Long rest-pause sets

HST_Rihad

HST_Rihad

Active Member
See how this guy does 15 squat reps with what essentially seems to be his 4-6RM.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cb8Kg5EqQGQ

How good are these for mass? Essentially a bunch of singles with 5-15 second rest. Nice training time economy going on there. Applies to squats, deads, chins, and whatever else you could think of.
 
Interesting...I'm not too thrilled how quickly he comes down, and bounces though!

Personally, it's hard to imagine if this is better than a typical 3X5 with strict rest periods between sets...?
 
I'm not a fan of rest pause during squats. Too dangerous. This is one of those exercises where messing with your form can cause injuries. Seems kind of stupid to risk it.
 
It's just an extreme form of clustering, IMO.

I've often done chins like this. It can be very frustrating at first, taking the time, but v.effective at getting the rep count for high loads. I wouldn't do it for any exercise where the weight is positioned above me, or inherent injury risk, i.e. squats, OHP's, bench variants etc.
 
wungun said:
Interesting...I'm not too thrilled how quickly he comes down, and bounces though!

Personally, it's hard to imagine if this is better than a typical 3X5 with strict rest periods between sets...?
Click to expand...

He says he experienced greatest increases in his thigh girth when he trained squats like that 3 times a week in one long set (he only did that type of training for a month).
He basically warned about the same thing, that one has to have stable squatting form, because it's easy to goof towards the end of the set.
 
In this type of workout style, you would probably be less likely to get injured from losing form by using (yikes) machines.
 
Im sure you have heard of 20 rep squats programs that become rest pause sets after around the 12th rep. They have worked well for a lot of guys for putting overall body mass on.
 
My current routine is an A, B split of:
A Leg Press, Row, Bench (no Squat rack at the gym, Smith machine squats hurt my knees :( )
B Deadlift, Chin, Overhead Press

All work sets at 90% 1RM, which is my 5 RM.
Only 1 workout per week, so a cycle is 2 weeks.
Cycle 1 is sets of 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 after warm up.
Cycle 2 is 15 rest pause reps.
If needed, Cycle 3 is 50% 1RM, 15 or 20 easy reps; else go back to cycle 1 again.

Loving it. Fully recovered going into each workout. High tension and enough volume. Workout takes maybe 20 minutes. I know, not HST per se. Is very much like Mentzer's old consolidation routine, but with more reps. Metabolic affect is huge from 15 dead lifts. Try it, you might like it :)

EDIT: switching back to same A, B workout, but back to standard HST 6 week cycle. I changed gyms and now have a squat rack! After experimenting with both this hybrid and HST, going back to the latter. I finally found out that it was not the frequency of the workout per se, but the frequency of doing squats and deads in the same session. I know, people here have warned about this, call me stupid :o Also, as expected, over the long term, not going thru the 15s and 10s at my age caught up with me. Lesson learned, back to HST for good. Hope someone else benefits from my experiment.
 
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