weight increments

N

need2eat

New Member
I might be a little puzzled on the increments.

I see where many on say the 15's will end with 40lbs for example. Then the first workout for 10's, starts with 30lbs.

Call me crazy but if you can do 40lbs 15times, 10 would be much easier, so why not add lbs instead of subract.

Just wondering, cause ive got my first 10's workout, 3-10 lbs more than my last 15's, depending on whether im using more or less weight. Is that a problem?

Thanks
 
Many people perform HST that way since it is the overall progression that matters, not each individual increment. However, like you, I don't like to zigzag so I rarely go backwards with my increments when going to a lower rep range.
 
Don't worry Bryan says in the faq section that no one has suffered from zigzagging, or rather that no-one has gain more by not zigzagging.

I've started thinking about this and I believe its because each first week is like a mini-SD for the second week of stimulus, lifting light weights in the first weeks makes your mind and body think "hey, this is easy", and doesn't adapt via the repeat bout effect (by making the connective tissue tougher), so in the 2nd week when the weight approaches your RM, the body goes "****, better grow". I just did my 1st workout of my 2nd week of 10s, after thinking the 1st week was easy, I got the shock of my life trying to lift the weight and actually finding it hard! I'm sure my muscles felt the same way, and will grow accordingly.
 
<div></div><div id="QUOTEHEAD">QUOTE</div><div id="QUOTE">Call me crazy but if you can do 40lbs 15times, 10 would be much easier, so why not add lbs instead of subract.</div>
If that was your RM load at the end of 15s then you may well have gone to failure trying to lift it. Zig-zagging allows some extra time for your CNS to get over the RM lifts without actually deloading. You will soon be using higher loads again as you progress through the 10s towards the 10RM w/o. Same thing applies to starting the 5s.

At the end of the day, you have to decide whether you want to allow zig-zagging or not. It allows you to use slightly larger weight increments (or, at least, it's often a consequence of larger weight increments).

Personally, I like it in there. I tried removing it for a cycle and actually found it harder to make my RMs that time. Now I always leave a bit of zig-zagging in and it helps me psychologically with the feeling that I am building towards new RMs for each mesocycle.

Although I was initially concerned about zig-zagging it has not had a detrimental effect on any of my cycles. In fact, I think the opposite is true.
 
agree with lol after each mini-cycle (maxing out) the next session should be a little easier to give your cns time to recover without having to stop training alltogether.personaly prefer to use the same weight for the first session of 10s as the last session of 15s the add every other session.
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