GOOD READ!!!!
Answer:
It is important not to get too caught up in small percentages. In other words, no need to split hairs when you don't actually have a view of the hairs you're trying to split. We cannot predict exactly how much weight to use at any given time because we simply cant see into the muscle tissue itself. Therefore
we work our way along by finding an advantageous starting point and then keeping track of where weve most recently been.
The Principles Involved:
Your muscle, depending on the size of the muscle group,
will not likely be able to sense a small increases in load, such as 2.5 pounds or 1 kilo. Your CNS won't really know the difference either. It doesn't get direct feedback from your muscle tissue about actual tension levels (aside from golgi and to a lesser extent spindles). The CNS is more sensitive to the degree of exhaustion, or a given level of output for a given duration. You will however because you know what you loaded on the bar last time and you know that you're putting 1 kilo more weight on this time. So aside from a mind game we play with ourselves, we need to try to make each workout a relatively more
severe structural challenge to our muscle tissue. The challenge to our CNS and to ourselves is secondary to this. This is and important element that distinguishes Hypertrophy-Specific Training from other methods of training done for other reasons.
Speaking short tem, what your muscles are responding to from workout to workout (~48 hours later) is the "repeated" structural challenge. The frequency that this occurs is also important. This will be true for about 3-4 weeks. The more frequent the load, and the more sensitive your tissue is to that loading, the longer you can get away with no increase in load. You heard me correctly. Until your tissue as finished building up its resistance to the current level of abuse youre putting it through, it will continue to respond (i.e. change) to the workouts even if the weight has not increased. Depending on the absolute amount of weight used, and the level of conditioning the tissue had when you started, this can work for anywhere from 3-4 weeks. However, there is a definite curve of diminishing returns during those weeks. The last workout wont be near as productive as the 2nd or 3rd workout.
Despite this short term efficacy of constant or static weight loads, increasing the load from workout to workout does serve a obvious purpose. It helps to cause adequate physical trauma to the tissue more consistently, thereby more consistantly activating important hypertrophic pathways like satellite cell activity and internal mechanotransduciton pathways. Too little or no damage due to imperceptibly small increments means your muscles ability to resist trauma will soon catch up to you and growth will stop. Too much damage from huge increments means youre headed for injury and possibly fiber necrosis and an increase in fibrous connective tissue (not good).
The Application of those Principles:
So how do we apply the principles we just discussed? After all, just knowing that something works a certain way, doesnt
mean you know how to make it do what you want it to. So lets summarize this
first. You want the tissue to be traumatized more than just on the first
workout. So, considering the tissues ability to rapidly protect itself from
further trauma (growing resistant to the tension itself), you have to
continually increase the weight in order to stay ahead of the tissues physical
adaptation to the last workout. This is fundamentally contrary to ALL other
programs before HST which preach full recovery before hitting the muscle again.
Anybody serious about hypertrophy will need to train again before the muscle is
recovered.
So we know that the load must be continually increased in order to grow
consistantly. However, this poses a problem to us because we are only so strong.
Unlike Superman, there is only so much weight that we can lift. So our
well-validated strategy to continually increase the weight is only a temporary
solution. Here we come to another juncture that is fundamentally different from
other programs. Some programs, unable to understand why growth stops, would have
you change exercises to confuse the muscle. After all, dont all our organs
grow in response to confusion? Just think if this were true, people with blond
hair would have HUGE brains. (Just kidding&relax
). Others would have you
simply train harder, do more sets, do forced reps, decrease the rest period, or
whatever they can think of to make the same weight loads feel for difficult.
They call it upping the intensity . Why? Because they dont really understand
why they have stopped growing. If you dont know why youve stopped growing, you
are going to have a very hard time fixing the problem.
So back to our dilemma, we deal with our the problem of limited strength with
Strategic Deconditioning (SD), which then allows us to use the minimum possible
weight that will still produce hypertrophy when we start. This is the only
reason using submax weights during an HST cycle works. After SD you have
effectively decreased the amount of weight required to stimulate growth. And at
the same time you have given yourself some headroom to increase the weight each
and every workout for a decent length of time before you max out your strength.
Even when using SD properly, we still end up with certain limitations, or
boundaries that we must work within. The lower boundary is that we still have to
start with a good amount of weight to cause hypertrophy, regardless of how weak
we are. The upper boundary is due to the fact that we are only so strong so we
cant increase the weight forever. The difference between the lower boundary
(minimum amount of starting weight) and the upper boundary (max strength) will
differ from one person to another. Sure, these boundaries change over time. We
get stronger over time and we also tend to be more or less conditioned when we
start. So both boundaries can move up or down over time.
Here is the key to understanding the answer to your question about increments.
The smaller the difference between your required starting weight and your max
strength will determine what kind of increments you will use. This is not
complicated nor does it need to be. On average you should be able to make 6
increments between your minimum effective weight and your repetition max. It is
not uncommon however that people will need to reduce the number of increments
and repeat a few poundages to accommodate small muscle groups such as shoulders
(lateral raises etc). All in all you will end up increasing the weight 18 -20
times over the course of 6-8 weeks. This consistent increase in load and
Strategic Deconditioning has a great deal to do with the effectiveness of HST.
In the end it isnt necessary to focus on how big of an increment to make. What
will determine your success is more dependent upon how wide the range is between
your effective starting poundages during the 15s and your ending poundages used
for 5s or negatives. So your goal for continued success, cycle after cycle, is
to increase that range by either decreasing the effective starting weight and/or
increasing the finishing weight of the cycle.
