This is a question for those who are familiar with Chad Waterbury’s work, and the ideas behind it :
Chad, in his ABBH program prescribes increasing reps from week to week on a 10x3 scheme so that by week 3 you are doing 5 reps. All the while, you are doing 80%1RM. Well, in this sense we’ve progressed to lead to one path.
What other ways could this progress?
What about decreasing the rest time density between workouts by 10seconds?
How about incremental weight increases without reaching failure on any reps each week?
Adding sets?
Could this progression be periodized to use a similiar reps/sets scheme through a 11 week period or so perhaps by first increasing load (3 weeks) testing (1 week) and then through decreased rest periods (3 weeks) retesting and then via added reps (3 weeks) - assumably all these variables would have different challenges associated with them?
Also the load would be altered in accordance with testing to accomodate gained strength.
How would this work, lets say, in a program like ABBH where there is both low rep and high rep work being done every week?
All of your ideas are good progression schemes. As for the ABBH, perform it as prescribed for maximum hypertrophy. My OSC program increases the density by decreasing rest periods each week.
First try the ABBH as prescribed, then you can adjust variables to see how the results compare.
Ike - I just forgot to delete ‘density’ it was originally ‘increasing the density’. But anyways, I like workouts that get shorter over the course of a month by 20-30 seconds per set. It’s an interesting challenge to do singles with 90 seconds on the 1st, and try to do them with 15 seconds around the 29th.
Chad - I’m not actually using the ABBH, I’m just interested in how each method of progression might impact different variables of performance or if they all lead to the same place. While I really dig the ABBH program’s scheme, I have no considerable interest in hypertrophy at the moment and a lot of interest in gaining strength. Some say with the latter comes the former anyways, and thats fine by me, but I’m not going out of my way for it. It’s more of a theoretical issue for me than anything else.
