6 sessions a week?

[dohste]

Hey,

I'm very new to HST, having only learned about it 2 days ago, and I'm now trying to put a program together to start next week.

One question I have is how important is the format of 3 workout sessions a week?

So for myself - I normally train early in the morning before work and having previously always used conventional split routines, my favorite way to train was with a 4 or 5 day split, purely because it forced me into a good routine where I'd be up early every morning and almost instinctively head to the gym. Whereas I find having 2 days of getting up that bit later and heading straight to work normally results in "negative motivational effects" on my training days! LOL

So would I be possibly overtraining or otherwise adversely affecting my HST program if I where to train either 5 or 6 days consecutively? Normally with any other routine I wouldn't even consider it, but the low volume per workout on any single muscle with HST leaves me less certain...

 

[grunt11]

I’ve been using a 5-6 day spilt for the last 7 months ever since I started doing HST, also working out before work. As long as you manage the volume you should be fine. The only problem I’ve encountered doing this is some tendonitis from working each body part to many times a week and my muscles growing way to fast for my tendons to keep up. I just changed to s 6 day/week 3 way split which seems to be working great for gains and hopefully once I get to SD will allow me to get the tendonitis back under control because of the extra day off between the same body parts.

 

[dohste]

Thanks for the reply!!

I've been reading about a bit more since posting that question and I found somewhere that ~48hrs is recommended as the time between workouts. But you also used the term "split" - so does that mean you're doing for example upper body every second day and legs every other or something like that?

Also as someone who started HST 7 months ago I'd love to hear how you find it? I assume you're sold on the idea since you're still on the forums here? Good gains?

I can follow the ideas it's based on, but it's still so different to everything else I've read or done that I can't help but be a tiny bit skeptical - I'm just hoping the next 4 or 6 weeks will prove my skepticism wrong!!

One other thing if you don't mind:

I read the following:

"Of course, you could adjust your reps every week (e.g. 15,12,10,8,5,etc), but this is more complicated"

And as such I'm thinking of starting at x12 reps and then changing each week. I'm planning to start on 12 because the weights I'm used to for the x6 rep range aren't all that high, so if I were to go to my 15 rep max and then even below that for progressive load - well I imagine I'd be doing next to nothing at that stage and whatever about everything else I just can't see how lifting a weight 15 times that I could manage maybe 18 or 20 with is going to accomplish anything... Am I missing something there??

 

[grunt11]

When I first started I was doing a full body workout 6 days a week but low volume each day. I found that as the weights got heavier later in the cycle I couldn’t recover daily so I adjusted so I was hitting each body part every other day. Eventually I simplified things and went to an Upper/Lower/Upper/Lower/Upper 5 day/week split. That worked well for me for several months but I was finding my tendons need more than 48 hours to recover so now I’m doing a Push/Pull/Legs split twice a week and loving it.

I know that the basic recommendation is working every muscle group every 48 hours however I think you reach a point were the added volume need to grow is not maintainable on an every other day schedule. Also there is mounting evidence that except for beginners hitting each muscle more than twice a week shows little improvement.

As for my gains I’ve put on 32 lbs. in about 7 months. My target has been 1 lb./week. I estimate that 20 lbs. of that was muscle and about 12 lbs. of fat. Recently I just did a cut and dropped about 7 lbs. of the fat and started bulking again. I’ve been getting all sorts of comments from people about how big, huge is becoming a common word, I look. My upper legs are almost to big for my loose fit jeans (rubbing the hair of my thighs). And on days I workout my arms (push or pull) I have trouble getting my arms out of my rolled up sleeves at work. So yes it’s worked great but I’ve also been beating the crap out of myself most days of the week. And I’m making sure to eat at least 500 calories over maintenance every day.

I think that HST especially vanilla HST is great for beginners and people who don’t want to make lifting a way of life. However, if willing I think that one can make or maintain much better gains by tweaking any system to their own needs. My routine still maintains the basic principles of HST but I’ve ditched sets and reps for just hitting a number of target reps (40-60) per body part. I will get these reps any way I can. Sets of 10, clusters of 3, myo-reps or heavy singles using M- Time. The basic idea is to push my body as much as possible while letting it tell me when to pull back rather than being a slave to a specific set/rep scheme.

As far as the 15 rep range. I like to think of it as an active recovery. it’s not necessary and IMO once you start progressing isn’t going to help much with size but it will allow your connective tissues to recover and keep up with your muscles. What I’ve switched to doing is starting closer to the 10 rep range. Actually I use 75-80% of my 1RM and progress until I stall on the primary exercise for each body part. For the secondary exercise for each body part I shoot for a target of 10-15 reps for the first set and then keep doing reps one way or another until I get to the target for that exercises. There are advantages for muscle growth in doing some higher rep work so I make sure to include both heavy weight low rep and lighter weight high rep work in every workout. Keeping in mind that I still follow the principle of progressive loading on all the exercises.