Let's see if this get your attention: From the FAQ e-book
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3) Progressive Load
Anywhere one goes, one hears "Changing one's routine is a way to prevent stagnation. If you're not growing, change things."
We're all in the business of growing muscle. Unfortunately, the body doesn't like to do that. It's rather expensive for the body to repair and produce new muscle tissue. It requires both lots of protein and lots of energy (sort of like the "parts" and the "labor).
So, when an exercise is performed that damages the muscle tissue, in addition to the growth response the muscle also becomes resistant to further damage from that load. This is called the Repeated Bout Effect.
(4) This is why routines fail to cause further progress. It is also why HST incorporates progressive load.
Side note: strength programs and growth
As anyone who's done WSB will tell you, strength programs can induce a good deal of hypertrophy. As a result, many bodybuilders adopt strength-training programs as a means of causing growth. By isolating and understanding WHY they cause growth, you can just skip straight to the growth-causing elements without wasting time with all of the neural tricks that strength training uses to increase your 1RM.
Strength programs typically have people work with very low reps, often to failure. Both of those have been shown to increase the nervous system's efficiency at performing a movement, thus increasing strength. So, when someone starts a strength training program, initially he/she sees a lot of growth.
His/her muscles are not that resistant to damage, and at high tension levels the Repeated Bout Effect takes a little while to kick in. As long as he/she also continues making strength gains, he/she will experience progressive load, and will see muscle growth as long as he/she is overeating. Unfortunately, after a time the strength gains will slow to a crawl, and at that point the muscles are very resistant to damage and will simply not grow.
At this point, conventional wisdom would have our trainee change up his/her routine. This advice is somewhat sound, as new exercises can put new levels of tension on muscle fibers and thus elicit more growth. Also, a rep change can stimulate new growth as well, but ONLY if the new rep range is lower and allows more weight to be used, thus loading the tissue at new levels.
Instead of changing the routine, HST advocates...
4) Strategic Deconditioning
Before each cycle, in order to make the muscles responsive to the light weights in the beginning, a period of 9-14 days is taken off from all training. This reverses some of the effects of the RBE. It allows HST-users to experience rapid and sustainable progress.
This is one of the reasons why newbies experience such great initial gains.
They have had such long deconditioning periods. Trained individuals also notice this; when coming off of a planned or unplanned layoff they often experience a renewal of gains.</div>
Then...
<div></div><div id="QUOTEHEAD">QUOTE</div><div id="QUOTE">So the next cycle i start with x load + arond 10% of x. But it still not even close to the y load so there will be no hypertrophy because i already got used to the y load + to the work & power of the y load </div>
SD is important so you can grow again with small loads, after you've "broken" or "erased" the muscle memory...but you really should do some reading thre is plenty of info here and...its free!
