Stupidly Simple Scheme for Strength and Size
It's easier than you think
Welcome back to another edition of the free Friday newsletter here at the 5DLC, where every week we will do a deeper dive on a chosen aspect of health and fitness. To get full access to all my best work and to have a planned progressive workout program delivered to your inbox 3x per week, consider $5/month for a full subscription.
Strength doesn’t have to be complicated.
Size doesn’t have to be complicated.
It can actually be very very simple.
Simple doesn’t mean easy. The hard work will still have to be done.
Hard. But simple.
I hope we can see the distinction.
Good morning my friends, happy Friday.
I hope your carbs have been carby and your caffeine has been caffeine-y?
I don’t know. I think I need more.
The volume debate. The set and rep scheme debate. It’s endless on the internet and to be honest, it’s really stupid. It’s splitting hairs and it’s a bit pedantic. I don’t know if I used that word right but I’m going to leave it in there and take a chance.
Why are we talking about whether we should do 2 or 3 sets of 6 or 8 reps when a large percentage of the population aren’t working out at all?
For us fitness professionals, for us ACTUAL fitness professionals, our priority should be to get people in the gym in the first place.
Once they do that, we can get them following a program.
Once they’ve followed a super basic program, we can advance them a little.
Only once they’ve reached the upper tier of advanced trainee can we worry about splitting these kinds of hairs. What percentage of lifters ever reach that point? Not many.
In that interest, I am going to give you the easiest set and rep scheme you’ll ever need.
But before I do, I need to outline a couple of things that will be important.
If you’re new here, a set and rep scheme is simply how many sets of how many reps you do for each exercise.
For example: bench press - 2 sets of 6-8 reps at RPE 8.
Oooooo wait a minute… what’s RPE?
I’m so glad you asked, I was going there next.
Should the paid tier not be your speed, but you would prefer an ebook program, the 30Minute Muscle Method is exactly what you need. 30 minutes, 3x per week for 12 weeks and you’ll be stronger than ever before.
Oh yea, I have a substack only discount code for it to thank you all for being here. Enter “Club20” to get 20% off.
RPE
RPE is an acronym for rating of perceived exertion and it is just a means of monitoring exercise intensity on a scale of 1-10.
In the context of strength training, a simple way to think about it is how close we take each set to muscular failure, with a 10 being you could not move that weight another inch no matter how hard you try.
It has been established in the research that spending almost all of your training time in the 7-9 RPE range is sort of “optimal”, meaning that you will make gains without beating your body up too much.
Sure, if we had 1 set left to do and then we could never lift again the rest of our lives, we’re going to RPE 10 and then beyond. But when we’re trying to lift for life going that far too often can result in beating the crap out of your body.
The most difficult thing for people is measuring RPE so I’m going to attempt to tell you how.
First we need to understand the 3 phases of each rep. The first phase is the eccentric, or the lowering phase. This is when we lower the weight down and feel the muscle stretch. The second is after the eccentric, are there any pauses in the stretched position. The third, and for our purposes today the only one you really need to understand, is the concentric. The concentric is when we lift the weight.
The best way to measure RPE is with velocity based training. That sounds complicated so I’ll explain. Velocity based training is just how fast are we moving the weight on the concentric phase.
The first rep of a set, you should be able to make that concentric phase fly. Like it really shouldn’t be difficult at all.
Second rep, same.
Depending on how many reps you’re doing in a set, each rep will get progressively more difficult.
Once you stop being able to move that concentric phase with the same speed, once that weight slows down, you’ve reached about an RPE 8. Most people can push out another rep or two after that point.
The Scheme
So this scheme is something I developed while I was backpacking through the Tibetan rainforest searching for the lost genome that grows calf muscles.
I didn’t find it by the way. It doesn’t exist.
Kidding, I didn’t develop this. It’s existed for a long time I’m just going to share it with you.
This scheme is not really much different to how I do things in the paid tier of our program.
It’s perfect for people like us because it’s time efficient, and it will increase strength and size.
This is after you’ve warmed up of course, we can’t just jump in cold and do this.
Set 1 - this is going to be your kind of “working warm-up” set. Like it is meant to be difficult, but we’re not going all out. For this first set we want to shoot for the 6-8 rep range at about RPE 7-8. We want it to be challenging, we want the weight to start to slow down, but we’re not going past that.
Set 2 - Increase the weight, and strap up cause this is where it gets nasty. We’re shooting for the 4-5 rep range here at RPE 9, and occasionally 10. This will be your top set, and this will be where things get crazy.
See how simple this is?
That’s literally all there is to it. Spend most of your time doing some semblance of this, and progressively adding more weight as you go and you’ll be stronger than ever before you know it.
This isn’t flashy, it’s not sexy, but it works.
That’s what we do here.
We don’t chase novelty and we don’t chase sensation.
We chase results.
I’m going to leave you all there for today.
I’ll see you all next week.
I’m in your corner.
-Justin