HST and Weight

I

Ibrahim

New Member
Sorry if this has been asked before, but I did look for a bit.

Say Im doing bicep curls.. at the gym theres 2kg increments and lets say my 15RM is 14kg (per arm ofcourse). That would mean the following??

1=4
2=6
3=8
4=10
5=12
6= 14

is this right? what if my gym partner's 15RM is 12 or 10kg? he would be lfiting 2 or 0 his first time with these increments?
 
Repeat increments instead. Don't start out with less than 70% or so of your max. So instead, do this
1 = 8
2 = 10
3 = 10
4 = 12
5 = 12
6 = 14
 
As a useful rule of thumb, start your cycle with about 70-75% of your RM for each rep range and then add 5% each session. Starting with 75%, you then have loads of 75%, 80%, 85%, 90%, 95%, 100% x nRM, where n is the rep range.

In the case of dbs, you'll often have to repeat loads because the dbs are fixed loads. If you want to avoid this, you could just do a bb exercise instead; loads will be heavier so increments will be larger.
 
I know it's now vanilla HST, but I did read in the articles here (maybe even the main one) that 15s, 10s and 5s were just a convenient and easy way to communicate the concept, but that there's nothing wrong with changing reps each week.

After reading that, and also after observing the same problem that the OP posted, I decided to go with one week cycles (so did my 12s last week and onto my 10s this week), which means only 3 decrements instead of 6. That way my starting weight doesn't end up ridiculously light.

I'm still new to HST, so maybe I've missed something, but I'm surprised this isn't a more favoured option. Considering the stress that seems to be placed on Progressive Load, then I would have thought this approach slightly preferable to repeating the weights, but repeating the weights seems to be the most common suggested solution to this. Am I missing something?
 
I think one reason many people don’t do 15, 12, 10, 8, 5, 3, is because technically to do it right you have to find 6 rather than 3 RMs. After my 1st cycle I took what I consider a simpler approach. I just start at around 70-75% (I tried lower but didn’t find it productive) of my 1RM determined at the end of the previous cycle and increment about 5% each week. Any way you do it as long as you’re getting weight progression you are adhering to HST (and really most strength) principles.


As for the repeating or even zig-zagging weights, some people like it because it give them periodization in the form of deloads every 2 weeks. Since RBE should be a big factor in such a short time they’re probably not losing much compared to progressing in smaller amounts each workout, though I can’t really say that for sure.

Since today I’m starting my second workout of the first week of my cycle I was thinking about the same thing as I drove home last night from work. Would it be better from a hypertrophy standpoint to just increment 5% each week using the same weights during both workouts (perhaps more volume on the second one) or split the 5% up and increment 2.5% for each workout at least on my bigger lifts which would still be about 10-15 lbs. each time. From everything I’ve read larger increments have more potential to cause hypertrophy while smaller increments have more potential to cause strength gains.
 
hmm. Larger increments good for hypertrophy... That does also sound familiar now that you mention it.

That could then be a bit of a flaw in my present program, because I'm making continuous but small increments each session. Well I've started it now so I'm going to keep with it to the end, but I might give the conventional approach a go then after my SD and just do the same weight twice.

I have to admit I cheated a bit to avoid needing to test 6 different RMs. I've been training for prob about 2 - 3 years now and was fairly accurately able to calculate my RM's from my recent logs.
 
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