What to do after 5s?

S

swimbody

New Member
Okay, Friday is my last day of fives. I've already seen a huge difference in my total body strength. Awesome! What is after the 5s, a week of negatives and a week of "eccentrics"? Could someone outline a good negative program (I don't have a partner) and some comments about the eccentric exercises? I have an idea of what I should do but I just want confirmation.

Thanks in advance!
 
negatives are 'eccentrics'. its simply an alternative name. so you will not be doing negatives and then eccentrics, because they are one and the same.

When you finish 5s, you have a choice.
1)using the same exercises you used throughout the preceeding cycle, take your 2RM and perform 5 good quality negative reps. Do this for 2 weeks (dont increase the load. there is no real need and it is a little risky)

2)if you are unable to perform negative reps because they are unsuitable (eg squats or deadlifts) or you require a spotter (eg benchpress), then continue for another 2 weeks with your 5RM.

either way you will continue to provide growth stimulus for 2 additional weeks before SD is required
 
To increase the effectiveness of doing the 5s at the same weight for an additional 2 weeks (if this is what you choose to do), add dropsets to your final work set of each exercise.

What this means: say you are doing 2 work sets (those performed after warm-up, the "real" ones) of incline press, and say you are using 100 lbs for example. Do your 2nd set, then as quickly as possible, do another 5-10 reps with about 30-40% less weight, which would be 60-70 lbs. This gives you 10-15 reps total. You can drop the weight again & do another 5-10, if you like, but don't push too far around failure; you are going for "burn" here.

It helps with free-weights, where you can, to set up the weights on the bar so that you can quickly strip off what you want & leave the right amount, as quickly as possible. So say you have that 100 lb from above, and you'll do your dropset with 70 lb. Put a 35, a 10 & a 5 lb plate on each side. Do your work sets, strip off the 10 & 5 plates off each side & do the drop set.

Hope this makes sense & helps. Good luck!
 
Hi All,

What about continuing to increment the weight for two more weeks and working toward one's 3RM?

During the last two weeks of my last cycle, I performed two sets of 3s for each excercise, until I reached my 3RM (on the 6th WO). Seemed to work out well. Any thoughts on this approach?
 
Also doable. You have to be careful about avoiding failure, though, which is tricky with such short reps.

When doing a long cycle with such short sets, strongly consider adding drop sets at least occasionally. I do them every time.
 
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