six weeks earlier, on the second day of the programme (I just really like these leggings):

According to Strengthlevel, that takes me from being stronger than 59 percent of female lifters my age and weight, to being stronger than 86 percent. (As mentioned above, I don’t weigh myself, but the last time I did was about a year ago and I weighed 75kg, so I’ve been using that as as a guideline.) Which seems like a satisfying improvement! More concretely, I can now get ass-to-grass (fully below parallel) with a 50kg bar during my warmup. That’s new.

You’ll notice that 70kg is not 77.5kg — I forgot to add the 2.5kg on the first workout, and missed two sessions in the six week block, so I ended up 7.5kg short of my target. Watching the videos I made to time my sets, I think I could probably have gone over 70kg: I’m not pausing for that long between reps, and I didn’t feel absolutely spent at the end of the last set. But I’m very happy with where I got to. 

I’ve felt tired and hungry quite a lot of the time while doing this. (To celebrate finishing, I ate an Easter egg and fell asleep on the sofa watching Desperate Housewives.) Even if I couldn’t face glugging through a gallon of milk a day, I needed to eat more than usual, especially protein. A lot of eggs were sacrificed in the service of this project. A lot of Greek yoghurt was consumed. For emotional sustenance, I probably listened to the “Ante Up” remix about a hundred times. And though I didn’t track the way I looked, I do think I’ve visibly gained muscle all over, especially in my quads and glutes. This is what you’d expect from doing hypertrophy sets of squats for six weeks, but still feels like magic when you see it happen. 

The biggest gain is probably psychological. Before doing this, the prospect of squatting 70kg for 20 reps seemed insane. I told myself that I expected to fail somewhere in the mid-60s, and I was OK with that. It’s been instructive to learn that it really is possible to grind out one more rep, and then one more, and then another — even when it feels completely vile. It’s good to be taught that your physical limits are further away than you probably think, and that the two seconds of unpleasantness it takes to do that eighteenth rep (the worst rep) is eminently survivable.

Another mental shift, though one that’s general to every form of exercise I’ve done seriously, is this: doing something that changes the way you look can change the way you feel about how you look. Not as in “exercise makes you hotter, so you’ll like yourself more”. As in “seeing how your body adapts to stress will make you feel more kindly towards your body”. I recently read a book about the history of beauty which referred to “hours sweating in the gym” as a form of “trial” women go through, and this made me sad. There’s a big moral difference between the adversarial position of seeing your body as raw matter to be crafted (which I think is how some people do approach gym going), and seeing your body as yourself, responsive to the environment you’re in and the decisions you make. Your body was born to do, not just to be.

Should you do a 20-squat programme? If you’re new to weightlifting, it will probably be more horrible than helpful, so I wouldn’t recommend. But if you’re moderately experienced — perhaps you’ve done a few blocks of 5x5 — and interested in getting stronger, and looking to get bigger (or at least not likely to be distressed if you do get bigger), I think you should try it. You’ll definitely get better at squatting. And you’ll definitely get better at doing uncomfortable things for slightly longer than you think you can bear. Together, those can appreciably improve your life. The gallon of milk is entirely at your discretion.

1. Showing a draft version of this post to friends opened up a whole world of weird things people have been told about squats: apparently there are PTs out there instructing clients to “keep your back upright” when squatting. This is mad nonsense that will definitely stop you getting full depth and probably lead to you falling over. Starting Strength by Mark Rippetoe is a really useful resource for all things form (and also funny).