Read this quick post and remember it so you don’t make a mistake on the following 2 occasions.
And both these occasions WILL apply to you at some point.
They are:
(1) When you’re new to lifting
(2) When you’re coming back after a lay-off
By a lay-off I’m not referring to the scheduled week off training we all take in THT training. I mean that for some reason you can’t train for a few weeks, or you deliberately chose not to train for an extended period of time (if the latter, I’m shaking my head at you in disappointment).
Both of the occasions above require a period of ANATOMICAL ADAPTATION.
1. Basically we need to increase our neuromuscular efficiency i.e. have our nervous sytem learn the movements, speed up motor reactions, improve coordination, and optimize efficiency in general.
If you’ve ever seen a newbie trying to do overhead dumbbell presses for example, they’re wobbling all over the place on the positive and negative parts of the rep. Their coordination is pretty terrible until they ‘learn’ the movement.
2. Furthermore, you’ll need to give the muscle tissue, ligaments, and tendons time to develop in preparation for more and more training.
Yes, just like muscle fibers, tendons and ligaments can also increase in diameter.
This means we’ve less chance of hurting ourselves now and in the future by working in this rep range.
3. However, we still want to train to stimulate growth in the muscle tissue. We can strike a great balance here: All of these requirements are best facilitated with lighter loads and higher reps.
So the ideal rep range here is 8-12 reps.
As a nice bonus this is probably the rep range where most muscular hypertrophy/growth is stimulated for reasons I outline in this article, “how many reps per set for muscle growth‘.
So this fits nicely into the THT picture 🙂
Remember that other phases of THT training are ‘Strength’ and ‘Mixed’ (where you use different rep ranges), which you can read more about here in this article: ‘Reps & Sets‘. The end result is CHRONIC or CONTINUOUS hypertrophy, which is rather nice if you ask me 😉
Train With Intensity!
Mark
So how long do you suggest we use that rep range after a long break for example, until we can go back to the 4-6 rep range? Or do you suggest staying at the 8 reps if that’s where the perfect balance between strength and muscular hypertrophy occurs? In that case then should one should just lower the weights when coming back from a long break and stick to doing 8 reps?
Thanks Mark, great timing for me, I’ve just had to take 2 weeks out of my schedule for an unexpected and unavoidable matter and was wondering how best to approach training again – I was thinking of going the other way, dropping to 4-6 reps and upping the load, so this has put me right and with a logical and easily understood reasoning.
Starting again on Friday.
Can’t thank you enough.
Paul
p.s. any tips for holiday workouts? that’s another interruption looming in my not too distant future…
@Yash. 2 weeks is enough if you want to drop to another rep range. On the 2nd week attempt to beat your reps you set the previous week. From there move to 6-8 reps to failure or 7-10 reps to failure.
@Paul. Cool 🙂 Not sure what you mean by holiday workouts. If you mean going on vacation for a week or so, I just take that time as a week off. Just enjoy the time off.