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    Registered User Pops1085's Avatar
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    Working towards my CSCS, help me understand part of my textbook?

    Hi all, so I am having some trouble right understanding a particular part of my textbook and was wondering if somebody could help explain why you would do this. I don't have a professor or colleges to ask as I am learning on my own with the hopes of passing the certification exam, landing an internship, and using that internship to hopefully land a job.
    Anyways the book I'm reading is NSCA's Essentials of Strength Training and Conditioning 4th ed.

    I'm currently trying to understand periodization, and when looking at the example program they give, on certain mesocycles they will assign a load like, "80% 4RM" which is confusing. I feel like they didn't talk about this at all in the textbook. Do they mean that you should be doing 80% of 90% (a 4RM is ~90% of a 1RM)? Because wouldn't that just be 72% of the 1RM? Why would you work at that low of a an intensity for that amount of repetitions? And why not just write it as a percentage of a 1 Rep max?

    Here is a picture of both pages for those curious.

    https://imgur.com/4C0dFRx
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  2. #2
    husband, father, trainer KyleAaron's Avatar
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    X% of YRM will be as you say.

    You would express it as a percentage of a rep-maximum other than 1 for the simple reason that that's the workout through a week. For example, there may be a day of a single heavy set of 5, effectively a 5RM, and then another day of 60% and another day of 80% of that. So you can then quickly do the calculations of load for each workout.

    With X-rep maxima, as X rises, its repeatability and reliability as a measure increases. 1RM can be strongly affected by technique, sleep the night before, nutrition of the day, mood and so on. This is seen in powerlifting or weightlifting meets where people commonly put up third attempts higher than anything they've ever done before, or else fail lifts they've easily made in the gym. And 1RM is even less reliable with a less-experienced lifter, because technique isn't as polished, they're not as used to the grind, etc. So a newbie may have a 1RM performance +/-10% depending on the day, while an experienced lifter manages +/-5%.

    2RMs and higher will be progressively more reliable and repeatable, since over several reps the variations in technique etc tend to even out.

    As well, while a newbie's 1RM is unreliable, a more experienced lifter's 1RM will be reliable - but take a lot out of them, because it's more load. Squatting 100kg once is a different experience to squatting 200kg once, let alone 300kg. So while the 1RM of the experienced lifter is more reliable, you still wouldn't test it often because it'll take too much out of them, and they won't be able to repeat it for a month or two.

    They have 8RM for biceps curl because trying a 1RM would be abominably stupid, you'd just get bicep tendon tears and the like.

    In your example from the book, they have 1RM for power clean and hang snatch because testing 1RM in the quick lifts doesn't take much out of you. On the other hand, because the quick lifts are more technique-intensive, the 1RM measure will be completely unreliable for the newbie. In this case it's just an example of the fact that the people who write books about training tend not to actually train anyone, so they tend to miss basic things. Which is why they have a 4RM forward step lunge. How do you test a rep maximum for forward step lunge? What happens when they fail a rep? In a squat they just dump the bar on the safeties, in a forward step lunge they'd fall over.

    As with most textbooks, you have a mixture of things that make sense, and things that are just fcking stupid and nobody competent who actually trains people would do them. You figure out what they want to hear and tell them that, they pass you, and then you go and do whatever you want.
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