Rep Ranges and Individual Biomechanics

Same thing you would do with the weightlifting. If I want to lift weights, if I want to get, if I want to build muscle doesn't really matter what rep range you use as long as you go close to technical failure. Now, some ranges are probably much better than others, especially if you look at the rep ranges to the extremes they are biased towards something in an extreme manner So bodybuilders have had this figured out for like 100 years The best rep ranges for muscle growth tend to be somewhere between like eight to 12 And now with the evidence based guys will say, well, it doesn't really matter, somewhere between, say, six and 20. And I would, I would agree with that, right? It opens up a lot of different methods, and it opens up a lot of stuff for different body types and different. When you look at body types, how long are my levers? What am I suited for somebody with really like you got somebody that's built like a grasshopper they're not going to be built for powerlifting they are really long limbs they're never good probably never going to make a good powerlifter um so you start thinking about they probably don't need anything under six reps because they they're not built to produce strength anyways and they have to produce way more torque at joints to move that load than somebody with more optimal levers for this. So it's like, okay, here's my client. They want to, they want to change their physique, you know, sets of five or below heavy eccentrics, probably not in their wheelhouse, but you know, sets of eight to 20 probably are. If somebody's built a different way, okay, then the lower reps might work better, but you're, you're always biased at the extreme. So everything has a, pretty much everything has a continuum and a bell curve. So your best results are probably going to be somewhere in 70% of the inside of that bell curve, which means probably eight to 20 reps, maybe for some people, six to 20. And then if you bias it towards that 15% over here, where it's under six reps, yeah, you're still going to grow muscle. It's probably not going to be as fast as just pump work, but you're going to get a lot stronger there than you would in say an eight to 12 rep range. And if you go to the other extreme, you're going to build a lot more strength endurance. You're going to still build hypertrophy, but you're probably not going to get that strong. So we have to figure out where's the best return on your investment for what you're looking for. And if it's for physique, most of your work is going to be in the middle of that bell curve, and then occasionally maybe popping in and out of these places. same thing with the conditioning most people have a horrible aerobic conditioning and so we've got we have to look at its bell curve a lactic a lactic work probably not that beneficial you know glycolytic lactic work probably more beneficial but if you want to bias it towards aerobic got to do aerobic aerobic type things which means you got to either do steady state cardio or aerobic cell intervals or glycolytic work with incomplete rest as a way to modify these things, but you need to get a clear defined, clear defined, uh, per, per, uh, what am I looking for? Perspective of what is the end adaptation I need for this phase, for this mesocycle, you know, for this period of my training. And I need to bias my training towards that one goal until I hit that adaptation and then I have to reassess. Right. So, um, for example, we've got a guy uh he's a footy player that plays afl and his aerobic uh his aerobic engine is really good because he's done a lot of aerobic work but now when he goes and plays footy he's good for the first half of the game and then he crumbles well he needs to get more anaerobic output because the starting and the stopping and the buffering lactate or buffering hydrogen and all this other stuff that he needs his those systems are crumbling because he's he's moved too far off to one side we got to bring it back so everything has to be assessed and then you have to choose the right tool for the job not saying that not saying that other tools won't work but some are going to work better at certain times did you have him do um the dreaded cooper's test modified i didn't actually didn't need to because i already knew so sometimes you don't need to assess because you already kind of know so with him I had a good idea of what his resting heart rate was and it was fairly low um you get a guy's resting heart rate's fairly low he's been doing a lot of aerobic work 26 27 years of age you already have a pretty good idea and the guy can go and run forever but then you find out that he's not doing well when he plays and he's putting in deceleration to change the direction and starting and stopping it's like okay now we need to work on the the anaerobic stuff. So now he's doing more of that stuff, but you know, from the physique and the physique perspective, physique, physique periodization is pretty simple. Um, the main thing is we need to eliminate weak body parts. And then we got it. We have to go through stages of building muscle, pulling off fat, building muscle, pulling off fat. So it is, I view it as similar to what I use with a high level athlete. It's just a different type of perspective on what is important, what's not important, not important for a bodybuilder to be able to hammer out 200 kilograms, single single rep squats but being really good at mind muscle connection feeling the muscle prioritizing body parts that might be behind limiting work on muscles that are already overly big It more of a science and art thing than it is with high athletes And so when you have people who come to you for physique goals and they need the aerobic work in the beginning and they're doing that, do you ever think that they're like, oh, so yeah, I was right. you do have to do cardio to get to where I need to be because that's what they're starting with. They don't really know that they're not going to be doing more of that going into the end of that phase. I think a lot of it, a lot of it's education. If you just educate the client and get them to understand, they're either going to understand or they're not. And if they don't understand, I'm not going to train them. Uh, because if you have something that has a time beginning and end and it's for something like bodybuilding or photo shoot there's not a lot of time for me to argue with people yeah and a lot of times people come like we had a long time with you and you were kind of cruisy about what you wanted to do and then covid pushed the the wedding back a little bit and i was like all right well you know we got plenty of time now so a lot of times people come to me because they fucked up and they're like i've got eight weeks left i'm like okay i don't have a lot of time to dick around like you're gonna do what daddy says or go to someone else because I don't, I'm going to try to educate you as much as possible. We don't have a lot of time for me to fuck around with arguing with you about this type of stuff. Yeah. Yeah. No. And that's why I, like, I think we work well together because now I hear you like in my head where sometimes I'll do a set and I'm like, fuck, I could go like 20 pounds heavier and I'll do like six sets. Cause there's only five that you want me to do, but I'm like, I can't mark that down. Cause he's going to see that it's 20 pounds less. And that like, you know, you, you get that mindset where you're in the gym because when you're training, like we've discussed, sometimes people don't train hard enough, but you have to get to that point where you're like, okay, I am dying.