Did I Get Lost Chasing Effective Reps Over High Quality Practice?

One of my main philosophies as a lifter and coach has always been that if you get stronger in large, compound, multi joint, full body movements, in strength biased rep ranges, this will in turn allow you to use heavier weights in hypertrophy biased rep schemes, which should therefore allow for more growth over time.  Simultaneously, if you do large, compound, multi joint full body movements using hypertrophy biased rep schemes you will build muscle in the right places, and this will then potentiate more strength down the road, transferring to increased poundage on the bar as more contractile tissue is created you have more little workers available to move bigger weights.  While this is all sound in theory, and in practice as most people who do successfully get stronger in the 6-12 rep range in the big 3 lifts generally do build muscle in the right places, and subsequently end up expressing larger 1 rep maxes, the potential problem becomes when too much of a powerlifting program is aimed at chasing hypertrophically stimulative effective reps.  To some degree chasing too many heavy neuromuscular stimulating reps is a culprit of some of the same problems I am about to describe as well. 

While all is sound in theory, and there are many examples of this working great in practice.  There are also many examples where this does not seem to work as well in practice, and different strategies are needed for individuals who don’t do as well when exposed to the SBD movements in hypertrophy rep ranges. 

I should try to explain what I mean when I say effective reps.  The idea of effective reps comes from hypertrophy literature and the basic idea is that the last few reps in a set to failure, or close enough to failure, are the reps that the highest motor unit recruitment will occur, and the most muscle fibers will contract, therefore these reps are the most stimulative reps of the set.  The reps early on in a set just setting up the muscle fibres with fatigue needed to induce this state where the most motor units are recruited, thus if you do not train proximal enough to failure your reps will not be stimulative and will not create any gainz. 

Some places where this type of planning doesn’t seem to work as well as it should tend to be when working with people whose technique is not yet consistent or sound, individuals who have a problem joint or area in the chain, people with a movement compensation pattern that exacerbates closer to failure, and taller, longer-limbed lifters with less muscle relative to unit of bone. 

I think I was admittedly dogmatic in some of my programming approaches over the years.  I knew what I had done to become bigger and stronger.  I have been reading strength, hypertrophy, and powerlifting books and articles since probably 2005 or 2006.  I have tried almost every major powerlifting program, idea, or philosophy that has come out since then, and I have enough theory knowledge and understanding to back up my ideas and explain why they should work.  I even have a ton of clients who have showed their results from my strategies and methods.  Unfortunately for every success story there are always failures as well.  High level athletes you seemingly failed to get stronger, people whose bodies just couldn’t handle the training, or results that left both lifter and coach wanting.  It is not a comfortable thing for coaches to admit that they could not get someone stronger or better.  I wonder how much I biased my program and philosophy on what I thought worked best for me and brought me my highest results, and then just wanted everyone to do what I did.  Along with that, I wonder how often my brain operated in the world of theory, telling myself the story of what should happen, ignoring the data points in front of me telling me that a different strategy might be needed. 

Tough questions I have been asking myself as a coach lately

Have I worn out too many people’s backs, hips, and/or shoulders? 

How much of that is going to be inherent to competitive powerlifting training?

Is the training that I bias to, or have biased to in the past, causing this to happen more often or disproportionately? 

I am not sure how I could truly go about answering these questions as I would have to go back in time, make a number of changes to a lot of programs, and then compare them to the clients who were not as successful as I thought they could have been, or people who were getting worn out or pushed away from competitive powerlifting training, or at least the style I was prescribing, or pushed away from me as a coach. 

The problems of inconsistent technique

Part of me was, and still is, of the mind that you just need to put the work in, focus harder on your technical cues, and learn to execute better at the end of the set. 

Anyone who has been around long enough knows I love 3x8 in the squat, 3x10 in the bench, and 3x7 in the deadlift.  These types of prescriptions can be so simple and valuable in building an individuals base wider so that you can build higher peaks in the future.  With some people you can even get away with simply adding a submaximal single or double to that training prescription and you’ve created the perfect powerlifting program for them.  If an individual has technical inconsistencies, loading or rep schemes will need to be limited to a point where the is preferably no technical breakdown.  While this limit on loading should yield effective movement practice, these individuals still need to learn how to push hard and strain against heavy weight, and you can facilitate that using machine work that is proximal to failure.  This allows you to focus on raising the ceiling of the loading that causes technical breakdown relative to 1RM, while also trying to raise brute force output coming from individual joints. 

A Weak Link in the Chain

A small chink in the armour can cause issues that leave results of higher volume, submaximal, practice-based training wanting.  One of the main issues that occurs is that a small nagging joint can limit either the ability to load the movement, or the ability of the whole body to fire as one.  The whole idea of higher volume, submaximal, practiced based training philosophy is that you can maximally fire every muscle as hard as you can on every rep, practicing what you weed need your body to do under a 1RM load.  If something isn’t firing, or a nagging joint or area is wearing out faster than the rest of the body, then there is probably some reps later in a set or as sets go on that are not of high levels of force that we might consider them maximally effective anyway. 

Stressful Compensation Patterns

The classic compensation pattern that everyone knows is the lifter with longer femurs and a shorter torso that has to hinge a lot when they squat in order to squat to depth and keep the bar centered over the middle of their foot.  While it isn’t true that every individual who squats this way can’t handle any volume, it sure does seem like you need less squat and DL movements and more direct leg work to keep these people healthier and training hard over the long term.  I still do like the idea that you should be able to build up this trunk tolerance to workload over time, but until that time comes you can get a lot out of lower volumes of squat and DL while mashing the legs with machines and single leg movements that are less stressful to the structures of the trunk. 

Muscle Per Unit of Bone

It is easier to gain muscle using movements that put your body in more stable environments because that increased stability allows the muscle to contract even harder.  Longer lifters not only seem to have less muscle per unit of bone, which can create disadvantages from the get-go, but they also seem to build less muscle from higher volumes of SBD and need more targeted accessory work to build muscle in the right places to drive performance development in SBD.   

A Note on Load Selection

There was a weird shift a few years back where more coaches were talking about hypertrophy biased rep ranges in the squat or deadlift being overly or disproportionately fatiguing and that it was not worth the risk and the specificity was not the same anyway.  A big part of me just doubled down against this culture and idea because I thought it was soft. I still think this is soft ass thinking.  I still think more people should do squat 10s.  The number of reps is not the problem; the load selection is the problem.  I digress.  My mistake was in becoming dogmatic about my thinking and choosing not to use great tools that were at my disposal.

My athletic background and the time I spent as a strength and conditioning coach for “real” athletes always had me anchoring on the idea that you don’t need machines, make your body the machine.  While I will always still love using a barbell over any other implement in the gym, I am sure I left potential gainz on the table for myself and some clients over my time by biasing away from a lot of different machine usage.  I think this bias started when I was early in my powerlifting career and I could load 10 plates per side on a leg press or hack squat and rep it for 10-12 reps but I could only squat 5 plates for 3.  Man, I mostly just don’t want to have to load and unload all those plates.  If the machine helps you lift that much more weight, why would I want to use it?  I was young, dumb, and didn’t know any better, so I was also doing stuff like walking lunges with 3 plates, Bulgarians with 275+, and thinking this was normal.  The leg pressing and hack squatting was probably helping me achieve the success in the squat and with single leg movements, but I didn’t know it at the time. 

One thing that it took me a long time to wrap my head around was the idea that increasing stability in a movement pattern allows the muscle to contract harder.  I was also against doing things like holding the rack during a split squat or using a smith machine for single leg movements.  In my mind if you choose a single leg movement like a split squat you are choosing it because it is inherently less stable than a squat, why would I hold on to something to help me balance?  If you just get stronger, that will improve your stability and that will transfer to the squat better.  I still see so much value in this, but I also see the value of increasing stability through patterns and doing single leg work on machines or just using more machines in general.  Which kind of brings me full circle, If I can create harder contractions by increasing stability then I should be able to find movements that grow muscle and strength in the appropriate places that should then transfer to the squat and deadlift, assuming your program still has some kind of squatting and deadlifting in it.  If I am going to chase effective reps, then in some way it may be more advantageous to do this with movements that are even more stable than even compound barbell movements.  Even though my brain knows doing big movements to failure with a barbell is more bad ass than having to load way too many plates on the hack squat machine.