Steady State Cycle Question

Question for you all,

In the Building the Gymnastic Body book, Coach Sommer says the majority of work should look something like 3x3 or 3x5. He also says to take the total number of reps you can do and half them for your working sets. So if I can do 7 parallel bar dips total I should do around 4 for my working sets. My question is that if I can do more than 5 TOTAL (i.e. 7), should I be moving an to a more difficult dip variation or should I wait until I can do more more than 5 for the WORKING SETS. To me it just feels like if I can do 7 reps on regular dips (and this is with a very slow and controlled 3130 tempo) I should move on to the next variation.

Let me know what you guys think. Thanks.

Nobody has any advice on this topic?

I think he was only talking about the static exercises when he said to take your max and devide it by 2. If you can do 5 or more reps I think you should move on to the next progression if you can, and if pure strength is your goal.

No matter what, if you can't do 5x5 then you have not built the strength endurance necessary to ensure ongoing progress. What Coach specifically wrote was that the work sets can be as low as 3x3 or as high as 5x5, but if you can't do 5x5 then you aren't ready to move on. That's basic strength training, whether you are lifting weights or your own body does not change that.

Being able to do 7 reps for one single set is not enough to be moving on by itself. You are always free to do so, but you may find that you start running into problems with form (or possibly pain) on Russian dips and Russian L dips, though in my opinion the dip progressions are fairly easy for the most part. Regardless, when you can do 5x5 fairly easily, you will find that you are much more stable and much stronger. Even then, with dynamic work you may find that you need to work with added weight before you are able to do certain progressions. You may also find that you respond better to higher reps, some people are like that. It will take experimenting. The best way to determine whether or not you should be moving on is to do 5 sets. If you can not at least do a total of 14 reps over 5 sets, no rest-pausing, then you are not ready for that progression. If you can, then you should be fine.

I will say that in the beginning steady state is much more important for statics than dynamics, isokinetics, FBE, whatever you want to call them. It IS more important if you choose to try to move forward towards higher level movements, because you will have to build work capacity, and that doesn't happen without some fairly carefully planned overloading and maintaining that load until you are able to handle it easily. Then you add on more, you'll experience the same difficulties to some degree, and once again you will adapt. For that, SSC works beautifully.