If a weekly split would be similar to Dorian Yates…how many effective reps would you recommend for each workout / muscle group?
How long until you start to lose the gains from a workout?
Chest / biceps
Off
Legs
Shoulders / triceps
Off
Back / traps
Off
Repeat
So for example for chest if I did 15-25 effective reps between flat, incline, and dips…would that stimulus carry over til the following workout a week later?
Thanks
No idea.
The best we can do is propose an educated guess because it hasn’t been studied. And frankly I doubt that we can actually properly study it, at least for now.
The reason is that it’s hard to measure the number of effective reps performed, for a few reasons for that:
To be able to evaluate the number of effective reps we must know exactly how many reps in reserve there was. And people are notoriously bad at evaluating that. Especially the beginners typically used in studies. And it’s even worse is we rely on the scientiest to evaluate how many reps the participants have in reserve by looking at them. Being 1-2 reps “off” per set is likely. And while it doesn’t sound like much, over something like 10 sets that a difference of 10-20 reps!
Depending on the exercise or execution, a set taken to failure can provide 4, 5 or 6 effective reps… again, even a 1 rep difference in the estimation can pile up pretty quickly.
The closer to failure a rep is, the more “effective” it is. Let’s say that the 5 reps prior to failure are effective reps… the last rep is more effective than the 3rd one which is more effective than the 5th one. While talking in terms of effective reps is a great way to simplify things, it’s actually a bit more complex than that.
Then we must consider that people have differences in responses and tolerance to exercise. So some might hit a point of diminishing returns at X number of effective reps and someone else might see better results up to X + 10 or 15 (or more).
I’m not even comfortable giving you an approximate range for where maximum growth occurs. I can say that with 20-25 effective reps per muscle you will stimulate growth. But it might not (it likely not) gonna lead to maximal gains for most.
I also need to mention that the effective reps theory is actually not proven. It’s just that, a theory. I like it, I think it has a lot behind it, but who knows, in 5 years maybe it will be completely invalidated.
What do you mean?
Do you mean after you stop training, how long until you start losing muscle. Or how many times you can provide the same stimulus to the body until the gains stimulated decrease.
This topic was automatically closed 30 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.