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HST Strategic Deconditioning??
- Thread starter shahamit
- Start date
After being exposed to a given load, your muscles adapt and become resistant to the load the next time it's used. Simple put, hypertrophy has diminishing returns for the next time you use that weight.
What's the answer? Raise the weight next time (hence, incrementing).
However, we aren't increment to infinity and beyond can we? There's always a maximum weight we can lift.
The heavier the load, the longer/more often we can use it and expect hypertrophy from the exposure, however ultimately this "Repeated Bout Effect" will catch up, and our gains will stall.
So what do we do?
Well, the answer is to decondition/make the muscle un-adapt to the load exposure, but without causing muscle atrophy/wasting/degradation.
So, we stop lifting for a period of 9-14 days (or longer). The longer we don't lift weights, the lighter load we can expose the muscle to when we restart and gain a hypertrophic response.
If I decondition for 9 days, I probably wouldn't cause hypertrophy next time I use a weight in my 10 rep range, but I will most likely gain hypertrophy from a weight in my 5 rep range.
If I decondtion for 14 days or longer, I could probably get a response from a weight in the middle/upper end of my 15 rep range (so a relatively light load).
The key to this logic is that you do not need a maximum weight load to cause hypertrophy from a muscle that has deconditioned.
Because we will chronically continue to gain muscle over time, and there is a strength-size relationship (though not entirely defined), and because we use the last phase (post 5s or 5RM phase) to work on strength, we increase our maximums for each exercise (strength goes up).
Hence, we gain a greater range of weights with a higher end point.
This is our strategy to overcome a plateau in both size and strength...so it's strategic deconditioning.
To determine how low your weights will be when you restart, figure out your 15, 10 and 5 rep max at the end (schedule one extra final workout) of your cycle.
Record these weights, and then work backwards by 6 decrements to figure out what weight you will be using for each session of the next cycle.
e.g I figured out my 15RM for bench was 85kg
So next cycle, I'm using 60, 65, 70, 75, 80, 85 for the 15s phase.
Hope that helped a lil.
What's the answer? Raise the weight next time (hence, incrementing).
However, we aren't increment to infinity and beyond can we? There's always a maximum weight we can lift.
The heavier the load, the longer/more often we can use it and expect hypertrophy from the exposure, however ultimately this "Repeated Bout Effect" will catch up, and our gains will stall.
So what do we do?
Well, the answer is to decondition/make the muscle un-adapt to the load exposure, but without causing muscle atrophy/wasting/degradation.
So, we stop lifting for a period of 9-14 days (or longer). The longer we don't lift weights, the lighter load we can expose the muscle to when we restart and gain a hypertrophic response.
If I decondition for 9 days, I probably wouldn't cause hypertrophy next time I use a weight in my 10 rep range, but I will most likely gain hypertrophy from a weight in my 5 rep range.
If I decondtion for 14 days or longer, I could probably get a response from a weight in the middle/upper end of my 15 rep range (so a relatively light load).
The key to this logic is that you do not need a maximum weight load to cause hypertrophy from a muscle that has deconditioned.
Because we will chronically continue to gain muscle over time, and there is a strength-size relationship (though not entirely defined), and because we use the last phase (post 5s or 5RM phase) to work on strength, we increase our maximums for each exercise (strength goes up).
Hence, we gain a greater range of weights with a higher end point.
This is our strategy to overcome a plateau in both size and strength...so it's strategic deconditioning.
To determine how low your weights will be when you restart, figure out your 15, 10 and 5 rep max at the end (schedule one extra final workout) of your cycle.
Record these weights, and then work backwards by 6 decrements to figure out what weight you will be using for each session of the next cycle.
e.g I figured out my 15RM for bench was 85kg
So next cycle, I'm using 60, 65, 70, 75, 80, 85 for the 15s phase.
Hope that helped a lil.