[quote]Bill Roberts wrote:
Wow… since a 1 rep increase represents at least a 2% increase in strength (often more), your strength then has been increasing by at least 1.02 to say the 40th power every year.
(Assuming you mean weekly, and granting say 12 weeks per year that aren’t so good.)
That means increasing your strength 2.2 times per year, so over the last say 3 years, I trust then that since your strength always increases this much per week, your strength has increased by more than 6 times in say the last 3 years. Really?
Or you are adding reps to non-maximal performances. Then changing things up, and again adding reps to non-maximal performances.
Rather than actually increasing in strength so much every week as corresponds with being one rep stronger.
As mentioned, this is a topic that I have tried more than enough on already, never with any good result. So I will leave it to this: Those of you that are experienced, and know accurately what you were lifting a year ago, etc. and of course what you are now:
Try dividing out the improvement by the weeks. It ain’t gonna be any 5 lb per week, or 1% per week. Not on a sustained basis.
Those who have the illusion that they always gain this fast, obtain it by switching things around and constantly changing the reference. The apparent 5 lb per week increases are relative to non-maximal, for the individual, performance due to referring to a point of having just resumed an exercise after a layoff from it, and having lost some skill on it.
Else, everyone who was at say a 300 lb bench, would be adding 250 lb per year and we’d have countless multi-ton benchers. For that matter most who were benching 300 (for example) at some point of being experienced, aren’t benching 820 raw 10 years later thanks to adding even 1 lb per week.
And yes the microloading has benefit.
There are ways to program things where weight increases DO correspond to what the body can do.
But the typical recommendation does not match up with, other than beginner gains, what is possible. Sorry you ain’t adding 5 lb strength every week to your bench for years on end, particularly not from an already-decent point.
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So what Bill is saying is that it’s impossible to improve consistently or the bench press numbers would keep going up with no end in site. In other words there is a limit to human strength. Geee… I’m glad I read Bill’s post or I would still be in the dark.