Modified Rest-Pause and "HST 2.0"
At Lyle's board, a bunch of us labcoats had a pretty fascinating discussion about the idea of "modified rest pause."
This arose (independently invented by at least me and Blade separately, possibly Ron/NWLifter, too) out of experiments arising from fatigue management/clustering methods ala max-stim.
The principle, basically, is to do a series of rest/pause sets in which your guideline to terminate the set you are in is a noticeable decrease in movement speed from one rep to the next. Some arbitrary time is picked (e.g. 15-30 seconds) in which you rest between bouts of these "mini-sets" until a prescribed number of reps have been hit.
Here's the description I gave on Lyle's board about the variation I experimented with:
<div></div><div id="QUOTEHEAD">QUOTE</div><div id="QUOTE">Take a reasonable weight (something between, say, 5-15 RM):
* Perform repetitions until movement speed noticeably slows down, never risking failure
* Rest 30 seconds (or, to make things really simple, take 12-15 deep breaths ala DC training)
* Repeat the above sequence until a prescribed number of reps (10, 12, 15, 20, whatever) have been hit. If you want a good guideline, doubling the # of reps of whatever RM it is seems useful. E.g. 10 reps with a 5 RM, 20 reps with a 10 RM, etc.
Possible sequence using ~10 RM:
7 reps
30 seconds
5 reps
30 seconds
3 reps
30 seconds
3 reps
30 seconds
2 reps = 20 total reps</div>
Blade has taken this idea even further and has been using load intensification cycles ala HST using this principle.
The idea here is that you can, theoretically, greatly increase the acute stimulus by doing all this work in a relatively short time period, but proactively stopping using movement speed as a guideline becomes a means of avoiding overtraining.
What's neat about this method is that it might solve one of the dilemmas of HST, imho, which is insufficient acute stimulus to drive gains past some point on a full body split. I.e. an inability to do "enough" to grow acutely on a session per session basis.
As such, I have been giving thought to an
HST 2.0 - same old principles, slightly modified methodology.
The way this would work would be as such:
* SD as normal
* Optionally (encouraged), the cycle is started in the standard HST format using a block of 2 weeks of 15's. This serves both to condition our tissues for the heavier loads to come, and serves as a break-in to increase our volition strength before we embark on the modified rest pause.
* Starting with the third week, approximately ~6 weeks of this modified rest/pause method are used scaling from 15 RM (~65% 1 RM) to 5 RM (~85% 1 RM). I think a good, default number of total reps would be 20, which is what Dan uses for Max-Stim.
* It is my opinion that, as loads get very high (~5-8 RM), doing 20 total reps as part of one huge set with only ~30 seconds rest between mini-sets might become problematic from a recovery point of view. I.e. training into/near failure too much towards the end of the mega-set.
As such, I think a useful guideline would be to use no more than 5 total "mini-sets" at any given time. If you have not completed your prescribed number of reps, no sweat - just rest a few minutes as if the mini-sets represented one "normal" set, and do another series of up to 5 mini-sets.
I would guess 2 such series would be enough all the way up to ~5 RM to squeeze in 20 total reps.
If anyone wanted hard numbers as to what the %'s of 1 RM would look like starting at the beginning of week 3, it might be something like this:
Week 3
65
66.25
67.5
Week 4
68.75
70
71.25
Week 5
72.5
73.75
75
Week 6
76.25
77.5
78.75
Week 7
80
81.25
82.5
Week 8
83.75
85
86.25
Week 9 - SD
Default, encouraged exercises:
* Knee extension dominant lower body (high bar squat, leg press)
* Hip extension dominant lower body (low bar squat, SLDL, RDL)
* Calves (any calf raise variant, donkeys would probably be most useful)
* Vertical push (any seated or standing shoulder press)
* Vertical pull (lat pulldowns, chins, pullups)
* Horizontal Push (bench variants, dips)
* Horizontal Pull (row variants)
* Biceps
* Triceps
As a thought, though, I'm not sure we'd need to use the modified rest/pause on calves, biceps, or triceps unless one of these were a weak point for the individual. These could probably be done using "conventional" sets.
