One of the aspects that makes my style of training, the kind taught in Off The Floor, at The Movement Minneapolis, or in the Fitocracy PR Every Day coaching group so different is that there are no specified rep schemes. For some people, this represents a massive change in their way of thinking. If you have been accustomed to simply following a number of reps to do, it’s a tectonic shift.

The reason I don’t give reps is not that I am lazy or have some religious belief that prevents me from using numbers. The reason I don’t give reps is that I don’t know how many reps you need to do. I could tell you too few and I’d be doing you a disservice preventing you from maximizing your potential. I could tell you too many and you’d be pushing past your limits risking injury. As a coach I can sometimes judge when someone is going too far, but there are a myriad of sensations that you are privy to well before I can see when something is going wrong.

Believe it or not, you do know. But, it’s entangled with beliefs and a lack of understanding of the underlying reasoning.  I think that widening the foundation of your understanding of what we’re trying to accomplish with various rep schemes can help people feel more comfortable in leading themselves.

Why do we do different rep schemes?

Put simply, different numbers of reps cause different physiological stresses. In the chart below I’ve noted some of the properties of doing different numbers of reps. I used Brad Schoenfeld’s 3 main mechanisms of muscle hypertrophy and added two of mine own that relate more to strength adaptation without significant hypertrophy. These are gross generalizations and not to be taken as literal absolutist statements.

A caveat that I should note is that the rep ranges are based on an assumption that you are using a weight that you only able to do for that number of reps before reaching into excessive effort. You don’t get high connective tissue stress if you deadlift 5lbs for 3 reps unless you are an infant.

As you can see, low reps cause more of some types of phsyiological stress and high reps cause more in others.

Knowing what physiological stresses you’re going to bring about is about half of the puzzle. The other half is knowing the trade-off and the relationship between the different reps.

The biggest one I’d specifically like to address in this article is volume.

In case you’re not familiar with this term (you should be), volume is the total amount of work done. You can look at it per movement, or per workout. If you deadlift 225lbs 10 times you have 2250lbs of volume. If you deadlift 100 times you have 22,500lbs of volume.

There is a bell-curved relationship between low reps, moderate reps, and high reps. See the chart:

Described verbally: at your lowest reps per set (singles) you will do very little total volume, perhaps only a few reps total. At the very highest reps per set, where you are hitting muscular failure on the first set, you may do a lot of reps but the resulting metabolic stress and muscular damage will prevent you from accomplishing much volume in subsequent sets.

Somewhere in the middle lies the sweet spot. There is a point at which the metabolic stress is mitigated, mechanical tension is moderated, and muscle damage is limited. This is the spot where you could seemingly do endless amounts of volume.

On either side of this point you also have a wide berth where you can achieve large amounts of training volume. These are the areas of the curve I encourage people to take advantage of and increase their training volume. Most people I work with are shocked at how much training volume they are actually capable of and likewise how little their current training programming actually consists of. Once you start doing 25,000lb workouts on the regular, you start realizing why you weren’t progressing with 8,000lb workouts. You are literally capable of so much more.

Programming physical training is a lot of science, with a hint of art in how you actually apply it. I think my friend Nick Tumminello said it well when he said “Training is the art of expressing the science.” As you’ve hopefully learned above there are different ways to accomplish the same thing with each variable affecting the others slightly. If you want to learn more about how to customize and individualize training programs from one of the very, very best keep in mind that Eric Cressey’s High Performance Handbook is only on sale through today. When someone has built their entire business on some of the very best athletes in the world getting results, coming back, and sending their teammates you can bet that you are going to learn something valuable. Plus, apparently Eric has extended the offer to win a trip to Cressey Performance so that is still up for grabs.

Go peep the High Performance Handbook.

I am an unabashed “strength guy.” That is to say, while it is nice that as a byproduct of my training I look pretty good naked, it’s just not my goal. In aligning myself as a strength guy I am not a kettlebell guy, or a barbell guy, or a bodyweight guy. Sometimes I do kettlebell clean and jerks and sometimes I deadlift barbells.  All of those things are tools or means to the end of achieving greater strength.

Tools aside, when it comes to types of movement, I generally stick to pure strength things. I don’t particularly enjoy bodyweight calisthenics, I don’t run unless it’s a (hill) sprint, and I don’t do sets of high reps just to get a pump.

So you can imagine what I might say about yoga. In the words of my buddy Mike Sheehan (say this with a thick Boston accent): “How is that gonna make me strongeh?” I’ve generally relegated yoga to women and guys who wear pants that should fit women.

The thing is, I was wrong.

I was wrong, and I intend to tell you why I was wrong.

One of the very core tenets of the Gym Movement protocol that I learned from Frankie Faires is this very simple idea:

Move what’s not moving.

When you internalize that simple idea, doors unlock and gates swing open to a world of possibility. Moving what’s not moving has allowed me to get stronger, more athletic, and get out of and stay out of pain. It’s also helped countless of my clients do the same. Let me give you a few very basic examples to get you thinking:

• If your knees hurt when you squat but you’re not sitting back into your hips at all then your knees are not the problem – your hips are not moving. Move the hips, and the knees aren’t a problem anymore.
• Bret Contreras has made himself famous with one simple idea: Your glutes aren’t moving. Get them moving and all kinds of other functions improve.

Just to show you how powerful this idea is, you can take it out of the training world and apply it to a completely different area of life:

• Spending too much time working lately and no time socializing? How much would your entire worldview improve if you moved what’s not moving: your social life?
• Have you ever had a sudden, persistent, intense craving for a particular food or type of food? Your intution is a powerful force, and it’s probably telling you that you need something you haven’t had in some time.

I could go on for pages giving examples, but that’s not the point of this post, so I’ll get to the point.

Yoga has given me an unexpected opportunity to see or feel what’s not moving, and then move it. Doing that has allowed me to move better during my strength training, making me measurably stronger.

To illustrate what I mean, allow me to describe how I approach a yoga class. Incidentally, I take the classes my wonderful instructors at The Movement Minneapolis teach. Together, we’re developing an innovative approach that allows people to engineer their own process.

1. As the instructor describes and demonstrates the pose, I’ll move into it the best I can.
2. Once I’m “in” the pose, I’ll start moving around in the associated joints seeing if there is something that is stuck or not moving very much.
3. When I find an area that lacks movement, I’ll move the joints AROUND that joint to create more movement. For example, in the yoga twisting lunge pose (don’t ask for the sanskrit name, I’m not a hippie) I might find that I can’t get much upper body rotation. In that case, I’ll move my hips around looking to see where I can find more movement in my spine.
4. Once I’ve moved as much as I can in that position, I’ll move on to the next position.

This process is one that you can only undergo by either doing your very own yoga practice, or by going to a class but being willing to move at your own pace and ignore the machinations of the class around you. Move past a position if it’s not doing anything for you, and spend some more time on it if you need to.

Is this instantly going to take you from being a bodyweight overhead presser to a double-bodyweight overhead presser? Nope. Could it help you move what’s not moving, and unlock untapped potential? Absolutely.