The word is getting out.

[harhar]

He gets on my nerves as well... I guess it's cool though when all you want to be is a slow chunk of meat.

LOL. Yay for OL.

 

[mekannik]

Personally I have been following the 10x3 for almost a year now, with the past few months focusing more on my diet to enhance effects of lifting. This rep/set scheme has become my favorite, displacing the 1-6 method, even though that has proven better for me with overall strength.

Supersetting antagonistic muscle groups with 10x3 cuts down on my gym time and helps balance out my front-back, top-bottom strength ratios. Plus the added benefit (mentally) of using visibly higher loads feeds the ego.

The only times I do not follow either of these schemes is with the olympic lifts and variations thereof.

 

[BiggT]

Great info. from you guys as always. BiggT -- just want to challenge one point: if 1-5 isn't for strength, and the body only sees work, etc., then what about OLY lifters who train pretty exclusively in the 1-3 range? I know they don't eat to get big but it just seems to me that you WILL get bigger if you are using more reps. I think it has something to do w/ exhaustion and breaking down proteins, etc., which maybe really kicks into high gear once you have enough time under tension or something. I'm just speculating here.

I might not have typed that as clear as I wanted to.....I do think 1-5 reps is a great strength training range, and near max effort singles, doubles, and triples are heavily neural. What I was referring to is that just because something is sets of 3 or sets of 4 or sets of 5 doesn't have to mean that is is strength training and nothing more simply because it is at or below that 'magical number of 8 reps'......if you work up to one heavy triple where the 3rd rep is an all out exertion and you can't do another, then I don't feel that is optimal for hypertrophy, but if it is a weight you can handle for 10 sets of 3 and get all your reps and still work hard, and it takes no longer to complete the 10x3 than it would for you to do 3 sets of 10, the body is still doing 30 total reps with a weight. And if you're progressing the weight eash session and keeping sets/reps constant, then hypertrophy will occur, and this is more effective than blindly pumping away on all sorts of exercises just trying to hit '8-12' reps because that is a 'hypertrophy range' and keep the muscle under tension and force blood to the area, etc, etc.

For Olympic lifters, it depends on the lifter and the weight class.....Look at Pyros Dimas' physique, particularly his quads, he definitely gets a hypertrophy response....I think Olympic lifters have the best traps and upper backs in the world as a whole, and they certainly aren't doing shrugs for 3 sets of 12 once a week as part of their workout, but rather shrugging dynamically as either part of the lifts or doing jump shurgs in their strength training ranges ...in fact most of the lifters above 175lbs or so have noticeable muscle mass, and if you can put aside the fact that diet is responsible for their bodyfat levels, the superheavies have an ungodly amount of muscle on their bodies.

 

[bignate73]

Great info. from you guys as always. BiggT -- just want to challenge one point: if 1-5 isn't for strength, and the body only sees work, etc., then what about OLY lifters who train pretty exclusively in the 1-3 range? I know they don't eat to get big but it just seems to me that you WILL get bigger if you are using more reps. I think it has something to do w/ exhaustion and breaking down proteins, etc., which maybe really kicks into high gear once you have enough time under tension or something. I'm just speculating here.

primarily concentric work, less muscle damage for the most part. the negative is primarily where hypertrophy is stimulated as it does more damage to cross bridges. also a great deal of CNS optimization compared to a slower less explosive typical exercise. muscle recruitment is efficient and only the needed motor units are fired to be explosive enough.

thats my take on it.

 

[BiggT]

The hypertrophy I see in olympic lifters, I see in the quads (squats/front squats), shoulders (overhead work to train the jerk), and upper back (dynamic pulling).

Olympic Lifters do not use set/rep schemes like 3x12 or 4x8, but they do a high number of low rep sets with anywhere from maybe 80%-95% of a 1rm. Which is similar to a guy benches 375x1 doing 10x3 with 335 and progressing all 10 sets of 3 weekly. I don't feel that this is any better or worse than using 4x8 and progressively increasing weights in the same manner.....but I was just trying to point out that something doesn't HAVE to be 8 reps or higher to be hypertrophy work....and more importantly for the BB community, just because something is 8-12 reps, doesn't mean it is optimal for hypertrophy if you're doing something different every week, just blindly trying to get sore and pumped and hit '8-12 reps' with no plan for progress whatsoever.

Thats basically what I was trying to get at above, but sometimes I can get a little verbal diaherrea.

 

[Protobuilder]

if you work up to one heavy triple where the 3rd rep is an all out exertion and you can't do another, then I don't feel that is optimal for hypertrophy, but if it is a weight you can handle for 10 sets of 3 and get all your reps and still work hard, and it takes no longer to complete the 10x3 than it would for you to do 3 sets of 10, the body is still doing 30 total reps with a weight. And if you're progressing the weight eash session and keeping sets/reps constant, then hypertrophy will occur, and this is more effective than blindly pumping away on all sorts of exercises just trying to hit '8-12' reps because that is a 'hypertrophy range' and keep the muscle under tension and force blood to the area, etc, etc.

Nice.

How important is it to overall load that you perform the 10x3 or the 3x10 in the same timeframe. I just can't see being able to do it w/ high %1RM on the 3x10.

 

[BiggT]

Nice.

How important is it to overall load that you perform the 10x3 or the 3x10 in the same timeframe. I just can't see being able to do it w/ high %1RM on the 3x10.

I would think it is important because the body responds to total workload, and that all time under tension really is, is total workload, so the body is being stressed for 30 total reps completed over x amount of time. How important this actually is, I don't know, but what I was getting at is that the 10x3 shouldn't be done with so much weight that they are all out max effort triples and you need to rest 10 min between sets and it is ok to miss reps, etc.

I think it would be doable with a relatively high percentage......a guy with a 400 bench would be at 325 if you took 80%....10 triples with 325 for a 400 bencher probably would be too light, saying you take maybe 3 minutes between sets, I'd think the lifter could handle 340 or 345 for the work sets.

 

[Protobuilder]

You must spread Karma around before giving it to BiggT again.

 

[silver_shadow]

i'm pretty late on this thread... just a few things i'd like to point out.
madcow, u said that bber's benefit from WSB. that is because wsb is specifically broken into 3 different phases all at once. unlike some other routines in which the guy will cycle... some weeks of hypertrophy, then some weeks of speed work and then some weeks of maxing out... first of all, where does one draw the line between these 3 if one were to cycle? so that said, all 3 are done every wk in wsb... so hypertrophy was intended to be a part of the program.
the other thing i wanted to say... u say that all those isolation movements that BBers typically do are good for refining after bulking... i'd like to take a more extreme stand on that and say that it's a waste of time and bodybuilders are better off doing the same compound movements during a cutting phase as they would (or should anyway) do during a bulking phase... the only differences would obviously be diet, the poundages he is lifting and off course cardio (HIIT preferably).

 

[Madcow2]

i'm pretty late on this thread... just a few things i'd like to point out.
madcow, u said that bber's benefit from WSB. that is because wsb is specifically broken into 3 different phases all at once. unlike some other routines in which the guy will cycle... some weeks of hypertrophy, then some weeks of speed work and then some weeks of maxing out... first of all, where does one draw the line between these 3 if one were to cycle? so that said, all 3 are done every wk in wsb... so hypertrophy was intended to be a part of the program.

What I was getting at is that the primary goal of WSB is not hypertrophy and that it still works far better than most programs that people organize for hypertrophy as a primary goal. Now the detail side, every PL program has hypertrophy elements. You just can't do enough ME or very high intensity work so there is always a give and take. Westside makes it speed and assistance to make it more pertinent but that aside there will always be lower intensity higher volume workload in any program (even in OL if you look away from the classic lifts and examine assistance or squatting). So yes, this can cause hypertrophy and I think Louie and Dave have plainly said it, but the primary purpose of the program is not hypertrophy and yet it still produces what I consider to be far more successful hypertrophy results than most of the rather butt-head bodybuilding stuff you see in the gyms. Big lifts moving north combined with eating = hypertrophy.