SESSION NOTES: Relative Stamina (487-492)
Programming Science:
This session contains three upper body pull based movements and three upper body press based movements.
Each group of three exercises contains an overlap in the muscle groups – all pressing movements grouped together, and all pulling movement grouped together. This means that movement quality and efficiency (particularly in kipping movements) becomes a real priority.
The reps increase from two to eight, then drop by twos each set. This ‘pyramid’ style rep scheme will allow workrate to stay high even as fatigue becomes an issue.
Health and Body Composition Benefits:
This session is a form of resistance training that provides a stimulus with lighter loads and higher volume than an absolute strength or power based session. While the high levels of fatigue in this session makes it less effective to increase strength and power, it will improve your stamina – the ability of your muscles to resist fatigue.
Often, higher repetition movements are neglected for the upper body (while walking/cycling etc are included for the lower body), but by including these higher repetition upper body movements, we’re helping to develop blood vessels in the upper body which will help reduce cardiovascular risk factors.
High repetition resistance training like this will also improve your flexibility (by going through a full range of motion), posture and coordination. It will also build stability around your joints and spine to give you a healthy musculo-skeletal system and reduce joint and back pain. These movements will also help develop tendon strength.
Although this session is not designed with cardiovascular training as its priority, the higher repetitions do mean there is a crossover to cardiovascular benefits. These include improved cardiovascular endurance, respiratory function and cardiac health.
As a result of this style of session, you will experience changes in blood chemistry, including favourable effects on cholesterol, blood glucose, triglyceride and lipid levels.
In terms of body composition, higher repetition, lower load movements are an important part of an exercise program for increasing lean muscle. Muscle is a metabolically active tissue, so increasing it will maximise how much energy your body burns at rest. This makes it an effective session to reach healthy levels of body fat, both visceral fat (around the organs) and subcutaneous fat (under your skin). After this session, your body will go through a prolonged state of ‘EPOC’ (excess post- exercise oxygen consumption), meaning you’ll continue burning energy long after you finish training – further aiding healthy body composition.
Performance Benefits:
The high repetition movements in this session train the ability of your muscles to resist fatigue – increasing their stamina. This comes from improvements in the efficiency of slow twitch (fatigue resistant) muscle fibres.
As a result of the volume of repetitions, this session will increase the mitochondrial density in your muscle cells, allowing them to more efficiently convert energy into fuel. This means you can sustain higher rates of muscle contraction before fatigue or failure.
The higher volumes will also increase capillary density in your muscles, allowing for efficient delivery of oxygen and fuel, and removal of waste products (further adding to the fatigue resistance).
Strategy:
The grouping of similar movements means that there is little respite in each grouping. Treat all three movements as the same when pacing this – which means you’ll need to start more conservatively than you might expect.
How it Should Feel:
The limiting factors here should be both localised muscular endurance and muscular strength (under fatigue).
Scaling Guidelines:
If you’re not able to do the movements without assistance, scale the load (using some form of assistance like a band), rather than scaling the range of movement or the reps. This will ensure the correct volume is achieved to deliver the benefits of these higher rep ranges.
Modify around injuries with exercises as close as possible to the stimulus of the movement you’re modifying.
Common Mistakes:
Treating the three exercises in each grouping as three separate movements (instead of similar movement types as they are) will mean you start too fast. Be conservative early and build as you go.
