5x5 Training: The Ultimate Strength and Muscle Building Guide

From the very first time you stepped into a gym and began asking questions to a personal trainer who looked like he knew what he was doing, you’ve been completing eight to 10 reps of every strength training lift in sets of three.  

“That’s how true bodybuilders have always done it,” the personal trainer told you. “If you want to experience rapid muscle growth, that’s the way to go.”

And they were right; your muscle size increased consistently for quite a while. However, you also couldn’t help but to notice that the biggest and strongest guy in the gym didn’t stick to this routine at all. Sure, he lifted heavy weights, but he did it with fewer reps, and there were days that he plainly lifted far less weight than others. 

Seeing this guy complete five sets of five reps of the same barbell lifts — and continuing to build muscle all the while — has you questioning everything you’ve been told about strength training. 

So now your real question is, what’s the deal with the 5x5 workout this guy is doing? More importantly, if you reshape your tried and true method of weight training to follow his example, will you achieve the same results? 

What is 5x5 Training?

Although it is not the most common method employed for bodybuilding, the 5x5 workout approach is one of the basic foundations of many strength training programs. In other words, there are some subtle differences between training to build strength and training for increased muscle mass, and the two methodologies don’t overlap as neatly as you might think they would..

Both new and experienced lifters routinely struggle with comprehending the fact that adding muscle doesn’t always equate to adding strength, or vice versa. This is especially true when an athlete is training specifically with strength gains in mind, and doesn’t particularly care about maximizing muscle size. 

Eventually, this all makes sense once you deepen your understanding of how muscle mass and strength are increased, and how it’s possible to build the former without automatically increasing the latter.

Where did the 5x5 workout come from?

Credit for the creation of the 5x5 workout is commonly granted to strength and conditioning pioneer Bill Starr. The basic structure of the workout was intended to challenge athletes to consistently challenge their peak strength level each week, and train their entire body during each workout session, all while getting sufficient training volume and rest.  

In order to accomplish this, Starr added further guidance to his 5x5 workout. Specifically, the workout consisted of what Starr considered to be “The Big Three” exercises: Power clean, bench press, and back squat. 

Beyond that, the workout also factored in ascending weight totals on two fronts. During each workout, the amount of weight being lifted increased over the course of each five-rep set. Second, the workouts were divided into heavy, light, and medium days — in that order. 

After the heavy day, the athlete must back off and lift with comparatively light weights. The weight increases during the medium workout, and then peaks again so that you’re lifting with heavy weights during every third workout.

Key principles of the 5x5 workout 

The guiding principles behind the 5x5 strategy is that it overloads the muscle with significant volume — which slightly exceeds the lower level of the eight-to-10-rep approach — while inviting the athlete to lift intensely by exclusively employing multi-joint compound movements.

Moreover, this approach naturally encourages the trainee to complete a greater number of peak-intensity reps throughout the week, and trains the entire body with a frequency that exceeds programs that get around to training each muscle group once per week. 

Frequent total-body training is often omitted from programs that include a high number of isolation exercises that involve movement across only one joint.

Benefits of 5x5 Training

There are many benefits to the 5x5 training program that will make it both appealing and effective as you attempt to boost your size. However, one of the hallmarks of the plan is that you are never lifting the same weight in consecutive sets.

For some people, it can seem counterproductive to intentionally scale back your intensity level on two-thirds of your training days. You can’t argue with results, though, and there are reasons why this approach is so effective at building power.

Strength gains

The most obvious advantage to 5x5 training is that it encourages you to challenge the peak strength level of your entire body at least once per week. As a result of utilizing this measured approach to attacking strength, the 5x5 workout has been proven — both anecdotally and through studies — to increase peak strength levels.

Studies show that high-load workouts with fewer reps are more effective at increasing a trainee’s strength than lower-load workouts with higher reps. (1) This should be a clear indication that quality is superior to quantity when it comes to building strength.

This is further underscored by the studies that show how single sets of six repetitions performed two to three times per week at 70 to 85 percent of an athlete’s single rep maximum are still sufficient to increase overall strength. (2) 

While this doesn’t necessarily mean that a single-set, low-volume  approach is the most effective approach to strength gains, it does reveal the benefits of regularly lifting with intensity.

Muscle hypertrophy

Even though the 5x5 workout is geared more toward increasing strength than growing muscle, studies reflect that training strategies that closely resemble the 5x5 approach to weight training have prompted significant increases in muscle mass along with strength.

In one study in particular, a group of trained athletes who completed seven sets of three repetitions with heavy weight had equivalent muscle growth to a group that trained specifically for hypertrophy using three sets of 10 reps. Moreover, the group that trained for strength also acquired superior strength in the process. (3)

Improved fitness levels

With increases in both strength and muscle mass come enhanced physical performance. The results of the 5x5 approach enable your body to bring more force to bear during athletic endeavors. 

The outcome is an elevated overall fitness level, and a body that is better prepared for the rigors of sports setting. Training for hypertrophy doesn’t always translate neatly to athleticism, but targeting explosive power during training will increase your ability alongside your size.

Suitability for different fitness levels 

There are several features of the 5x5 workout that make it ideal for new lifters, intermediate lifters, and experienced lifters. Because the trainee is always beginning with a starting weight well below the peak weight level of the day, they are able to gauge their ability to complete the workout as written, and can make adjustments to the weight as needed. 

Moreover, the heavy-light-medium approach to lifting reduces the overall intimidation factor, as the trainee only needs to be prepared to push their muscles to their peak fatigue level on one day each week, and they are provided with four total rest days.

To put it another way, while this workout program required trainees to be disciplined, part of that discipline is the requirement that the trainee has the option to stay home and not train at all for the majority of the week. 

Because of this, the 5x5 approach follows an efficiency model that benefits people who prefer to spend the least number of hours at a gym, and would like to devote the fewest days to working out.

Convenience

Taken in its original form, the 5x5 training program, the 5x5 workout requires a barbell, a weight bench, and a squat rack, so the equipment requirement is already minimal.

Now, if you choose to supplement or substitute lifts in relation to the three foundational lifts included in the original, there are ways to configure the 5x5 routine so that only a barbell is needed to maintain the core benefits of the routine.

This makes the 5x5 plan very simple to complete in most gyms, or to purchase equipment in order to complete the workout at home. This is true even if you decide to replace the barbell with a set of two dumbbells for certain exercises.

Fearlessness

By essentially halving the targeted rep range from 10 down to five, and only requiring the person lifting to reach peak output for one set out of every five during only one of three workouts each week, it eliminates much of the fear from the training process.

This doesn’t mean that you should lift without concentrating and focusing on what you’re doing, because it’s important to remain focused on every single repetition. However, it does mean that you can spend fewer lifts and repetitions worried about the dangers of incurring an injury because you overextended yourself.

The Original Lifts

Yes, you can theoretically pick any exercises you like and follow the 5x5 training protocol. However, the original 5x5 workout was a full-body workout consisting of three compound exercises that collectively  incorporate every major muscle group in your body to at least some degree.

So if you want to get a taste of what the original 5x5 routine consisted of, or if you want to ensure that your workouts all contain the nucleus of what the 5x5 workout was intended to be, you’ll need to include the following exercises in your workouts.

Back Squat

Often referred to as the “King of Exercises,” the back squat is one of the preeminent muscle building moves for the lower body, while also assisting you greatly in the area of core stabilization.

On top of training your legs, the back squat also has a reputation for being a major testosterone booster. Therefore, training yourself with squats can be a way to increase the intensity with which you can approach all of your other lifts.

Technique and form

1. Place the weight bar against your upper back and shoulders, and step back and away from the squat rack.

2. Bend at the knees and waist and extend your hips backwards to lower the weight toward the ground.

3. Press through your heels to raise your body back to its original position.

Bench Press

The bench press is a favorite exercise of many people because it both boosts and tests upper-body strength. There’s a solid likelihood that no single one rep max has ever been requested more frequently than a person’s maximum bench press weight, because it is such a cherished measurement of power.

Because a heavy bench press weight is prized by many, many people are more likely to shorten their range of motion and sacrifice form on this exercise than any other simply so that they can claim a higher performance total. 

For this reason, it’s important to make sure you maintain a full range of motion throughout the exercise so that you’re not cheating your way toward a heavier weight that your muscles aren’t prepared for.

Technique and form

1. Lie flat on a weight bench with your hands grasping a barbell at a position slightly wider than shoulder width apart, and with your arms fully extended.

2. Bend at the elbows to lower the bar toward your chest until it makes contact.

3. Press through your chest and arms and straighten your elbows to raise the bar back to its starting position.

Power Clean

The power clean is fantastic exercise for developing pulling power in both the upper body and lower body. That’s because you’re simultaneously engaging your arms and legs to yank a heavy weight from its starting position on the ground all the way up to your shoulders.

Despite its benefits, a power clean is a highly technical and complex movement, so it might be worth your while to practice with an empty bar, or work your way through light warmup sets before you begin to add weight to the bar.

Technique and form

1. Begin with the barbell on the ground, and with your hands holding the bar with an overhand grip, in a position slightly wider than shoulder width.

2. Simultaneously press your feet into the ground and pull from your back and shoulders to bend your elbows and raise the bar to shoulder level.

3. Extend your elbows underneath the bar, and allow the shaft of the bar to come to rest on your fingers, supported by your shoulders.

4. Lower the weight back to its starting position.

The Additional Lifts

There’s no rule stipulating that you can’t deviate behind Starr’s three main exercises when you participate in 5x5 workouts, although there should be some adherence to the idea that you include at least three big lifts that are compound exercises, and that each of your major muscle groups is involved in the workout. 

With this in mind, here are a few compound lifts that are commonly added to 5x5 workouts, or added to the workouts as supplemental exercises. 

Please bear in mind that some of these exercises can be more challenging when it comes to total weight calculations because they require adding additional weight to your body weight.

Overhead Press

The overhead press specifically targets your shoulder muscles — and to a lesser extent, your triceps — in ways that other barbell exercises simply can’t. This makes it one of the additions to a 5x5 workout program that fills in one of the perceived gaps of the original routine.

While the overhead press is an excellent shoulder exercise that also places some focus on the triceps, it is not capable of targeting your chest. 

In that respect, it makes more sense to use the overhead press as an addition to a workout routine that includes the bench press as opposed to a replacement for it.

Technique and form

1. From a standing position, hold the bar at shoulder level, with your elbows bent downwards toward the floor.

2. Press from your shoulders and extend the bar to raise it over your head.

3. Bend at the elbows to lower the bar back to its starting point.

Barbell Row

Because the power clean is such a complex lift, the barbell row is a far simpler substitute that focuses exclusively on the pulling activity of the back through a far simpler pattern of movement.

In addition to training the muscles of your back, the barbell row also challenges your biceps and rear deltoids to some degree. This helps to increase its attractiveness within a total-body training setting, since it reaches muscles that aren’t accounted for through the other lifts.

The tradeoff is that this is the barbell row is a far less explosive move that doesn’t involve the legs nearly as much as the power clean would, so take that into consideration if you wish to prioritize lower body fitness.

Technique and form

1. With an overhand grip, grab a barbell with your arms and knees bent and raise it off the floor with straight arms so that your back is slightly arched.

2. Bend at your elbows to raise the bar to your chest, pausing briefly when it makes contact.

3. Extend your elbows to lower the bar back to its starting point.

Pull Up

Because pull ups are a bodyweight movement that even strong people often have difficulty with, they can be challenging to include in a 5x5 program with the mathematical precision of other movements. 

However, if you are sufficiently strong that you can make pull-ups more challenging by adding weight to them — either by holding it between your legs or dangling it from your waist with a belt and chain — you can make pull-ups the primary back-builder of your 5x5 workout.

Technique and form

1. Grab an elevated bar with an overhand grip, and with your hands slightly wider than shoulder width apart.

2. Bend at your elbows and pull through your arms and back to raise your body off the floor, and lift your chest toward the bar.

3. Extend at the elbows and relax your back to lower your body back to its original position.

Bodyweight Dip

Much like the pull up, a bodyweight dip can be included in the 5x5 training methodology if you can add enough weight to your body to enable your sets to fall within the five repetition range and produce the desired effect.

Unlike pull ups, bodyweight dips directly train your chest, triceps, and to a lesser extent your shoulders. This can make them a suitable chest exercise replacement if you find yourself without a rack on which to elevate a barbell. 

Technique and form

1. Raise yourself onto two parallel bars with your body suspended between the bars.

2. Bend at your elbows and lean forward to allow your body to descend between the bars to chest level.

3. Press through your chest and triceps to raise your body back to its starting point.

Deadlift

While a back squat places your entire muscular system beneath a heavy weight and asks you to press it off the ground, a deadlift requires you to use your muscles in a similar movement pattern to pull a heavy weight off the ground.

For a great many people, it makes very little difference whether they train with a deadlift or a squat as long as their lower body gets trained with a heavy compound movement. Because of this, the deadlift is an excellent squat replacement if you don’t have a squat rack available.

In either case, you may want to consider wearing a weightlifting belt, because both squats and deadlifts place incredible stress on the lower back, and particularly when massive quantities of weight are being lifted.

Technique and form

1. Begin with the barbell on the ground, and with your hands holding the bar with an overhand grip, or with an alternating grip, in a position slightly wider than shoulder width.

2. Press your feet into the ground and straighten your legs and waist to extend your body into an upright position while you hold the bar.

3. Bend at your waist and knees to lower the weight back to its starting position.

The 5x5 Workout Plan

To be clear, most of the magic of the 5x5 workout is in its proper execution over an extended period of time, which means you need to have a long term commitment to the precise design of the program. 

Once you begin the program, you’ll need to make regular mathematical calculations if you want to take the program seriously. 

No, you don’t need to be spot on with your math in order to achieve the benefits of the program. However, if your ultimate goal is to increase strength in a steady, quantifiable way, it would be advisable to follow the program to the letter.

Structure

It becomes simpler to comprehend the structure of a 5x5 training plan if you begin with the framework of the first workout. Once you have a sense for how the first workout of each week unfolds, you can see how the next two workouts fall in line, and lead into the workouts of the following week.

No matter what your first exercise is on the heavy lifting day, the important thing is to begin with 60 percent of the set’s maximum weight, and then you’ll add weight at a rate of 10 percentage points per set until you achieve your maximum weight by the final set.

To be clear, when you are adding weight, you are not calculating how much weight to add based on your one rep max. Instead, you are adding weight until you reach the maximum weight you think you could lift five times after you’ve completed four prior sets.

The second training day is said to be performed with light weight, but light is a highly relative term. Your peak lifting weight on your light day should be 80 of the maximum weight you used on the heavy day. 

Therefore, if your maximum weight for the barbell row on your heavy day was 100 pounds, you would work your way up to 80 pounds in approximately 10 pound increments, over the course of five sets.

Similarly, on the third lifting day — the moderate day — you would work your way up to 90 percent of the peak from your heavy day. To stick with our example from the barbell row, you would probably start with 50 pounds, and work your way up to 90 pounds.

The Original 5x5 Workout

The original 5x5 workout was very simple, as it required trainees to complete five sets of five reps of each exercise — power clean, bench press, and back squat — after they completed a few warmup sets.

Starr was not a stickler for the ordering of the exercises. He thought it was okay if you completed five reps of one exercise, then moved on to the next exercise and finished one full circuit of each exercise at 60 percent of the targeted maximum before you would add weight across the board to each exercise.

A Contemporary 5x5 Workout 

The modern 5x5 workout makes allowances for the many people who believe there is an increased risk of an injury if they perform power cleans, which is a very technical and potentially dangerous lift if you don’t execute it with proper form. 

In these cases, it is common to see barbell rows added in place of power cleans, with the overhead press also included to target the shoulders more directly.

In addition, it is also common to substitute deadlifts for squats, particularly in cases when someone is training at home and doesn’t own a squat rack. So a modern alternative to the original 5x5 routine would consist of the deadlift, barbell row, bench press, and overhead press exercises, with each exercise done for five sets of five reps.

The Weekly Schedule

The configuration of your week is absolutely critical, as the proper execution of the 5x5 workout will necessitate that you insert at least one rest day after each workout, and ideally two rest days after between your moderate day and your heavy day. 

Because of the spacing between workouts that is emblematic of a good program, a training system built on 5x5 principles will commonly take on a Monday, Wednesday Friday training pattern, with the weekends being free of any form of lifting. 

As long as you have at least one rest day between each workout, and two days off preceding the heavy lifting day, the pattern still holds true. With this in mind, Sunday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday are also common strength training schedules.

Progression and Plateaus

Because there is so much math involved in the progression of the 5x5 strength program, it can be easy for the ultimate strategy behind building strength and achieving muscle gains to get lost in the numbers. 

Fortunately for all of us, Bill Starr baked some principles into his famous workout regiment that will help you know the right moments to slide more weight onto the bar.

How to Increase Weights

If you could boil down the entire strategy of 5x5 protocol into a single performance goal, it would be that you would want to build strength so that you could add weight to the heaviest lifts of your next workout with heavy weights. In order to achieve that means, there are very precise instructions for how you should increase weight from one workout to the next.

In this case, the only time you will add weight to your workout is when you are unable to complete all five sets of five reps during your heaviest training day. If all reps are completed with good form, you should add 10 pounds to the peak bar weight on your heavy day, and recalculate all of the weights of your barbell lifts throughout the week based on this newly established peak.  

Contending with Plateaus

While breaking plateaus is  a frequent struggle of resistance training, the 5x5 approach factors this difficulty into the configuration of each weekly training regimen. 

Keeping in mind that the topmost weight should only be increased if the heaviest five reps are completed with a normal amount of struggle, it can be a normal feature of this workout to remain at the same weight for a few weeks while your muscles adapt.

On the flip side, if you are overly ambitious and fail to get three reps at your new peak weight after a weight increase, you are advised to cut back the new weight by five pounds, or potentially even to revert back to the prior weight until you are able to clear that level with little difficulty. 

While it is good to be ambitious, it is wise to ensure that you can execute all of the movement patterns safely before lifting more weight.

Nutrition and Recovery

Lifting weights with high intensity is one of the most successful strategies for adding strength and muscle to your body, but there is far more to the process than hoisting the heaviest weights you can. 

A fair amount of the recipe for achieving your training goals requires you to be diligent about how you manage your time and efforts outside of the weight room, whether it’s located inside of a commercial gym, or contained within your own home.

Importance of Proper Nutrition

If you intend to build muscle efficiently, you need to have a nutrition regiment that complements the hard work you’re doing in the weight room. In particular, you should consume an abundance of protein, and potentially look for a protein supplement to boost your protein intake even further.

Studies have demonstrated the capacity of protein to not only accelerate the rate at which we repair muscle tissue in between workouts, but also its ability to increase bone density and alleviate muscle soreness. In fact, without proper nutrition, some of your best efforts with a barbell in your hand may be entirely for naught.

Recovery Tips 

In addition to optimizing your nutrition to accelerate your muscle growth, making the most of your rest periods is also part of an optimal strategy for helping you get through the 5x5 training regimen. 

Both sleep and rest have proven to be critical for hastening muscle recovery. So while it may be instinctive for you to attempt to find something physical to do, your wisest course of action is to capitalize on your rest periods so that you can maximize your strength and muscle growth.

The Numerical Path to Size and Strength

By now, you can hopefully see why the 5x5 training approach has led to rapid strength improvement for many of the world’s most powerful athletes, and is still a baseline system used to enhance the strength of many of the strongest athletes of the modern era. 

If you wish to experience rapid increase in muscle size and functional strength, the 5x5 workout is certainly worth a try. Its process has been proven to work time and time again, and it is an excellent method to use if you want to assess your present status, and reliably push your way to improvement. 

References

1. Schoenfeld BJ, Grgic J, Ogborn D, Krieger JW. Strength and Hypertrophy Adaptations Between Low- vs. High-Load Resistance Training: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis. J Strength Cond Res. 2017 Dec;31(12):3508-3523. doi: 10.1519/JSC.0000000000002200. PMID: 28834797.

2. Androulakis-Korakakis P, Fisher JP, Steele J. The Minimum Effective Training Dose Required to Increase 1RM Strength in Resistance-Trained Men: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis. Sports Med. 2020 Apr;50(4):751-765. doi: 10.1007/s40279-019-01236-0. PMID: 31797219.

3. Schoenfeld BJ, Ratamess NA, Peterson MD, Contreras B, Sonmez GT, Alvar BA. Effects of different volume-equated resistance training loading strategies on muscular adaptations in well-trained men. J Strength Cond Res. 2014 Oct;28(10):2909-18. doi: 10.1519/JSC.0000000000000480. PMID: 24714538.