Episode 35: High reps have a purpose

Ron Harris

The holidays were upon us at last. Spirits were high all around. A monster of a blizzard had dumped a foot and a half of the light, fluffy stuff on my town on December 20^th, ensuring that all-important White Christmas Big Crosby sang about. As for the Blue Christmas in the Elvis song, we even had that covered with the release of the blockbuster film Avatar, with blue aliens in 3-D.

The snow itself had indeed been light and fluffy. While I still had to spend a total of around five hours

shoveling out my driveway, at least I hadn’t wrecked my lower back tossing hundreds of shovel’s worth of it over the six-foot fence into my neighbor’s yard (hey, more snow for your little brats to cavort in, buddy!). When I have done the same with heavy, wet snow, I often woke up the next day with my back feeling like I had participated in some marathon deadlift workout of 50 sets of 20 reps.

It was only Christmas Eve, but I already knew what my present was – a 55-inch flat-screen which would be the star of my new home theater, which was taking the place of the old ordinary TV room. I figured since usually I have to wait about six months for a movie to come out on DVD/Blu-Ray to see it unless it’s something I can take my 10-year-old son to, I might as well watch it in style and in the best quality possible. Oh, I earned this – do you know how many stupid kid’s movies I have sat through in the theater?  My man cave wasn’t done yet. The new leather sectional sofa was going to be delivered after the walls and ceiling were completely remodeled – that would be my wife’s idea. But I can’t complain. I get my ridiculous TV, and the value of our house goes up every time we remodel something like the bathroom or kitchen. Why, in the current real estate market, my house is now almost worth as much as we paid for it over eight years ago! The market has to come back eventually. Hell, even bell-bottoms did that.

My sole client Jared had just started his school Christmas vacation less than two hours before, but here he was in the gym with me. Our high school football team had finished with a dismal record of 1-10 for the season on Thanksgiving Day. There was occasion to give thanks – at least that humiliating season had ended and they could all look forward to doing better next year. In the interest of time, it being Christmas Eve and the gym closing early, Jared was simply training with me as I did my own chest and triceps workout. In just a few hours, I would be at my sister-in-law’s house for her annual party. In addition to a house packed with Cubans and Puerto Ricans and salsa music loud enough to make your ears bleed, there would be an abundance of food and drink. I planned on doing some real damage there in both departments, but first I needed to make sure Jared got a great workout. He had his heart set on competing next summer in a local show, and my job was to make sure he looked the best he possibly could.

As for me, I had not taken any time off from the weights since the Team Universe contest, and I certainly hadn’t taken a break in the six months preceding it – which meant the whole year I had been mercilessly blasting away with heavy iron. A couple weeks ago I had finally recognized that I needed to back off for a week or two. My arthritic shoulders were starting to ache again and the tendonitis in my perpetually inflamed right elbow was the worst it had been in a very long time. At first I considered a week off from lifting and only doing cardio. That was pondered all of ten seconds and rejected. I love training too much to stop even for a week. So I reached a compromise with my stubborn self. I would use lighter weights, higher reps, stop all sets shy of failure, and reduce the overall volume. I would do that for two weeks in lieu of not lifting at all. That would give my joints and tendons a chance to heal up a little, and provide me time to do a bit more cardio. I had bulked up to 235 pounds in less than three months after competing at 198, and the extra weight had me snoring so bad it sounded like some insane lumberjack was sawing logs in my bedroom all night. The wife wasn’t too pleased with this.

But a funny thing happened during that first week. I actually enjoyed the higher reps and taking shorter rests between sets. The pumps were outrageous, and I was connecting perfectly with the muscles even though I wasn’t even attempting to emphasize the contraction point of the rep as I normally do. The one thing that made me decide that this style of training would be something I would have to include in the future was when my biceps got sore from four sets of fifteen on incline dumbbell curls. I had abandoned the exercise a couple years ago because it killed my wrists and pulled on my shoulders in a weird way. That had been with 45’s or 50’s for sets of 6-8 reps. Staying with 25’s for four sets, my wrists and shoulders felt fine – but my biceps were on fire! They even got sore the next day, a rarity for them. I was sold.

I was now in my second week of that, and of course Jared just had to know why I was doing weights that he himself could almost handle. And why was I doing sets of 15 reps today, when I had instilled in him that 8-12 was the optimal range for growth? After explaining that I was taking a break from my normal heavy training for a couple weeks, I also informed him that this was something I would probably do every couple months from now on, and not as a way of easing up. Instead, I would start incorporating higher-rep weeks every so often, but taking the sets to failure. This would shock the muscles in a different way than what they were accustomed to.

“Should I do that too?” Jared asked.

“I don’t think it makes sense for you to at this point to do entire workouts that way, but certainly we can have you finish off a bodypart with a few high-rep sets.”

“That training system I was reading about has you do that, and supposedly it helps break up the muscle fascia.” I smiled.

“That John Parrillo in Ohio I mention all the time was talking about breaking up muscle fascia to permit greater muscle growth almost ten years before you were born, kid. He advocated aggressive stretching during the workout while the muscles were fully pumped for best results. He also talked a lot about high-rep sets as a tool to increase the capillary density inside the muscles.” Jared clearly had no idea what I was talking about. My expertise in the area was admittedly limited, but I did my best.

“Capillaries are tiny blood vessels, smaller in diameter than veins and obviously arteries, but they are critical for transporting nutrients into the muscles and shuttling out waste products. If you can create more of those, which high-rep training does, you increase the amount of blood available to your muscles during a workout. You’ll get bigger and better pumps.”

“So that’s what high reps are good for?” he asked.

“Parrillo also believed that by engaging in very high-rep sets, you would increase the number of mitochondria in the muscle, allowing for more work, as well as open up more high-threshold nerve pathways so a higher percentage of muscle fibers are able to fire. One of his infamous tools for this was 100-rep sets of belt squats, done on a device he invented and sold. Anyone who ever tried those will tell you it was just about the most brutal experience of their lives.”

“Did you ever do them, Ron?” I looked away and flashed back to that baking-hot August day in 1997 in Pasadena, California. A whole group of spotters had gathered around the belt squat on the outdoor workout deck of World Gym, both to assist and to prevent my escape before all 100 reps were complete. I vaguely recalled begging, whining, pleading, and being on the verge of tears. But the burning agony in my legs, lower back, and lungs is something I will never forget.

“Yeah, I think I did them once,” I replied. “When you come back to your normal type of sets and reps, you are able to perform at a higher level. And lately, I have also started to believe that without doing higher reps for the muscle groups and getting that extra degree of pump is critical for growth, especially in stubborn bodyparts.”

“Like your arms?” Jared grinned.

“Wow, what a zinger,” I retorted. “Why don’t you go down to the local meeting of Little People and make fun of how short they are, too?” His smile disappeared. “So we’ll start adding those in. In fact, we’ve done your heavy work on triceps already. Let’s have you finish off with rope pushdowns. We’ll trade off for sets of 15-20 reps, I go you go.” He nodded. A few minutes later, both our tri’s were swollen and tight with nutrient-rich blood.

I left the gym feeling good. Jared was bursting with excitement to be training like a bodybuilder again and couldn’t wait to compete, and that type of enthusiasm is always infectious. I had just picked up on a technique I had ignored and/or forgotten about after many years, and it could help me make new gains past age forty. There was a punch bowl of Mojitos and a feast of roast pork waiting for me in a few hours, and in a week or two the kick-ass home theater I had always wanted would be finished. As I got into my car, even the snowflakes that had just started to drift out of the slate-gray sky couldn’t bring my mood down. I turned on the radio. My wife had been messing with my pre-sets again because it was tuned to an Oldies station. And what was playing? I kid you not – “Let it snow.”