[quote]McMuscles wrote:
I’ve been squatting 220lb (just passed parralel) for a while now and noticed that if I put on just a little more weight I cant squat as deep.
Last week I did 9 sets of 6-7 to try and improve my strength and today I added just 11 lb and only got 3 reps in before I had to stop going so deep.
I’m giving it 100% and I can’t seem to break the barrier.
Is it normal to only gain slight, gradual amounts of strength with squatting?
My legs are growing but my strength doesn’t seem to be following suit. ???
[/quote]
Your legs are growing and your strength isn’t following suit because you’ve got a bunch of volume but not a lot of intensity. Here’s what I mean.
One of the primary factors in making a muscle grow is volume. Just moving a lot of weight, a lot. But this doesn’t always help with adding weight to the bar. Take two guys with two similar, but different squat programs. Guy A and Guy B
[u]Squat Program[/u]
A: 10x10
B: 5x10
All other things being equal, B will be able to move up in weight much faster than A, because his volume is lower, and his body has some resources left over after adapting to the volume to gain strength as well.
(for the purpose of this illustration, we’re assuming all sets are done with identical weight).
IIRC, your program involves a rediculous amount of volume. Frankly, I’m kinda surprised you’re able to move up weight at all. But you should be gaining mass like crazy. Sometimes there are trade-offs in these sort of things.