Sets of fives are great, but what if sets of one rep or sets of eight reps could actually be better for strength development? Lets’ talk about a new perspective on rep ranges for strength
Hi, so, I’m Alex. I’m a professional strength and conditioning coach. I’ve been doing that for about a decade, and I’ve coached well over 160 athletes, all the way from recreational through to senior international level. I’ve also been head coach of Outlift Powerlifting Club and of Yorkshire barbed weightlifting club, and I’ve been a tutor for british weightlifting since 2018.
Right. So I think the way that we’ve been thinking about strength training is wrong. Or rather, like, not so much wrong, but it’s limited. It’s been too limited. Okay, so what we’re gonna go through today is I’m gonna take you through the classic/textbook strength rep ranges, then what I think the issues with that are, and then we’re going to go through some recommendations that you can put into your own training to potentially make it a little bit more effective.
The ‘Old Way’ – Classic/Textbook Strength Rep Ranges
So the old way, the classic way, the textbook way, if you will.
I’m going to call this the fives, or the fahhves, if you’re a Mark Rippetoe fan. (You gotta imagine that in a texan accent – or rather my bad attempt at a texan accent)
- 5×5
- 4×5
- 3×5
You get the idea…
But the fives, right, you do your five by fives. You’ve got starting strength is all fives. Strong lifts is fives. It’s a classic rep scheme for a reason. I’ve used Texas methods loads. I’m still a big fan of it. I want to make really clear that I’ve used rep schemes like threes and fives a lot. I still use them a lot. I still programme them a lot. They still make up a real good bread and butter of my programming.
There’s nothing wrong with using threes and fives for strength. Okay, just want to make that really clear before someone jumps in and starts giving me grief – Just hear me out for a minute.
The Issue – Nothing Works Forever
Here’s the thing, though. Right here is nothing works forever. Okay? There is a point of diminishing returns where adaptive resistance kicks in. You can do fives for a given amount of time, but you will start to get less from them.
A Personal Story to Illustrate the Point
Okay, I’m going to give you a personal anecdote and then I’m going to sort of, like, move on. But I was coached by Glenn Pendlay for a while. If you don’t know who he was, he was a US national team coach for a while, with dozens of national and international lifters to his name. So Glenn was one of the OG weightlifting coaches.
He had me run a programme for a while that was very, very 5’s dominant. Over a few weeks we would hit a five rep max and then do five by five at 90% of that, and four by five at 92% and so on until we built up to a new five rep max over five weeks.
We ran this cycle for what must have been 15 or 20 weeks with no deloads, zero deload weeks, five times a week. Just like intense squatting, pulling, deadlifting, over and over and over for back squat and front squat.
- And the first block, I improved like 7%
- And then the next I improved 5%
- And then the next I improved like 2%
So there was this like, decreasing amount of returns. And like, I think the next cycle I tried to do, I actually got injured. I think I got like some niggles and just stuff didn’t feel right.
What I probably should have done a smarter approach at that point. Glenn was really old school, but if we’d have moved to maybe some threes or just some sixes or eights, just mixed it up a little bit, exercise variation or rep scheme variation, I would hazard a guess that my progress would have been significantly better.
And I’ve seen that with a lot of the athletes that I coach. If you keep on doing the same thing over and over and over again, they get less from it. The injury likelihood goes up because you’re overusing the muscles in the exact same way. So I think change it up a little bit.
Think About These Alternatives For a Moment
And I’m gonna propose this as a hypothesis for you, right?
- Say that you train for six weeks to get two or 3% or a 5% improvement in your five rep max, right?
- What if you could have used that time and trained in sets of ten, but because it’s completely new and novel to you, you could have seen a 20 or 30 or a 40% improvement in your ten rep max,
Which I have seen dozens of athletes do at this point. Right? So this isn’t hypothetical. This is something that dozens of people can do and I’ve done myself.
Wouldn’t you argue that a 40% improvement in your ten rep max is better than a 5% improvement in your five rep max? Right?
Like, yes, I know it’s not as close to your one rep max, so it’s technically you’re producing maybe a little bit less force maximally, but the actual, the sum total, the sum amount of your improvement is SO much bigger. Wouldn’t you argue that you’re getting WAY stronger by doing that.
10×1 Better for Strength?
On the other end of that spectrum, what about singles?
I’ve had a lot of lifters and I’ve had them do ten sets of one, literally ten single reps. And if they make a couple of lifts and it looks really good, they move up in weight, and if they do a couple of lifts and they miss them, or it doesn’t look good or doesn’t feel good, then they move down in weight, so they just do ten single reps.
This is something I use for some of my more advanced lifters, and it allows them to get a lot of feel for their heavy loads. It allows them to practise setting up and walking out a heavy bar or squat, and it really allows them to dial in the central nervous systems at the top loads.
That’s not a classic strength rep scheme. Right. You wouldn’t see many ten by one workouts programmed, because it’s not five by five. It’s not five by three or six by three. You don’t even see that much on a peaking programme, but I’ve used this now with God damn, like, maybe three dozen lifters, and I have yet to have anyone not do amazingly well with it. The amount of confidence they gain from it, the consistency they get with weights at 85% to 90% plus is phenomenal.
So it makes you wonder, right, if these classic rep schemes that we have, do we follow them just because they’re in a textbook, and could the actual rep schemes that we use for strength be actually a little bit broader and potentially more effective?
Strength Rep Schemes and Youth Athletes – Another Variable
Another great example is with youth athletes, I’ve worked with 3 youth talent pathways, and if you actually use sets of eight to ten, you’ll see that their strength goes up WAY more because they get better motor learning. They get eight or ten reps to practise the movement instead of three to five.
So they get way more technical practise. And as a result, their nervous system learns the pattern, their motor learning improves and they get stronger because motor sequencing and motor learning is a massive part of strength. So there’s a big argument to be made that for a lot of people, higher reps will actually get them stronger.
Wrapping Up
Alright, that’s it for today, hopefully I’ve given you some food for thought with regards to strength rep schemes.
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Hope to see you in there
’til next time
Alex
