Deadlift Dice

I have always played around with the idea of having randomly generated workouts. In general, and also for specific exercises, variety to a point is useful and a good way to mix it up both mentally and physically. Crossfit makes a solid attempt at programming variety, but for me leaves a lot to be desired. Why not use dice and actually make a workout as random as possible?

The deadlift is one of my favorite exercises to do. It is fun, simple, and I can do relatively more on the deadlift than any other exercise (relative to my bodyweight and what someone of my experience should be able to do). Long story short, picking up heavy weight from the ground and dropping it is awesome. However, training the deadlift very hard can take a big toll on the body, and I actually find that my deadlift strength depends mostly on how much I weigh and not how often I train it or how much thought I put in to my programming. Therefore I still want to train the deadlift once per week, but I want to put as little mental effort in to my planning, and get rid of the stress of meeting any fixed benchmarks.

So the Deadlift is a perfect guinea pig for random training, and the alliteration 'Deadlift Dice' is very satisfying.

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'Deadlift Dice'

You need two die, preferably different colors. Or you can just roll one die twice.

Die/roll #1 – exercise selection
Die/roll #2 – rep scheme

roll die #1.
1 or 2 – conventional deadlift
3 or 4 – sumo deadlift
5 or 6 – snatch grip deadlift (or defecit deadlift)

roll die #2.
1 or 2 – volume
3 or 4 – speed/power
5 or 6 – intensity

volume = high sets, high reps = 5-8 sets of 5-10 reps
speed/power = high sets, low reps = 5-8 sets of 1-3 reps (focus on speed)
intensity = low sets, mid reps = 1-3 sets of 3-5 reps

Choose an appropriate weight yourself. These rep schemes are just examples.

Possible tweaks:
- If you don't like the deadlift variations, get rid of die #1 and just do a random rep scheme with your favorite variation.
- choose fewer deadlift variations or rep schemes, and distribute them across numbers 1-6.
- Choose more exercises or rep schemes and use a fancy die with more than six sides. Ask your neighborhood tabletop RPG player.

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This same concept could be applied to any other type of exercise, and also to running, biking, swimming, rowing, etc. Weight could also be chosen, although with some dependence on the rep scheme. Options could be unequally spread across the available numbers. The idea is that the planning work is only done once and then each training session all you have to do is roll the dice and do what they say.