High Reps - More to it Than You Think
The term high rep training usually conjures up images of skinny,stringy muscles devoid of much in the way of size and development.
Weaklings engaged in hopelessly light weight pansy workouts.
What self respecting hard core iron warrior would be caught dead performing such worthless workouts? And if they were found dead, hopefully their fellow comrades would throw a few more plates on the bar or place the pin on the weight stack a lot lower on the machine they were found by.
Serious weight trainers seem to have an aversion to high reps and to any form of weight training perceived to be not geared to huge gains in size and strength.
Back in the day I myself was guilty of this mentality.
I can remember when asked by an endurance athlete, why I wanted big thick muscles and wouldn't they slow me down if I had to run away.
My response was that I wouldn't have to run away because my defense was my size and strength.
He just looked at me and wheeled on his heels and walked away shaking his head.
The reason I bring this memory up is the fact that the brief exchange we had stuck with me for years.
When a usually insignificant brief blip like this occurs in the normal course of one's life it is forgotten soon after it is over, but the fact that it sticks in our mind points to it being the catalysis to an epiphany, something that hits you at a deeper level, laying open and revealing something of importance even if at the moment you do not fully grasp all the ramifications inherent with it.
This was the case with high rep training, it floated around in my subconscious, surfacing occasionally as I searched for alternate training approaches to compliment my bodybuilding workouts to further improve my physique.
As you reach the upper limits of physique development you arrive at a stage at which you can turn on and channel 100% intensity into any exercise you are doing, like flipping a switch.
While this is a good thing, it also has a direct effect on how much work you can give to a muscle group.
What I mean by this is as your intensity increases and the efficiency at which you can reach and stimulate all the available muscle fibers of a given muscle group necessitates the need for a reduction in the amount of work given to the muscle, that being the amount of workouts, exercises, and sets done in a week so as not to overwhelm the muscle and cause over training, halt size and strength gains and even cause muscle size and strength loss because the muscle cannot recover because of too much stress, too often.
When I reached this stage I began to experiment to get around this roadblock.
I tried limiting my sets, exercises, number of times I worked a given muscle group.
Nothing seemed to work and I only had one training mode, all out.
My workouts became ridiculous affairs, a couple of sets of a few exercises for each muscle group with reps between four and eight and at the time I was making the mistake of splitting my upper body into a push workout and a pull workout and doing a lower body workout too, all in the same week.
The muscles have the capacity to improve 300% but the nervous system only has a 50% improvement rate.
What does that mean? It means you are eventually able to generate more stress than your central nervous system can handle and that equates to a bodybuilding progress nervous breakdown in which your body can no longer deal with and recover from the overwhelming onslaught and just shuts down and does nothing toward muscle size and strength gains no matter how hard you try.
Eventually I was down to a single whole body workout a week, doing one set per exercise for upper body and two sets per exercise for lower body so I could get a decent amount of exercises from enough angles to work all sections of the major muscle groups.
It worked, I started gaining and improving, but as time went by I noticed that by training the muscles once a week my body felt in a positive anabolic state for three to four days after the workout although feeling excessively tired, then feeling back to normal by day four or five before starting to feel in a negative state, feeling like I was slipping in the remaining days leading to my next workout.
Every time I tried adding a second workout to my schedule, no matter how condensed, it did nothing to move me forward.
At their worst the second workouts further fatigued me and at their best they did nothing to further fatigue me but nothing to enhance my energy, regular workout productivity, or physique improvement.
I had already abandoned rep ranges below ten reps, finding no further place for them in my training as I was as big as I was ever going to get and my tendons, ligaments, and joints leapt for joy, no more weekly poundings with heavy weight for low to medium reps.
I was rewarded with being able to keep the muscle I had built and improving on the refinements of my physique by bringing up parts of each muscle group to further balance and complete my development, all without joint stiffness and connective tissue fatigue from all the excessive pull on the ligaments and tendons that heavy weight impose.
But still I felt something was lacking.
I had always known there was more to a muscle than muscle fiber, There were slow twitch and fast twitch fibers, capillaries, muscle cell myrofibrils, along with extracellular and intracellular fluid.
In my earlier days this other stuff didn't interest me, I just wanted to lift heavy and get big and strong even though I knew that these other components were capable of some increase in muscle size.
Some increase equated to not worth my while as I was after big gains.
But now that I had increased my reps to ten to fifteen for upper body and ten to twenty for lower body, my body was taking on a better appearance, the muscles looked fuller, more detail, a completeness I had been lacking with heavy low rep basic exercise training.
I put isolated movements before increasingly more compound ones, dropped to one set per exercise to get the greatest possible amount of range and angle of pull from a given muscle group, cut my rest periods to one minute while still training my whole body in one workout, once a week.
My total set count for a workout was between thirty to forty five depending on my needs and only training once a week my body could recover, but the recovery was too long and every time I would try a body part split or add another workout with a similar rep range with half the workload or a lower intensity level it wouldn't work.
After much experimentation I decided the only thing I had never tried was high reps, then the epiphany I had years earlier came back and I got an outrageously simple idea.
I usually trained on fridays because it gave me the weekend, two full days to jump start recovery, so I put the other planned workout on monday like I did with all the other attempts at a second workout.
I threw out all isolation exercises and chose five exercises for push, pull, and lower body that worked the muscle around the whole range possible for the joint.
One set of each for upper body, one set each of three exercises for calves, and two sets of one exercise for hamstrings and three sets of one exercise for quadriceps and I doubled my usual rep count for a given movement that I would do in my regular workout while keeping my rest periods between exercises to one minute.
The workout looked something like this: behind neck barbell press, incline dumbbell bench press, dumbbell pullovers, close grip barbell bench press, and bench dips for push muscles and wide behind neck pulldowns, wide front pulldowns, close parallel grip pulldowns, close parallel grip seated low pulley cable row, and standing low pulley cable row to hips for pull muscles for one set of twenty four reps each.
Then one set of forty reps for seated calf raise, one set of thirty reps for standing calf raise, and one set of twenty reps for bent over calf raise, then two sets of leg curls for thirty and twenty four reps, and finally three sets of forty, thirty, and twenty reps on rope squats, keeping my body vertical.
You do not go to failure on this workout.
On upper body use a poundage of about twenty five pounds lighter than what you can do for twelve reps( on bench dips, do them with your feet on the floor while your hands are resting on a high bench about hip height.
) Twenty five pounds lighter on the calf movements you can do for twenty reps, half the weight on hamstrings, and by doing the easiest version of rope squats.
Make adjustments as needed to suit your own bodies muscular leverage capabilities in a given movement.
What was the result? Less post workout fatigue, better recovery, more energy for my regular workout, no negative drop in the anabolic effect coming into my next regular workout, increased vascularity and muscle fullness.
This was due to an increase in blood flow to the muscles, causing the veins and capillaries to split and branch off to reach a larger area of the muscle being worked to handle the extra blood being forced into the muscle with extended time under tension.
The body always seeks to adapt to make it easier on itself which results in superior flow to a working muscle to super feed it with fresh oxygenated and nutrient rich blood which in turn causes the muscles to work more aerobically, increasing endurance, gleaning whatever size increase it can from the slow twitch fibers, and increasing cell count within the muscle fibers, and increasing extracellular and intracellular fluid volume.
I had inadvertently invented the nudge workout that would link me from one regular workout to the next without any negative repercussions while keeping the muscles stimulated in only positive ways by giving them everything they needed from the two training approaches, all adding up to a winning formula for a complete physique.
Give this a try, you will like the results.
Weaklings engaged in hopelessly light weight pansy workouts.
What self respecting hard core iron warrior would be caught dead performing such worthless workouts? And if they were found dead, hopefully their fellow comrades would throw a few more plates on the bar or place the pin on the weight stack a lot lower on the machine they were found by.
Serious weight trainers seem to have an aversion to high reps and to any form of weight training perceived to be not geared to huge gains in size and strength.
Back in the day I myself was guilty of this mentality.
I can remember when asked by an endurance athlete, why I wanted big thick muscles and wouldn't they slow me down if I had to run away.
My response was that I wouldn't have to run away because my defense was my size and strength.
He just looked at me and wheeled on his heels and walked away shaking his head.
The reason I bring this memory up is the fact that the brief exchange we had stuck with me for years.
When a usually insignificant brief blip like this occurs in the normal course of one's life it is forgotten soon after it is over, but the fact that it sticks in our mind points to it being the catalysis to an epiphany, something that hits you at a deeper level, laying open and revealing something of importance even if at the moment you do not fully grasp all the ramifications inherent with it.
This was the case with high rep training, it floated around in my subconscious, surfacing occasionally as I searched for alternate training approaches to compliment my bodybuilding workouts to further improve my physique.
As you reach the upper limits of physique development you arrive at a stage at which you can turn on and channel 100% intensity into any exercise you are doing, like flipping a switch.
While this is a good thing, it also has a direct effect on how much work you can give to a muscle group.
What I mean by this is as your intensity increases and the efficiency at which you can reach and stimulate all the available muscle fibers of a given muscle group necessitates the need for a reduction in the amount of work given to the muscle, that being the amount of workouts, exercises, and sets done in a week so as not to overwhelm the muscle and cause over training, halt size and strength gains and even cause muscle size and strength loss because the muscle cannot recover because of too much stress, too often.
When I reached this stage I began to experiment to get around this roadblock.
I tried limiting my sets, exercises, number of times I worked a given muscle group.
Nothing seemed to work and I only had one training mode, all out.
My workouts became ridiculous affairs, a couple of sets of a few exercises for each muscle group with reps between four and eight and at the time I was making the mistake of splitting my upper body into a push workout and a pull workout and doing a lower body workout too, all in the same week.
The muscles have the capacity to improve 300% but the nervous system only has a 50% improvement rate.
What does that mean? It means you are eventually able to generate more stress than your central nervous system can handle and that equates to a bodybuilding progress nervous breakdown in which your body can no longer deal with and recover from the overwhelming onslaught and just shuts down and does nothing toward muscle size and strength gains no matter how hard you try.
Eventually I was down to a single whole body workout a week, doing one set per exercise for upper body and two sets per exercise for lower body so I could get a decent amount of exercises from enough angles to work all sections of the major muscle groups.
It worked, I started gaining and improving, but as time went by I noticed that by training the muscles once a week my body felt in a positive anabolic state for three to four days after the workout although feeling excessively tired, then feeling back to normal by day four or five before starting to feel in a negative state, feeling like I was slipping in the remaining days leading to my next workout.
Every time I tried adding a second workout to my schedule, no matter how condensed, it did nothing to move me forward.
At their worst the second workouts further fatigued me and at their best they did nothing to further fatigue me but nothing to enhance my energy, regular workout productivity, or physique improvement.
I had already abandoned rep ranges below ten reps, finding no further place for them in my training as I was as big as I was ever going to get and my tendons, ligaments, and joints leapt for joy, no more weekly poundings with heavy weight for low to medium reps.
I was rewarded with being able to keep the muscle I had built and improving on the refinements of my physique by bringing up parts of each muscle group to further balance and complete my development, all without joint stiffness and connective tissue fatigue from all the excessive pull on the ligaments and tendons that heavy weight impose.
But still I felt something was lacking.
I had always known there was more to a muscle than muscle fiber, There were slow twitch and fast twitch fibers, capillaries, muscle cell myrofibrils, along with extracellular and intracellular fluid.
In my earlier days this other stuff didn't interest me, I just wanted to lift heavy and get big and strong even though I knew that these other components were capable of some increase in muscle size.
Some increase equated to not worth my while as I was after big gains.
But now that I had increased my reps to ten to fifteen for upper body and ten to twenty for lower body, my body was taking on a better appearance, the muscles looked fuller, more detail, a completeness I had been lacking with heavy low rep basic exercise training.
I put isolated movements before increasingly more compound ones, dropped to one set per exercise to get the greatest possible amount of range and angle of pull from a given muscle group, cut my rest periods to one minute while still training my whole body in one workout, once a week.
My total set count for a workout was between thirty to forty five depending on my needs and only training once a week my body could recover, but the recovery was too long and every time I would try a body part split or add another workout with a similar rep range with half the workload or a lower intensity level it wouldn't work.
After much experimentation I decided the only thing I had never tried was high reps, then the epiphany I had years earlier came back and I got an outrageously simple idea.
I usually trained on fridays because it gave me the weekend, two full days to jump start recovery, so I put the other planned workout on monday like I did with all the other attempts at a second workout.
I threw out all isolation exercises and chose five exercises for push, pull, and lower body that worked the muscle around the whole range possible for the joint.
One set of each for upper body, one set each of three exercises for calves, and two sets of one exercise for hamstrings and three sets of one exercise for quadriceps and I doubled my usual rep count for a given movement that I would do in my regular workout while keeping my rest periods between exercises to one minute.
The workout looked something like this: behind neck barbell press, incline dumbbell bench press, dumbbell pullovers, close grip barbell bench press, and bench dips for push muscles and wide behind neck pulldowns, wide front pulldowns, close parallel grip pulldowns, close parallel grip seated low pulley cable row, and standing low pulley cable row to hips for pull muscles for one set of twenty four reps each.
Then one set of forty reps for seated calf raise, one set of thirty reps for standing calf raise, and one set of twenty reps for bent over calf raise, then two sets of leg curls for thirty and twenty four reps, and finally three sets of forty, thirty, and twenty reps on rope squats, keeping my body vertical.
You do not go to failure on this workout.
On upper body use a poundage of about twenty five pounds lighter than what you can do for twelve reps( on bench dips, do them with your feet on the floor while your hands are resting on a high bench about hip height.
) Twenty five pounds lighter on the calf movements you can do for twenty reps, half the weight on hamstrings, and by doing the easiest version of rope squats.
Make adjustments as needed to suit your own bodies muscular leverage capabilities in a given movement.
What was the result? Less post workout fatigue, better recovery, more energy for my regular workout, no negative drop in the anabolic effect coming into my next regular workout, increased vascularity and muscle fullness.
This was due to an increase in blood flow to the muscles, causing the veins and capillaries to split and branch off to reach a larger area of the muscle being worked to handle the extra blood being forced into the muscle with extended time under tension.
The body always seeks to adapt to make it easier on itself which results in superior flow to a working muscle to super feed it with fresh oxygenated and nutrient rich blood which in turn causes the muscles to work more aerobically, increasing endurance, gleaning whatever size increase it can from the slow twitch fibers, and increasing cell count within the muscle fibers, and increasing extracellular and intracellular fluid volume.
I had inadvertently invented the nudge workout that would link me from one regular workout to the next without any negative repercussions while keeping the muscles stimulated in only positive ways by giving them everything they needed from the two training approaches, all adding up to a winning formula for a complete physique.
Give this a try, you will like the results.
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