O.k. I must’ve misread/misinerpretated (my english is lacking) because he wrote:
“Shoulder abduction angle — some research indicates that the contribution of the regions of the trapezius to scapular retraction differs with shoulder abduction angle. Across the upper and middle regions, muscle activation increases as shoulder abduction increases from 0 to 90 degrees. In general, middle region activation is higher than upper region activation. However, the relative contribution of the upper region increases with shoulder abduction. Thus, the position with the arms in the anatomical position (by the sides of the body) is better for isolating the middle trapezius, while the position with the arms out to the sides is better for training the upper trapezius.”
I don’t write about or talk about strength development much if at all anymore, because I find it to be the most boring thing on the planet to talk about.
But if you’re talking about strength development then I wrote a whole book on it called base building and I still stand by all of those principles.
In other words, the 5 sets of 3-5 reps sub-maximal loading with CAT style reps.
Powerlifters use high rep periods with success. They will build fatigue, but that is the purpose. After you’ve done heavy 4x8 or 5x10 for a while, dropping to 4x4 or 5x5 feels easy, even though the weights get heavier.
So, work capacity. Also, your form should not go to shitter with longer sets. High rep periods also build muscle, optimal or not.
PS. I’m not against the low rep approach. That is where most succesful PLs tend to spend majority of their time - doing submax. sets of 3,4,5,6 (or building up to a 1-2 hard ones). But higher rep offer nice off season phase and different (mental and physical) stimulus.
I hear people say this every now and then, and to me it sounds like completely backwards thinking. It’s like saying that the purpose of driving your car is to burn gas and accumulate mileage.
I read this subforum consistently without ever posting, but I felt I should say that after I read the article you wrote about CAT reps, I gave it a try and it made a huge difference in increasing my squat when it hadn’t been going anywhere for a while. Thanks.
Might be. This is clearly something some very successful lifters have done, and I have experienced it my self, even though I’m can’t be labeled as elite lifter. I also know there are people who don’t do this. I can’t really say its the way, just tried to bring up some reasons why some do it.
That was mature.
Anyway. I’m not trying to say one must do this. I just brought up a fact I’ve noticed. Some PLs use high rep periods and seem to have success. These are some reasons I’ve heard and experienced my self. Not trying to make any absolutes here.
I have hard time believing something that successful lifters do, and have done, is useless. Same goes to the other way around. Sometimes I heard people looking down bodybuilding work for strength training as a non-specific waste of time. Things are never black and white, specially when we’re talking about human physiology.
Chris already addressed this but the point is, you’re wrong and this would be very stupid to do and not how you get better at building strength.
Strength is neurally driven. So the last thing you want to happen is to be driving a fatigued nervous system while you’re trying to create more efficient motor patterns. Over time, you want to develop incredibly efficient motor patterns so that the intramuscular latency is minimized and you have all of the high threshold motor units firing as synchronously as possible.
What happens over time is that more HTMU are freed up, and more loading can be applied.
None of this requires or needs a fatigued nervous system or muscles.
Do you guys just make this shit up because it sounds good?
I hopefully made it clear that I’m not speaking by my experience. I’ve done couple meets.
I personally know some lifters who are competing at international levels and use this kind of volume blocks. They might be wrong. Just observing what they have been doing.
About the more known lifters: Chad Wesley Smith, Bryce Krawczyk and Mike Tuchscherer have used high weekly volume in their training. It probably needs to be noted that we can mostly drop the insane high volumes away. But the volume has been much higher than some CAT -sets.
The fatigue logic has been taught me like this: more work you do, more work you can do. So if you expose yourself to high volume training (at times!), you have easier time to smash through the strength phase. Again this might be garbage, but there is definitely no consensus in this topic. This kind of training causes the wear and tear. That’s true. But it does not mean its not successful.
PS. I did actually just read today very good article how ones personality and othr non-physiological affects programming and how that might could be seen in ones training style. How some might benefit more aggressive low volume sessions, and others thrive in submaximal full body training.
I truly understand your view (I skimmed through your article about periodization for PL), and know your know your shit. But there are other competent coaches representing the other point of view and they also know their shit.
It could have some benefit for adding muscle mass, but the competition lifts aren’t particularly effective for hypertrophy. Perhaps some bodybuilding exercises would be a more direct and efficient way of accomplishing that.
It’s possible to still make progress with suboptimal methods, and some people can just tolerate a ton of volume. Look at what people are saying about the JTS AI program, at least 90% had minimal gains or even got weaker while a few actually had good results. A training method that only works for genetic outliers is not exactly something to recommend for the general population.
I agree, and it’s the same thing I have been telling people. But the problem is that there are so many people pushing all this high volume stuff that it’s easy to get confused. When Mike Israetel started talking about MRV for powerlifting and all that, there were a lot of people who were skeptical because the volume he was advocating was much less than they were used to.