German Volume Training?

Does anybody have any experience with this stuff? I was getting bored with my normal chest routines today, so I went ahead and tried this. I did German Volume Style Training trying to get a 10x10 Bench Press.

Actually I did 10-10-10-10-10-10-9-7-6-5 reps. It didn’t feel like much so I went ahead and finished it off with 5 sets of flyes.

Does this work or not? I’ve hit a chest plateau and I need to make a drastic change. The idea behind German Volume Training is to reach a certain “volume” or number by leaving plenty reps left in a set, even if you can do 15… you’re only supposed to do 10; this is so strange to me becuase i’m used to doing about 10 all out reps then drop down and hit 10 more than drop a third time and hit 10 more.

I guess you’re supposed to keep doing this until you reach all 10 sets with 10 reps, then add weight and start all over again once you can do 100 reps with a certain weight. I guess next chest session I will try harder on those last 4 sets. But it was my triceps giving out on the last 4 sets and not my chest, so I’m not sure if this is going to work for me or not. I usually do about a dozen supersets with about 6 different exercises.

Has anybody had any hypertrophy gains off of this or is this strictly for building strength? If its just for strength gain, then maybe this will help me get over the chest plateau I’ve hit.

[quote]Go heavy fool wrote:
Has anybody had any hypertrophy gains off of this or is this strictly for building strength? If its just for strength gain, then maybe this will help me get over the chest plateau I’ve hit.[/quote]

I got the program off an article on Poliquin’s site. It was 10x10 super-setted opposite muscle groups.

I found I put a decent amount of size on but very little strength. There was a phase 2 where it went into 10x6 or something like that but I went onto something different.

So to answer your question, I gained little strength but put on some size.

I did the AGVT on this site and had some very good hypertrophy gains from it. It’s not the 10X10 set up (but it is seriously pretty brutal on some days. lol)

http://www.T-Nation.com/readTopic.do?id=658759

I did GVT and found that I gained some size from it. But, when I went back to my regular training I found that I was weaker.

Others may have different results.

I dunno, I’ll give it about 6-8 weeks and see where I am. If i don’t see noticable improvements, I’ll try something else. But your guys remarks seem to be positive… so i’ll stick with this routine for a while.

I just started a 10x10 for bench and squat too. Not sure if it is on par with the loading parameters of the GVT here though.

One noticeable difference was the adaptation to volume from one week to the next. I tappered off at the end exactly as you have, last week. This week I hit the tenth rep of the tenth set right on the head. One major change I made in this time period was the addition of creatine. I’d speculate that that could be a prety big factor.

One thing I was kicking around though- The total volume of weight goes through the roof prety quickly when your multiplier is 100. A 5 lb. increase on the bar = 500 lbs. above the previous volume total.

Thats a big jump.

It looks like one would get better results in both size and strength by incorporating some kind of periodization with the program.

An example 12-week cycle:

3 weeks 10 sets of 10 reps
1 week 3 sets of 10 reps
3 weeks 10 sets of 6 reps
1 week 3 sets of 6 reps
3 weeks 10 sets of 3 reps
1 week 3 sets of 3 reps
Repeat

Beef