hey guys my name is Steven Low and I am the author of overcoming gravity so we'll be going over part nine today and part nine is still in part two on constructing your workout routine and chapter nine is going over all the stuff in regards to strength work so we have your types of exercises and exercise notation I'm going over concentrix isometrics and eccentrics in regard to strength training and how to set those up and then sets exercise order rest times pair sets and some other types of sets Tempo core work and then summarizing it all with some general recommendations so types of exercises and notation basically as I covered a little bit in chapter two I believe concentric exercises also referred to as Dynamics in book are mainly exercises that are focused on the muscle shortening phase of the exercise so obviously in push-ups the muscle shortening phase is when you push up from the bottom of the push-up usually these are referred to with a specific Tempo so it's the X in the one zero XO tempo and then these are expressed as sets of repetitions so three sets of say five repetitions or twelve repetitions or anywhere in between isometric exercises obviously are where the muscle stays in the same length the entire time so any of your planche or front lever or back lever type of holds where the muscles are staying at the same length the entire time but you're still exerting Force and these are expressed as sets so for example three sets of 10 second holds eccentrics or eccentric exercises are where you typically work most of the movement in the muscle lengthening phase so for example if you can't do a pull-up yet you may jump up to the top of the position and then slowly lower down as an eccentric and usually these are expressed in sets as well but usually in reps of how long the eccentric is done so three sets of three reps of say five to ten seconds in the lowering phase of each repetition and usually if you're doing reps in a row usually you state the amount of rest if it's not stated like for three reps of five to seven to ten second eccentric usually if there's no rest that means you jump back up and do another one so three reps of five seconds would be do a five second slow eccentric all the way down five seconds jump back up to the top lower again for five seconds then jump back up and lower again for five seconds and then there would be a rest time in between each of those steps so assisted concentrix and concentrix basically in the book I use a bunch of heuristics in order to give beginners a general recommendation obviously if you're moving towards training beginner intermediate and advanced they might not necessarily work as well but in this case this one does and that is perform your maximum repetitions minus one and for three sets minimum obviously there's some variation in this the reason for the max reps minus one is it generally maximizes volume percent it could be Max reps minus two so if 10 reps is your max if you go to failure in your first set usually you'd get something like 10 reps and then your next set since you went to failure you your body might be more tired so you might get eight reps the next set and after that and then maybe like seven or six reps after that going towards max reps to minus one would be 9 usually allows you to get sets across in order to avoid failure and maybe on your last set maybe your third fourth or fifth set you would hit failure at about nine reps and you can also do like the eight reps as I said max reps minus two so if you're going to failure usually you get like say 10 8 6 so add it up that's 24 total repetitions whereas if you had went with Max drops minus 1 10 minus one you get 999 that's 27 repetitions usually helps to maximize the amount of reps in your workout while avoiding failure which can increase fatigue so much that you start to drop reps at the end of sets so that's why I made that recommendation obviously anything for strength and hypertrophy training within about three to four reps to failure or reps in reserve is pretty effective and usually through a cycle you wouldn't maintain at three to four reps in reserve you would move towards failure at the end because you're increasing your reps over time and so like you know you can't always just keep adding reps to Pull-Ups so like say you started with a five rep max of pull-ups you start with four reps and then build up to five six seven if you started with a few reps in reserve obviously as you increase the Reps over time to you know eight nine ten you would be closer towards failure and you wouldn't just maintain that Reserve so The the Reserve will go away anyway as you push towards failure and through a cycle your Mesocycle and so it's not a big deal if your reps and reserves start to decrease at the end you should be going towards and closer to failure as you get stronger just by the natural progression of a cycle so assisted and modified concentrics these are different various methods in order to make a progression harder or easier usually assisted is making it easier but I wanted to discuss both examples things that make exercises harder you can use a weighted vests or ankle weights to make say like a tuck planche hold harder whereas if you were doing a tuck planche Advanced duck blanch and you wanted to make it easier you could use a counterweight pulley so that would be like a pulley going up over and then down and it has some weight on the end and you strap the other end to yourself either around your waist or so and that weight helps to pull down some of your weight so that it helps to hold you up likewise you can use bands you know wrap around the pull bar rings and then under your waist or your feet area and that can help to reduce the amount of resistance that your muscles are using in order to make a harder progression easier so in the book rule I also include a general option for hypertrophy which is beginner should aim for about 10 sets per muscle group for hypertrophy and I do want to take that back a little bit the modified one that I want to recommend is generally about three to six sets for Pure beginners is adequate enough for strength and hypertrophy about four to eight sets per trained beginners and about six to ten sets for intermediates is approximately the optimal set range as I discussed before the the optimal set range will go up as you improve over time and your work capacity goes up so obviously like someone who is Elite would have a much higher work capacity than those who are beginners or trained beginners or inmates so I'm starting out with less and then adding more as you need it over time is effective and using these ranges generally helps to prevent overuse injury as well so if a beginner jumped into 10 sets some would be able to handle it but some would be flirting with ovaries as well so I kind of want to stick to those ranges in general just as you get stronger and then you can add more as your work capacity increases as necessary okay so isometric holds I had a hard time fitting everything onto this slide in particular but basically in the when I came across strength training on Mad cow's site geocydia site back in the day he had the concept of the prilotin charts and basically the product and charts were made so that for Olympic weightlifters so they could get an adequate stimulus in order to progress then I made my own for isometric exercises to help people progress and then I mean the second edition of overcome gravity I basically made a huge chart of them in order to help people understand it more because they it was very hard for them to understand the specific ranges and hold times in the chart I made so I basically made it very specific if your hold time is this then or if your max hold time is this then you should do about this amount of hold time this Mass sets and so on and so let's look at some examples on the next slide so as I mentioned the prilipin tables were initially made to get a training stimulus for those to improve with Olympic lifts like your cleaning jerk and snatch some other common methods that many gymnastics coaches use prior to me coming up with these tables the 60 second method and aim for like 50 of your max hold and so this would lead to an inordinate amount of sets a cumbersome amount if you were hold times were very short so like if you can only hold like a 10 second tuck planche that would mean you would aim for about 50 of that or five seconds and 12 sets of Five Seconds of the tuck planche that's obviously too much and makes a workout extremely long to do and so when I was coming up these tables to find the best amount basically I was aiming for a sweet spot where you get a training stimulus from the isometric holds but you weren't doing too many sets and your holes weren't too long and so anecdotally through my own training and coaching I found about The Sweet Spot of a hold is about between 67 to about 75 of your max hold time obviously there's some variability it could be about 60 to 80 percent but generally 67 to 75 seemed to be about the best range for most people and so this basically was as I mentioned an attempt to balance intensity and exercise so that most people we get in about the three to six set range and about the six to 15 second hold range which is sufficient for training stimulus to improve on the specific hold and so as an example if we look back over the previous chart if we had a 14 second Max hold time basically that would correspond to a 10 second hold and about five sets for that hold so it's not an excessive amount of holds in like the 50 percent method for 60 seconds if you had a 14 second hold time you'd be aiming for a seven second hold and then you would be doing that for about eight eight to nine sets so that's way too much obviously you can get a fairly good training stimulus with a slightly longer hold and less sets so that's how the prilippin isometric tables work so once you get your hold set your sets and holds generally you're going to want to increase your time you're holding over time so you name for 10 second holds one workout then you can aim to work towards improving those to 11 seconds then 12 seconds and so on and so you don't necessarily have to keep looking back at the table you basically aim for some type of linear progression with your setting set hold time increases and that will provide the adaptation you can always recalculate based on the charts so you know if you made it up to 14 or 15 second holds and you're still progressing you can potentially recalculate by doing a Max hold again and then figuring out what your appropriate hold time and set times might need to be all right so cluster reps are often the most effective in regard to using eccentrics to progress with a given stimulus in order to get stronger like the isometric charts and so an example of this would be three sets of three reps of seven seconds eccentrics so the cluster would be the the three reps where you would lower for seven seconds so like with a pull-up you would jump up to the top with no rest lower seven seconds and repeat three times for that whole cluster or so you do that and then repeat it for two more times so I took my wife from about one pull-up to 12 pull-ups in 12 weeks with the cluster 5x5 method the cluster method for pull-ups would be something like if you can do one pull-up then you do four eccentrics and then once you can do two pull-ups you do three eccentrics three pull-ups two eccentrics four pull-ups one eccentric and then once you can do five pull-ups you don't do any any eccentrics at all and this method is fairly good at helping people get from zero pull-ups up to about five Pull-Ups so you have about five sets of five obviously that can be too much for some so I like to say about three sets three to five sets of three to five reps of those clusters and that tends to work fairly well likewise one arm Trends for the majority of people I've coached two one arm shins if they're using the Centric method in order to progress to that particular exercise usually doing about three sets of three reps of ten seconds lowers on the arm will be close to if not able to do a one arm chain and very rare that someone is very far away if they can do smooth slow lowering of 10 seconds uniform speed of three three reps in a row and then also do that over three sets that they're not very close to a one arm chain so in general I do mainly like using eccentrics to break plateaus I generally don't like them using as a main exercise and the reason for that is that they are very intense on the nervous system and can put people in a bigger fatigue and Recovery deficit and so usually I do like them for mostly breaking about toes but if you are using them in a routine I like to them only to be one maybe two at most eccentrics in a routine at a time otherwise it's almost too much on recovery foreign sets and exercise order so as I've talked about before most of the examples I've used have three sets of exercises but there's nothing really special about three sets of exercise even though it's become more of the standard in strength training a lot of strength training programs use anywhere from like three to five sets but there's nothing too special about that I'm usually anywhere between two to five sets is fairly effective especially if you're doing one to two exercises in a routine for beginners and intermediates and like I mentioned before the three to six or four to six four to eight and six to ten set range for beginners trained beginners in an interview it's tends to be best for the optimal volume to progress for them and so as long as you're keeping your exercises in that particular set range you tend to be progressing fairly effectively intermediates in particular can usually jump to three exercises per muscle group so like with push that would be dips a push-up or planche exercise and handstand push-ups as you can see with the six to ten set rep range if you're doing three sets per exercise usually you can go to three exercises in an intermediate range and so that is one of the benefits of the increase in work capacity you can work potentially more exercises or if you wanted to focus on specific exercises in order to get stronger at that specific exercise so like more focus on dips or more focus on planche exercises you can have you know up to like two sets of five exercises for intermediates on those two specific exercises so that can be an effective way to really emphasize one specific exercise if your goals are more narrow whereas if your goals are more wide you can have the three exercises spread out to three sets similarly with exercise order decreasing the quality of subsequent sets so like if you did pull-ups and dips first usually over time the third fourth fifth exercises in a routine are going to be less quality so I give the example of the book like the first exercise is usually like 100 quality next exercise is maybe like 98 97 then after that 95 94. so by the end of your workout if you are training pretty hard usually you're in the you know 80s maybe 70s capacity you definitely like feel like you're more fatigued and if you had gone back to like the first exercise you definitely would not get as many reps as you did in the beginning and so it's important to prioritize which exercises you want to improve on the most as the first then the next one as a second and then the next one is the third so that's the main thing to keep in mind with exercise order the ones that you want to improve on the most should go first all right rest times is still a fairly controversial thing in the training world and generally speaking the for strengthen the hypertrophy you want to do at least three to five minutes for compounds and bounce two to three plus minutes for isolations so why is three minutes fairly standard I include in the book that you get about 50 ATP or muscle energy refill in your muscles at 30 seconds about 75 percent at 60 Seconds 90 that should be 90 and 90 seconds 95 at two minutes and 99 at three minutes so if you want to make sure that you're getting the full amount of quality and being not be limited by your muscles energy refill rate to get the full amount of neurological stimulus for strength gains as well as the full amount of stimulus for working your muscles through the full amount of repetitions you want to do at least three minutes so I isolations can be a bit less namely because it's not as important with compounds to not drop reps so in general the the main concept here is that quality sets matter over quantity there's a good Stronger by science article on rep ranges for hypertrophy they basically go all the studies in regard to rep ranges but then also cover it in regard to what they mean by like quality sets and maximizing repetitions and they come to a similar conclusion so if you want to look that up I believe it's "Hypertrophy range fact or fiction" with Stronger by science so in general the reason why you don't use lower than like two minutes for hypertrophy training is that you can get the pump in a similarly by just using higher rep ranges so like obviously you're going to build up a pump in your muscle such as bicep curls if you're going to do incomplete rests like say one minute between your bicep curl sets but you can still build a pump if you went to higher reps and we know that good hypertrophy training is generally in the 5 to 30 rep range from the scientific studies and so if you want the pump it's better just to rest longer and do more repetitions rather than do incomplete rests and start to drop repetitions that you can't perform at the same weight likewise some newer research may suggest that volume matched lower rest times so like if you're resting less than one to two minutes or or two minutes or less generally if you're resting less than that then you're it's as effective for hypertrophy as you as if you did like higher rest times and got as many reps in a certain rep range basically you're adding more sets to make up for the fact that you're doing lower rest times and so you're getting about as many repetitions as it's fairly the same for a hypertrophy so the main reason why I wouldn't do it is basically you're adding on more sets when you could have just rested longer and not drop reps and so it's just more efficient to rest long enough to make sure that you can get all the Reps in the sets that you need and not just keep adding on more and more stats and going to more more closer and closer to failure so that's the importance of understanding that oh yeah you can get a similar hypertrophy stimulus if you just kept adding on some more sets if you're just starting to drop a ton of reps but I'm generally not worth it in regard to time as well for endurance training there's value in training incomplete rests so I'm generally about 30 seconds to 120 seconds or two minutes to increase metabolic adaptations but they're also complete rests help to maximize your sets on increasing your rep range so in general if somebody is training for like a you know PT exam physical training exam for like firefighter the military or whatever usually I suggest some type of strength training you know one two times a week to maximize for your ability to produce Force so like an individual push-up is not you know fifty percent of your max but 30 that increases your maximum endurance then I also suggest some type of training on incomplete rests so like going close to failure you know doing short rest pumping out some more reps taking a short rest doing some more reps as that helps build up the metabolic adaptations closer to failure and then also suggest obviously doing some mac sets where you know you just go for as High Reps as you can try to get into a rhythm and all of these types of training put together to help to maximize endurance adaptations so it's important to do both as you get closer to a specific test then obviously you want to do more specific Max endurance training and endurance training and maybe cut out the strength work but that's more specific to a test all right so different types of sets so standard sets obviously are doing say push-ups rests three minutes and doing another set of push-ups and so on so paired sets are one way to save time especially if you're doing a full body exercise you get most of the benefit probably about 85 to 95 percent of the benefit of strengthen hypertrophy while you save almost half the time so the way to do this is you know versus your standard sets is to pair pull-ups with an an exercise that does not overlap with muscle groups so say squats so basically you do pull-ups rest 1. 5 minutes instead of three do your a set of squats then rest for 1.
5 minutes then go back and repeat pull ups rest 1. 5 minutes squats rest 1. 5 minutes Etc so there is still three minutes of rest between your pull-up sets which allows you to get most of the energy obviously your cardiovascular system and your body is a little bit more fatigued so you can drop some reps here and there which is why it's not you know optimal for strength and hypertrophy but doing it does save half the time as you're able to compress two separate exercises in the time it took to do one specific exercise there is also a misconception that you can kind of pair three things so doing say pull-ups rest one minute then squats then rest one minute then push-ups and then doing that so that that's more akin to circuit training and then if you look at the benefit of that or like even if you do like pull-ups rest 1.
5 push-ups rest 1.
