Women doing HST?

[eck]

After I'm done with my current round of workout(next 2 months), I was looking into maybe doing HST.

I've been looking through the archives looking for women who have done HST and found anay's journal but that is about it.

I was hoping for insight on how well it worked for you, difficulties you have found with the program etc and any tweaks you have had to make.

 

[RottenWillow]

Hey there Eck,

I update my HST journal fairly regularly so keep reading it for ongoing observations and difficulties. But one thing I'll mention right now is the problems I've had adding significant poundage increments at each workout.

I think my 15RM row was 35lbs. If I choose a 3% increment for each day of that minicycle we are talking about 1.2lb poundage increases for each workout. Backlash pointed out to me that he thought these poundage increases were'nt big enough to adequately implement the progressive overload principle of HST. But notice that if I use this percentage with my squat of 265 we are incrementing 9-10lbs which is pretty significant.

What I'm getting at is since we have a lot less upper body strength than men it is a special consideration for us when trying to create an effective increment for each workout. If we increment too little there isnt enough of a progressive overload each workout and if we increment too much we're down to almost NO poundage at all.

What I've ended up doing is increase the increment of my upper body exercises to 4-6% to yield higher poundage changes each workout. The 10RM row workout I'm currently doing looks like this: 27.5/30/32.5/35/37.5/40lbs.

If you do the math thats actually a 6% increase each time but still only amounts to a 2.5lb increase each time.