Supplemental Exercises: Distinct Exercises or Circuit Style

[LateStart]

Hey all -

Love the book, read it cover to cover during my holiday travels, and keep going back to reference it. I'm getting ready to start my first training cycle and was looking for some clarification on the SE's. In the strength phase for instance, the prescribed work:rest ratio is 6-8 reps followed by 3-5 minutes of rest. Is this "total body" rest, or exercise specific rest?

So should I be sitting around for three minutes after each set of each exercise, or can I do the SE's as more of a circuit?  Since I'm training primarily for strength and power, with minimal emphasis on power endurance, my suspicion is that I should be sitting around for three minutes following each exercise, but it seems like this could make the workouts rather long.

Thanks!

[MarkAnderson]

I do them in circuit-style, primarily so as to not waste huge amounts of time sitting around, as you alluded to. The upside of doing so are that you create higher general metabolic stress, which is better for calorie burning. The downside is that you tend to approach each set a bit more fatigued than you otherwise would be, so your ability to crush is somewhat diminished, and it can be come more of an endurance workout than a strength workout. A good way to help mitigate that is to keep the intensity high and the # of reps low.

If you are training a specific SE that is really important to your goals, it would probably be better to isolate that exercise and do all sets of it before you move on to the others. For me, I've had great success using a circuit method, and since these exercises are designed to train for relatively complex movements, it's probably not a bad thing to train them with a bit of general fatigue.

If you go with a circuit, think about the best order for the exercises. For example, you probably don't want to start with biceps curls, and then immediately do explosive pull-ups (or lock-off laps or inverted 1-arm rows). If you did that, your biceps would already be smoked, and so they would be the "weak link" in the chain, and you would fail long before your lats, etc were properly fatigued. Here's a typical order I might use:

-Pull exercise (varies between 1-arm pull-ups, 1-Arm Inverted Rows, Explosive pull-ups)
-Leg raise exercise (varies between hanging leg raises, hanging leg raises from rings, and front levers)
-Biceps Curls
-Lateral to Front Raise
-Shoulder Press

The crux is going between the last two, since they both involve the shoulder, so I take a longer break between sets at that point to do some forearm stretching.

[LateStart]

Thanks for the reply Mark. I like your idea of a hybrid circuit workout with an emphasis on really important SE's early on.

Appreciate the advice!

[slimshaky]

ditto the circuit gig for pretty much same reasons (namely time). i do a couple groups of 3 exercises, with 2 or 3 sets each depending on how tired i am or time constraints. basically i do my first set of the 3 exercises, grab a drink and start cleaning up my workout area, do next set of 3, grab a quick drink... etc. it kind of kills a bunch of birds with one stone, and the small break helps keep the strength aspect a bit higher instead of falling more into an endurance mode.

it's pretty amazing how quickly i can actually SEE the difference when i do these consistently. i think this might be due to it being so late in your workout that your body is digging pretty deep into the gas tank. this is one reason i sometimes limit it to 2 sets, so i don't dig such a recovery hole.

mark, i have a quick question. in terms of recovery - if you do the HB workout and then wreck your big muscles afterwards, do you think the body 'prioritizes' its recovery efforts on the big muscles? i have always been kind of worried about this. if i do an HB workout, i want my forearms/fingers to recover as quickly and strongly as possible.

[MarkAnderson]

That's a great question. The "Interference Effect", which theorizes that training strength and endurance concurrently (in the same muscle group) reduces the effectiveness of the strength training, is well-documented and supported by various studies. For example, if your goal is to improve squat strength, it would be better to train squats for strength alone, rather than training squats while also riding a bike frequently. So there's a good argument against ARCing within a Strength Phase (if improving strength is overwhelmingly vital to your overall performance improvement). I've also heard people say that performing extensive cardio exercise after strength training can impede your body's ability to restore glycogen supplies in the strength-trained muscles, even if the cardio is not performed in the same muscle groups. I have no idea if that is factually correct, but when I used to ride or run, I would always make a point NOT to do either on a HB day just in case that is true.

As for strength-training multiple muscle groups of varying size in the same day, I know that weightlifters do this all the time. Really serious weightlifters will train 6 days a week, but they stagger muscle groups so that each muscle group gets 2-3 days of rest between training bouts. So for example, on day one they may do legs and chest, day two they do arms and shoulders, day three they do back and core (I'm making these up, BTW), and then they repeat the schedule.

I've been doing HB + SE for more than 10 years and it seems to work out ok. It may not be optimal though. Recently I've been adding more and more SEs, and I've noticed I seem to get exponentially more tired afterwards, so I'm probably at or past the point of diminishing returns. I would recommend that you make sure you are consuming plenty of protein so that your metabolic systems aren't required to make a "choice", in the event that that is how it actually works