Training Female Lifters - The Neuromuscular Efficiency Episode | Starting Strength Radio #76
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I've actually been curious about something. Does the phenomenon of the heavier, lower rep set being a more ideal stress for women extend in the other direction? Anyone who's been around gyms and people who lift have met guys who seem to have done extremely well even in terms of strength doing higher rep work. At the same time, one might encounter in their own training or see around the gym completely different results. I would often see huge, muscular guys in my gym, along with extremely average looking guys, both doing the same sort of training. Same exercise selection, same reps, same sets, same relative intensities, same training consistency. For the big guys it seemed to be working great. For the average guys it seemed like they were trying to strike a wet match, shit just wouldn't take. Is this potentially also caused by more gifted athletes actually being able to get a significant strength training stress out of higher rep work, the same way women with less neuromuscular efficiency require lower rep work for a similar training stress?
I mean that a guy that efficient at recruiting motor units into contraction gets enough of a strength training stress from cleans that deadlifts might not be necessary, as they are for everybody else.
Brings new understanding of why Robert Oberst thinks you don't have to deadlift and you can just do cleans. But that's the core reason I asked about it, because gifted people seem to be able to get results from training that average people would flatten out on very quickly. The follow-up question I have, is does it stand to reason that even males who are at the lower end of that spectrum of vertical jump potential, could also benefit from the switch to 5 triples when their training gets hung up?
Not unless 5s seem to really stop working. So far that's not the case. An arbitrary switch like that would be dumb. But the crappy self-administered SVJ test I tried last night in my garage did only amount to about a 16 inch height. Could be I could do better with a different setup and not coming right off a workout, I dunno. But it's something I've been curious about for a while now so I decided to give it a try. So, I might try 5 sets of 3 on a lift if things seem to really flatten out, same as I have for the two female "clients" I've been practicing my amateurish coaching abilities on.
SVJ data are specific to college-aged persons. SVJ drops quickly with age. How old are you?