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EricT · 10-15-2007, 03:49 PM

You express yourself very well. It really makes it easy to discuss these things.

Yeah, I know you always have this in mind which is why I mentoned it to you specifically even though everyone doing this routine has the same problems. I'm not talking about throwing out the tenants of the routine of course. The whole point of it is simple progression and loading the bar.

You talked about losing focus and whether they "count". Maybe not. Regardless, in a general sense there is a point of diminishing returns when we focus solely on reps and sets. I know for myself that during periods where I became solely concerned with getting the volume in at all costs it coincided with bad recovery, aches, pains, and LESS overall progression. If you think about it this is the step before the statement you made the damage of getting sloppy. But even beyond that there is the simply question the training affect.

You take a certain high intensity and if a lot of good quality work could be done in a certain time frame then great. But you know most of the time the focus is on just getting the work done in that time frame and not on the quality of it (technique, speed, etc). So, at that same intensity what is going to do better? 25 reps with half of them being shit reps. Or 25 high quality reps that just so happen to be triple or doubles if quality coudn't be maintained doing 5x5 for instance. Obviously this is a general question and not a debate about 5x5 training vs. other things.

I usually had a habit during this type of training to get my reps in regardless. Say if I only got 21 reps I would get those last reps in by rest pausing. But a lot of the time I did this after it all turned to shit not before. I've certainly noticed better overall progress when more of my training was of a quality nature so what if I had focused more on that sometimes during more set routines like 5x5? ESPECIALLY since a lot of my time has traditionally been spent going back and fixing things I "broke" during that type of training.

Here's a good example. Look at some of the training where people do max work and speed work and maybe RE work. And especially these so called hybrid routines where you try to do 5x5 work couple with other advanced things. You have a lot of days focused on volume where half the time you're grining out a bunch of sloppy super-slow shit. Then maybe you try to make up for that by doing "speed work". The idea being that you train two different "qualities" of strength at separate times. Now I'm not saying that is not ever valid or useful but what if more of that heavy work was done with the better technique and in a fresher state where you were going as fast as possible instead of in a fatigued and sloppy state where most of your fast twitch fibers already went on vacation anyway? Just a thought.