[quote]BBriere wrote:
Coach,
I’ve just been wondering. Since some of your earlier articles such as HSS-100 and Pendulum Training advocated higher reps and more bodybuilding techniques, do you still hold those articles to be valid? Would you say if you were training for bodybuilding principles that it’s still best to stay at low reps and ramp up or go for higher reps?[/quote]
I addressed this in the past. For all my training ‘‘career’’ (well, except for the first 2 years) I used mostly lots of sets (6-12+) of low reps (6 or less) of few exercises (2-4 per workout). That’s how my first coach had us train for football (training heavily based on powerlifting and olympic lifting with plyo thrown in) then I continued to train the same way when I switched to olympic lifting.
This pretty much covers a period ranging from 1990 to 2001. During that period I’d say that 90% of all my sessions were based on doing 4 basic lifts per workout. Either using an upper-lower split (when playing football) or a traditional olympic lifting breakdown (1 snatch variation, 1 clean & jerk variation, 1 squat variation, 1 pull or deadlift variation); doing a high number of sets of each exercise (6-12+) and kept my reps in the 1-5 range.
10% of the time (about 2 weeks after every 4 months of training) I would do a more traditional bodybuilding training to give my joints and psyche a break.
I then trained in a powerlifting gym for about 1-2 years, still doing the same type of workouts but focusing more on the bench and squat (used a program designed from reading Westside’s stuff). So I was still doing mostly low reps, with some inclusion of a little medium reps (6-8) on some isolation exercises.
I then got injured, started my career as a coach and decided to get lean to increase my credibility. I added more typical bodybuilding stuff, still keep a base of heavy lifting.
Around 2003 I decided to compete in bodybuilding and drastically changed my training; dropping the heavy lifting and focused mostly on isolation, tempo, drop sets, etc. It actually destroyed my physique and did very poorly at my first contest (lost a lot of muscle mass and fullness). I didn’t realize that it was the change in training, I simply believed that I overdieted.
I competed again a years after that still training like a bodybuilder, with typical ‘‘fatigue-isolation-pump’’ stuff. Did a bit better mostly because between both contests I had gotten back to heavy lifting and rebuilt somewhat of a base. I did better at the contest, but still wasn’t that good.
I basically decided to forget about bodybuilding at that point and really decided to get back to trying out for powerlifting. So I got back to heavy lifting and dropped most ‘‘pump’’ stuff (still doing isolation work, but heavier).
I was approached by Sebastien Cossette who wanted to compete in his first bodybuilding show (in 2005 I think). Being backstage with him kinda made we want to compete again. Which I did a year later. But I was a bit smarter and kept rotating strength-based training (3 weeks) with higher reps stuff (3 weeks) and did better at the contest.
BUT most of the people who knew me still asked what happened… the thing is that even though I was a pretty good shape at the show. I looked much better… bigger, fuller, more muscular and almost as lean 5 months prior to the show when I was still doing mostly strength stuff.
I once again blamed it on diet. It took me a while to realize it, but I finally understood that:
Heavy low reps training = muscular, full, powerful looking
Higher reps = losing fullness, not as muscular
Obviously this is just a sample size of 1 test subject (me). But I am now convinced that ‘‘pump’’ training is less than optimal for most. I’m not saying that everybody will need to keep using exclusively super low reps; some of my clients use a lot of work in the 6-8 range for example. But most will do better avoiding all those pump, fatigue-inducing techniques.
YES I wrote articles involving higher reps stuff and technique aimed at creating a burn or pump. But I wrote those when I was doing that type of training myself and when you are in the middle of doing something it is often hard to stay objective.
