1000 Reps to Bigger Muscles

Training Bodybuilding
101

I respct T-Nation authors too, but sometimes feel that I need to dig under each rock there is in the road to find good advice…so to me, detailing what you have done in the past 5 yeas, mr KCB, works fine, becuase it gives me a great idea of periodization and adaptation overcoming.

I do have to ask, Mr Vandal, how come you got big with a 10-12 sets of 8-12 reps twice a week per bodypart with a 2020 tempo, which is as generic as aspirin, and got big?

What did you all do to get big and bigger, not now when your bodies have the momentum given by your training and experience, but when you started scrawny and looking to get brawny?

102

[quote]louisluthor wrote:
I respct T-Nation authors too, but sometimes feel that I need to dig under each rock there is in the road to find good advice…so to me, detailing what you have done in the past 5 yeas, mr KCB, works fine, becuase it gives me a great idea of periodization and adaptation overcoming.

I do have to ask, Mr Vandal, how come you got big with a 10-12 sets of 8-12 reps twice a week per bodypart with a 2020 tempo, which is as generic as aspirin, and got big?

What did you all do to get big and bigger, not now when your bodies have the momentum given by your training and experience, but when you started scrawny and looking to get brawny?[/quote]

In getting bigger there are only two rules - food and progressing stress. The food determines how big you’ll get and the workout frequency and quality determine how fast you’ll get there.

There really isn’t anything else. You can never go below 10 reps and grow and you can never go above 5 and grow. You can split, full-body…whatever, if you’re at least 3x/week at the gym focused on your workouts and are serious about eating you will get there.

I started out doing calisthenics, there’s so much you can do with limited equipment it’s unreal. You can have people who bench twice what you do ask you how to get big just off bodyweight crap. Then I got to weights and that was great too in a different way. You’ll never be able to get so strong without weights. I bulked up and lost it all four times during my training experience. But when bodybuilding is your priority you just make it happen - you never get hungry, you train like you should and you get your results. And ‘comeback weight’ comes easy so if life interferes it’s not like you have to do it all over the same way.

103

I ran into friend this week…little guy, about 5’7’’ and a half inch height, 175 pound heavy, called Z? Mario, whom we call “Boneco” (puppet, doll, small action figure) because of his small size and his job: he was a street mime, making ends meet by waiting tables at night and doing his mimic routine at day in Sao Paulo.

Boneco wasn’t what you might call a bodybuilder, but he may teach us all more than any expert at T-Nation. He showed me that you can build a great body by working hard and a lot.

Boneco didn’t have money for a gym, he had to support his houehold, and he didn’t make more than 150 US$ a month, and trust me, most of us would still be hard-pressed here in Brazil to make ends meet with a 300 US$ salary to support a house with you and your wife in a humble neighborhood, let alone supporting a household with a handicapped mother and a mentally-retarded brother in a poor one.

What boneco had was the gift which came to him via a fihter from the Chuteboxe gym, a Muay thai guy who belived in him. He gave him a et of parallel bars and fixed bars and a vest which he could load and unload with lead bricks to created added weight.

Let me repeat: a single vest which could be loaded up to 45 pounds of added weight, a small belt with iron bricks that could hold another 25 pounds and a set of parallel bars and fixed bar.

Boneco started doing EDT without knowing…after a 6-months perod of not seeing him, when the job is scarce and he must do his street routine further down my neighborhood, I suddenly see him with what I calculate to be 35 pounds of muscle on him (really 25 and a fat loss that made it look like a 50-pounds gain)…of course i ask him how he did that.

He described to me his routine, and I couldn’t help but smile and feel like hitting myself with a brick for missing the forest for the trees myself. Boneco did EDT and drop sets with pre-exhaust without even using such schemes…let me explain.

He started doing dips and pull-ups without the added weight. When he could manage it, he would increase the load on the vest, eventually he manged to sue both the belt and the vest at the same time, and he did the following:

He kept 2 reps shy of failure, sometimes 3-…normally he did as many good reps a he could, got off the bars, tried to rest as much as he needed, and get back on the bars fast for another try, until he would see that if he started resting 30 seconds between sets and putting out 15-20 reps, he would be resting a full minute and squeezing out 8-10 reps.

He told me he stopped the workout when the number of reps dropped to a point that he didn’t feel much, he said that the msucles stared to “numb up”, so he just called it a day.

With time, he was using 65 pounds on him and starting at 15-18 reps and ending at 6-8 reps, resting 15-30 seconds at first and ending up with 2-minute rests, but didn’t feel nough, so instead of doing more sets, he decided to pair dips with pushups…after that felt obsolete or unproductive, he did dips, then pushups and then bitch-ups…following this method with the pull-up/chin-ups as well.

All I can say is that his hard work paid off…he found the road to muscle hypertrophy by simply making his own way, following no other path than his, instead of following in on somebody else’s footsteps, he decided to be the first man on the moon so to speak, and leave the steps for others to follow…and boy he did it.

I think i may have fallen into a pitfall myself, expalining to much and putting too much attention to details, so as to create details and discove factors of the equation that weren’t even there to begin with…Boneco’s method is flexible, simple and above all, so simple you can’t screw it up.

If i had used it, I would probably do something different, like alternating weighted dips with the dips+pushup`s supersets and swing back and forth between these ideas to keep the gains going, but truth is, no matter how you flip and flop such a simple and effective program, you still get many good things from it.

I guess that sometimes you must start a long trip just to get to the point where you started. Just learn something from it and it won’t be in vain.

104

Good story. It’s so easy to get complasent at times… Then you get someone like Boneco, without really any means, show you that maybe you aren’t putting all the effort you thought you were doing… Reminds me of Chris Shugart’s article “tighten up.”

Did you ask him how long a training session lasted normally?

KCB.

105

Mr Majin wrote:

…Example. The pushup is said to be about 60% of bodyweight. But let’s make it 50% just in case. So for a 200lb person it would be 100lbs…

How much percentage of bodyweight is a dip for the chest? 80%, perhaps 90% or a mere 70% ?

It can be a 100% considering you are suspended in the air by your arms without any other support angle?

106

[quote]KCB wrote:
Good story. It’s so easy to get complasent at times… Then you get someone like Boneco, without really any means, show you that maybe you aren’t putting all the effort you thought you were doing… Reminds me of Chris Shugart’s article “tighten up.”

Did you ask him how long a training session lasted normally?

KCB.
[/quote]

Well, I have seen him practice today’s afternoon, as i left the office and decided to wlak to the aprk before heading home…his cousin is starting on the method, as he just arrived from Curitiba.

From what i saw Boneco do and from what Joao (his cousin) did, I can tell you how does a beginner and an advanced trainee uses this method.

He hits big muscles first, so chest dips, pushups and such are in order…his grip or hand separation might get narrower as the workout progresses, but the emphasis on the major mucle group is strictly sustained.

The sesion lasts 45 minutes, no more than 60 and no less than 30. He said that if he trained only one muscle group per session, perhaps he would have started out with 15 minutes and ended with 45 minutes of direct work per muscle group.

He also says that the more time you spend working a muscle on a given session, the more days you will have to wait to hit it again, soreness will make sure that you learn that lesson fast, as he said. meaning that you may worka muscle for 15 minutes in a three times per week tpe of split, or perhaps even 4 times, and also, you could train the muscle group twice a week with a 30-45 minutes timeframe, or just train once per week like old-school bodybuilders, if devoting 45-60 minutes per muscle group, and end up as sore as if you got trampled by an elephant, as he said colorfully “do as much and as often as you need to make it feel just like it should”

Gues than it is pretty simple, and gets very complicated…one way to summarize is that his way of training is to do his best as many times as he can, run the body down and destroy it to rebuild it even better, recovering enough to do so.

107

[quote]louisluthor wrote:
Mr Majin wrote:

…Example. The pushup is said to be about 60% of bodyweight. But let’s make it 50% just in case. So for a 200lb person it would be 100lbs…

How much percentage of bodyweight is a dip for the chest? 80%, perhaps 90% or a mere 70% ?

It can be a 100% considering you are suspended in the air by your arms without any other support angle?[/quote]

Well, technically you’re lifting with your arms so they aren’t supposed to count. There’s an article or thread somewhere about this. Regardless, they are both great and simple exercises. Volume can do wonders.

108

Louisluthor:

I think that when you dip, you lift at least 80% of your bodyweight, but when you do chins or pull-ups, you lift no less than 90%, because unlike what happens during the dip, you don’t support your structure in the arms, even if they exert force, that’s the factor Majin left out.

On a different subject, I went to try Boneco’s workout myself today, under his guidance, as it was leg day for him…I discovered that, judging by my standards, since i am an advanced lifter, that there are endless possibilities to this workout.

If I do as many reps as possible per set without reaching failure, just stopping at a safe distance from it, not too much anyways, I start with 18-rep sets and end in 5-rep sets, which follows his advise to stay between 5 and 20, although he says that in time, you can go further into it and stop when you can’t get a triple, at the first set where you hit a double, but 5-7 reps is a safer distance to not overtrain…

Just like he said, the more you work the muscle for a day, the less days a week you can work on it. I would think that you may start with 30-60 seconds of rest between sets, to what he also agrees vehemently, and end up in 2-minute rests between sets.

He says that over 2 minutes and under 30 seconds is just a waste of time. I agree, becuase truth is, under 30 seconds, it feels like a rest-pause set.

One thing that I didn’t catch untl today: he said that you can do this workout for long or for hard effects…when i asked him what did he mean, he amazed me with his simple form to periodize:

In EDT you are advised to start easy, and pick a weight that you can lift for 10-12 times as a maximum for the exercise and only lift it for 5 times, initially. then proceed to go for the maximum reps…

the initial sets may be half-assed in terms of reps per load, but using half the reps allow you to really put all of your strength on each lift, so the energy output is very high, yet you keep the muscle group fresh, so you move on and like a car, you move on to a higher gear to put the pedal to the emtal without melting the engine down.

In Boneco’s method, you stay away from failure, normally you may hit 15 reps, yet you do know you have it in you to do a 18-rep set. You will end up doing sets of 2 reps when you could be able to hit 5 reps on them, but the upside of it is that you will be able to hit a muscle group for a full 45 minutes to focus on it and hammer it into a growth surge.

However, the surefire way to know when to stop was when he got to the sets of 2 reps, where he knew he could get 4 reps…the moment he hit his first set of singles, he called it a day.

It was a surefire, foolproof way to avoid injury or overtraining.

Boneco said that 45 minutes is the higher end, I did get it wrong because he said to me that he liked to do 10 minutes of good cardio, jogging or running up and down the ebach in his bike before the lifting part of his workout and 5 minutes of shadow-boxing or race swimming against the currents at the end, to keep the blood flowing into the upper body.

On the shorter end, which was 15 minutes, he said that it occurred when he did maxed out at each set. He got 15 reps on a given set and didn’t do a 16th becuase he knew he would fail on it, at the lifting or lowering, but he would fail on it and collapse.

All of those were sets taken to the maximum productivity, this is, the most reps that he could get out of a weight without reaching failure, so that’s 1-rep shy of failure. He normally did sets which started on 15 reps and ended in doubles or triples too…

I asked him why not singles and he said that it would be too much intensity for one day, he never drops below 2 reps, and at the first set where he can get only 1 rep, he knows it’s time to stop and go home.

Periodizing these two different types of workouts is like periodizing your own programs based on the Arthur Jones saying “You can train long or you can train hard, but you can’t do both”…well, Boneco surely found a way to do so.

I just wanted to ask him things quietly, no rush, and personally, I don’t want to even speak to him about things like Tempo, Time Under Tension and such…his mind is as innocent and open, clean and unprejudiced as a baby’s, and I think that we have a treasure here: a lifter which doesn’t have enough money to even buy himself a pair of aerobics dumbells and yet, he’s got a physique worthy of being postered in a Fitness mag or competition.

I would appreciate any questions from you all, and any obervations you might make as to how does he does his reps and all, in case i leave out some detail, so we can ask him and find out about it, so as to learn from this guy.

109

Great thread. I tried to apply the principles mentioned throughout this thread to my workout. And it felt like a really good workout.

Instead of swimming x number of laps, resting, swimming x number of laps, resting. I just swam as many laps as I could, then rested, then swam as many laps as I could, etc. And I just didn’t count. I just did this for 35 minutes.

When it came time to doing pullups, pushups, and ab work, I did the same thing. And instead of counting, I just concentrated on working on the muscle.

Now, the difficult question:

  • with this approach, how long do you rest between sets?

I gave myself a minute and a half. And in one situation that worked out great, in another situation, that didn’t feel like enough.

How do you approach the rest factor?

Cheers,

tweak

110

[quote]tweaker wrote:
Great thread. I tried to apply the principles mentioned throughout this thread to my workout. And it felt like a really good workout.

When it came time to doing pullups, pushups, and ab work, I did the same thing. And instead of counting, I just concentrated on working on the muscle.

Now, the difficult question:

  • with this approach, how long do you rest between sets?

I gave myself a minute and a half. And in one situation that worked out great, in another situation, that didn’t feel like enough.

How do you approach the rest factor?

Cheers,

tweak[/quote]

Well tweak, truth is, you are doing it right.

Boneco explained to me that he did his maximum number of reps for a given attempt, thenrested as little as possible and then went back at it. It might remind you of a Gironda-based rest principle, since at first, he can give you 15-20 reps per set and then he rests for 30-45 seconds and hits the bars again, this time hitting 12-15 reps per set, resting now a little more as his tiredness is harder to put aside, so after 45-60 second she hits the bars and gets 10-12 reps, rests now for 60-75 seconds and goes back at it again, getting now possibly 8-10 reps,then resting for 75-90 seconds before another try, where he would get a mere 6-8 reps, then he would rest 90 seconds to a little, and so on and so off, until he gets a full 2 minute rest, by then, he might be squeezing singles.

To express it numerically, it’s simple: 15-20 reps and 30-45 seconds rests + 12-15 reps and 45 secs rest + 10-12 reps and 60-sec rests + 8-10 reps and 75 secs rest + 6-8 reps and 90 secs rest + 4-6 reps and 105 secs rest + 2-4 reps and 120 seconds rest + 1-rep (end of the set) + 3-5 minutes of rest before starting the series again.

Reps go down and rest intervals go up, so it might be a type of rest-pausing set. If you are using added weight, you can drop off some weight between sets, which will allow you to work for a longer session, so intensity is compensated by volume, this is, you’ll be able to do more sets, since the first option won’t get you to do more than 3-5 sets, a maximum of 6 at best, while the weight-dropping can get you to hit your muscle group with as much as 8 sets per session.

He ould know it hen he reached his first single, to rest as much as he could to sum up his strength agaion for another try, from the top. He didn’t exactly reach failure on each segment, he just stopped at the maximum number of reps he could give on a set, but as he said " I hit 15, and i stop, because at the 16th rep I ould either fail under my form parameters or start doing reps sloppy to get a couple more"..meaning he did 15 reps on a set here all reps ere good and solid, perfect textbook form, and stopped at the 15th becuase at the 16th, he ould reach the edge, or break form and hit another couple reps, as high as 17 or 18 reps, but those last 2-3 reps ould be really sloppy, like cheat reps, and ould force the muscle too much, overstraining the fibers.

Then he’d rest for a full 5 minutes and hit his body again from the start of this, which he does for 3-4 times or as many as he can take…pretty much, he knows he reached a limit when he starts the series over and finds out he can’t get past 10 reps…

Think of it as a gigantic rest-pausing set, the intervals between “segments” are small, but the interval between sets or series is normally such as in a strength protocol, so the body recovers enough to let you use a high volume for the session.

If you want, try another thing…just max out at each set, rest as much as you need to (anything from 1 minute to 2 is fine, if you can rest less, good for you, if you don’t, doesn’t matter) and only stop lifting when you canot get half of the number of reps you got on you first set.

No, as for Louisluthor, Boneco thinks of counting 1-second on the eccentric, and as for the concentric, it is not like he cares about anything but contracting hard.

111

I’ve notice a lot of guys that don’t know a damn thing about weight lifting actually have great arms. When I ask them what they do, its usually something like 30 minutes of curls every night, x7 a week. They don’t do big lifts, they “overtrain” that body part, yet it seems to grow?!

112

Ever notice how mechanics get big forearms, lumberjacks get big backs and football playes get big thighs and calves?

If you do curls 7 times a week, then you are NOT overtraining, you are OVERCOMPENSATING…repetitive stimules forces growth by sheer stress accumulation hich forces the body to grow.

113

I just read the lastest article by Gentilcore " The 90% method" and it struck me why Boneco’s “Forrest-Gump-simpleton-like” program worked, why Olympic lifters got big on occasions and powerlifters have some guys with very nice looking physiques too in their ranks, also gymnasts and lumberjacks, mechanics and construction workers…it is plain simple…and also very hard to understand because of that.

The article describes, according to Zatziorsky, the 3 main ways to develop muscle size via strength-based reps and methods:

  1. Lifting a maximal load (exercising against maximal resistance): the maximal effort method.

  2. Lifting a non-maximal load to failure, with the muscles developing the maximum force possible in a fatigued state during the final repetitions: the repeated effort method.

  3. Lifting (or throwing) a non-maximal load with the highest attainable speed: the dynamic effort method.

Now, if we see things clearly, option 2 is what boneco applies…wheter drop setting or not, it is what has been working for him

I also have seen a guy train in my gym…he’s got this great body, but no brains, so to him tempo and tut and such things don’t exist…

He just goes to the gym, warms up and in less than 6 sets, he has found his way to reach his maxium 5-3 reps set…he does as many sets of 3-5 reps as he can, then just adjusts the load and keeps on at it, until he sees that he has dropped more than 20% off the initial load…then he just does high-rep sets of 15-20 on isolation or bodyweight exercises…and cals it a day or two before having another go at it again.

That’s a big volume approach to option 1, and yet, his body is big and menacing enough to make it into a police line-up along Lou ferrigno and any of the Met_RX World’s Strongest man finalists if somebody reported the Incredible Hulk’s twin and non-green skinned brother has been on a rampage.

And as for option 3, I bet my ass than that applies to emchanics and such…fast and pwerful movements, big volume and sets of many reps, but in the right zone of time under tension, sheer stress accumulation, like swimmers, sprinters and boxers or martial artists of some styles as muay thai, tae kwon do or such…

All in all…just find something different from what you do, hard as hell from start to finish and do it as mucha s you possibly can before switching, and odds are, no matter howe little thought you give to it, as long as you use a modicum of intelligence and common sense, you will get big.

114

I was getting a lot of comments on the program of the second person I talked about, and I decided to go ahead and give you all a description of my friend?s workout.

Carlos Mario, or Carlinho as we affectionately call him, has a very ?gung-ho? mentality about lifting. His program is based on the ?Balls to the Wall? mindset of the 1-10 program, but a little more focused on administering the volume of work to land in a zone where you get your gains in more accommodating and metabolically-induced growth surges based on your body?s adaptation to severe power/strength protocols.

To summarize, Carlinho warms up with a set of 20-pushups, which is a very pumping set, for I know he can?t do more than 25 without stopping at failure. Then he squeezes 15-20 reps or anything from 12-18 reps in the dips or the flat bench press, having rested about 2 minutes from the pushups set and then he calls it another 2 minutes before he starts the pain.

He basically asks for my help and loads the bar so as to reach a set of his 3-5 Rep Max, in less that 6 sets, meaning that he starts at something like 8 reps in set 1, then goes heavier and squeezes something like 6 or 7, then goes heavier and squeezes another 6 reps, perhaps 5, and then puts as much weight on it as to reach a set of 4-5 reps, and at the final and fifth set, he has reached the load where he migh get a 3-5 rep maximum set. It might not be his real 3-5 RM, since he spent energy in the approaching sets, but that?s no problem.

Now, it took him 5 sets, beginning at something like 8 reps in the first set and ending in 3-5 reps in the last one, resting appropriately between them (at the first couple, something like 1 minute, then something like 2 at the last couple of sets). Now, he will try to get as many of those 3-5 rep sets as he can with that load.

By the time he hits a double, he will drop the load to 90% of the initial one and squeeze some more sets, until he will hit another double and then strip some weight off, another 10% of the initial load, now being at 80% of his first 3-5 rep load, and squeeze some more sets until he hits another double.

When he finishes, he goes to perform 2-3 sets of maximum reps in pushups, or an isolation exercise with moderate loads, and goes home. That gets the blood flowing into the muscle, and accumulates direct work on a fatigued muscle and also enhances the amount of work put into the muscle for a metabolic activation of the growth process.

The difference with Boneco?s program is that this is a gym-oriented program, not one you can do at exercise bars or your garage gym (unless you got really nice equipment or own a gym and live right next to it) and it focuses not on manipulating the rest-periods to accommodate the strength levels but instead, accommodate the load to keep in synch with your strength levels and leave the rest periods long enough to recover well and pursue a high-volume low-rep protocol.

In Boneco?s program, you start with as many reps as you can get, the first set being 15-18 or 15-20, or simply 15 flat-out reps, and the last set being a single. You also might be able to work more often with Boneco?s program, unless you decide to do as he does (given the fact that he?s got enough time doing it and he?s good enough at it as to do so) and rest 5 minutes after he hits the first single and then start from the beginning, once again from the top, or to simply do the same program but with pushups instead of dips, so the weight is reduced for another go at it, a simple drop-setting principle like the one used by our friend here, ending up in a second reduction, so you end up performing bitch-ups…or you can do 15-20 dips, at the first set followed by pushups, and when you get good at it, you superset dips, pushups and bitch-ups, and the rest periods will adjust to your needs as long as you try to rest as little as possible, and so on and so off as you want to adjust it to your needs and skills?.

Now, there are at least half a dozen ways to spin Boneco?s program, but it is very similar to this program, except for the fact this is a more steady one in what refers to parameters, for the only thing that changes is the weight, not the number of reps or the rest periods.

If you do three weeks of this, rest for a week and then do Boneco?s program for another three weeks before resting for another week and going back to it, you will get big and strong and will be able to stick to these program concepts for life. I am a fan of the work 3 weeks and rest 1 week concept to prevent the general adaptation syndrome, and that makes a lot of sense, as well as alternating between the 2 most efficient ends of the training program pendulum. After all, it is so simple, it must work.

Now, I will be away for most of November, going to Minas Gerais, Curitiba and other places in the country for business, and I won’t have much time, so if somebody wants a comment or opinion, or perhaps wishes to give me his, I would appreciate it if you hit me on private message with a copy of what you post, so that i get an e-mail warning and can respond for all of us to read, after all, one head can’t out think the whole thread, right?

115

Ok , Vandal, dude, it’s time somebody saidf it straight to your face. No disrespect here, bro, but you seem to have lost sight of your own program man, kinda odd, since I was agreeing with it.

I liked the idea of keeping your efforts in the high-end of your produtive capabilities.

Your original program was cool, made sense to me to try to move the most weight per set by multiplying reps per load used, and to choose the option where you got the best quantity in the less reps, because any asshole can bench press 10 pounds for 100 reps and say he moved 1000 pounds per set, but only someone strong can move the same 1000 pounds with 20 reps.

Made a whole lot of sense to me bro, and I bet my ass it made a whole lot of sense for a lot of people here too.

That aid, I think you did overlook an important fact. You want to amke each rep count and therefore, make each set a productive set. I did disagree on the low-reps thinking. Yous aid it was dumb to bench press 250 pounds for 5 reps if you could only get 1250 pounds of work per set with that, but you preferred to use 10-rep sets with 185 pounds to get 1850 pounds per set…

But I can hit 20 5-rep sets with 1250 pounds of work per set and yet, if I hit 185 pounds on 10-rep sets, I can’t et more than 10-12…so at the end of the day, even moving less pounds per set, I move more pounds per workout.

I also do something which your friend does, I hit my best weight for 5 reps, and when i can lift that weight for 5 reps, I take the weight off…something like 15% and hit another bunch of 5-rep sets until I can’t hit 5 reps againa nd then go home…that’s nothing new, it’s a stretch of the Russian Bear program, I have read the article too, bro.

If i had to recommend a program, it would be a HSS100 variation:

Hit your muscle with a heavy exercise, on a “extended 5’s” method, as described here on this thread and on Christian Thibaudeau’s “Hss-100-Chest Specialization” article… then hit a pre-exhaustion superset in which you mix a cable isolation exercise (dumbells don’t work that well, read some of CT’s work on that to see why) with a bodyweight exercise, and then you hit the muscle with a slow-motion, accentuated eccentric or concentric eccentric compound-isolation alternation (lift the dumbels as a bench press, lower them as a fly for example) type of method, and end it with a good and light-load 100-reps “set”…that’ll work twice a week.

116

I should have seen this coming…

Let me regale you with the story of a lifter which had a very funny, even retarded method to gain muscle mass.

He didn’t know shit about lifting. Truth is, i was too busy with my workouts and my office work to even give this guy advice, and it wasn’t like he was gonna listen.

He used to go to the gym, and lift a big-ass weight for like 3-5 times, rest the load a little sretch and do some windmilling, without even leaving the bench or station h was at, and then grab the weight after something like 15-20 seconds and ghit it again, until he had to re-rack the load again, rest for another 15-20 secs again and then lift again.

He didn’t stop until he got a single. Then he could rest something like 2 minutes or so and go back at it again. Normally, when he couldn’t hit as many reps as he did wioth the first load, that is 3-5 reps in the first segment, he dropped the load, like a tenth, so he started over again and then when he hit the same plateau, reduced the load by another 10%, now at 80% of the starting load and when he couldn’t get 3-5 eps on the first segment, he went home.

Guess what: from 145 pounds, he did somehow shoot up to 175 pounds in 5 months, and not onl tht, his pussy.ass bench rpess max of 15 pounds became a solid 245 pounds.

And eat your heart out like we did: he was ripped, to the bone, like he was a living bodybuilding poster, and we all thought he was shooting up steroids and taking supplements, but after I ran into him and saw what his job was, I knew this guy ws too poor and too dumb, illiterate at best in what refers to lifting, to even know what protein poweders were.

What he did was like your “extended 5’s” method, which was coupled with a little Russian Bear philosophy of reducing the inital set and only stopping at a 80% of the starting load, not dropping below that. And it worked for HIM.

I have met bozos who think lifting heavy gets you big. It does, if you lift enough times, not as reps per set, but reps per load. They have this stupid argument that 10 x3 is better than 3 x 10 because they can use heavier loads and also, because if they do lift 275 for 10 sets of 3 reps instead of 195 pounds for 3 sets of 10 reps, they also say “in a 10-rep set, only the last 2 or 3 reps actually count, for you are tired and then you just did 7-8 approach or warm-up, work-up reps and only 2 or 3 really demanding work reps, effective reps”…yeah, right…it’s like saying foreplay and sex is a prelude to cumming and getting (if possible) an orgasm, which ain’t worth the trouble if it’s not short enough to do it between the comercial breaks of a boxing championship title fight.

If you are gonna use low reps, ither do rest-pause or drop sets. If you use high reps, use them pre-exhaustion or combine low and high reps…and if you are gonan sue medium reps, do them slow or in variation exercises…it’s that simple…

I don’t believe in middle terms. Life may have a wide array of shades of grey, but it don’t have a middle point to shit. Just like when you vote in your country you do between republicans and democats, you can’t go into bodybuilding thinking there’s a medium way in which you can stay for life…it ain’t like Buddhism…there ain’t no middle groud.

Lifting heavy weights for low reps is good, as long s you don’t lift that way only. Sets between 3 and 6 reps or 6-8 reps ain’t gonna get you big if that’s all you do.

Neither will 15-20 or 12-18 rep sets no matter how much T.U.T. you use or how many times you max out and go to the extreme, touch the edge line on the sets.

Bodybuilding is a pendulum swing…you can’t stay on one side of it or the body will get accustomed to it, and even in the session, you can’t allow the body to stay in one area only.

If i lift between 3 and 7 reps, i can feel different effects from different loads between those rep numbers. I can get a better pump out of a load I lift 6 times than one I managed to lift for 3 times or one I could lift for 8 times, even if my speed was the same and the rest periods according to each set, as each one had its own type of impact in my CNS and metabolism.

I just love to squeeze the muscle for all it’s got, so drop sets are cool, and rest-pausing too when I lift between 3 and 7 reps. because lifting a weight for 3, 5 or 7 reps ain’t gonna make me feel like i ddi something more than a good powerful set to gain strenght, I need to do 4-6 reps, drop some load, hit the bars again and get another 3-5 reps and then drop off some more weight to hit a final 2-3 reps, or just leave the laod the same and do 5+3`2 like your “extended 5’s” method prescibes.

If i work with high reps, i like to hit a heavy 4-6 reps set before hitting a set of 15-20 reps, so the supersetting method makes me get a better deeper feeling and burn, a pump which tells me I was working for size.

If I were to use only bodyweight exercises, like a prisioner or somebody with no gym access, I’d hit reps above 12, or above 15 reps per set, always trying to max out and give it my best at each set.

Medium reps is a range i stay away from because I can’t either lift heavy enough to make 8-12 reps feel like they should, or get enough sets out of a weight to feel my muscles worked thoroughly and good, neither can decide to max out or superset it without bruning up my energy storages and end up feeling like I danced (not walked, danced) the whole Rio de Janeiro’s carnival on my hands. I just can go as high or as heavy as I can, I can’t balance the weight and reps factors.

I would prefer to hit 8-12 reps with a rest-pause set or a very tight low-rep drop set than to actually do it with one load ona straight set. That’s me, and that’s my take.

You say I orgot what my own method was. Well, Ididn’t…althugh you got some math problems my friend…

let’s say i can lift 275 pounds for 5 reps, and I decided to lift that weight for as many sets as possible. I know, from experience, Ican get 20 sets. Now, 275 x 5 x 20 = 27500 pounds of work per workout.

And if Istick to my 15-reps per set at 195 pounds, I get something like 10 or 12 sets, that is 195 x15 x 10(let’s say it’s just 10 sets and not 12 as i can get) that’s 29500 pounds per workout.

WE not only get more pounds moved, we also get a better pump. now, i don’t know you, but my body can tell when it is doing a set for strength and a set for size and a set for endurance. I can just feel it, just like you can tell between cold, lukewarm and boiling hot when you get into the shower. I just think you know what type of set is working your body in the right direction that you have set yourself as a goal to march towards to, and then, no matter how much weight you end up lifting at the end of the session, you will do what you need to do to get where you need to get.

Now, if you have some lifting problems i feel bad about you, son, I got a thousand problems but tempo, rep-ranges and volume ain’t in on them.

117

Mr Vandal sure writes a lot.

I want to ask something: you basically say, Mr Vandal, that if a person can work with 250 pounds per a 3-rep set, and do 20 of those, it won’t be as good as doing 20 sets of 6-rep with 180 pounds, because even if it gives you less pounds per workout session, you get a better pump, and the sets should be aimed at the pump, like when you said “my body feels the difference when it’s working on a strength set, a growth set and an endurance set”, right?

118

[quote]louisluthor wrote:
Mr Vandal sure writes a lot.

I want to ask something: you basically say, Mr Vandal, that if a person can work with 250 pounds per a 3-rep set, and do 20 of those, it won’t be as good as doing 20 sets of 6-rep with 180 pounds, because even if it gives you less pounds per workout session, you get a better pump, and the sets should be aimed at the pump, like when you said “my body feels the difference when it’s working on a strength set, a growth set and an endurance set”, right?[/quote]

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Well, I do write a lot, sorry about that, but I like to be as explicit as I can to be accurate. Here’s a saying in the lageal profession " If it isn’t written clearly, if it is not understood inmediately, then it cannot be sustained in a court of law"…

I think in the same way you think, and yes, i think we should all go with our feeling, out gut.

I used to be a beginner, son, all of us were…back in the day I wasn’t very adventurous, so I read a whole bunch of books and articles and used to believe in tempo and all…big mistake.

I read the Ian King article and other articles which were using the same charts, to see what speed of movment should I use…this was what you oftenly saw:

X0X and 10X tempos= quickness, power

201 and 101 tempos= strength, power

211 and 311 tempos= neurally-induced, neural-end hypertrophy

412, 501, 303, and such= metabolic-end hypertrophy, fitness…

I used to count seconds…really, guilty as charged, I confess to that…and that was when I saw the light, thanks the a girl…yes,a girl, and I mean a female bodybuilder.

She told me " I have never in my life trained like that, and I look better than most of you guys"…and those words did hurt like hell, especially because she followed them by saying " and I don’t take any steroids, or heavy supplements, and supposedly have only a tenth of the testosteron level YOU have"…

Basically, to make this story short, I sat down and we talked…after that chat I understood tempo differently…

When Charlie Poliquin used a 4020 tempo for his German Volume Training system, he might have meant to move the weight with a 4/2 ratio than your normal speed. This is take twice the time to lift the weight and four times as much to lower than your usual lifting and lowering cadence or speed, or simply lift at half the speed you lift and lower in twice as much time as you lift.

It might mean to lift in a 2-seconds up and 1-second down speed, but to the lifter, if the lifter is somebody who is used to lift in about half a second and lower in about another half second, which is how most newbies do their exercises, since they don’t accentuate the eccentric, and sometimes the wieght makes them lift twice as slow as they lower, so it’s kinda funny to see how this concept works.

If i see a 201 tempo, this point of view makes me think that the 1 means to multiply my lifting speed for 1, meaning, to keep my usual speed, and the 2 means to lower in twice as much time as I take to lift, and if i see a 1 in the middle of them, meaning the pause at the bottom, it means to pause for the same amount of time it would take me to lift, also if i see the same 1 after the 3 numbers, meaning the pause at the top.

I understand them now as ratios between phases, not as seconds per phase. if I see an X means to em to lift as fast as I can, faster than my usual speed…this is no rocket science or algorythmical equation for rocket scientists.

Some may disagree and think that a 2010 tempo is meant to be 2 seconds down and 1 second up.

With time and practice, yes, that might be the case, the 1 meaning to move the weight or attempt to move it fast, and the X if there would be a 20X0 tempo notation, to really move the weight fast on the way up, not be happy with just trying and getting any speed.

That would be for someone whose lifting experience and load tolerance allows him to move that way, and even so, it is still a ratio, not a parameter…when i get strong enough to lift 250 pounds in 1 second (even if I might have been trying to lift it faster), I can be strong enough to lwoer in 2 seconds.

If I could lift it explosively, as fast as i could, in a 20X0 tempo, i can be strong enough to easily resist it on the way down for 2 seconds,a dn if they were using a more hypertrophy-based stream of thought and posted a 41X1 tempo prescription, I could resist it on the way down for 4 seconds and pause at bottom and at the top for 1 weith ease. I would be feeling the last reps only and most of the stress and srain would come from the speed of lifting and not the load lifted.

Now, i have never ever seen somebody here count seconds, and some of the biggest guys in the world probably don’t even count how many pounds they add to the bar, they just have the gung-ho mentality of lifting, balanced wisely with the concept of efficient stress-fatigue/recovery management to get big, and some guys out there barely count 1 second to lwoer the load.

Now beginners, let me tell you, don’t even worry about the 1-second minimum. I didn’t, I barely bothered in adding plats and lifitng as much as I could for those 10-12 rep sets as they prescribed in Ironmag, Flex and such…

I used to lift just like when i did pushups. I didn’t just shootmyself up in hopes inertia and momentum carried me to the top of the movement, neither dropped down to earth without control, a small resistance against it. I just did a push-up per second, and also a dip per second,a nd thought everybody did bench presses like that for 10-12 rep sets

Guess what: I didn’t grow jack squat from it. And that was after using like a half-dozen beginner’s programs you saw in mags, which don’t bother in explaining tempo, or speed ratios.

This girl told me that she couldn’t tell me how many reps per set and how many sets, how fast to lift and lower, how much load to use and how many times to train, but she reduced it all to 4 simple truth that can’t lead you wrong:

1-) Your body can feel the difference between a 100-meters sprint and a 10-miles marathon effort justa s easy as a power walk and a slow dance. You need to listen to it so as to know what’s the proper combination between speed of lifting, load reps and set and rest time and training frequency.

2-) Start at the basics. Nothing’s more basic than the rep. Find a load and speed of lifting that can be felt at the second or 3rd rep of a set of 5-7 reps and then experiment with increasing and decresing the load and the rep numbers, even change the speed after you have done so and then add or decrease weight (depends if you move faster or slower than the initial speed) and see what’s the combination that works best.

Rest as much as you need between sets and don’t expect to find the combination in less than 3 sessions for the muscle group or groups targeted.

3-) If you like doing an exercise, means you are doing it wrong. The idea isn’t to lift as heavy as to tear something up inside you, or to get an aneurysm or drop down and pass out from exhaustion, but the idea is that it shold be demanding, hard and intense, not easy.

If you think the gym is to socialize, go to a Bar and get fat and drunk, if you like to do cardio and move around a lot, join the cheerleading squad or a samba school, and if you think it is to brag about how much weight you can move on the barbell, start lifting your own car and work at the docks carrying bags on your back. You are there to grow big and strong, not to make friends, hook up with chicks, brag in front of other guys or relax.

4-) Nothing works forever, so when something gets easy, flip-flop it and then you will continue to get big and strong. Yes, you might find out it’s best for you to lift 180 pounds for 6 reps for 20 sets, but after 3 weeks of training, you might want to lift heavier, drop the reps to half, extend the rest periods and lift harder, which might be fatser or attempt to be, and gain some strength for a couple week before taking 1 week off and return to the program you were usign 3 weeks ago.

Variation, which is the same as periodization when done intelligently, works as much as any supplement or steroid can, because there is an harmony between opposites which you can use to grow, since bodybuilding is a pendulum (I learned this from her, truth be told), and therefore, you must not find a middle way to stick to for your life, but rather go back and froth between what you know works for you, if the middle way was so cool, God would have made the world live in a perpetual state of dusk/dawn, a twilight, not night, not day, not winter, not summer, so you must always flow between two points, like the tides…it works for anyone, it will work for you.

I hope this last post will help. I plan to visit my family now for the holidays.

I leave on the 15th to work in the rural areas the townships and courthouses and penal facilities, before courts close from december 25 to january 5, and those days I shall be with my folks down at Rio de Janeiro, then work like a madman from january 5 to february 15 to compensate for the court’s holidays leave and then it’s gonna be carnival so…just don’t expect to see more of me until carnival ends…you are all invited guys…you’ll love to come here, just don’t go alone to pick chicks, you might end up with 3 blondes on you and I can tell you why it ain’t such a good thing.

119

Ok, I need to remind you of the timed sets thing you said.

I agree with you that the use, the smart use, of drop sets and supersets, standard, pre-exhaust or post-exhaust is good.

I like high-set reps with a lot of work production and I think soemtimes you need to move slow as you go lighter and vice-versa, move faster when you go heavier, and of course, lower in reps.

I like timed sets…I normally would applaud you for the use of a smart “metabolic-end oriented hypertrophy” srategy of a slow smooth tempo between 1 and 2 seconds on the way up and 2 seconds or close on the way down for 8-12 rep sets. It is easy and stimulates you for growth, but I’d prefer to use timed sets.

I think that if you traina muscle group twice a week, you can use timed sets to make it grow.

care to debate? or better yet, elaborate ?

120

[quote]Pump_Daddy wrote:
Ok, I need to remind you of the timed sets thing you said.

I agree with you that the use, the smart use, of drop sets and supersets, standard, pre-exhaust or post-exhaust is good.

I like high-set reps with a lot of work production and I think soemtimes you need to move slow as you go lighter and vice-versa, move faster when you go heavier, and of course, lower in reps.

I like timed sets…I normally would applaud you for the use of a smart “metabolic-end oriented hypertrophy” srategy of a slow smooth tempo between 1 and 2 seconds on the way up and 2 seconds or close on the way down for 8-12 rep sets. It is easy and stimulates you for growth, but I’d prefer to use timed sets.

I think that if you traina muscle group twice a week, you can use timed sets to make it grow.

care to debate? or better yet, elaborate ?[/quote]

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Well, I like to use timed sets when i train a beginner or an athlete, somebody who can’t really go balls-out on a set because he has got to get good at his sport, or he is too new at the iron game to start using low tmpos or heavy sets.

Basically, I consider timed sets, or the concept of timed sets, useful for metabolic-end hypertrophy when training with very little intensity.

The most effective training protocol for newbies I have seen are the Timed Sets, which i precsibre just as CT wrote them in the timed sets article: I have recommended the ones between 20-40 seconds, something like 10-12 sets per session.

Now, as for myself, I can advise a trainee to use weights between 30 and 40% of his 1Rm load and rep seepds like 1 full rep per second. That’s about 20-40 reps per set with 30-40% of his 1RM, just as CT stated, but to me, the load and tempo can be altered as long as you kep within the timeframe of the set and the eccentric doesn’t go over 1 second.

So you might end up with 20-or-30-rep sets with 40-50%, even 60% of your 1RM at a 10X0 tempo (1 second and a half per rep )and still get the desired effect, but considering the hypertrophy will be less functional-wise and more bulky, more “for show”.

Now, as for total volume, my idea is to keep the sets between 8 and 12 per session, and to train twice a week, certainly no more than 3 times, splitting the sets between no les than 2 exercises on different movement planes, and by the way, short-range ones, like benches and dips.

Basically, the more you train a muscle group, the less often you can train it, if you do train it right. Good to see that Thib got that idea and included it in a brainy coment in the latest article about training splits.

Now, Timed Sets are useful for functional hypertrophy in their original form, and in the little adaptation form I explained, they are useful for more bulky and less functional hypertrophy.

The basics of a weight is that you must balance the tension with the time spent under such tension. Now, first way of doing that is to either increase the load or to slow-down the movement. Nobody ever thinks of increasing rep ranges because we still think the muscle can count reps and can’t count tempo or load.

I guess we all need to experiment a little while, see what works for us and just think of it in terms of PRODUCTIVITY and not TECHNICITY.

I like drop sets way better than rest pause sets. They adapt better to the CNS and go to the metabolic-end side of hypertrophy, so I use thema lot, combined with my PRODUCTIVITY idea.

My 5-rep max on the bench press, at a 10X0 tempo, is 315 pounds. That’s 7,5 seconds, or 7 seconds and 1575 pounds of work. I can usually complete 8 sets of 5 on a workout before i decide to go home, havving drained my strength enough to barely squeeze two or three sets of pushups befoe the muscle goews numb enough to not even do a flye with a 1-pound dumbell.

It feels like a strength set, pumping and all, but feels as a strength set, doesn’t really feel like it’s working any other aspect of the muscle rather than recruitment of fibers and force production…meaning I don’t feel the pump or the sensation that would get me to say “burn baby burn, grow motherfucker grow” to my muscles.

I can bench press 275 pounds for 8 reps at a 10X0 tempo. That’s 12 seconds and 2200 pounds of work per set, and I can give you 12 sets per workout. But to me, that’s a STRENGTH set, not a HYPERTROPHY set, which would be 12 reps with a load of 215 pounds, which is, at the same 10X0 tempo, 18 seconds and over 2500 pounds of work per set, considering I can give you like 12 or 14 sets per workout.

I can also go to 185 pounds and do 15-rep sets, which is even more productive, 2775, but right after I hit my 15th rep I notice that it can’t go over 15 reps without becoming more of an endurance set, despite its apparent productivity, because at 20 reps, I can move 150 pounds per set…and guess what, it is more tiresome, fatigues me more per set, so I end up doing less sets,about 15 of them if i get lucky, normall the same 12 sets or just 10 therefore moving less weight per session than with my 12-rep set.

What this means is that there will be a point where you see diminished returns…you can’t curl a 1-pound dumbells 1000 times and say you moved a ton, and expect to get big.

You can’t curl a 100 pounds dumbel for ten times and think that you are gonna get freakishly big from that.

What you can do is to curl a 50-pounds, or a 25-pounds dumbell (dpending on your own body’s mechanics and metabolism) enough times to get big, the answer being in the middle of the two points of view, and that applies to bodybuilding only.

Generally, the idea of a set based in Productivity is to find the best set, the one where you can more more weight per unit of time for the most units of time.

That’s the rep-range and load combination that allos you to move the most weight per set for the most sets per workout you can handle.

Just do this: let’s say you train total-body for 3 times a week or split for twice a week pr muscle grouping. In one session, hit your body with no less than 5 sets with 5 different loads, starting at no less than 8 reps per set and not going over 15 reps.

Write down how much time it took you to rest between each set, and how much weight you managed to lift, but don’t go to failure, stay like 3 reps shy of it on each set. Feel them out and be honest, mark the one that felt most pumping.

Next session, use sets from 15 to 20 reps, and do the same. See how they feel, compare them with the feeling of the previous session’s sets, and make a good analysis.

Some people move mroe weight per set as the load dapts and the reps go between 10-12 some between 12-15 reps and some actually between 8-10 reps, in any case, there’s a point where in order to get higher reps, the weight decreases and then you see that the amount of weight per set become constant and then drops down.

It’s like walking up a hill, as hard as it may be to walk up,after you get to the top, the rest of the road is downhill, and easier. Meaning it becomes an endurance workout. My top is at 13-14 reps.

I can reach 15 on the first sets, but anyays, after I go over 15 reps, I need to decrease the weight,and worse than getting the same amount of weight per set (if not less) with more reps (despite the fact some of the readers might point out, that I get more time under tension to compensate for it, the intensity or productivity drops and that is what the focus should be on, if not, these would be timed sets), I get less sets done per workout for I fatigue more, thus making it an endurance workout (a half-assed and counterproductive, catabolic one at that) instead of a hypertrophy one.

Just find the way to move more load per workout, by moving the most load per set without making it a strength set or an endurance set…the way you accumulate tension damage and fatigue will tell you when a set tilts towards one of such ends and will allow you to adjust to it.

That’s why i love bodyweight sets. You can just do dips and chins and see to do as many reps as you can each time you start a set, doesn’t matter if the reps decrease and the rest-periods get longer, as long as you work it hard and thoroughly, you are on the road to success…

Boneco taught me that life is simpler in terms of functionality and such, and I guess than it is the message I try to spread, we don’t need to listen to anybody else but our own bodies, but we can use the principles that apply the best to them, as the Gurus sometimes publsh them.

Well guys see you soon, i start my comission in an hour at the local Courthouse and today pans out to be an intriguing and exciting day…see you soon guys.