Bryan Haycock
Founder
Group: Administrator
Posts: 1097
Joined: Mar. 2002
Posted: June 09 2003,6:53
"Gonna make this quick because it has been addressed elsewhere as well as here already.
Try to think of things outside of sets and reps. After all, what is a set? It’s simply a measure of reps. And what are reps? simply a method of counting contractions. Research on the relationship between contraction number and hypertrophy have demonstrated very little if any correlation. Instead, hypertrophy is a matter of tension primarily with an obvious time component. Most researchers who use human subjects in weight training experiments are not body builders themselves nor are they all that familiar with muscle growth. This is why they continually ask the wrong questions in their research hypothesis, thereby making them misinterpret there results.
The more sensitive the muscle is to the tension, the less time is required to cause a hypertrophic reaction (think of skin and calluses). So the only way of knowing whether you should do 1 set or 2 sets or whatever, is to have a specific measure of how sensitive your tissue is at that moment to loading. Unfortunately, we don't have the ability to measure that in the gym.
What's the solution? Well, first off, you need some way to get an idea of how sensitive the muscle is to loading on any given day. We know from research and experience that if you've been training consistently for the last few weeks, the muscle is fairly resistant to that training stimulus. We also know that if you haven't trained the muscle for 2-3 weeks, significant deconditioning has taken place, making it more sensitive than it was during the chronic training period.
Strategic Deconditioning allows one to be reasonably sure that a less than maximum weight load will be sufficient to induce microtrauma, satellite cell activation, and thus growth. Being able to use a less than maximum load is critical if Progressive Load is a true principle. After the first workout, you can be fairly certain that a greater load must be applied each subsequent workout to achieve the same potency of the loading stimulus over and over again. The discrepancy between the minimum effective load and your max load determines how long the growth cycle can reasonably last.
Of course, you can’t get around the inverse relationship between volume and frequency but that’s another thread.
So in short (this was supposed to be short) the answer to whether you should do 1 set of 2 depends in large part on what you did during the preceding workouts and how soon you are going to workout again.
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One more thing, when considering research, never assume an increase in strength equals an increase in size. It doesn't matter that most researchers assume these are synonymus, we, and anyone who has ever given HIT a fair chance, knows strength gains and size gains are not one in the same."
ca a du sens ce qu'il dit, j'aime bien la fin ahaha, c'est plutot Heavy Duty consolidation routine qu'il faudrait dire.
C'est vrai que ca prend du temps jusqu'à ce que les gains de force débouchent sur des gains de muscle, mais ca reste malgré tout le seul moyen. Haycock dit que le HST peut faire grossir sans meme augmenter les charges d'un cycle à l'autre...