MAS
@Evan – When I trained 2-4 times per week, my body never had time to fully recover. My strength cycled. My injury rate was higher. The sweet spot for me – regardless of intensity – is one workout every 5 to 7 days. My research has led me to believe that full recovery takes longer as our training age and intensity increases.
My focus is no longer on the numbers at the gym, which is the purpose of this post. I believe the magic is in figuring out how to optimize nutrition for growth and increase the rate of recovery.
If one could figure out to increase full recovery by a single day at equal intensity, that would trump any workout protocol for hypertrophy. One of the problems us ectomorphs have is we can leave well enough alone. We don’t trust the process and we try and micro-manage. We over train, we under eat, we abuse coffee and when that doesn’t work, we do even more. We never accept our genetics and we push ourselves to injury.
Evan Unlike you, when I started strength training, I almost immediately fell into HIT. After using HIT for some time, I had reached strength plateaus in all of my exercises. Therefore, back in 2004, I decided to try something different. Instead of always training with 100% intensity, I decided to systematically try lower intensity levels while increasing the training frequency to 3 times per week. I tried intensity levels from 60% to 90%–at 5% increments. My rep range was always 6-10. (Just to clarify, if a lifter’s 10 repetition maximum on the barbell curl is 100 lbs, then lifting 90 lbs for 10 reps would be 90% intensity.) I stuck to a given intensity level for one month. Then, at the end of the month, I did a strength test to see how I fared at that intensity level.
What I found surprised me. I made slow but steady progress with intensity levels between 65% and 85%, inclusive. It didn’t seem to matter where I was within that range. Anywhere between 65% and 85% intensity led to slow but consistently predictable progress. When the intensity got up to 90%, I noticed a slight DECREASE in strength–which I interpreted as the beginning of overtraining. When the intensity got down to 60%, my strength suddenly declined precipitously. All this surprised me since, at 65% to 75% intensity, the weights felt surprisingly light. I would walk away from the gym feeling like my muscles were still fresh. Despite this, the strength tests showed steady improvements. For example, my bench press was 235 lbs prior to this experiment. By the end of the experiment, my bench press had reached 285 lbs (I weighed 185 lbs at the time).
Since then my strength and body weight has gone down due to lifting sabbaticals as well as having difficulties eating enough calories to keep my body weight at 185+ lbs. I sympathize with ectomorphs who have trouble eating enough calories. Recently, after a long sabbatical, I’ve started strength training again–hence my interest in the subject and all these posts.
