Page 13 - Top Cover Issue 6

TOP COVER ISSUE 6 13

THE 20 REP WORKOUT HEALTH & FITNESS

JUSTIN CONWAY LOOKS AT THE USE OF COMPOUND LIFTING EXERCISES

WWW.FUNDAMENTALISTFITNESS.COM

strict form

with an

appropriate

weight

point….Instead.....take a deep breath, pause for a moment and
then carry on! You will probably manage another 2 – 3 reps if you
are lucky before really wanting to stop and rack the weight…..
Again, Don’t stop!! Take a few more deep breaths and push out
another rep, whilst maintaining form and cadence. Keep the
weight ‘under control’ throughout. Take another brief pause and as a magic number but obviously the more reps you can push
push out another, then another until you reach 20 reps. out the more muscle fibres will be recruited, returning greater
If you just can’t quite make it to 20 – maybe 19 or 18 reps then growth and strength. You will see from the above why these
don’t worry, as I have said before these should not be treated sets are sometimes called ‘breathing sets’ or ‘rest-pause’ training.
As you are still using a relatively heavy weight for this ‘working’
set you will need to ensure that you are full warmed up first. You
can do this with either a generalised warm-up or as I prefer with
2 warm up sets. Warm up sets are better as far as you can use a
much lighter weight to practice form and get the blood flowing
through the muscles to be used and warm-up the specific joints
involved.
The advantages.....

You have already seen from the results of Joseph Curtis Hise how
much this type of training can benefit your results in strength and
muscle growth. However the benefits of training with this type
of training regime go much further than just results – although
arguably these other benefits all add up to providing you with
the greater results overall! By training up to 20 reps, the weights
you use are obviously going to be a lot lighter than say if you
were adopting a number of sets with just 5 reps. The advantage
of this is it allows you to control the weight better giving you
better, targeted stimulation of the muscle groups being used.
It also helps massively in the reduction of injuries to not only
the muscles but to connective tissue and the reduced stress on
joints. These advantages alone will allow you to train for longer
periods without injury allowing you take full advantage of the
‘progressive overload’ principles of consistent progression. Also,
training with this many reps will make the one working set a lot
longer in duration than multiple low rep sets. This in turn gives
the muscles being trained longer ‘Time under tension’ – another