@dawn16 In my experience: RR is a great routine. I think it is excellent for beginners who need structure to get going, and it is also great for intermediates/advanced who need structure on which to build more advanced routines. It is great in exposing a large fraction of the anatomy to resistance training, and it is great in being highly customizable and "extensible."
IMHO, where it is a bit "deficient" is that: (a) it is fairly time-consuming/exhausting. (b) Doing 5 sets of each for (squat, pull / hinge, dip / row, push / core-triplet) takes me 2 to 3 hours, and leaves me pretty wasted. I was finding that my pull-ups and dips were lagging behind the other body areas so I checked out what the greasing the groove stuff was about and have adopted that to bring those two body areas up to be more in balance with the rest. Once my pull-up and dip capacities are on a par with the other body areas, I'll stop doing GTG for those two, put them back into the RR and continue.
@philadelphiastory Well you're not really supposed to do 5 sets of any exercise, it takes me 75min to do the RR, excluding warmup, which is still a lot but doable. I think the RR is as good as it gets when it gets to 3 times a week full body workout, but it will obviously not yield the same results as some super specialized routine. Just the leg portion of RR requires so much energy during recovery that it will probably somewhat limit your upper body gains, in comparison to a narrower workout. On the bright side, chances of injury and overuse will be a lot smaller when doing a more balanced workout.
@philadelphiastory I just checked and I think you are supposed to stick with 3 sets. I sometimes do 4 sets of a single exercise but I don't think that's recommended for the entire workout.
@sps3rvn Hmm, you are right it does say 3 sets for RR. I must have brought in the 5 sets notion from some other source.
Cool! I guess next week will be a bit more intense and low volume
Good to mix up the periodization; that much is a widely accepted principle I think. Thanks for the heads up!
@sps3rvn Found this video on "volume" and thought you might appreciate it. Pretty much "wall of text" stuff but the Ph.D. dude is smart and Jeff strikes me as an earnest interlocutor at all times!
@philadelphiastory Isn't GTG non-hypertrophy though? It's just pure strength. See bodybuilders for example. They can't do GTG. They don't live in the gym. They just train somehow and have a good proportional size.
Btw. Are there beginners who plateu every 1-2 week?
@dawn16 To be honest, I'm not sure. I know what the prevailing wisdom is among exercise buffs: train with resistance that would induce failure at different rep ranges to target the three distinct types of adaptation
Strength: ~8 to 10
Hypertrophy: ~12 to 20
Muscular endurance: 25+
I don't want to claim that these principles are "wrong," but from what little reading of the literature I've done, the evidence for it is not especially strong. Full disclosure: I spent 30 years doing teaching and research in human biology and (before retiring 6 years ago) knew the literature on certain aspects of human biology very well (addiction, obesity, psychoneuroendocrinology of stress response), but exercise physiology or related fields are NOT one of my strong suits; so I could be ill-informed in my skepticism of the rigor of this prevailing model of how the varying types of muscular adaptation are trained. With that said, it does seem that much of the knowledge seems to be based on the accumulation of "folk wisdom" from the allied exercise communities over the past ~100+ years, and not so much on the sort of rigorous case-controlled, crossover trials kinds of studies that we all expect when it comes to things like cancer therapy or psychiatric drugs.
