Limitations of high intensity training

[BendtheBar]

Originally Posted by Rich Knapp

Going to failure is so misunderstood. People think that is till you can no longer move the weight.

When in reality, when you need to take a pause get your breath or rest to drive another rep, you are at failure in a set. That little rest/pause is refilling the muscles glycogen.

I have had great results with high volume the last few years.

Failure or possibly poor conditioning Rich? I don't want to derail the thread, but I often pause because of poor conditioning, for example, on reps of dumbbell rows. My muscle strength and endurance is there, but the exercise itself is so taxing that I feel like I sprinted a quarter mile by rep 5.

[5kgLifter]

Originally Posted by BendtheBar

Failure or possibly poor conditioning Rich? I don't want to derail the thread, but I often pause because of poor conditioning, for example, on reps of dumbbell rows. My muscle strength and endurance is there, but the exercise itself is so taxing that I feel like I sprinted a quarter mile by rep 5.

Just to add very briefly to this point; I tend to have to employ rest-pause on overheads and some other exercises due to bodily "health" restrictions aka TOS.



But, back to the HIT, is it always to failure? I hadn't realised that about the concept.

[BendtheBar]

Originally Posted by 5kgLifter

Just to add very briefly to this point; I tend to have to employ rest-pause on overheads and some other exercises due to bodily "health" restrictions aka TOS.



But, back to the HIT, is it always to failure? I hadn't realised that about the concept.

I have a book by Ellington Darden, who is a proponent of HIT, and some of his advanced workouts feature training days that aren't to failure. But outside of this book, everything I've seen is to failure.

On the topic of failure...there is muscular failure, cardiovascular failure (can't catch our breath so we stop or slow), and several other failures. I had to stop a set at Rich's house this past weekend because I could no longer feel my hands and dumbbell presses started to get dangerous. Circulation failure, or whatever you want to call it.

In the HIT context, failure is muscular failure.

[Rich Knapp]

I am referring to when you rep out 8-9 reps and have to physically take a brake to do a rep or 2 more.

I wasn't referring to advanced training with rest pause or a planed pause style rep.

I was referring to the beginner repping and then stopping to get there breath and a brake to be able to do any more reps.
Many 60's and 70's pro bbers will back this up. Its were I learned it from.

[kitarpyar]

Originally Posted by BendtheBar

If we put the Reeve's beginner up with one working set and didn't attribute it to Reeve's, but instead called it a HIT workout and added failure, a lot of people wouldn't take it seriously because of the HIT Jedi hatred.

I see where you are getting at. And mostly, I agree with you on this. Just as there are HIT jedis, there are lots of people who hate HIT jedis to the point that they wont even listen to what they say. But ... I differ in the opinion that Reeves' beginner routine (for most part) is like a HIT routine. If anything, his methods might involve failure in the higher volume variants, but I doubt it. I had a feeling after reading his book that his core philosophy was to use volume as a way to getting around without training to failure.

I mentioned there is room for ambiguity, so let me elaborate a bit more on that. The Reeve's plan:

The diktat was, once you get 12 reps, increase weight (5 lbs). Consider a case where you are using 150 lbs, but actually have the capacity to get in 160 lbs for the target reps. You would increase the weight next workout to 155 for 12 reps, and you still wouldn't hit failure. This point becomes especially critical for beginners. Their bodies adapt very fast, and with each workout, the threshold for "failure" goes up; initially it goes up so rapidly, that they don't reach failure when they increase the weight by 5 lbs/workout.

In other words, this is the regime when everyone talks of milking the linear progression, and while this can be tough workouts, this is not necessarily training to failure HIT style.

As a trainee advanced though, Reeves advocated higher volume of work. In his book (Building a Classic physique the natural way), he recommends increasing the number of sets to 2 once the trainee can't add weights/reps every workout with the single set protocol on a consistent basis. This would imply that he was advocating increasing the volume to avoid training to failure consistently. Similarly, moved on from 2 sets to 3 sets later on, but never did I see him advocate more than 3 sets.

Instead beyond this, he changed the routine. If you look at his beginner's routine, he had 9-10 exercises, one per bodypart. If you look at the final routine in the book (the one he states was his peak or championship routines), he further increased the total volume by increasing the number of exercises to 3-4 moves/bodypart. Including all of it, he had 27 or 28 exercises per session, 2-4 sets/exercise, and a whopping 61-62 work sets per session, each of which lasted about 2.5 hours. Reeves was a beast too, one with incredible genetics, who relied on volume as he advanced more and more.

Anyway, the whole point in this post is this: going through the routines of Reeves, I can sense that he used volume as a tool to progress without training to absolute failure (at least on a consistent basis), so in that sense I would not think of Reeves routines as HIT style. I agree with you though, that if you dont look at his training philosophy in a holistic manner, rather looked at one block of his routines, his principles are ambiguous enough to be thought that this is a style close to HIT.

Hope I make sense, lol

Getting back to the topic of the thread, regarding limitations of HIT - a major limitation according to me lies with the trainees - failure in HIT is "perceptive" rather than "measurable". Two different individuals with different mindset, and training to failure will mean different things. Heck, even for the same individual, working out after a good day in the office and a bad day in the office, mindset would be different and failure would take different meanings.

Plus as Fazc pointed out, HIT is a very good tool, but we would do well to keep in mind that this is not the only tool.

[Fazc]

Kit that makes a hell of a lot of sense, you've explained a very ambiguous topic with a good deal of accuracy.

Using volume to progress is essentially the way I approached my lifting while I first joined this site, in my 'Fazc's Log' thread. I reflected on my experiences here:

Increasing Weekly Training Volume - Muscle and Brawn Bodybuilding, Powerlifting and Muscle Building.

Also for further reading into this, if you research Doug Youngs style of progression he had some very interesting ideas on this related to his powerlifting.

[BendtheBar]

Originally Posted by kitarpyar

But ... I differ in the opinion that Reeves' beginner routine (for most part) is like a HIT routine.

I agree with you Kit. I am merely saying one set per bodypart looks like a HIT routine on the surface. I think we both know that 80% of posters who comment on routines like this on any random forum speak first and think second.

I am not saying they are the same, but rather on the surface the Reeve's beginner would appear to many to not be too far off. My point was that if you posted it as a simple structure on another forum, someone would chime in and call it HIT. I believe this would happen, if anybody really bothered to respond.

this is not necessarily training to failure HIT style.

Again I agree. I never stated they were the same. I merely stated many would perceive them to look the same on the surface. They look much closer in nature (fullbody, one top set, etc.) than the Reeve's looks to any random volume workout in a magazine.

Though we are familiar with fullbody workouts on this site, they are still misunderstood by at least 95% of posters across the Internet.

Great post about Reeves.

Regarding Reeve's style in general, I've read the Reeve's book among other things and understand quite a bit about his approach. This slow building is the essence of many workouts that GL and I worked on together.

his principles are ambiguous enough to be thought that this is a style close to HIT.

Just caught this after my ramble. Ignore everthing prior to this.

[BendtheBar]

The diktat was, once you get 12 reps, increase weight (5 lbs). Consider a case where you are using 150 lbs, but actually have the capacity to get in 160 lbs for the target reps. You would increase the weight next workout to 155

This is the approach I used for a very long time. My focus was always on adding reps, as opposed to adding weight each week. Once I hit the target rep ceiling I added weight. This is also the method I primarily teach, though it's not exactly like the Reeves approach.

[BendtheBar]

Originally Posted by Fazc

Kit that makes a hell of a lot of sense, you've explained a very ambiguous topic with a good deal of accuracy.

Using volume to progress is essentially the way I approached my lifting while I first joined this site, in my 'Fazc's Log' thread. I reflected on my experiences here:

Increasing Weekly Training Volume - Muscle and Brawn Bodybuilding, Powerlifting and Muscle Building.

Also for further reading into this, if you research Doug Youngs style of progression he had some very interesting ideas on this related to his powerlifting.

For anyone curious, there is a thread on Doug Young here:

http://muscleandbrawn.com/forums/pow...oug-young.html

Feel free to add any resources or quotes you may have found.

[Daniel]

Kit wrote: "Reeves advocated higher volume of work. In his book (Building a Classic physique the natural way), he recommends increasing the number of sets to 2 once the trainee can't add weights/reps every workout with the single set protocol on a consistent basis. This would imply that he was advocating increasing the volume to avoid training to failure consistently. Similarly, moved on from 2 sets to 3 sets later on, but never did I see him advocate more than 3 sets."

So when Steve Reeves trained on one set as a begginer, do you think he would train until he knew he was about to hit failure if he attempted another rep? In other words, one (or 2) reps before failure? And if he couldn't manage to progress he would add another set in order to be able to progress more slowly between two sets, and then three? And would these sets be pushed within a rep or two of failure as well?

Also, would that be the difference between a begginer, and intermediate, and an advanced lifter? In other words, begginers will be able to make fast enough gaines on one set, an intermediate needs two sets to gain across, and an advanced needs 3?

I know those are a lot of questions. I'm realizing that I am not that experienced with some of the finer points of programming.

-Daniel