Recently I had a chance to speak with Steven Low, who is a former gymnast.
Here is a list of his feats of strength, and he is probably best known as the author of the book,
Overcoming Gravity. Is there a recommended general rep and set scheme for training body weight
skills? Yeah, so for beginners and intermediates you generally want to go with the 5 to 10, maybe up
to 12 rep range to build the requisite muscle mass because most beginners and intermediates
don't have as much muscle mass as they need for the skill. Mid-intermediate to advanced and beyond
generally the three to five rep max is superior for strength gain. From my point of view, you know,
achieving advanced body weight moves is similar to maximizing your ability to doing one rep maxes
because I'm pretty sure most people would rather be able to do a five-second planche instead of a
one-minute straddle planche, for example. Is that statement right? Because if that's right, then
my intuition is we should train one rep max for one rep max, right? Why do we want to spend extra
effort at getting better at three rep maxes and five rep maxes? Yeah, so to answer that, we gotta
get into the physiology a little bit. Based on like the Henneman's size principle, that states
that your body recruits low threshold motor units to high threshold. Steven eventually went into the
details of the science, but I want to explain what Steven means in layman's term. Training
3-5RMs is optimal because you mainly train for strength, but you still get some hypertrophy.
Just for a quick review, high overall volume is optimal for hypertrophy. High intensity per rep
is optimal for strength gains. According to Steven, the strength gains of training 1RMs
are equivalent to those of training 3~5RMs. If I mainly train 1RMs, I will probably get results a
bit faster because of specificity, but eventually I will hit a plateau because there's a limit on
how much strength potential there is per muscle. Therefore, increasing muscle mass becomes the
solution to increasing the overall strength output to take ourselves to the next level. However, you
have to only increase the muscle mass only in the target region, which usually means the upper body.
If you increase your muscle mass uniformly throughout your entire body, including legs,
bodyweight exercises will actually become harder as I explained in this video, so check it out
later if you haven't yet. And of course, if your strength level is low, increasing muscle mass will
make bodyweight exercises harder for no reason. To sum up, when your strength level is high,
increasing muscle mass in the target region will be the key to taking you to the next level in
bodyweight exercises. What's the typical intensity of 3 rep max versus one rep max, is it like 50% of
one rep max or is it 80%? What's the typical? Okay, so there are studies done on this and generally
around 90% of your one rep max is your three rep max. 5RM is about 85, uh maybe a little bit higher,
87-ish percent. Even at these lower weights away from one rep max, you're still getting a very good
training intensity there. That intensity definitely sounds a little too high to me.
I think there's no way I can do ninety percent of one rep max intensity for three reps because if
you actually times the number, so let's say ninety percent times three, that's actually 2.7 times of
volume. I find that kind of impossible, so is this actually the norm that most people experience?
There is specificity there and that you'll be able to usually do more reps at the intensity that you
practice at as opposed to the ones you aren't practicing, but it normalizes pretty quickly if
you start training the other rep ranges. In terms of hypertrophy, how can you increase muscle mass
just on the muscle group that you want? And usually that's the upper body. It's pretty simple,
you mainly work the movements that you're trying to get. So what I'm hearing is, you know, I can
eat a maintenance calorie like without a calorie surplus, but I switch my one to two reps training
to like three to five as you suggested, I will start to see muscle growth over time on myself. Is
that what I'm hearing? If you're eating at caloric maintenance, then you're not going to gain weight,
so the only way your body is going to add muscle is if it slowly recomposes itself, like slowly
loses fat by burning up the fat calories with the protein you ingest to add on muscle, so you'll
basically gain muscle where you need it if you're staying at the same body weight. Okay, I think my
body fat is pretty low, so I guess I still have to eat a calorie surplus to grow muscles. The
training structure, if someone does full body for a day and someone split between push-pull
and someone split between lower body and upper body, so I'm wondering, what are your thoughts on
these? Full body allows you to hit exercises three times a week so that's why it's generally best for
beginners and intermediates. The reason why you would move on from that is you're hitting so
many things at once, so you're getting your upper body push, your upper body pull your core and legs.
Um, if exercises are getting very hard so like if somebody is using squats and deadlifts for their
legs, those can be pretty taxing on the nervous system, where the quality of your upper body push
and upper body pull will start to drop compared to actually doing them on different days, so that
would be a good reason to switch over from a full body routine to a split and usually that occurs
in the intermediate or advanced range. There is a way to make full body work as you're getting
like really strong, but it tends to be harder to do than just go to a split. So for me personally
I split it between push-pull, and I've been doing that for multiple years. Do you actually recommend
splitting into even more fine grain? So meaning like four days, one day it's like straight-arm
push, one day is straight-arm pull and one day is bent-arm push, and one day is bent-arm pull.
What's your recommendation on how to do this? Usually I don't split it further,
and the reason for that is because strength is basically predicated on repeating exercises
over and over, and you know progressing with them. You're going to be doing all those exercises maybe
like once a week. One time a week not that good for progressing things, you only get about 50
workouts in a year with each exercise. With at least two, if you're doing the two-day splits, and
that's, you know, 100 days a year, more chances to improve specific exercises incrementally and so
you usually get a bunch more progress that way. We continued the discussion in depth for about
an hour, but I know not everyone is interested in nerding out on the details of bodyweight training,
so I will stop right here. If you happen to be interested in the details,
you should definitely check out Steven's book, Overcoming Gravity, and also his subreddit
r/overcominggravity. It was very enlightening to have an expert like Steven to assess my training
routine. It looks like I am doing everything right except that I am too hyperfocused on
increasing strength. If you completely ignore hypertrophy like me, you will eventually hit a
plateau at some point. To me, being able to do the one-arm pull-up is a pretty good plateau to be on,
and as a climber, I have a motivation to keep my body mass low because there's no such thing
like finger hypertrophy to increase finger muscle mass. If bodyweight exercises is your main sport,
you should focus on increasing strength and get some hypertrophy along with it.
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