Forgive me for any typos/errors contained within this post; I am currently traveling to a conference. In particular, an annual conference centered around the ultimate tensile strength of various fibers (henceforth referred-to as “The Conference”). A truly riveting experience!
If I told you I was on the Board of The Conference, would you belive me? Now, I normally encourage my dear readers to add a fairly large handful of salt to everything I say, but in this case, I am no spinster. In fact, I would invite you to The Conference becasue I’m a nice guy, but I mean, c’mon! Just look at you! We only allow the most erudite and prestigious patrons to attend The Conference.
…
Anyhoo, today I am going to take a little time to discuss why Cooper has you all doing one set to failure, rather than doing multiple sets as the zeitgeist would dictate. It’s really simple, really. Mostly boils-down to E F F I C I E N C Y (and the folks over at 3rd Position Nutrition are all about efficiency)!
Consider the following hypothetical (henceforth referred-to as “Hypothetical #A”)…
HYPOTHTICAL #A:
You are working out
You do Bicep Curls
Three sets of 5-8 or whetever
Takes about 10 seconds to do the set
Then rest for 3 minutes
Repeat two more times before moving on the next exercise
In Hypothetical #A, the total amount of time that your biceps are actually doing any real work is about 30 seconds (3 sets x 10 seconds/set). Now consider another hypothetical (hereafter referred-to as “Hypothetical #B”)…
HYPOTHTICAL #B:
STRONK-maxxing (i.e. you are working out)
You perform 1 set, and go until FAILURE
You beform Bicep Curl at a tempo of about 4 seconds concentric, 2 seconds all-out squeeze at the top, 4 seconds eccentric
Total time to do 1 rep = 10 seconds (4 + 2 + 4 = 10)
Only beform 6 reps before FAILURE
Move on to
sextnext exercise
In Hypothetical #B, the total amount of time that your biceps are doing real work is about 60 seconds (1 set of 6 reps, each rep taking roughly 10 seconds).
Now suppose after perfrobing that one set to FAILURE as outlined in Hypothetical #B, you rest for 3 minutes bfore moving on to the sext next exercise. The total amount of time you spent doing a given exercise is approx 4 minutes (60 second set + 3 minutes rest), whereas in Hypothtical #A, the total amount of time you spent doing a given exercise was roughly 9 minutes and 30 seconds (10 second set + 3 minutes rest + 10 second set + 3 minute rest + 10 second set + 3 minute rest). In other words, Hypothetical #B (which is the methodology Cooper employs in his “Greater Intensity; Less Frequency Protocol” rebrand) did twice the amount of work than Hypothetical #A (60 seconds vs. 30 seconds) did in less than half the amount of time (4 minutes vs. 9.5 minutes).
It is this apporach that allows you to achieve comparable (if not better) results than the standard approach to strength training whilst only working out for as little as 15 minutes per day, twice per week.
“Your purpose is not to go into the gym to see how tough you are, how much work you can perform, or how long you can endure. Your actual, literal purpose is to go into the gym and intelligently do what nature requires to trigger the growth mechanism into motion, then get the hell out, go home, rest and grow. So what if your workouts only take 20 minutes? So what!”
- Mike Mentzer -
Sinple as.
-Elwood