How to know when to stop a set.

mastery on Hinge Rows...oh man the DOMS right in the rhomboids. soon. pushups too, im looking forward to the xiaopengs. #fingerstwitching >_>

gohei_ said:

What if, instead of going to failure now and then, you take a quick breather in the middle of your set (a few seconds rest) and then finish your last reps/seconds with good form. Which way would be more beneficial?

what about this? 

strme said:

what about this?

I guess the question would be, "why"? What would be the benefit of doing that instead of just pushing to the limit?

i asking here same question like gohei ,because my friends gymnastic guys they always doing so(max 3sec).  so i want to know your opinion. i doing this with HBR..  i think i need this extra work for my endurance. looks like helping me. i doing this only 3 weeks. 

Keegan said:

I guess the question would be, "why"? What would be the benefit of doing that instead of just pushing to the limit?

because you dont hit failure. personally ive always had better results if I dont hit failure. 

DESTINY said:

because you dont hit failure. personally ive always had better results if I dont hit failure.

Cool, then that's your answer. It was more of a rhetorical question to make the person asking the question think about why they were asking the question and to hopefully come up with a personalized answer.

If, like yourself, you have previous experience trying both training to failure and staying short of failure and have found that avoiding failure works better for you as an individual, then that experience would be a good reason to approach training in that manner.

But asking generalized questions about it or thinking that simply because someone else's body responds a certain way will mean your body will respond the same way won't necessarily give you an answer that is appropriate for you.

I think though that judging by Coach's success and his recent posts on the subject that people should follow his advice of pushing themselves hard and not cutting sets short purposely and then only make alterations should they find that they as individuals need to do so. But everyone is free to do what they wish of course.

Most people tend to confuse the onset of mental discomfort with actual physical failure.  Most of the time, the reality is that there is quite a large margin available to increase the amount of work being done before they are even remotely close to physical failure.

Yours in Fitness,

Coach Sommer

Coach Sommer said:

Most people tend to confuse the onset of mental discomfort with actual physical failure.  Most of the time, the reality is that there is quite a large margin available to increase the amount of work being done before they are even remotely close to physical failure.

 

Yours in Fitness,

Coach Sommer

Hollow body rocks will give people ample opportunity to experience and play with this perceptual gap, muhahaha! 

I have been pushing myself with RC pe6 lately and even though my mind is screaming at me to let go and my whole body is shaking ridiculously I don't stop until my body starts to sink involuntarily. Not sure if I should continue doing this or stop once my body starts the uncontrollable shaking.

Did 4x60r bHBR yesterday. These recent post about working hard got me through it. It also explains why it took me so long to get through PE1.

You really can work a lot harder than you think, just have to put your mind to it. I surprised myself and now pretty confident going onto test for mastery this week.

ausswe said:

I have been pushing myself with RC pe6 lately and even though my mind is screaming at me to let go and my whole body is shaking ridiculously I don't stop until my body starts to sink involuntarily. Not sure if I should continue doing this or stop once my body starts the uncontrollable shaking.

Continue doing that! RC6 is the definition of a very dim light at the end of a very long tunnel.

Haha alright shaking like I'm have an epileptic fit will continue! Hopefully sometime this year ill have mastery without the shake

Love your enthusiasm Gray!

I'd like to chime in here and try to give a sense of work ethic that I found Coach Sommer demands from his athletes (I attended the London seminar in Jan), something that we were briefly able to witness over the 2 days.  That lesson in work ethic was probably more valuable a lesson than all of the other myriad of technical pointers that coach gave out over the weekend. It made such a profound impression on all of us and will definitely stay with me for a long time to come....that even if you feel you're dying in a workset - keep going!

Here are a couple of quotes from Winston Churchill which I believe reflect this work ethic and can help a person when they're feeling the strain in a workset or a period of stagnation:

“Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.”  - If I fail today - so what? If I fail tomorrow - so what? I'll keep going until I nail the exercise and won't be disheartened.

“This is no time for ease and comfort. It is time to dare and endure.”  - It's never going to get any easier, the whole point is progressing in levels of strength difficulty.  But our levels of tolerance to pain can definitely be improved on.  Learn to block it out and accept it.

And my personal favourite "If you are going through hell - keep going" 

Gotta love Churchill!

Ok, so the summary to the summary would be:

FIGHT AND FOCUS, GODDAMIT!

i was too busy training but big thanks to everyone for this thread. keep moving forward and stay safe guys.

I think the possibility of injury is something to give serious consideration to.

I think two things needs to be assessed when it comes to pain and pushing through:  ones tolerance to pain and where the pain is coming from.  If ones tolerance to pain is excessive, I think it is obvious that pushing through pain may put one at risk.  If the pain is one where there is pain or tenderness near tendons and/or muscle's connection points, that may not be a pain that is prudent to work through.

I developed tendonitis in my elbow after I had ignored the pain in my elbow and worked through it all the way from week 5 to 9 of RC/PE6 and for another month of microcycles between week 7 and 9.  I'm not exactly sure what I should done but my guess is probably to go back to week 2 and then continue up the progression again.

At this point, I am cycling to Week 1 and Week 2 because that is barely all I can do without annoying my elbow.

KenW said:

.....I developed tendonitis in my elbow after I had ignored the pain in my elbow....

Interesting.  I've found that the high volume requirements of the program have kept me from injuring myself.  The load is simply not great enough, and my muscles will tire before my joints have been under enough stress.

Compare 5x15 hinge rows with my previous attempts at say, 3x3 ring pullups.

Before Coach's comments about not giving up earlier, I was only adding 6 seconds per week. However since then, I've been pushing much harder and today I finally completed 5x60s of ABH

Hmms said:

Before Coach's comments about not giving up earlier, I was only adding 6 seconds per week. However since then, I've been pushing much harder and today I finally completed 5x60s of ABH

I was stuck in FL/PE1 at 35-40 secs. Then mastery in 3 weeks after the comments

I was stuck on the first PEs for months, in most of them I couldn't even clear week 9. Then I had to stop working out for a while for unrelated reasons, and during that time I read on the forums about pushing harder and not giving up too easily. Two months ago I started training again, from week 6 on every PE1 except SLS. This week I mastered FL/PE1, HBP/PE1 and sPL/PE1 (except for the IM) without repeating any cycles. Working harder made a huge difference. Previously I was cautious of working too hard because I had read about how you should not go to failure.

Now to master ABH  (in which I have made great progress as well) 

I'm hitting muscle failure on a progression currently,  I'll get through the first 2 sets, before I reach physical failure in the 3rd, trying to hit the rep goal... then my 4th and 5th sets are pitiful, I can barely get through a few reps.

What is the guiding wisdom for when you reach failure in early sets, which then impede progress in the following sets?  Should I be lowering my rep goal, increasing rest between sets, or finishing up the rest of the sets with an earlier progression variation?

Rob Rowland said:

I'm hitting muscle failure on a progression currently,  I'll get through the first 2 sets, before I reach physical failure in the 3rd, trying to hit the rep goal... then my 4th and 5th sets are pitiful, I can barely get through a few reps.

 

I had a similar question that wasn't answered, or at least may have been assumed I answered my own question; Posted 18 June 2014 - 05:55 AM (my second to last post).  So I looked through a few forums to see if I could get an answer, this forum being the last.  Still couldn't find much or @ least somewhat indirect answers.  

My issue, again, is with HBP/PE2 and RC/PE1 (Week 9 4x12 reps).  2nd attempt at these was on Friday.  Going through 3 day split routine the first attempt was on Monday.  I wrote down how I had issues from last 3 sets of each routine.  First set was ok, then second set was up to 8 reps, had to pause for a few breaths, gone to 10 reps, paused for another few breaths and got the remaining 2 for total of the 12 reps.  

My thought between the time was to go back to Block2 and start all over again.  But I thought of my new found strength and the feeling of the DOMS and how I felt fresh on Friday to do the same thing again.  Doing the workout again, was similar results.  

Ultimately my thoughts is to do it like how I did it back with weight training or how I would 'catch up eventually' to workout videos like P90x, as an example; caught up to the people working out after a few weeks.  So I said, eventually I would catch up to week 9 by staying there for a few weeks and move onto week 10.  

Is that doable, should I stick with week 9 until I get full reps in back to back for a few weeks before going into week 10?  or should I go back to Block2 Week 5 or even Week 7, since I'm sure I can crank 5by9 reps?  

If you're hitting physical failure before you've reached your target reps, the first step is to double-check that you've properly mastered all the preceding elements. Video tape yourself doing those, and ask for a form check if you're not sure that your form was perfect. The second step is to make sure you've actually reached physical failure. If there was a pack of howling wolves chasing you and the only way to escape was to do one more rep, would you be able to do it?

If you've ascertained that you did master the preceding elements correctly and you are reaching physical failure, there are a number of approaches you can take. Here are some ideas:

- you can repeat the weak you're on until you've reached your target

- you can take as much rest as you need to hit your target, and gradually decrease that rest to zero.

- create a "mini-mini-cycle" that begins with a rep scheme you know you can hit, and gradually builds up to the target you're failing to achieve. 

- you can do a steady-state cycle at the hardest rep scheme you've successfully performed

- you can 

Joshua Slocum said:

If there was a pack of howling wolves chasing you and the only way to escape was to do one more rep, would you be able to do it?

 

If you've ascertained that you did master the preceding elements correctly and you are reaching physical failure, there are a number of approaches you can take. Here are some ideas:

 

- you can repeat the weak you're on until you've reached your target

- you can take as much rest as you need to hit your target, and gradually decrease that rest to zero.

 

Well so far so good.  My thoughts was on what I wrote yesterday before bed, indirect meditation, till I woke up thinking about it (not sure if I dreamt about it as well, lol).  But I'm glad I'm on the right track and not doing anything to break my progress.  Thanks Josh for the reply and direction helping me realize that I'm on the right track, I tend to overanalyze even with 'indirect' (which was direct after a while) answers given throughout my reading of the various posts in the various topics of discussion.  

As for resting, I've decided to stick with the 3 day training cycle, which I started the past week.  Where I have weekends off, with recuperation of 3-4 days rest (if you really look at it (really, look at it)), give or take my core (being that it is hit on F4 and F3) which is every other day and weekends off (overThought about that as well) :-).

As for video, I noticed it was distracting when I was weight training changing the camera angles during rest as opposed to just going in or prepping for next set.  I started in earlier session(s) with videotaping GB routine, but stopped and just went IN after that.  Stay tuned though.  I was told I lost my mass appeal, yet I'm cut up now.  Wednesday is my next training for F4, with Monday and Friday F3+HS/PE2 (headstand balance has gotten easier as well as I demo'd to my daughter, cold, 2 times with a few minutes rest between during our time together); but overall, going strictly by the book.

Finally for the wolves scenario, I would be able to crank out the remainder reps as I reEvaluate, in my thoughts, of my routine.  There's fatigue, then there is that second wind, although I have not gone through that feeling for a while.  But I'm sure it could be mustered up when needed.