After some number crunching, I have doubts about the hyperbolic results you describe in your article. You claim to have started with a weight beyond your 1 rep maximum and in 84 days increased the reps with the same weight to 40. As I explain below, this is an approximately 200% increase in strength in 3 months!
Don't get me wrong, I am interested enough to try it and as you point out the time will go by anyway. I sincerely hope I'm wrong and that I can double my bench press in three months. I have been lifting weights for 15 years and one of my long term goals is to bench twice my bodyweight. My focus is more on strength rather than bodybuilding so I am approaching your technique from that angle. What follows is a long, potentially dull explanation of the experiment and how I calculated the strength increase. I will post my progress at the end of March (day 35, see below) and in May when the cycle is complete.
While my shoulders are weaker than my chest, the potential risk for injury seemed too great so I chose to experiment with the bench press. I was also not willing to attempt a one rep max totally cold and chose my body weight. I work out at home with a power cage and can get up and perform one set first thing after waking, well second thing after a trip to the john, and last thing before going to sleep. After a few windmills and posterior rotator cuff stretches, I was able to lift my body weight, 155 lbs., five times. There were probably a couple more reps in me, but I didn't want to push it. Using the formula below I get a cold one rep max of about 180 lbs. A little arithmetic tells me I would have to add .4 reps per day to reach 40 reps by day 84. This works out to an additional rep every two to three days. Using the standard regression formula (1 rep equals 100%, 2 reps equals 94.3%,3 reps equals 90.6%, the whole table can be seen here:
http://www.bodybuilding.com/fun/1rm.htm.) for estimating a one rep maximum from a given number of reps works well up to about 10 reps and can be extended with less accuracy to 20 reps. After 20 reps this formula starts to break down and at 40 reps it's useless. So in terms of increasing your one rep maximum it is difficult to calculate the increase from 5 to 40 reps. Assuming an acceptable level of accuracy, think ballpark, for the 20 rep estimate, benching 155 lbs. for 20 reps equals about a 255 lb. one rep max. If you're getting an additional rep every two to three days then you get to twenty reps in about 35 days. This is about a 40% increase in a little over a month. Rather than continue past 20 reps you can recalculate a 5 rep maximum and start on day 36 with that weight. In my case that would mean restarting on day 36 with 220 lbs. Assuming the same rate of progression you would reach 20 reps again on day 74, ten days shy of 12 weeks. It would be reasonable to expect marginal gains to diminish and the rate of progression to slow and it could take the extra ten days to get to 20 reps. Using the same formula, at the end of 84 days I would have a cold one rep max of 360 lbs, 220 lbs. at 20 reps or 220 * .606. This is a 200% increase in 12 weeks.
It Works... up to a point.
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