One of the mistakes I made was seeing a jacked up Olympic lifter or powerlifter and thinking, doing what they do will get me jacked and stacked, well we have to learn quickly if we are talented enough for that.
A decade of technical work and still only lifting mediocre weight won’t do it.
Gotta find another way to utilize 1-rep max which I found a concept for this.
I’ve done 3-max effort lifts this week. One I posted here. And damn did this add some muscle poppage to my build!!!
This may or may not be warming up with singles, it may be warming up with sets of 10-20, then hitting a 1-rep max.
It may not be a PR weight, but when I say 1-rep max, it means you got nothing else left.
There will be more to look forward to on this concept, discovery!!!
I am entirely against 1 rep max lifts, except for a powerlift meet. And then only IN those 9 attempts you are given, of which in a perfect meet only three attempts are 1 rep maximum lifts.
With 1rep it’s 1rep and you are done. With 3-reps, well, your injury risk goes up by 200percent chance.
I’m 100 percent srs.
I’m not against doing 2-3reps max at all. I’m not against anything, except copying world class programs when I’m not ever going to be world class and really won’t get the best results.
Just saying…….
Also, I’m not talking about only doing the big 3 here, or the big 2 (O’lifting). I’m talking about variation lifts.
In those meets you are judged with pauses and depth etc.
In a dead-lift if you stall on your lift, it won’t count, so that ain’t considered perfect, yet it’s still a max effort.
Today I did a hack dead lift from the rack, think about the opposite of a RDL out of the rack, except I actually touched the floor. I did a 1-rep max that actually stalled, well, the bar got stuck as my glutes were in the way, I jiggled and hit the lift, that sticky point rocked my quads like , holy crap! I had nothing left, I was so pumped though.
While not the same as data, it is something Dave Tate has talked about as well. I forget which episodes of Table Talk its in, but the idea that for him (a beat up old powerlifter with more reps under his belt than most of us will ever even see), singles are safer than multiple reps because they allow him to set up perfectly, while also reducing the amount of wear and tear on joints. I think thats a very, very specific example though from someone with a pretty unique set of circumstances.
Its also worth considering that what the OP is refering to as 1RM doesn’t sound like the same as what other people mean. It sounds similar to Dan Johns concept of sorta max, the maximum weight you feel comfortable hitting on the day. I’ve had a brief scan for the T-Nation article where Dan explains this, but all i could find was Dragon Door articles, which i won’t link to.
You’d have to talk to Dave Tate for that level of detail. I’m not sure he really went into the context around what his full training looked like and if he did, i don’t remember it. Even if he did, thats a very, very unique circumstance. Not very many of us have several decades of elite powerlifting behind us.
I do think that if your technique is absolutely rock solid, working up to a sorta-max every session could be safer than resetting every time. I can’t see it being effective long term for almost any lift though.
Yes, I am using them to get better and add to my build.
My gym lifts suck and they always have.
I was once really into those old Ironmind training hall tapes showing the Bulgarian weighting, these guys weighing only 150# but had backs that were stacked, that’s because they could pop over 400 in snatch attempts, even though there were lots of failures, doing those attempts are stimulating all the big muscles.
Also, I’m not ever advocating doing this every session, I’m a huge fan of light very high rep work too, but the heavy stuff is where the density is built.
I spent years and years doing variations of hang cleans , jerks etc. but all it did was get me more efficient with my puny lifts, which isn’t going get me jacked looking and if it does eventually, well I don’t have another 20years to waste.
Gosh, I’d say the bar was stalled for 3 seconds, other than that it was moving steady.
I would not do this with a squat though. I saw the J. Masters double quad tear and that BS ain’t worth a chit, and there are other things at play when it came to that guy and that squat style etc.
Even for competitive powerlifting, many powerlifters save their 1 rep maximum effort for the meet. It is not a portion of the training strategy.
Obviously, for competitive bodybuilding 1 rep max has no place in the training strategy.
What remains are the rest of the weight trainers. Why place 1 rep max as a strategy? The reason I hear most is that they are testing how strong they are. My comment to them is that I am using every training session with the main aim is getting either getting stronger or getting bigger. I can see if my strength is increasing with a 5 rep maximum effort and still be training to get stronger.
Most of these people are adding weight until they miss. In most cases the form breaks on misses. Now you are learning how to miss. This is a horrible competitive powerlifting strategy, but also a poor training strategy for all weight lifting.
IMO, for all those wanting to add muscle tissue, 5 reps is the minimum number of reps that should be done in the gym. I know this flies in the face of 5-3-1. That said, I would incorporate 5-3-1 to get over a strength plateau, but then go back to the higher reps. Remember: Your goal is to put on muscle, not get freaky strong (unless that is your goal, which for most I don’t believe it is.) Most people are striving to look good naked. Tell me that is not true.
Today I’m feeling beat up, as yesterday I hit that 1-rep max Hack lift, plus I also hit a 1-rep max incline dumbbell press.
I did 2-sets of 10, 1-set of 9 before that max lift and I actually failed it on 1st attempt. I drank some honey real quick and got it, had nothing else left.
So today I wanted to squat, I don’t have a rack so I do steinborn squats-
I worked up to a medium set of 5 just to get everything firing, then I did-
157 x60reps in one set.
I did speed sets of 10 there and final 10 was 1, 3, 3, 3 last 6 I was roaring, god that was brutal. The bar never left my back.
Honestly I don’t feel so beat up now. So I strongly believe in light recovery, but I want to still make that hard as hell.
Using mathematical “set theory” illustration: 1 rep maximum is a small subset of the set of heavy singles. But IMO, heavy singles are a significant portion of competitive powerlifting training strategy. They are an insignificant portion of bodybuilding training strategy.
I never competed in powerlifting and never plan to, therefore I will never experience the 1-rep max effort you speak of in a meet, so I have to do it in general training.
I did complete in strongman and used the heavy singles all the time. They never really worked for me. That was 20 years ago, I’m sure I was doing lots of other things wrong too.
But you also need to know yourself, I can tell you that I’m never going to stick to anything that’s planned, my mind works like this “if I have to stick with a planned rep/set program, I will rebel” that is something i see in me as I get older too. I was a bit better following something when I was younger. I’m way more of an instinctive lifter now than ever.
