Eat your leftovers

Today is Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving.

If you're wondering what to do what those leftovers...eat them!

To encourage that, I'm posting four links about bulking up a skinny guy.

If you're looking for a book on the subject, I've previously reviewed Scrawny to Brawny. It's a dead-on solid plan for training and packing in the food to get bigger and stronger.

The Cure for Skinny

This article is a roundtable with Joe DeFranco (author of Westside for Skinny Bastards), Vince DelMonte, and Craig Weller.

You'll notice most of the advice in this article is about one thing - eating. Getting in enough food, followed closely by making sure it's quality food, is the most important thing for a skinny guy trying to be a non-skinny guy. You've got Craig's "Do 20 pushups every hour and eat a [protein bar]." You've got Vince's comment about getting bigger being an "all-out war in the gym and the kitchen" for a skinny guy. You've got Joe's "Hour of Power" - twice a week eating everything you can without puking.

Next we've got 37 Tips and Tales from Dave Tate.

Yes, he's saying eat piles of Chinese food and pizza soaked in oil. Yes, that's probably kind of nuts. But it shows you the extremes you'll need to go to in order to gain size sometimes. It's also a good counter-example - if you're eating a huge amount of low-quality high-calorie foods, you're certain to gain some kind of weight, whether you are training intensely or not. And if you're not eating lots of excess calories, don't worry too much about getting "too bulky." Even for big strong guys training day-in day-out, it's a hard thing to do. It's not going to happen by accident.

Finally, a quick video on post-workout shakes by Justin Harris.

"Get some food in ya."

Indicator Lifts

In Joe DeFranco's article "Westside for Skinny Bastards III" he discusses the idea of indicator lifts. These are lifts that demonstrate certain aspects of your strength, which you can use to determine the success or failure of your training program.

I'll wait here while you go and read it. Scroll down to "INDICATOR EXERCISES" and read away.

Okay, so here is the question - What are yours?

You need to determine what they are, and why. Why, in my opinion is critical.

The four lifts listed in WS4SB3 come with a good explanation of why they were selected. Maximal strength? Bench press for the upper body, box squat for the lower body. Explosiveness? Vertical jump or box jumps - since the height you can jump is a great predictor of athletic potential. Relative strength? Chinups. You need to be strong to do them, but only good relative strength will let you do them with heavy additional weight and only good relative strength-endurance will let you do them in bunches. Those four lifts have a good rationale behind them.

This article suggested three for MMA athletes, and provides a lot of good information on how to improve them. But it doesn't provide the "why." There isn't anything to indicate why they were selected, and what they mean - do the better fighters have a higher close-grip bench press? If their close-grip bench press goes up, what about their fighting game improves? This isn't meant to disparage the article - just to point out the missing element I'm focused on here. Why are those important?

Let's look at some examples.

Two easy ones are powerlifting and weightlifting.

A powerlifter's indicator lifts are the flat barbell bench press, the deadlift (either conventional or sumo style), and the back squat. If those lifts are improving, the program is working. If they are not, no matter what else is going up (max chinups, vertical jump, accessory lifts), the program isn't working.

A Olympic weightlifter's indicator lifts are the snatch and clean-and-jerk; possible the components of the latter, too - the clean, the jerk. If the competed lifts are improving, the system is working.

It gets more complicated as what you need to improve isn't a lift but a quality, like sprinting speed or jumping height or long-distance endurance? You need find out what in your training is going up along with that quality, and then see if that is causation (you squat heavier, your sprints times are better because you're stronger) or just coincidence (your bench press goes up, your sprint times are better...but if the bench press stagnates, your sprint times continue to improve).

If your indicator lifts go up, no one can tell you your program is not succeeding. If they are not, something must change, no matter what else the program is doing for you.

I think this is something you need to determine for yourself, or in conjunction with a coach. I have no easy answers. It's food for thought - what do you think ties best to the qualities you need? And yes, going back to a point I bring up often - you need to track your results. You need to be able to look at your notes and find the correlation between what you do and where you are. If you're not recording it, you're just guessing and depending on memory. Write it all down, and see what you are doing and where it is getting you.

And for what it's worth, I lift at DeFranco's. So my predictor lifts for MMA? Box squat, bench press, box jump, and chinups. So far, they are climbing slowly but steadily, and it's showing up on the mat.

Interview with Joe DeFranco

Recently, a trainee from Germany came to DeFranco's Training. At the end of his visit, he did a short video interview with the owner/head trainer, Joe DeFranco.

Here is the interview, on Ask Joe

Enjoy.

Basics: Rep Range

How many reps?

A "rep range" is the number of repetitions you do in a given exercise.

The most common rep range you'll find people doing is sets of 10 repetitions. I have no numbers on how common it is, but if you ask all the gym-goers you know what they do, don't be surprised if they say "sets of 10 reps" or "sets of 8-12 reps."

This is often regardless of their goals.

"I want to be stronger." - probably doing sets of 10.
"I want to lose weight." - probably doing sets of 10.
"I need more endurance." - maybe sets of 10?
"I want to get big." - Oh, perhaps sets of 10.

This is a very common recommendation. You'll find it on EXRX (quoted from the ACSM). You'll find it in most diet-centered workout books. You'll hear it on the web all sorts of places. The only real variations you'll come across in popular media is 12-15 reps, usually recommended for women. Women, its said, need the higher reps to "tone" - although "tone" is poorly defined at best.

Not that there is something wrong with 10 rep sets. The problem is that it's usually fundamentally divorced from the goals of the lifter. It's given as a blanket recommendation to all lifters. What rep range you do should depend on the exercise you're doing, and why you are doing it.

So let's look at various rep ranges.

Rep Ranges

Your body responds to weight training by a process of supercompensation. Basically, it gets better at doing the things you do. It's supercompensation and not just compensation because your body over-responds to the stimulus. It will prepare for the next incidence of that stimulus (a given weight, number of repetitions, etc.) by overcompensating slightly. So this time 10 reps of 135 pounds is hard, but next time, your body wants to be prepared to do a little more. How it supercompensates is based on the stimulus.

Low Reps (1-5 reps) : Generally, exercising for low reps emphasizes muscular strength and neurological improvements. That is, your body gets physically stronger, and learns to activate your muscle fibers more efficiently to let you lift more. Each repetition is so close to the body's maximal strength that it reacts by improving that maximal strength for next time.
Short Version: Your gains are more strength than size or endurance.

Medium Reps (6-12 reps) : When you lift for medium reps, you get some strength, but not as much. Your body responds by increasing muscular size, primarily. It doesn't get so much stress that it needs to re-pattern itself to fire more muscle fibers faster, like it does at low loads. But it does get stressed in a way that requires more muscular fiber size and more endurance, so it improves them. It doesn't need so much strength, so it doesn't improve that as much.
Short version: Your gains are more size and endurance than strength.

High Reps (13-20+ reps): When you lift for high reps, you get little strength, but more endurance. Each repetition doesn't require that much strength, so your body doesn't require better neurological efficiency or muscular size. It does require more endurance, because you are asking it to work over and over again.
Short version: Your gains are more endurance than size or strength.

Very High Reps: At this level of repetition, it's all endurance. You are lifting a weight or doing an exercise that doesn't need more than a fraction of your strength. You begin to limit yourself only by endurance - you run out of energy rather than run out of muscular strength needed to keep lifting. If you think about it, a marathon is nothing but 26.2 miles of jogging steps, each of which is a single rep. You are so far into the endurance continuum that your body may sacrifice size and strength, which is why marathon runners don't look like sprinters, although both run.
Short version: Your gains are all endurance.

All of these assume you are training with an appropriate weight. That is, you are doing 1-rep sets with something at or very close to your 1-rep maximum, or that you are doing 10 reps with your 10-rep maximum. The number of sets matters - if you do 1 set of 10, you can probably go a little heavier than 3 sets of 10, but in the end the difference isn't important to the discussion at hand.

All of this is on a continuum. A set of 6 repetitions has a bit more in common with 5 or 7 reps than it does with 1 rep or 11 reps.

Here are two excellent articles that discuss this in more depth.

The first is an excerpt from the first edition of Starting Strength. It's the best chart available on rep ranges. As you can see, the lower the rep range, the better for strength.
Rep Range
(Edit: This link is no longer valid, however, this chart covers the same ground, and it's by the same authors.)

The second is a web article by Tom Venuto. It also goes into depth on the subject, and I recommend reading it through.
What Happens within the muscles in response to different rep ranges?

So what range should I use?

That depends on your goals.

Strength athletes like powerlifters lift for low reps because they need maximal strength to succeed in their sport. They are not judged on endurance or size, but on maximal strength.

Bodybuilders generally train in the 6-12 rep range, often 10 reps, because it promotes hypertrophy (muscle size increase) the best. They succeed in their sport by demonstrating size and muscle attractiveness, and are not called on to demonstrate strength or endurance.

And so on.

This isn't cut and dried - some systems mix up rep ranges. For example, Conjugate Periodization uses several rep ranges together. You might do back squats for 5 sets of 3 reps, but then do glute-ham raises for 4 sets of 8 and then reverse hypers for 4 sets of 10. The Westside for Skinny Bastards routine mixes several rep ranges, aiming to develop maximal strength, size, and endurance all together.

What's common to all approaches, though, is that they only work if they fit your goals. If you need strength without size but train for size and endurance, you're not training to you goal. If you need endurance but increase only your maximal strength, you aren't training to your goal.


I'm just starting out, what should I do? You can try a variety of rep ranges. But if you are looking for size and strength together, your best bet is to start with sets of 5 reps. This is the basis for the Starting Strength routine, for Bill Starr's 5x5 routine, and for Stronglifts 5x5. The Power to the People routine is all sets of 5 reps. Not all beginning programs use 5 reps, but those that do have a strong reputation for success. They straddle a nice middle ground between strength gains and gains in muscular size in a way that complements each element.

So, if I can do 10 reps at 135 pounds and I do 1 rep instead, it's better for strength? No. The rep ranges in those two articles assume you're really only able to lift that weight correctly that many times. Lowering the reps won't make a difference unless you raise the weight to match your new rep range.

Are low reps more dangerous than high reps? No, they really aren't. You aren't any more at risk doing a 5-rep maximum weight for 5 reps than you are doing a 10-rep maximum weight for 10 reps. The weight you lift is lower, yes, but each of them represents the maximum number of times you can lift that weight. Beyond that (the 6th or 11th rep) is not possible, therefore the final rep of each is equally dangerous. Both represent a maximal effort.
To put it another way, if lower rep were less dangerous, you wouldn't ever have repetitive motion injuries - people don't get carpal tunnel from lifting heavy weights but from typing or moving their arm in the same pattern to often. Tennis elbow and golfer's elbow aren't from massive weight stress but from a low load done too often.

What's the best rep range? By now, you should know the answer is, "for what?" It depends on your goals. If you've been working in a single rep range for a long time, the answer usually is "Whatever range you aren't doing now." The suggestions can be a little extreme but effective. If you're doing 3 sets of 10 and you're stuck, try 10 sets of 3 (at the appropriate weight for triples). If you're doing 5 sets of 5 reps and stuck, try 10 sets of 1 rep or maybe 3 sets of 10-15 for a while, and see if that breaks your plateau. But in general, beginners should probably stick with a rep range like 5 reps and just get stronger...all beginners have the same problem, they need more strength!