Bryce Lane’s 50/20: how to have it all, in just twenty minutes
50/20 is one of the hidden gems of the online physical culture community. It never ‘took off’ the way so many other programs have, but those who use it know just how effective (and fun) it can be. While extremely result-producing, 50/20 is also easy to overdo, so it should come with a user manual. This is my best attempt at read before using.
Bryce wrote his original concept after reading some articles Charles Staley wrote about EDT, escalating density training. The idea was to shoot for a certain number of sets/reps in a PR zone, generally by supersetting two antagonistic movements back and forth for 15 minutes or so. It was a stripped down, highly adjustable concept for bodybuilding.
In 2002 Bryce wrote the article Have It All! saying that this was an idea for “one workout” that could grant work capacity, usable strength and endurance and add bulk given the right food intake as well. I’ll include Bryce’s own basic explanation to start us off.
Here's how it works. For twenty minutes you do as many reps as you can of your chosen compound exercise, squats, deadlifts, power cleans or snatches, clean & presses etc. You do this twice a week. You use the same weight throughout the twenty minutes. About 75-80% of your gym-maximum in good clean form is fine to start. Begin with something you can easily do and add as you can. Do sets of twos, threes or even fives or tens, your choice, mix it up if you need to. Do a set and when you are able to focus again, do another. When you can get the right number of reps in twenty minutes then up the weight 5-10% next time and work up again. I like 10% jumps since I tend to do better with a bigger drop in volume and more of a challenge with the weight. However if you like the more gradual approach then by all means, use it. I try to shoot for fifty in twenty minutes since that number both keeps up my heart rate and breathing and makes it possible for me to use heavy weight in the 75-85% range. However the number you choose could just as well be anywhere between 20 (anything less than this isn't really doing much) and 100 reps (higher than this and the weight may be too small). If you can do 100 reps with 1.5 x bodyweight in 20 min. in the squat then you are one very conditioned individual with plenty of useful strength as well.
There you have it. Pick a big compound movement, take a moderately heavy weight and bang out 50 reps in 20 minutes. When you hit 50, add weight. Bryce wrote elsewhere that 50 was the end goal, and maybe you could start with something that you can hit for 35ish total reps and work up to grinding out the whole 50, and it should be a major effort to do so.
This is quite different from a normal sets/reps approach. Here, the sets reps and rest are all up to you, if you do more total work in a set time period, you’ve gotten better. It is very possible to have a planned approach here, and I think that in many cases this can be a wiser method. However, you should initially try it without preplanned sets and reps just to get a feel for the concept.
The first time you try this:
Pick a big upper body movement and a big lower body movement. Upper body = presses, pullups, dips, bench etc. and lower can be any kind of squat, or Romanian deadlift. Don’t try deadlifts from the floor your first time.
Take your working 10RM in your two chosen movements. This should be 10 clean reps done without grinding, gritting your teeth or excessive pausing between reps.
The split will be upper/lower. Upper body day, lower body day, rest. After the 50/20, fill in your gaps with a simple 3-5 sets of 3-5 reps in your ‘alternate’ movement pattern. That is, if you do bench for 50/20 then do rows or some other compound pull after; if you do squats for 50/20 then some hinging is in order.
Once you’ve warmed up however you want, that 10rm weight is what you will use for the whole 20 minute period. Do as many reps as you can without stopping or pausing. Ideally, stop when the first rep starts to slow down a bit. Rest as much as you want to and go again. Same thing—stop when the rep quality changes. Rinse and repeat for the rest of the allotted time. Got more than 50? Great! Add some weight. 5% if you want a similar experience and 10% if you’re feeling bold and don’t mind getting surprised by a notably bigger load next time.
After 3 weeks of this, take a week off to see where you’re at. That’s 6 sessions with each movement and you should have PR’d either your total rep count, or moved up in weight a bit every single time. If you didn’t, you likely pushed too hard or went too heavy at the outset.
If you kept up with the 2 upper and 2 lower days a week for 3 weeks, a 4th week off is mandatory. This doesn’t mean that you can’t workout, you can do one of three things:
Work up to a near max set of 2-5 reps in your lifts on the first training day of the week. If it felt good, go for a conservative 1RM on the second day ( 9-9.5RPE).
Find your working weight for two movements that you’ll use for the next cycle. If you’re doing the same movement, switch it up somehow. Parallel bar dips to ring dips. Bench to floor press or low incline. High bar squat to front squat or zercher.
Take the week entirely off, go for some walks and do some mobility. This would be a great time to find anything that feels out of whack so you can adjust accordingly.
As you run the cycle again, you have two setup options. First is to repeat what you did before. Don’t clockwork it out, just go by feel and keep the sets relatively high quality. Second is to do a sets/reps on a timer system. One simple plan—10 sets of 5 done every other minute for the 50 in 20. The other is alternating sets of 2 and 3 every single minute, that’ll also get you there. The thing about these is that you will at some point end up grinding some reps to hit your numbers.
Whichever one you choose, follow this simple rule: if you don’t progress for two sessions in a row, drop back. Thus—if you don’t progress in either your rep count or the load you use for two consecutive workouts of upper or two consecutive of lower, make it easier. This can either be cutting the weight used by 10%, or aiming for 10 fewer reps than you’ve been hitting. From here, be honest with yourself. If you feel good the next time around shoot for what you did before the little backoff. Or you can take a few sessions to add reps/weight to get back on track with a bit of a running start.
If you are very strict with yourself and this rule of backing off, chances are you won’t have to do the fourth week deload. You should still switch up the movements every 4-6 weeks (at the most) and don’t hesitate to take time off if it does feel necessary.
Variations on the weekly split:
I suggest starting with upper/lower. But you can also do push/pull/off, or push/pull/lower/off. In the former you’d pair presses with squats and upper body pull with hinges. In the latter, both push and pull are upper body and the lower body day is either a squat or a hinge, possibly just working on one for a while, possibly alternating.
Given limited days, you can train just twice a week. Two days of two big movements for 20 minutes each. Or, do both movements on one day and just the upper body movement on the second day, throwing in whatever else you need to feel good in the second time block. Downsizing and doing something like push/hinge one day and pull/squat the other with 15 minute blocks for each is another possibility.
Variations on layout:
Unilateral movements are great to do with 50/20 to make it more of a conditioning effort. Split squats or single leg deadlifts—left leg minute one right leg minute two. Or single arm rows, dumbbell bench, kb press, what have you. (This is a good place to note that Bryce is the origin of the ‘B squat’, which is also called the kickstand squat/deadlift.)
You can do an upper body push/pull for 20 minutes, doing 10 sets of each.
For higher volume it is absolutely okay to shoot for more than 50 reps. Personally, 20 sets of 5 pullups in 20 minutes is a great jumping-off point when I’m shooting for more advanced stuff. You could also do ladders here, going 1,2,3 or 2,3,5 for the 20 minutes. Combine the two—ladders of a push and a pull (they can be the same number of rungs but different reps, to match difficulty). For kettlebell swings, you could do sets of 10-20 every minute.
For more of a strength base, 20 singles is great as well. Steve Shafley has written about doing this for squats or deadlifts. This is less of the idea of 50/20 and won’t lend itself to developing as much endurance, but it’s another way to take advantage of the setup. You’ll still have your heart rate elevated the whole time with a big full body movement.
Movement ideas:
I’ve written a good deal about different movements already, but here are a few other thoughts that may help.
The deadlift deal. Bryce was against using deadlifts from the floor for 50/20 because he and others tended to burn out quickly on them. I tend to agree with this, but if you pick a variant that’s lower load (snatch grip, clean pull), or lower stress (trap bar, jefferson lift, block pull), that helps. Being able to drop every rep helps, too. So does being the sort of lifter who can ‘squeeze’ the bar off of the floor and doesn’t have to yank on it. I think if you have two to three of those four elements you can make the DL work with this format. You could also cut the reps, I’ve heard of 30 reps in 20 (10x3 every other minute) as being workable with the right weight on the bar.
If you’re doing weightlifting movements, stick with simpler variants. Power snatches instead of full snatches. Push press instead of C&J. And so forth.
Kettlebells—ideal for 50/20. You can use complexes if they’re simple (not a ‘flow’ of 18 different exercises). Clean and press, or clean/press or push press/front squat, are excellent. If you do a single clean before each set, it’s very possible to do presses day one and squats day two, with cleans on both days.
Odd objects—racing the clock lifting a weird heavy thing is addictive. As Bryce wrote, “the implement just begs you into the fight.” Shoulder it, bearhug squat it, load it to a platform or lift it overhead. You can use natural stones, atlas stones, kegs full of sand/water, sandbags, or a stack of bumper plates on a loading pin. Try it with a heavy grappling dummy! Have fun with it.
You can do carries for 20 minutes. Either choose a distance to be each ‘set’, or go by feel again and rest when you feel quality decreasing. Keep track of weight for total distance traveled. You can also do explosive sled pushes or pulls, or short, heavy drags. Push a car for distance using the quality set/20 min format.
Very high endurance bodyweight exercises. Doing bodyweight squats, pushups, rows or light kb swings can fit in here just fine as well. Instead of 50 reps you might shoot for 200-400.
Some examples:
I’ve used 50/20 or a similar variant with pullups, Romanian deadlifts, barbell presses, dumbbell bench, back squats, front squats, sandbag carries, and I think floor handstand pushups at one point. Overhead presses never really worked for me. RDLs were great and for a while directly affected my 1RM in a good way. Squats didn’t really help my heavier squats or max too much but I felt really solid doing them. Having legs with some good work capacity always feels great to me. Pullups, if you’re used to doing a lot of pullups, work well in 50/20 both with high reps, and using weight to keep the reps at 50 total.
One guy messaged me referring to an older article about 50/20 that I wrote in 2013 and said “I’ve basically been doing it the entire time since then” (about eight years!!) sticking to 10x5 on sandbag rows, sandbag squats, or sandbag presses. He also did rope pullups and some heavy carries/drags. He said that the key was to avoid entirely killing yourself every workout and I agree. That said, if you want to try the OG version and really push it on every set, by all means give it a shot. Just be sure to keep an eye on recovery and deloads.
Extras:
You are going to be putting some things on the back burner here. I mentioned that initially doing a quick 3-5 sets of 3-5 reps with whatever you’re leaving out would be a good place to start. Here are some other options, too.
Do the light 3-5x3-5 thing, and switch antagonistic movements every cycle. Pull and squat and then after a deload, press and hinge as your 50/20 lifts.
EDT for the other things as well. Do a 5 minute time block for the opposite of whatever you just did for 50/20.
Take a break on loading the deemphasized movements and do relevant mobility and patterning every day. If you’re doing heavy lower body pulls for 50/20, take 5-10 minutes to do some different lunges and squat mobility every morning.
Dan John’s Easy Strength concept for the other things, every day. Let’s say you’re doing presses and squats for 50/20. So every day you’d do 2x5, 5,3,2, or 1x10 on some rows, a couple sets of heavy ab work, and then 50-75 kb swings.
Screw the extras, we’re doing the Pavel thing. Here you’d do nothing but 50/20 for two or even one movement(s). Some good choices for this would be:
-odd object lift to shoulder
-Deficit snatch grip pull
-Trap bar deadlift
-push press (any implement)
-Natural press, a single arm press incorporating some side lean and a bit of leg drive
-Cheat row from the floor
-thruster either from a front or back squat (or one shoulder, with a bag)
-Bearhug squat
For just one, any form of overhead lift but especially with an odd object. With a barbell, reverse grip hang clean and press, squat clean + thruster, power snatch + overhead squat, clean grip muscle snatch from a deficit. Two dumbbell clean and press/push press with the dbs outside your legs is severely underrated. Do this with thick handles and you’d turn into some kind of local deity.
In closing—
50/20 is a truly excellent system that does indeed allow you to accomplish an awful lot relative to the time that you put into it. Like any autoregulated format, the better you know yourself and the more honest you can be, the better it’ll go. Hopefully this was a solid intro that had useful ideas for more advanced folks as well. If you tried 50/20 and did something especially weird/fun/interesting, I’d love to hear about it!
