Anyone ever try doing a strength and hyptrophy phase at the same time? For example doing 2 strnegth workouts in a week and also doing 2 hytrophy workouts in the same week? Anyone have some ideas on how it would work?
Another question, does anyone find that setting specific goals helps any?
Why not do sets of 4-6 on big multijoint lifts? Lots of people get big & strong doing things that way. I also think that doing anything without goals is a waste. Why bother if you don’t want to accomplish anything?
I think if you lift for strength and just eat a lot you’ll get big and strong. On your core lifts such as Squat, Bench, Row and Deadlift, lift heavy. Then on your assistance movements, use higher reps. You’ll get big and strong at the same time.
Setting specific goals is very helpfull. If you have a time frame you must have something completed by, you’ll be less likely to do stupid stuff to slow your progress, such as not sleeping enough and skipping meals.
The conjduget method that westside barball uses keeps maximal strength w/ hypertrophy all year round. www.deepsquatter.com and www.elitefts.com are two sites you can read up on it.
Try doing a 6 RM Compound movement followed by a 12RM more isolation type of movement with no rest in between. I have done this for a while and got really good strength gains while adding muscle. Ian King wrote something about this in one of his articles, not sure which one sorry. Basicaly you are using the fast twitch fibers first to generate a max force on the heavy weight and then tapping into the slow twitch to finish off the lower weight higher rep exercise. Maximizing fiber recruitment.
Interesting idea… I’ve been doing 5x5 training which, as Drax pointed out, is a nice comination of strength and hypertrophy. However, you can’t go full intensity every single workout. Some people like to have heavy and light days. A strength workout, I think, is more taxing on the nervous system that a hypertrophy workout. It might be a good thing to alternate between them, as you suggested. It would certainly add variety in the gym.
On ‘light’ days it’s better to keep the weight the same & do less volume. That way it’s easier to maintain strength. I think that’s where you do 60% of the volume of the heavy day.
Lots of good suggestions above…something I like to do for a short 3-4 week cycle for strength/hypertrophy is a 1-6 protocol (I think you might be able to dig up an article by Poliquin in the archives on T-Mag). Like Drax and others said though, 5x5 works real nice too.
IMO, mixed goals = sub average results in both, oppposed to the results achieved when focusing attention on one.