SESSION NOTES: Relative Stamina (800-810)
In the first minute, complete one rep of each exercise. In the second minute, complete two reps of each exercise. Continue until failure to complete. Then immediately, start again from one, this time swapping the order.
Programming Science:
This session contains one upper body push based movement and one upper body pull based movement.
The ascending repetition scheme is designed to progressively increase difficulty as you ‘graduate’ to each new minute. Not only does the amount of work being done each minute increase, but, as a result, the rest decreases. This results in an exponential increase in difficulty as the session progresses.
The push movements and the pull movements alternate, which has two effects. Firstly, there is some degree of recovery between movements of a similar type to maximise volume. Secondly, there is a ‘blood shunting’ effect, where your body is required to deliver oxygen and fuel, and remove waste, from large and alternating muscle beds.
This blood shunting means there will be a cardiorespiratory benefit, and you will have the added challenge of training with high levels of hydrogen ions (the acid feeling you get from high intensity exercise) in your system, and not just under localised muscular fatigue.
The swapping of the order the second time through ensures that if one exercise is more difficult than the other, it shouldn’t impact the benefit you’re achieving for the stronger exercise.
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 aim is to progress as far as possible, and the best way to do that is to break the movement up as much as possible. Ideally, you want each set taking as close to one minute as possible – spreading out the exercises over the entire 60 seconds. There is no requirement to go unbroken, so short sets are the best way to strategise this.
How it Should Feel:
The limiting factor here should be localised muscular endurance, meaning the muscles will be burning and it will be difficult to complete reps towards the end of each exercise.
The session will go from being very easy, to very difficult, very quickly.
Scaling Guidelines:
The intent of this session is to achieve very high repetitions, so scale as required to achieve this. Scale the load (with some form of assistance) rather than the range of motion. You should scale so each exercise is a similar difficulty, and so you reach approximately eight minutes in each attempt.
Modify around injuries with exercises as close as possible to the stimulus of the movement you’re modifying.
Common Mistakes:
The main mistake seen here is failing to start a new minute because you don’t think you’ll finish it. Even if you only just complete the previous set unbroken, you should still attempt as many as possible in the following set.
