One HST concept I don't fully understand...

W

wungun

Member
From the loads/work your muscles "see", from one rep block to the next, is your 10 rep at your max RM, say 100Lbs, the same as 5 reps at your max RM, for example, 130Lbs?
To me, it seems this is no different to your muscles...? i.e. the same " work" experienced...?
Can someone explain to me how this is effective for muscle growth?

I can understand for EACH rep, you are literally lifting more weight in your 5 rep blocks, but after 5 complete reps, your muscles are doing the same work as when you were doing your 10 rep block...?
 
I'm not really sure what you are saying. So let me try to see if I am understanding what you are saying. You seem to be equating load with "work"? Or do you really mean is volume? You seem to also be under the impression that work, or we will say volume, is equivalent to tension. Ergo, you believe that the muscle being exposed to the same amount of tension with 5 reps at your 5 RM as it is exposed to by 10 reps with your 10 RM? If we assume that by work, you mean load x total reps then you absolutely are not doing the same amount of "work" when you do 10 reps with your 10rm and you are doing when you do 5 reps with your 5rm.

So along those lines, basically, you are asking how you can cause the muscle to grow by reducing volume as you increase load, is that correct? If that is what you are asking, then yeah... I mean, pretty much all of this sort of thing is explained in my ebook, in the HST faqs and everything Bryan has written about HST. As load increases, tension increases and therefore less volume is required for growth.
 
What I'm basically saying is, 10 reps at 10rm might be the exact same thing as 5 reps at your 5rm.
From a technical standpoint, we ARE talking about work. A force exerted over a distance. And from your point of view, using the term "volume" to mean the same thing.
Work=forceXdistance. (W=Fs)
Distance, in this regard, would be the distance you move the weight times the reps.
If, for example, we take bench press. Let's say from your chest to full arm extension is 1 meter. So 1 rep would be 2 meters.
5 reps would equal 10 meters and 10 reps would equal 20 meter...double the amount of work if the same weight is used. If your 5 RM is 500 newtons (112Lbs) you are doing 5000 joules of work.
If your 10 RM is 250N (56Lbs) then you are also doing 5000J of work.

After doing the math, I can see now that typically your 5rm isn't going to be 1/2 the weight as your 10rm....which is good!

In all intents and purposes, you can see that "volume" in the weight lifting community is very much akin to "work".
More work, as done in your 5 rep block compared to your 10 rep block, equates to more loading on the muscle (I think!?)
If I lift 100lbs at 5 reps, I'd likely be lifting something like 85Lbs at 10 reps, so more actual work is being accomplished. From a mathematical view point, its identical to moving more weight over the same distance, or the same weight over more distance.

Now here is where the complicated physics comes in...
During the 5 rep phase, your muscles are under load half as long as with the 10 rep phase.
But you aren't lifting twice the weight...
For your muscles to see more " load", you'd have to lift more than double the weight with going from 5 reps to 10.

Do you see now where my concern is?
I hope I didn't confuse things. Lol
 
Last edited:
Unfortunately since you are talking about the human body and how it responds to weight training, it's not just simple math. There is a lot more involved that we just don't fully understand. The bottom line is that progressive load as suggested on the HST website works and you don't need to make it so complicated.
 
Oh, I know it works...its working for me! Its just how I try to understand things...I never take anything for granted.
 
Growth/strength is determined by muscle fiber recruitment. not the laws of physics. Heavier loads recruit more muscle fiber than lighter loads even if you are doing more "work" with lighter loads. Do that same comparison with 100 reps versus 5 or 10 reps and then compare the physiological results. There is no mathematical formula to accurately depict the impact on muscle size or strength change.
 
Work is not equivalent to tension. The amount of tension that a 5 RM load puts on the muscle is a lot more than a 10 RM load.

I'm not really sure why you feel that work needs to increase to cause muscle growth. Tension is increasing and tension, not work, is the growth stimulus, as outlined by Bryan in the HST articles, the FAQs and in the ebook.

Your math about work is irrelevant anyway because as O&G pointed out, heavier loads recruit more muscle fibers than lighter loads. As fatigue increases, more fibers are recruited. So you are actually using more fibers with heavier loads than you are with lighter loads, therefore more of the muscle is being exposed to tension earlier on in the set (and ergo doing work) when you use heavier loads than with lighter loads. With a 10 RM load, you are probably not hitting full recruitment until rep 7 or 8, so some of your muscle fibers aren't doing the work of moving that load for more than a couple of reps and they are only moving a 10 RM load, so that is all the tension that is being applied. Whereas with a 5 RM load, you are getting full recruitment most likely right away, so all fibers are being exposed immediately and therefore doing more work than they would with a lighter load.
 
A simple example that makes it clear that work-done is at best difficult to measure when it comes to muscles in the body is an isometric contraction. Take, for example, a bb curl held at the midpoint in a static contraction. If you were using a 10RM load, your biceps muscle fibres would be firing on and off in a kind of rotation until fatigue would eventually bring them all in to play. The effects of fatigue would continue to rise and eventually shut down enough fibres such that the contractile force being produced by the biceps would not be enough to overcome the downward force of the bar, at which point it would lower despite your best efforts to stop it from doing so.
How do you work out how much work you did? You didn't even complete a single rep with your 10RM load!
A better way to compare things might be to look at time-under-tension (TUT) for a particular load. What you need to have to elicit a continued growth response throughout a cycle is increasing load (to continually increase tension on the muscle as a whole) and enough TUT.
How much TUT is "enough"? Ah! That's the magic question. It depends on the conditioning of the muscle to the load but, generally, the more time spent under tension, the greater the hypertrophic response to that tension; but it is not a linear correlation. It is a case of diminishing returns, plus you only have a limited amount of energy and CNS recovery ability.
So, for effective and continued muscle growth you need to keep increasing the loading on the target muscles (within the bounds of common sense & safety) and subject them to it for a long enough time. A 5RM load will be effective for longer than a 10RM load if TUT is equal but lifting 5RM loads will fatigue you and beat you up more than 10RM loads. By working through a cycle and keeping ahead of RBE, you can continue the muscle-building process for longer before feeling drained and beaten up enough to require a break.
 
work and volume aren't nearly as important as TENSION, which is a product of load mostly.

This is why most natural pro bodybuilders train to get their muscles as strong as possible, as bigger muscles can produce higher tensions (move larger loads).
 
The laws of physics apply to inanimate objects and get thrown out the window when a central nervous system is involved. Look at what the lowly ant can physically accomplish. They make power lifters look like weaklings.
 
Sci said:
work and volume aren't nearly as important as TENSION, which is a product of load mostly.

This is why most natural pro bodybuilders train to get their muscles as strong as possible, as bigger muscles can produce higher tensions (move larger loads).
Click to expand...
so basically, if its about tension, if I do an exercise, say bench press, I can cheat with a heavier load and not fully bring the weight all the way down and still stimulate better growth than higher reps, lighter weight and perfect form?
 
wungun said:
so basically, if its about tension, if I do an exercise, say bench press, I can cheat with a heavier load and not fully bring the weight all the way down and still stimulate better growth than higher reps, lighter weight and perfect form?
Click to expand...
To some degree this is true. Reduced ROM Partials with heavier loads can be incorporated at the end of a cycle in order to squeeze out some additional hypertrophy before SD. (You'd want to use the strong range of a rep for best effect.) You do have to be careful though. It's very easy to sustain an injury.
There is no point starting a cycle with heavy partials just as there is no point starting the cycle with heavy 5s. What you want is to have the loads gradually increase over the course of a cycle and for the cycle to last for a good 8 weeks or so in order for remodelling and hypertrophy to occur. It doesn't matter if the loads zig-zag a bit between rep ranges just as long as the overall effect is steadily increasing loading of the muscle tissue.
My own personal preference is to use full-ROM movements throughout a cycle for most of my exercises. At the end of a cycle, I might drop the reps down to doubles and then singles in order to achieve the rep count I'm after while maintaining good form. That's about as much load as I want to handle.
A few exercises lend themselves to partials: cheat curls spring to mind. Bench, dips, chins and rows are also quite possible.
You might want to think about careful use of negatives or assisted negatives for some movements too. Eg. For leg press, you can lift the load with both legs and lower under control with one.
So partials can be useful but they are by no means the only way to lengthen a cycle. The most important thing is to stay away from injury because that will mess up your progress more than anything else. You want to be that trainee who continues to make steady progress over the course of a few years while remaining uninjured rather than the numpty who starts tossing super heavy loads around and ends up tearing a pec or something in the process. I was that numpty.
 
Old and Grey said:
The laws of physics apply to inanimate objects and get thrown out the window when a central nervous system is involved. Look at what the lowly ant can physically accomplish. They make power lifters look like weaklings.
Click to expand...

Yeah, but we are not ants.

The Laws of physics determine that you have to increase the cross-section area of a muscle to produce maximum force using your nervous system. I don't care how trained your nervous system is to stimulate your muscles, the muscles will tear and get ripped apart if loads are too heavy, without accompanied hypertrophy of the muscles, (also tendons and increased bone density.)
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top