Author’s Note: Check out http://www.leangains.com, the home of Martin Berkhan. The inspiration for this series of posts came from his article, The Minimalist. Enjoy!
Last time I discussed what I see as a pretty novel approach to hypertrophy, reverse pyramid training. It goes against a lot of dogma and mythology about pyramiding sets. Let’s be frank, you can lift the most when you’re warmed up and well rested, not midway through a painful series of squats. How the traditional pyramiding of weights got started I’ll never understand.
There’s been some discussion about how HIT and minimalist training fit into contemporary research. If you’re putting out a true max effort as described in my previous post, there is no way in hell you’re going to be able to perform another max effort of the same movement in two to three days. Impossible.
And I think this keys into the big debate in the community. For hypertrophy purposes, where on the volume vs. intensity axis should bodybuilders place themselves? Strength is a secondary concern to aesthetics, but clearly plays a formative role in building exceptional physiques, roid junkies aside.
Our first confounder, I suppose, is the current research, which pretty conclusively argues for a training frequency of 2x/week for a given muscle group. This sort of set up, however, presumes something far less than an max effort set, given that in the research trainees were doing three sets of an exercise. There’s clearly a compromise here between volume and intensity.
Either you suck it up and build your routine around maximizing strength in the hypertrophy rep ranges for a given set of major exercises, or you take a volume approach that has you gaining strength (albeit in slower fashion) across a given range of exercises. The guy who is giving his body 7 – 8 days of rest before hitting a given movement is going to be a lot fresher physiologically and psychologically than the guy who hit deadlifts a few days ago. He’s also going for broke, so to speak, when he performs a given exercise.
For those just beginning their training careers, this sort of approach can skyrocket your early gains. Getting the body used to heavy weights early on will give you the ability to, down the road, experiment with training philosophies while lifting appreciable loads. Most ill-guided trainees begin with the polar opposite – 6 days a week of high volume, high fatigue training. If this is done too early in a training career, gains stall quickly, and you’re left endless repping 135 pound back squat loads. If you even make it that far.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
This is a really interesting concept, and I read the article on Martin’s site as well. You mention this would be good for beginner strength gains, but considering that beginners progress at such a fast rate would it really provide much of an advantage over something else? For example, a simple 5×5 program is usually great for strength in beginners anyway, with the added benefit of volume to build a groove for compound exercises.
I’m kind of curious to try it out. As an intermediate, I think the benefits would be mostly from changing up your strength routine after stalling on an older program. As of now, I’m gonna give Dan John’s 40 day program a try during rugby season. It’s almost the polar opposite of this, with daily training, kind of reminiscent of that lift a calf every day until it’s a cow approach. Going from that to this would shock the system.
Nice blog.
@Yash
Dan John is a smart guy. I think higher frequency training has its place, but again, with beginners there’s the danger of too much too fast. Plus, if you get trainees thinking about progressive overload from day one, 135lbs can turn quickly into 435lbs. Best of luck in rugby!