Still Confused on Accessory/Assistance Programming for Powerlifting

Hey CT,
So I’ve gone over a lot of rep schemes and rep minimum’s and maximums. I slightly understand rep ranges for the main lifts for powerlifting. But I’ve also read about minimum reps per muscle per week. So for chest it says I need 60-120 reps per week.If I’m doing bench at 6 sets of 3, which is 18 reps, do I need to get a minimum of 42 reps for chest in on a second exercise that day? Or do more volume low intensity bench on a second day in the week?
For more info my ultimate goal is to look as strong as I am and be as stong as I look, but strength is a little more important tbh.

Any help from anyone would be great, thanks a lot my t nation friends.

Where did you read that? I don’t see how that could be true. And do you count separately a rep of chest fly and bench press or are they the same? This seems like BS :confused:

Read it a couple of places, and it reps, per body part per week. Larger muscles anywhere from 60 to 120 reps per week, smaller muscles 30 to 60 per week. And yes, bench and fly both count towards chest reps.

Those numbers are very arbitrary. For example, doing 20 reps of body weight push ups would be counted the same as 4 sets of 5 of heavy bench presses. It’s about causing the right amount of stress to force adaptation. Those total reps numbers don’t mean much.

Well I mean obviously volume and intensity change things, 4 sets of 5 at 70% 1rm don’t equal 4 sets of 5 at 85% 1rm. So 20 doesn’t always equal 20

Did you get this off aworkoutroutine? Wherever you read it I’d put it entirely out of your mind right now.

For more hypertrophy focus I’d recommend having a read of Mike Israetel’s stuff on the Renaissance Periodisation blog about Volume Training Landmarks (quick google will get you there). Greg Nuckols’ “The New Approach to Training Volume” article also goes through similar concepts.

Strength and hypertrophy are not mutually exclusive so these training concepts can be applied to off season or hypertrophy/accumulation blocks/phases where the goal is to do work/volume to add muscle or get a training effect that will potentiate further strength gains.

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Yeah I was going to mention Israetel work, very smart guy. He says that there is a sweet spot of weekly sets for hypertrophy, but even this number can be increased for phases.

Anyway it depends if you go beyond failure, to failure, shy of failure, when reps become slower… also if it’s band, barbell, dumbbell, machine…
CT at some point was doing arms everyday but would stop when speed decreased. Obviously you can recover fast from that.
Personnally my lats blew up when I was doing 30 pull ups before every session (5) and then there was some back work. This would fit way north of the recommended weekly back volume. But again you can’t quantify everything.

I personally do 200-350 repetitions a week, for examples, on my back muscles, 120 reps are easy.

BTW, as the rehabilitation and training of shoulder muscles in a week, I do about 400x BB cuban rotations.

I know a guy who makes per week of 1000 reps of any exercises with the rubber expanders on trapezium muscles. And it’s a powerlifter.

Yes! Before every workout as well I do 100 band pull-appart and 30 band face-pull-appart. And what about the warm-up reps? Would these count? And if you’re rampin? This doesn’t make much sense.

The other way around some program have you do low volume and you can still gain muscle… Like Dorian Yates… or The Best Damn…

Thanks a lot guys, this thread led me down a lot of research that really helped out