What a great read the interview with Charles Staley was, it’s good to see people who give answers without the b/s. I thought his statement about using rep speed as the true measure of failure was intriguing what did others think?.
I agree, interesting interview. Many interviews are not what they could be because the intrviewer was a dumbass and didn’t ask right questions. Chris clearly prepared well, good questions, great job. WSB guys on their speed day stop adding weight when the speed drops noticeably. They they go back to 50-60% of new max and begin a new cycle.
From everything I’ve seen Charles Staley
is a great guy, also smart and with very
good advice, but that one I did not think
too much of course (Of course, it could just
be that I am being stupid.)
In some applications I have no doubt of
the principle. For example, if training
the Olympic lifts, if your speed drops,
do no more reps.
But in general, the 10% speed reduction
figure seems very far off, and on top
of this, unfeasible in the details. For
example, it might be that with 60% 1RM,
I could do a lift explosively in half
a second. So what, I stop doing reps once
I couldn’t do it in 0.55 seconds? If I prefer doing the reps in 2 seconds so as to not have excessive momentum taking away tension in the upper parts of the lift, then how do I tell whether I “could have” done it 0.55 seconds or not?
Very often a rep will be somewhat slow, and considerably slower than just 10% slower than what might have been done while fresh, but another rep is still productive (in my opinion) and completely doable in excellent form.
But if say a rep takes four seconds of extremely great effort, then by all means don’t try another one in most circumstances.
At first, I kind of balked at the 10% idea. I had the same objections as you, but then I interpreted it differently.
Obviously, bodybuilders use tempo for many exercises. Say that you are doing a 2 second concentric. As fatigue sets in, you get slower, especially if using heavy loads. You would terminate the set when the concentric cannot be completed within 2.2 seconds.
That seems reasonable. I have yet to try it and I think it would be almost impossible to acually time each rep unless you had a very focused partner. So in practicality, I don't think it is very feasible, except for dynamic effort or even maximal effort work. But for repeated effort work (the meat and potatoes of a bodybuilding workout), I think it is possible, but very difficult to implement.
I can see the real application of it with power/speed training as discussed and using it as a gauge, it could also be applied to general BB training and used as a parameter not neccessarily a set in stone absolute. If you have a preset tempo and start going outside that you can often feel the change in rhythm.
Guys, I have seen a video of Charles working with people using a special gadget that actually measures the power you apply to the bar when doing a given lift, and the speed at which you lifted it (or, if you attach it to yourself, the power and speed of how fast YOU move, if say, you are doing dips or chins). Aside from getting this tool, though (which you can get through Charles by emailing him at his site, Myodynamics.com) I would find it pretty difficult to accurately determine when your speed has decreased enough to terminate further work.
But Jason, Charles said (but perhaps did not mean, since it seems to make so little sense in many applications?) within 10% of your best performance.
So if you could do a rep when fresh in 0.5 seconds, that would be your best performance, and the 10% would be relative to that.
Making it relative to the speed you choose
to do your first rep at first glance seems
to make more sense, but on further thought, if you chose 2 second reps to begin the set why does it make sense that you really ought to stop if a rep takes say 2.3 seconds, whereas if you had chosen 3 second reps and a rep takes 3.2 seconds you ought to keep going?
I suspect that due to the brevity of the interview Charles’ real thought processes here didn’t quite come out because this makes so little sense other than in some specific things like Olympic lifting or possibly
training with particularly heavy weight e.g.
90% 1RM or above and even then I see so many exceptions.
Very cool stuff. A little “too” opinionated for me though (see functional training question). Almost seemed like some of his answers were just obscure just to be obscure. Although I don’t plan on doing the EDT program it does sound very novel and fun.
Good call Bill! I don’t really think that the whole concept was fully developed in the interview. Obviously the application to dynamic and max effort work is fairly clear, because it is a percentage of your best effort. For repeated effort work though, I just don’t see the exact application.
On another note, I think that Charles has some incredibly insightful things to say about choosing the right career. The tidbit in this interview was great along with something he said from the SWIS conference last year that was something like:
The harder it is to explain to others what you do, the more likely your job is satisfying.
Or something like that. Really great point of view IMO.
On the other hand, there’s a famous and widely admired quote in the sciences (I don’t remember who said it though) that if you cannot fairly explain the general idea of what you do to a young child, you are a charlatan 
And that really is true I think, believe it or not. Even very advanced things like say the work of Richard Feynman, or decidedly less advanced things like what I do with prodrugs, you can find a simple way to say basically what is done that a child can understand.
For example, I could say, “Sometimes medicines
don’t work really well because they have a
hard time getting into your body.
I put new things on the medicines to help
them get into your body. Then once the
medicine is in your body the things I put on
come off. That’s what I do, put things
on medicines that come off later, and help
the medicines get in the body.”
Simple enough!
I do tend to think that, in the sciences anyway, if you can’t make it seem like you do
ANYTHING without having to cite very technical stuff – in other words, there is no broad generality that can be easily understood – then most likely you really are just bedazzling people with bullshit for a -career