This series has clarified a lot of concepts for me. So far you’re the only one that managed to explain “the general principles” that make a certain routine work.

Nope, makes perfect sense and I’ll actually touch on different ways of putting all of this together when I wrap up hypertrophy training. All of the approaches you described can work. For people who are very strong, doing all of the low rep work by itself often works best, simply because it’s too fatiguing to do anything afterwards (at the 4 year mark you’re probably getting close). So something like Layne Norton’s PHAT (one power day, one higher rep day). For folks who are not as strong, you can do it all in the same workout (i.e. heavy work followed by medium rep work followed by a couple of pump sets to finish off). Within the context of an upper/lower, the workouts also get brutally long if you try to do everything for a lot of bodyparts in the same workout. For someone at the 4 year mark I often recommend specialization approaches (where you focus on maybe two bodyparts per training cycle), which I haven’t written up yet. Maybe when this series is over.

Do you think there’s much truth to Poliquin’s often espoused theories about different reps being optimal for different trainees based on their muscle fibre types (slow twitch or fast twitch)? So that an assumed fast-twitch oly lifter would hypertrophy on lower reps (sets of 5 as you mentioned), but someone who was more of a mix or slow twitch would do better on relatively higher reps? Does the fact that slow-twitch fibres have limited hypertrophy potential tie in with how you were saying high rep stuff doesn’t normally work well for naturals, or is that just more of a function of tension and the light loads required for high reps?

I remember Poliquin used to say he would test the 1RM of something like the weighted chinup, then 10 minutes later have the trainee do max reps at 85% of their chinning weight, and the number of reps they got would be the rep range they would hypertrophy those muscles best in for that exercise, again going back to their fibre types. This would be assuming that 85% is best for hypertrophy, but makes an interesting distinction between people who may be able to get 3 reps with 85% vs. people who may be able to get 20 reps with 85% (as you’ve probably encountered in training people).

Sorry for the long-winded and open ended questions, as well as the loliquinisms, but I was just wondering about your take on the issue. Cheers.

And it’s 30-60 reps per muscle group. That was one thing I did leave out and was going to clarify on Tuesday week anyhow.