USAWA

by Thom Van Vleck

So I was talking training with Al Myers the other night and he asked me if I did a particular exercise.  I said I did.  Then he asked me what kind of weight I used.  I said bodyweight.  He then asked if I didn’t use weight how was it progressive resistance.  Was it reps?  I jokingly said I was up to a 1000 reps.

That got me to thinking about Ultra High reps. Usually strength training falls in the 1 to 10 rep range.  Body building 10 to 20 reps.  But what about high rep training.

My Uncle Phil was a bodybuilder but he had to travel a lot for his job.  Back in the 60’s and 70’s there weren’t many gyms he could find so he developed a routine where he would do 100 reps on bodyweight exercises.  Such as push ups, sit ups, leg raises, etc.  He weighed around 220lbs so doing 100 perfect push ups was a real challenge.  And believe me, he did them strict and non stop.

Bill Clark once wrote about doing something similar.  As a baseball scout he spent much of his time on the road.  He did a “Deck of Cards” workout.  He would shuffle a deck of cards, pick a bodyweight exercise, draw the card and do however many reps the card represented like in black jack.  This would amount to several hundred reps in one workout.

But what about weight training with high reps?

When I was a kid and just starting training I would peruse the weightlifting magazine collection my Uncles and grandfather had.  They went back to the 1930’s.  There was one magazine that had an article by Albert Beckles.  Beckles was a bodybuilder that placed as high as 2nd in the Mr. Olympia and won a pro event at age 61.  He competed at a high level from the 1960s to the 1990s.

This particular article he was pushing single sets of 32 reps.  This seems absurd and to be honest back in the day lifters would lie in articles about training as they wanted to keep their routines secret.  I read later articles on his training and it was more conventional.

But I tried it.  Talk about a pump!  I could see where as a bodybuilder that might be an effective routine to cycle in every once in awhile.  I don’t see how you could maintain that for very long but it might be good to “blow the cob webs out” every once in awhile.  Why 32?  Beckles just said that he originally would do them to failure and 32 was where he would usually end up.

I have a set and rep system I call “Hundred’s”.  I usually use it on calves and forearms that you need higher reps to get anything out of them.  If I use it on another body part it’s usually with an assistance exercise.  But I’ve used this set and reps program on the Bench Press before.  Believe it or not I started with 205 for 30 reps.  By the last set I was barely able to do 135 for 10 reps.

So sets and reps go like this:

First set:  30 reps

Second set: 25 reps

Third set: 20 reps

Fourth set: 15 reps

Fifth set: 10 reps

These total 100 reps.  I usually do them as quickly as I can.  The hump always seems to be the third set.  The final set I usually do slow and deliberately really squeezing the muscle.  What I like about the scheme is I feel confident I can do 5 less reps with each set although by the third set it becomes a real struggle.  I have to admit that 100 is a nice, round number.  I just adjust the weight until 100 reps is all I can do.

Will Ultra High reps build a lot of strength and power?  Probably not but they will build endurance which will in turn help with the lower rep exercises with the added conditioning.  If you try it share your results.