Creeping Death – John Meadows

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The most popular program of all time in my arsenal has been Creeping Death. I think it’s time we brought it back with a few twists!

Creeping Death was pretty sadistic in the fact that it didn’t wave volume or intensity, it was just flat out brutal. We will structure this one similarly however, I will give you some flexibility should you need some deload time during it. There are also some other twists I think you will like.

Program Duration and Split

First, this is also a 12 week old school push, pull, leg program! As is the case with me normally, I do things a little differently than the norm though.

Notice I do pull before push. That is because it makes more sense to me to give your lower back a break between leg and back training base days. I would hate to schedule squats and a deadlift version on consecutive days. On pump days it’s not a big deal.

I also have rear delts on push day even though it’s really a pull muscle, simply because I like for the entire delt to be pumped at once.

The original Creeping Death had a heavy emphasis on chest, back, and hams, but this one is going to allow for more focus should you want to focus on other areas.

Here is how it is set up

The weeks are written as 6 days of training. That is however NOT what I expect most to do. I want most of you to drop one of the pump days. This would make it a 5 day a week program just like the original Creeping Death program. You can drop your biggest strong point to focus on weak points, or heck, drop something you just hate to train if you just get more joy out of other bodyparts!

You could flip flop the pump days too and make the first 2-3 days pump days and the last 2-3 days base days. Generally, people rest more on the weekend, so I put base days early in week. Just know you can make that change if you choose to.

You will see all the sample splits included in the program.

Overload Method

In our last program, The Gamma Bomb, we used training volume increases as our primary overload method couple with heavy duty nasty pump work.

For this program our volume is steady, and we are using increased reps as our primary overload method on given base exercises. These exercises rotate out every 4 weeks roughly. We continue to really hammer bloodflow/pump work to augment this.

Proper Intensity

It is also critical to work at the right level of intensity regarding going to failure. Going too hard or too easy can compromise results. I have taken the guesswork out of this and will give you an “RPE” on every exercise to tell you how close to failure you should go.

Follow the RPE suggestion for each exercise to ensure you are training at the correct intensity level.

Proper Form

As usual, we include YouTube links to ensure you can see movements performed to help you master form and technique. 

Those are a few of the highlights, now let’s get to work!