Disclaimer: if you are not already experienced with HST and have many successful conventional cycles under your belt, please do not fool around with variants like what I'm about to describe. Start simple, always.
This is an old idea, and while, strictly speaking, it violates the 'start light and wind up heavy later' principle of HST, I think the overall pattern of progressive overload will still hold just fine. I call it an old idea because this came up years back in discussion amongst the regulars of this board.
In case nobody has seen this method, it would basically go something like this:
Determine 80% of your best effort for your 15, 10, and 5 rep maxes. This will be your starting weights for each. Your increments will be whatever lands you at a target RM on the 6th session, as per usual.
Then, it will go something like this:
Monday - 15s
Wednesday - 10s
Friday - 5s
As you can see, you would be performing every rep range every single week, varying the rep range used each day.
You would use your starting weights for each category the first week, then, the next week, add weight to each lift, incrementing every week thereafter towards your projected RM in each category.
Each week would represent a 'day' in the normal HST progression for each zone. And there are 6 total days in a 2 week block, so you will have 6 weeks total for the whole cycle.
I will again disclaimer that this does, strictly speaking, violate the principle of starting light and raming up weights for a true, tension progressive overload, but what few anecdotal reports I've heard for this variants have been good. Lyle Mcdonald, at one point, said something like this setup was one of the most successful HST runs he's ever had.
There's also research which may imply that this daily undulating pattern of rep variance may actually be superior for performance gains over time vs. a conventional, linear approach (of which HST's two weeks of 15s, 10s, and 5s would fall under).
If you want to take it one step further and are already experienced with HST (I'll reiterate that I wouldn't even consider this version or what I'm about to say otherwise), you could also use some sort of fatigue management or clustering method to squeeze in a decent chunk of volume per lift.
Anyways, I'm just surprised more people haven't tried this approach. If or when I try HST again, I'd probably give it a shot, as it's an interesting variant that I never got around to trying.
This is an old idea, and while, strictly speaking, it violates the 'start light and wind up heavy later' principle of HST, I think the overall pattern of progressive overload will still hold just fine. I call it an old idea because this came up years back in discussion amongst the regulars of this board.
In case nobody has seen this method, it would basically go something like this:
Determine 80% of your best effort for your 15, 10, and 5 rep maxes. This will be your starting weights for each. Your increments will be whatever lands you at a target RM on the 6th session, as per usual.
Then, it will go something like this:
Monday - 15s
Wednesday - 10s
Friday - 5s
As you can see, you would be performing every rep range every single week, varying the rep range used each day.
You would use your starting weights for each category the first week, then, the next week, add weight to each lift, incrementing every week thereafter towards your projected RM in each category.
Each week would represent a 'day' in the normal HST progression for each zone. And there are 6 total days in a 2 week block, so you will have 6 weeks total for the whole cycle.
I will again disclaimer that this does, strictly speaking, violate the principle of starting light and raming up weights for a true, tension progressive overload, but what few anecdotal reports I've heard for this variants have been good. Lyle Mcdonald, at one point, said something like this setup was one of the most successful HST runs he's ever had.
There's also research which may imply that this daily undulating pattern of rep variance may actually be superior for performance gains over time vs. a conventional, linear approach (of which HST's two weeks of 15s, 10s, and 5s would fall under).
If you want to take it one step further and are already experienced with HST (I'll reiterate that I wouldn't even consider this version or what I'm about to say otherwise), you could also use some sort of fatigue management or clustering method to squeeze in a decent chunk of volume per lift.
Anyways, I'm just surprised more people haven't tried this approach. If or when I try HST again, I'd probably give it a shot, as it's an interesting variant that I never got around to trying.