I’m browsing through ‘Strength training for all sports’, the top book recommended by Coach Poliquin, and undoubtedly a great resource for any Personal Trainers and Coaches alike.
A particular sentence caught my eye:
“Repetition training by the intensive interval training method leads to unusually high muscle glycogen storage; it also increases the storage of liver glycogen.”
The intensive interval method refered to consists of a load of 50-60% of your 1 rep max; the whole set is to last 20-45 seconds, 30 being ideal; the reps are to be performed as fast as possible; sets are to be supersetted as in a circuit training with 10-30 seconds between them, and 1-3 minutes rest after all sets are done.
Weight lifting in general increases your capacity to store glycogen BUT the aforementioned high rep protocol leads to UNUSUALLY high glycogen stores.
More glycogen means more energy for strength training once you’re done with a few weeks of intensive interval training; this translates into greater potential for strength/hypertrophy gains.
In all, this is just another reason why preceding a strength phase with a high rep, intensive phase is a good idea.
Intensive, high rep training. Goal: Increased glycogen storage capability.
Strength gain, optimized due to increased glycogen storage
Hypertrophy, optimized due to greater strength.
I dunno, that seems like a good way to go about getting stronger and bigger.
I’m assuming the point of your post was mostly to inform.
So consider this a bump.
Also, this just seems intuitive to me. If you do endurance training, it makes perfect sense that your body would want to increase energy stores to abnormally high levels.
I might consider doing this on my last week of my 4 week Mag-10 cycle before going with a 5x5 program for my post-cycle period.
Sounds interesting… How many sets in a superset, and what kind of exercises did he recommend? Also how many supersets and what about workout frequency? I know these are a lot of questions but as I said, I’m interested.
Not to bash that idea but wouldn’t feeder sets or drop sets be more beneficial than low intensity hi rep stuff?
trainin heavy then blast out 3 quick drop sets…
However, when you consider a strength-predominant phase of training when repetitions per set are 5 or less, you must realize that muscle glycogen is not the limiting factor in the continuation of each set. The reason that one cannot continue a set with such high intensity is because all of the muscle fibers and motor neurons have been fatigued and activated such that force production cannot be maintained.
If this explanation that you proposed is actually the case, then performing this type of training prior to a hypertrophy-based phase may be ideal, as glycogen storage then becomes more important.