I have a break from lifting because of a back injury, but I wanted to get some light pump, so decided to test 4-1-2 (4s lowering the weight, 1s hold, 2s lifting) cadence with some bw pullups, chins, ring dips and ring pushups. I have to tell you, this shit was VILE, even though I wasn't going to failure and made me question if I really should use as much weight, if I could just strip like a half of it and do just one or two devastating set, masochistically controlled throughout its whole duration.
What are your thoughts on it, does it work or is it just a gimmick?
>asking IST about lifting
good shit especially for bw exercises imo
4-1-2 is like the upper end of speed in the HIT world, it isn't slow at all. If you're going faster than that you're just ego-lifting or doing pointless pump sets. If you can't do a concentric pause or a 4 sec negative then the weight is too heavy and you'd get better results with less weight.
so would it be fully reasonable to drop the weights and switch to this sort of disciplined cadence? wouldn't that make me 'weaker' by shutting me out from heavy weights? I mean, I can do pullups with 45kg attached, but I'd probably have to drop more than a half of that if I wanted to do some reasonable number of 4-1-2 reps
What do you want anon? Strength or hypertrophy? Pick one. In the endgame you have to pick one. Noob days are over where strength meant gainz
>4-1-2
4-2-4 cadence is preferred. The two second hold is only advised for motions which there is no lockout or advantageous leverage. Also, try doing bench press, pushups, etc. without going to the lockout. Stop short of it so that you cannot reduce the loading on your muscles with leverage during the lockout.
>if I really should use as much weight
Use as much weight as necessary to maximize intensity. If the weight is too heavy to control, then you should decrease it. You should be using good form for all exercises as the form is necessary to guarantee you are recruiting the muscles you desire to train. I.e. cheat curls reduce the effectiveness of bicep recruitment during the curls.
>Strength or hypertrophy? Pick one
False dichotomy. If your muscles are getting bigger, the myofibrils are getting bigger (there is no way to get only sarcoplasmic hypertrophy, all instances of hypertrophy have myofibril hypertrophy) meaning that they can produce more force. This implies your muscles are getting stronger.
The only issue is whether or not you are using an isometric contraction with a single joint motion to measure force production using an isometric force transducer as your definition of strength or using a barbell compound to measure strength. The former has little to no skill component and can be positioned to reduce the involvement of leverage; it is solely muscle force production. The latter has a massive skill and leverage component which greatly affects the measurement and cannot be eliminated and is variable. Obviously practicing for a 1rm for a bench press for example will have a different out than simply training the muscles involved in the bench press and then testing your 1rm with the bench press just due to the lack of efficient motor unit recruitment from not practicing the bench press. The latter may actually have stronger muscles when measured with an isometric transducer.
I didn't get enough sleep last night and i made the mistake of going on a leg day today because i wanted to 'get it done' already so the upper body workout comes on monday. If i skipped today the legs i would have to go on Saturday again and that would make me take 7 days of rest. On the optimal routine of Mike he says 4-7 days rest. If i took 8 or 9 what would happen? My lifts stalled this week or pretty much stayed the same.
Also when i change the cadence too do i lower the weight? There is no way to lift what i was lifting with the 2-1-2 cadence.
Also this is a good video on why you should go slow
> If i took 8 or 9 what would happen?
Nothing negative. Some people do require more rest and others less. Unless you are completely sedentary like a vegetable, you can maintain muscle mass for as long as three weeks before starting to lose mass as long as you move around enough and don't crash diet.
>optimal routine
It's called the "ideal routine," not optimal routine. That is it is a routine that should be effective if followed, but can be changed according to the needs and demands of the individual. Some people may find that they need to focus directly on developing certain muscle groups in which case they may need to adjust the routine. Some people might find the Blood & Guts routine to be better for them while others might find a different routine to be better for them.
>My lifts stalled this week or pretty much stayed the same.
I would not worry about it. Consider timing your sets with a stopwatch as well. You may have also gained an amount of strength that is too subtle to be revealed on PRs or increase in the number of reps, but will be revealed in the amount of time it takes you to reach muscular failure. If you are getting stronger, it should take you a little bit longer to reach failure even if you haven't gained enough strength yet to increase your PR by a few pounds or do one more rep with your working weight.
>when i change the cadence too do i lower the weight? There is no way to lift what i was lifting with the 2-1-2 cadence.
It depends. If you can control the weight and you're still getting the desired time under tension, then you can use the same weight. If not, then you need to decrease it.
>Nothing negative
My only concern with the 'Ideal Routine' is that i feel the upper body frequency is not enough. For example I did chest and back last Saturday and im gonna do Shoulders and arms this Monday if everything goes well, if I took the 8 or 9 days as you said i would have hit upper next Wed so that's almost 2 weeks.
> but can be changed according to the needs and demands of the individual
this is true, im doing the no deadlift variation, it's going well so far.
>Consider timing your sets with a stopwatch as well.
I basically record my videos and I count the seconds of the start of the rep and check the form aswell, its a win win, most of my compounds end up 30-45 seconds and accesories around a min.
I'm doing HIT since february this year and I kept all my gains, i just feel less 'pumped' in the everyday life. This program requires patience
Thanks Mik'anon
I believe getting strong is partially about training a lot of movement patterns and vectors, i.e. you shouldn't just focus on muscle groups, but also on specific functions, like being able to lift something in a certain direction, lift yourself in a certain way and so on.
Interesting point, I'd like to see more comments on that.
The biggest most developed guy at my gym does this with what looks like it would be way too light for him. Guy does sets of 12 with 275 on incline all in a cadence. He told me it’s all about how you move the weight and not how much you move.
I get the feeling he could max out with a lot of weight though.
I experimented with slow lifts due to running out of weight and they made me super weak. Same point of failure and everything. If you look it up, like on wikipedia, it will refer to this (totally not sponsored) claim from a "study" showing superslow lifts being 40% better or something. If you actually read the study, it was only comparing people lifting weights slowly, lifting shit normally, the slow lifters were all over 20% worse at maximal lifts, thus weaker. It also violates some physiological principles like how you can't trick your muscles into thinking an apple is as heavy as a bowling ball just by lifting it slowly. Same shit about HIT people claiming people "ignore" the eccentric. You literally can't ignore it unless you just drop the weight at the top, like opening your hands and letting it hit the floor.
Yates was right to toss that shit out. I'm not saying bounce the weight but nobody says that so it's a moot point. Mentzer never used that cadence either he just wrote about it after he stopped lifting. He followed nautilus training mostly which used normal rep speeds (ie, not thinking about it)
I could tell it was making me weak because lifting my GF was getting harder.
Forgot to say I would support slow rep cadence for old people. Slow lateral raises are probably the safest shoulder exercise for that demographic. I just don't think most of the internet falls under that category.
>Same point of failure and everything.
If you achived the same failure that means you recruited enough motor units to promote growth.
>Run out of weights
skill issue tbh
This is because strength and size are not totally correlated. If you were reaching failure, resting for long enough, and eating enough, then you were gaining mass. Likely during that time, you lost some neurological adaptation for strength because you weren't specifically training it. But likely if you went back to strength training after the slow reps period, you might find you could break through old PRs.