Great Rules that Suck
By Jason Ferruggia
For www.EliteFTS.com
I was born with a rebellious streak. It’s been with me just about every day
of my 32-year existence. When I wake up every day, I know that I’ll probably do
or say something that will probably be nothing more than an act of rebellion in
some form or another against something that I see as wrong or unjust. I don’t
know why that is. I just accept it as part of my nature. I can’t control it so
I embrace it. It’s who I am.
Just like I can’t allow society’s rules to control the way I live, I also
can’t let certain so-called rules control the way I train myself or my
athletes. At the beginning of my career in this industry, I tried to follow all
of the rules. However, I soon realized that, just like in the real world, the
rules of the weight room are made to be broken.
The following are a few training rules that the “internet crowd” seems to
follow to the letter. I’m not sure where these rules first started, but I’d
like to be the first to address them in a whole new light. While these rules
can sometimes be great, they can also, sometimes, really suck.
There is an inverse relationship between sets and reps.
Tell that to a world champion powerlifter. After he’s worked up to a heavy
triple of somewhere around 700 lbs in the squat, explain to him that when you’re only doing three
reps per set, you need to do at least six to ten sets. See what kind of
reaction you get.
This rule has been around for years and too many people adhere to it like
the gospel truth. The rule simply states that if you do a lot of reps, you
don’t do a lot of sets. And if you do very few reps, you do a whole bunch of
sets. Therefore, if you’re going to do sets of ten reps, you only need to do two
to four sets. Conversely, if you’re going to do sets of three reps, you need to
do six to ten sets. This is a great rule, BUT…the only problem is…this rule
sucks.
Let me explain.
If you’re a beginner, this rule is great and should be followed. I’m sure everyone
would agree with that, right? Wrong. I don’t even agree with that. The reason
being that beginners don’t need to do low reps and should stick with an average
rep scheme of eight to twelve for at least their first few months of training.
With that technicality out of the way, I’ll say that this rule is great for
those who are slightly past the raw beginner stage. When you’re first
introduced to lower reps—say five per set—you should increase the amount of
sets from when you were doing twelve reps. While you may have done three sets
of twelve, you’ll now do five sets of five. The reason this rule makes sense
for intermediate trainees is because they’re not as neurologically efficient
and need repeated efforts to obtain a training effect. If you’re a regular
reader of this site, I’m sure you’ve heard all of this before and understand
exactly what I’m talking about. No further explanation needed.
So now that I’ve explained why and when that rule is great, let me now tell
you why and when it sucks. Once you’ve moved out of the intermediate stages of
training and into the somewhat advanced and fairly strong ones, this rule
sucks. You simply can’t follow this rule when you’re strong. In fact, this rule
actually becomes exactly the opposite of the truth when you’re strong. It does
a complete 180. As you get stronger, you become more neurologically efficient.
One of the implications of this is that it takes you fewer exposures to certain
stressors to achieve the desired training effect. When you’re weak and can only
bench press 135 lbs, you need a decent amount of volume to
get bigger and stronger. Doing 105 lbs for five sets of five is easily doable.
You could even do six sets of three with 125 lbs and get a good training
effect. Try this when you can bench 405 lbs or worse yet, 500 lbs. It ain’t
gonna happen.
When you get strong, this rule actually almost needs to be completely reversed.
The first and most obvious reason is that you’re now more neurologically
efficient and need fewer exposures to specific stressors to achieve the desired
training effect. The second, and less obvious reason, is that when you’re benching 135 lbs, it takes you three sets to safely warm up
to your starting weight. When you’re benching 405 lbs, it takes you quite a few more sets to
safely warm up to that weight. This is extra training volume that needs to be
accounted for yet no one ever brings up that important point. After a seven to
ten set warm up, you can’t be expected to now do that many work sets. Benching
405 lbs is so much more demanding on your body than benching 135 lbs. You would
be doing yourself more harm than good if you followed this rule. So when you’re
going to do low reps at this stage of your training, you would actually be
better served doing fewer sets. If you want to do sets of ten, you could
probably get away with doing a few more sets then you could when you’re doing
sets of three.
When you’re strong, this rule should read—there’s an equivalent relationship
between sets and reps. The lower the reps, the lower the sets; the higher the
reps, the higher the sets. Now this doesn’t mean that if you’re doing ten reps
you should do ten sets. That would be ludicrous. It means that if you’re doing
triples, the weight is going to be quite heavy and quite demanding on your CNS,
joints, tendons, and ligaments. It also means that you’re going to be doing a
lot of warm up sets. Therefore, you can’t do more than a few sets. On the other
hand, if you’re doing sets of ten, you could get away with a couple more sets.
Before you do anything in the gym, you always have to ask yourself what the
reason for doing it is. If you’re doing three reps, the goal is strength. If
you’re strong, you can achieve the goal of getting stronger in just a few sets.
If you’re doing sets of ten, the goal is obviously hypertrophy. Since
hypertrophy gains are associated with a higher volume of training (which in
itself is disputable), you can see why you it may be possible to do more sets
with the higher reps. It corresponds with the training goal.
There is an inverse relationship between reps and rest periods.
Again, this is a rule that only applies to beginners. I’ve seen newbies do
set after set of twenty rep squats with barely the slightest increase in heart rate or
perspiration. Last week, I decided to venture above six reps in the squat for
the first time in years. After working up to a few heavy triples, I stripped
the weight and decided to do a set of twenty reps nonstop for old time’s sake.
After I racked the twentieth rep, I collapsed in a heap and couldn’t get off
the floor for ten minutes. According to the rule in question, I should have
been able to pick myself back up in roughly 90–120 seconds and repeat the
effort with no problem.
So let me get this straight—what you’re telling me is that I need less rest
after doing twenty eyeball exploding reps than I do after doing a set of two?!
While I understand that this rule is based on the recovery of the nervous
system—and it makes sense from that perspective—I have to ask, what about every
other system? And what about the puke that made its way halfway up my esophagus
and could easily have sprayed the gym walls at any second? This needs to be
taken into account.
When you’re weak, doing light weights for high reps takes nothing out of
you. But you have to always ask yourself why you’re choosing a certain rep
range. If you’re doing high reps, the goal is hypertrophy and/or endurance.
Therefore, we don’t have to be overly worried about CNS recovery, and the rest
periods can be somewhat shorter. The problem is that when you get stronger, you
simply can’t follow this rule anymore because your recovery time will increase
greatly. If you still followed this rule as an advanced lifter, your
performance from one set to the next would drop drastically.
When bashing this rule for advanced lifters, however, I should point out
that I’m only talking about extreme rep differences. If you’re doing singles
and want full CNS recovery, you’re going to want to take a fairly long rest period
between sets. So the difference between doing sets of one rep and sets of ten
will not be that great. You’ll probably rest longer between the sets of
singles. In this instance, this rule is great. But if you’re comparing singles
to sets of twenty, especially in the case of a squat or deadlift, then this rule absolutely sucks.
The greater your training age, the lower your average number of reps in
training should be.
As a beginner, the majority of your training should be spent doing higher
reps. Sets of ten to twenty reps are the norm for most beginners, and they can
make great progress with these loading parameters. After a year or so, it’s
recommended that you start incorporating some heavier lifts into your training
and lowering your reps. As time goes on, you should lower your average number
of reps per set even more. This theory has stood the test of time. Thus, this
is a great rule.
Except for one tiny problem…it sucks.
Like the other rules listed, this is one I
followed for years with myself and all of my athletes. But then I began to
think about this a little more seriously and realized that this was probably
doing more harm than good. I discovered that with my twenty years of training,
I should now be doing almost all of my training in the range of one to six
reps. That’s a lot of heavy training, especially if you’re strong! So that
means that I’m constantly going heavy all the time on everything and
continually beating the shit out of my body. This just can’t be good. Somehow
most bodybuilders and powerlifters never heard this rule and don’t abide by it.
Yet, remarkably, they manage to still make progress and get bigger and stronger
many years into their training careers. The reason they never heard of this
rule is because they live in the weight room, not in the library or on internet
training forums.
My friend Jim Wendler has squatted 1000 lbs in competition,
yet he routinely does sets of eight to twelve reps on a regular basis. Dave
Tate does the same thing. According to this rule, neither of them should make
any progress whatsoever by doing reps that high. When I mentioned this to Dave,
he looked at me in utter confusion. He had never heard the rule before and
couldn’t begin to fathom how anyone could have come up with something so
ridiculous. Every big guy he ever lifted with in all his years at Westside
routinely did sets of eight to twelve reps and all continually grew bigger.
What people need to realize is that when you get really strong, training takes
quite a toll on your body. You just can’t go heavy all the time. You need some
lighter training, which means higher reps. Lighter sets of higher reps can
actually have a beneficial, almost restoration type of effect for the stronger
lifter and can improve tendon and ligament strength. Higher (8–12) reps aid in
recovery and get blood into the muscles. They also help build size no matter
what your training age is.
If you’re a beginner or intermediate lifter, this rule is great. It even has
some applications for the advanced lifter. However, when you start getting
carried away with it and following charts that say you can only do six reps and
under and are going incredibly heavy on every exercise that you do, this rule
absolutely sucks.
Like I said, sometimes rules are made to be broken.
Jason Ferruggia is a highly sought after performance enhancement specialist
who has worked with over 500 athletes during his thirteen years in the fitness
industry. He is the head training advisor for Men’s Fitness magazine and has
authored two books entitled How to Get Jacked (available at www.TheHardgainer.com ) and Tap
Out: Strength & Conditioning for Combat Sports (available at www.CombatConditioningSecrets.com
).
For more information about Jason, please visit www.J1Sstrength.com and sign up for your
free newsletter today.
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