Doug, you said you were incorporating Charles Staley’s latest method (as described in his article “Sets and Reps”) to your workouts.
I was thinking of using this in the near future, but after reading the article twice, I'm still not sure how to develop a program using his guidelines.
Could you offer your assistance since you are currently using this method? How did you put your training days and bodyparts together? And how did you put together sets and reps? Thank you for your help!
I don’t want to give away the details, but I’m in the process of writing an article specifically about how Charles trains his athletes. Since it probably won’t appear in the mag for a few months, and I don’t think Charles wants me giving away exactly how he goes about things, I’ll just give you a few guidelines to use if you want to try his type of training.
-Lower your volume (ie # of reps) from your typical hypertrophy program. If you generally use 12 sets per workout, 10 reps each set, you’d be doing 120 reps. With Staley type training, you’re focussing on quality of reps to access the higher threshold fibers, so don’t negate this quality by keeping the volume at the same level. You might use 4 reps per set (with the same weight as above) for a total of 25 sets per workout. This would give you 100 high quality reps.
-Use any split you want, and change it around like you would any other variable. Right now, I’m using the following split:
M: chest, biceps,
Tu: deadlift, lower abs, straight leg calves,
Th: back, triceps,
F: squat, upper abs, bent knee calves
-Focus on compound exercises. Don’t bother with assistance exercises. Of course, you’ll have to use some isolation exercises for calves and abs, but that’s about it. Bench, Incline Bench, Deadlift, Squat, Chins, Rows, Dips, and Barbell Curls are all you need.
Hope this helps…
Doug, thanks for the tips. I think I’ll wait for you to run your article in the future before I incorporate these techniques. At this point, I need to do high volume workouts to jolt myself into hypertrophy!
But yes, your tips did give me a better idea of how it works!
Hey Doug,if its not prying too much what kind of rest period and tempo are you using?
Mr Santillo, have you thought about write the Poliquin’s or Staley’s nutritonal methods. I think people are curious to know something about that too( or am I the only one)
Thanks
Ulisses, keep your rest periods pretty short. You’re not looking for complete neural recovery, just enough so that the rep quality is maintained. 60 seconds in most cases will do fine. I also wouldn’t superset opposed muscle groups when using this method. Tempo is gonna be “neural,” 20X1.
Mikey, Charles Staley is a HUGE proponent of the 40/30/30 nutrition plan, and for the majority of the time, so am I. All I know about Poliquin’s nutrition recommendations is what I’ve heard third-hand, sorry.