Putting it into practice; Hypertrophy-Specific Training

10th June 2012

To plan your hypertrophy-specific training schedule you need to calculate your 1 rep max. This is the heaviest weight you can lift just one time and no more.

You do not have to find out what this is by actually lifting it in the gym as doing it this way would take too long to work out. Each time you lift a weight your muscles are weakened so to find out your 1 rep max could take weeks as you would need to allow your muscles sufficient time to recover between experimental lifts. You may find that you can lift a certain weight six times and at this point your muscle experiences complete muscle failure; you are unable to lift it one more time while maintaining correct posture. Never force a lift and never cheat by swinging your torso to help a lift. There are times when you might do negatives, but these should only be incorporated into the end of a workout programme lasting up to 12 twelve weeks; the final week might use negative lifts. I shall write about this in a later posting.

After finding out how many times you can lift a certain weight, as long as it is less than 10 times, you can use a 1 rep max calculator to find your 1 rep max. You also need to find out what your 15 rep, 10 rep and 5 rep max's are so I use the exrx calculator for this which can be found here.

Having input the weight you managed to lift and the number of reps you did into the boxes at the top, the table on the right is populated giving you estimated weights for various percentages of your one rep max.

I use dos Remedios for my estimated reps at percentage of 1 repetition maximum, so for my 15 rep max I need to find the 60% of max, for my 10 rep max, I need to find the 75% of max and for the 5 rep max, I need the 85% of max.

You will need to do this for all the exercises to be used in the workout programme.

Over the course of the last few weeks, I have been slowly increasing the intensity of my weight lifting. I started on weights that I could comfortably lift more than 12 times and over time, I have increased the weight from one week to the next until last week I was lifting weights that I could not manage to lift more than 10 times. I was able to use these weights and the number of reps to predict all my one repetition maximums.

The exercises you need to do the predictions for are as follows;
(Clickable for video)

Squats (due to a lower back weakness and operation to my left knee, I used the leg press machine instead), seated leg curl, slight incline bench press (the incline helps to work the pec minor and front deltoids as well as the pec major. I do the power lifting version) Dips (for chest, I used the pec dec instead as I am not yet strong enough to do proper chest dips), lateral raises for rear deltoids, preacher curls for biceps, standing calf press, chins (again I am not strong enough yet so I used wide and narrow lat pull downs), bent over row (I used T-bar), shrugs for traps (I used the standing calf press machine) and French curl for triceps (like a skull crusher but behind the head and using an ezee bar).

In my next post, I shall show you what the weight training programme looks like for me using the two week cycles for 15, 10 and 5 rep maximums.