Just wanted to get people’s thoughts and opinions on the vince gironda principles of training lighter weights with high volume and reducing the rest periods. I am thinking of trying this style of training around full body workouts 4x a week
Two questions , what is your lifting experience and why full body four times a week? Also if memory servers Vince wasn’t about using light weight!
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Well I’m 32 now and been training since 15. Done all the usual stuff mainly for sports. For the last 5-10 years I have been mainly training for strength in the low rep ranges but would like to try and add some size through hypertrophy. I say lighter because he recommends keeping the rest to 60seconds and below for all 8 sets so to make sure my form and each rep is perfect is why I say using a lighter weight… My thoughts on doing full body 4 days was open to advice but I want to hit each muscle with high volume as a new approach
Im rusty on Vince’s approach… But 4 days full body is over kill IMO. you might want to look into his exact approach more.
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I’m not sure if I did it as prescribed by Vince
But 4x a week of fullbody 8x8 got me fast gains! I’m sure it was intended to do straight weight for all 8 sets, but I would have to decrease weight to maintain form and still keep up with the 15-30 sec rest periods. I personally did mine light, and didn’t mess up my heavier weights when I got back into it (other than deadlift - I did 405 and ended up having to do 285 for reps to build back up)
Yeah my plan is to find a weight where I can do all the 8x8 with good form with 60 seconds rest on each exercise and then when I can complete this i will reduce the rest times down to 45 seconds and then down to 15 seconds and only then will I add weight to the bar.
8x8 is good. Do you have a copy of Vince’s Unleashing the Wild Physique? There are many ways to interpret 8x8, and knowing Vince’s philosophies gives you a better perspective. A lot of people have there own version of 8x8 and it can be quite different to Vince’s.
I haven’t done it for 4-5 years but it can be quite punishing even with lighter weights. I used about 50% of my 8 rep max(not 1 rep max) I was natty at the time and was really happy with the results.
Vince was publicly against steroids, yet nearly all those guys that he trained were on gear
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It’s been four or five years since I did the 8x8, but it worked very well for me for a couple months. I ran full body 3 times per week, and I’m sure I did a variation of Gironda’s routine; I did 6 different exercises for 8 sets of 8 reps, then 2 exercises of 4 sets each - 54 sets per workout. I did straight weight, supersetting the first six exercises and resting the prescribed 60 seconds or less between each round and decreasing the rest periods each workout.
After a couple months, I was burned out of the high volume and low rest, but my work capacity skyrocketed and I didn’t lose strength.
It does get pretty taxing after a while, knowing the pain you are about to put yourself through. Vince’s solution was to train for 3 weeks and take the 4th wk off from weights, then repeat the cycle.