I’ve always thought the idea of doing a special “birthday workout” yearly is a bit of a meme, but every year there I am thinking “I need to figure out what to do for my birthday”… This year was no different, and to top it off I’m turning 40 which is a milestone and even changes me to a Master’s Competitor in Powerlifting and Strongman. I had to do something good.

I went to Reddit and asked for some suggestions and even Instagram, people just kept screaming “birthday squats!!!” which is squatting your body weight for the as many reps as you are years old in one set. I know why people wanted to see this, they think it’s hysterical to make me do 40 reps of pretty much anything because lets face it, that’s a lot of reps, I’m old…

The harsh reality set in that I was going to have to do birthday squats, or at least something involving them, but this was 40 and I view birthday squats as cardio, so I had to find a way to make this interesting… This is what I came up with.

Birthday Powerlifting Meet:

The rules – You will do a MINIMUM of 40 reps on of your body weight on the 3 main powerlifting lifts in one set, in the order you’d do them in a competition. Prior to the doing each one of these sets you have to do a “buy in” double of the following weights:

• Squats – 2x Body weight
• Bench Press – 1.5x Body weight
• Deadlifts – 2.5x Body weight

After hitting these top doubles, you immediately strip the weight off and go into the “at least 40” set. The following rules applied for each lift as 40 reps unbroken wasn’t going to happen, my cardio wasn’t going to keep up and I just can’t do it with bench.

• Squats – Bar had to stay on your back, I elected to use the slightly harder safety squat bar because it was easier to leave on my shoulders when getting a few breaths during a very long set
• Bench Press – I gave myself re-racks with the caveat that I couldn’t take either hand of the bar at all during any time during the set. To be blunt, I would have been better resting the bar on my chest and removing my hands…
• Deadlifts – Straps allowed, both hands need to remain on the bar at all times

Given those parameters each session went like this.

Birthday Squats:

I’ve linked the video for anyone who wants to see. The top double was 370lbs which really wasn’t that heavy for me, it went easy. Once I got to the “birthday” set, my strategy was to do 10-15 reps, breath a little, do 5-10 more, wash, rinse, repeat etc…

This is pretty much what I did with the only change of I tried a couple of sessions of just hitting doubles or triples, then breathing, etc… All in all I pushed this for more than the birthday minimum of 40 reps and got a total of 45!

Birthday Bench Press:

Also linked. Top double was 280 (rounding up) which is usually around a 5-6 rep max for me, but right now I have a bad left shoulder and had to keep my fingers crossed I wouldn’t aggravate it because this is right around the weight where it starts to flare up… Luckily for me, it didn’t impact me much, though these reps didn’t feel great, I still got them up and got them up clean.

Now down to the birthday set at 185, my strategy was to push out as many reps as I possibly could at first, rack then try and hit sets of 5. The double at 280 for sure impacted how far I could go on the first set, I was expecting 30, I only got to 25. This is when I found out that the “don’t take your hands off the bar” wasn’t a great resting strategy. While I was able to get my breath doing this, my arms felt like they were building up more lactic acid then they were if I was pushing. Also, I could tell my cardio was still impacted by the birthday squats because I’ve never gotten this winded benching…

Still, I pushed through and finished with 41 reps.

Birthday Deadlifts:

Honestly, I had no clue how these were going to go. My top double was 465 which was a weight I was very comfortable with and the 185lbs for the birthday set was the furthest compared too the other two lifts, so theoretically this should have been the easiest except for the obvious.

My legs were taxed already from birthday squats and my cardio was clearly effected by the combination of birthday squats/bench press… Deadlifts we’re going to be a gut check…

For the top double I decided to do these with no straps and my normal form, then grab the straps for the longer set rather than deal with grip during a very long duration set on a super humid day. The double went easy, the time it took me to strip almost 300lbs gave me a little rest, on to the birthday set.

I wasn’t sure whether or not to take an approach closer to squats, or bench for this and figured once I got into it, I’d know. This is exactly what happened.

The toll already put on my body from the other two lifts was clearly making an impact, while the weight moved comically fast I still had lactic acid in my legs from squatting and my lungs were pissed off at me for putting them through this a 3rd time during the day. I needed to take a strategy similar to squats to get through this…

I went through my first few waves of 15 reps, then into smaller sets when all the sudden it hit me, I completely lost count where I was…

I thought I was at about 25 reps but wasn’t sure if I was at 25 or 20… So I ground out 15 more reps and still wasn’t sure. The last thing I wanted to do was go back, watch the film and count 39 reps, so I did what anyone else in the world would have done: I got my breath, stood up and just pulled the bar as many times as I could before my breath ran out again and some how mustered another 10 reps.

To my surprise, when I watched the tape I realized I was way off in my count, I didn’t hit 39 reps, or 40, or 45 as I thought. I had hit 55 total reps and was finished way before I realized…

What I learned from this:

For starters, if I’m ever going to do this again, I probably should specifically train for it…

Second is that this is more of a cardio/endurance challenge than a strength one, but being strong did help. If you look at my top doubles they netted me a total of 1115lbs which equates to the powerlifting scores below and 6x bodyvweight for a total:

The final thing I learned from this is that these challenges may seem stupid, but there’s something mentally satisfying to completing them. My first thought after finishing the deadlifts (after “OMG I can’t breath”) was “I couldn’t have done this when I was 20 or 30”. As is normal, I’ve had some mixed feelings about hitting 40, they went away quickly after I did this challenge.

In the end, I’m really glad I did this. For some reason it took a very large mental load off of me and the sense of accomplishment afterwards felt great. Now with all that being said, will I do this again next year????

God no!!!!!!!