Antagonistic Muscle Hypertrophy

C

Canborn

New Member
I recently read a small article in Musclemag's September issue that talks about antagonizing strength. The article states. "A muscle is stronger if its antagonistic, or opposing muscle group, is contracted immediately before it's required to work."
I found this idea interesting and so decide to put together a routine that involves both the theories of antagonizing strength and Hypertrophy Specific Training.
I thought no better place to share this idea ( new or not ) than this forum.
The basic idea is that you would start the agonist muscle on 15's and the antagonist muscle on 5's.
Example:
Week 1-2
Barbell curls - 15's
Triceps extension - 5's
Bent Rows - 15's
Flat Bench - 5's

Week 3-4
Barbell curls - 10's
Triceps extension - 10's
Bent Rows - 10's
Flat Bench - 10's

Week 5-6
Barbell curls - 5's
Triceps extension - 15's
Bent Row - 5's
Flat Bench - 15's

That's the basic idea of it all. Just looking for some input/advice on the idea and muscle pairings.
What do you think ?
 
First problem is that you are not progressing but decreasing the load on your Flat Bench and Triceps Extensions. Any tiny benefit in strength you would get in the early sets of these exercises is going to be way overshadowed by the loss of strength and hypertrophy gains from not following progressive loading during the cycle.

Even if you paired them up but used progressive loading as long as you are using submaximal weights and reps (until you reach your RMs) then a tiny bit of extra strength isn’t going to do much if anything since you really won’t know how much extra weight to use. You could try for extra reps but then you’re not following the 15, 10, 5 rep protocol but rather training by feel since to get any benefit from the extra strength this is suppose too give you would have to keep doing reps until just short of failure.

Also if you are Bench Pressing correctly your lats actually play a roll. Pre-tiring them out with rows is going to hurt your Bench. There’s a reason power lifters don’t do a high rep set of rows just prior to a max Bench Press. If doing Rows prior to Bench Pressing did increase your Bench even by .5% you can be dam sure every power lifter in the world would be Rowing their a$$s off just before laying on the bench. Same goes for the other power lifts.

In my personal experience using antagonistic supersets during my first few HST cycles they did 3 things. They got me done faster. They kept my metabolic rate up (sort of cardio workout) and when the weights got heavy killed my compound lifts requiring me to adjust my workouts to allow for more recovery time even between antagonistic sets.

Personally I don’t see enhanced antagonistic muscle group strength as any worthwhile benefit of antagonistic supersets. Most people if not everyone would benefit more by focusing that effort on maintain perfect form, eating better and getting more rest.

That doesn’t mean there aren’t beneficial ways to get more out of each rep/set. I’ve found that doing bottom up Bench Presses and pause Squats when the weights are lighter greatly improves how much I get out of each rep. Myo-reps are probably the best single thing I’ve learned here for improving the quality of reps.

In the end I just don’t see doing antagonistic supersets for enhanced antagonistic muscle strength as a worthwhile reason for using them.
 
Thanks for the reply. One thing i would add is that even though one muscle group is starting on 5's and working up to 15 it comes back down from there to 5's again. I also wasn't really basing the routine on the strength aspect of Antagonistic muscle pairing more so the idea of the crossover effect of starting one muscle group on the heavy weight and the other on light as it would even out as the weights rep ratio crossed over. The ideas around this are pretty rough but i still think there is some benefits to it
 
What about pairing concentric contraction and eccentric contraction of the antagonistic muscle groups

example I'll use Wide grip pull up and a military press

say you did 15 reps for Wide grip pull up and negatives on military press and continue the negatives until you reach 5's for wide grip pull up then switch over to 15 reps on military press and negative pullups ?
 
What you’re proposing just won’t work with HST since it violates one of the basic principles . . . Progressive Load. Once you’ve been doing 5s or negatives for a couple weeks 10s and 15 aren’t going to be enough stimuli to make you grow much if at all. So the only effect you will get from the crossover is that the muscles that started heavy and worked their way down won’t grow as much as the muscles that started light and worked their way up even if you switch again and take both in the opposite directions because your muscles will need to be deconditioned in order to get optimal growth out of progressing the weights up again.

One of the big reasons HST works so well to build muscle is you progress from lighter weights to heavier weights and then decondition your muscles to allow your muscles to respond to the lighter weights again. Many other programs just have you deload or switch routines when you stagnate.

http://thinkmuscle.com/forum/showthread.php?14333-Summary-of-HST-principles

That’s not to say that other routines that utilize daily or weekly undulating periodization don’t work but they work differently, have different results and are used for different reasons. It also doesn’t mean that you can’t incorporate some form of periodization into HST, it actually has it built in for most lifts if you follow the standard 15, 10, 5 protocol since you are likely to get some zigzagging. Also each cycle is a form of periodization in that after you decondition your weights start out light and get progressively heavier again.
 
So it would make more sense to stagger the cycle then

example bicep 15,10,5 and when bicep reaches 5's you would start tris at 15's and start negatives for biceps. that would fit the HST priciples better then.
 
The article states. "A muscle is stronger if its antagonistic, or opposing muscle group, is contracted immediately before it's required to work."
Click to expand...

Seems like the natural conclusion from this statement is not that pairing antagonistic muscles the way you are trying to will aid in hypertrophy. It seems to me the conclusion you would draw is that if you are trying to hit a PR or perform some lift at a greater load than usual, that you would work the opposing muscle group first.
Just because you prime the muscle first, allowing it to contract better so that it is stronger, does not mean that it will aid hypertrophy...
 
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