Mr. America Doug Brignole’s Training, Part 11

Doug found higher reps to be much more productive than lower reps, as you’ve seen from his 3-set approach: 30, 20, 12 reps.

This runs counter to much of what hypertrophy researcher Chris Beardsley recommends. Doug’s observations were about himself after decades of training experience, not a blanket recommendation for everyone:

The real key [to accelerating my gains] was reducing the sets and increasing the frequency. But it also helped that I stopped trying to use super-heavy weight for sets of 6 or 8 reps. I’ve found that 10 reps seems to be the lowest number that actually stimulates muscle growth for me. But really between 15 and 20 reps per set is best, at least for me.

Doug says he is more of a thin ectomorph type. I am even more in that camp, with dental floss prevalent in my family tree…

Which makes it interesting that I too find higher reps more productive at stimulating hypertrophy. My former training partner at Iron Man magazine, Jonathan Lawson, was more of a muscular mesomorph with endomorph tendencies. He disliked higher reps, but did them with me to avoid a beating (kidding)…

You can see his thickness contrasted with my more rail-like tendencies above. And we’re not on any drugs whatsoever and trained exactly the same…

In a 2005 study in the European Journal of Applied Physiology (Colakoglu, M., et al. 95(1):20-26), researchers found that subjects who had the ACE-2 variant, or endurance gene (skinny), responded best to training using 12 to 15 reps. When those subjects used heavier weight that limited their reps to around eight, they showed close to zero gains…

On the other hand, subjects who were more anaerobic with the ACE-DD variant (more muscularly inclined), showed similar gains from both types of loads; however, they made slightly better gains from heavier lower-rep training.

Could there be a fiber-type/nervous-system correlation in why this is so?…

Perhaps trainees with more fast-twitch fibers (mesomorphs like Jonathan) can grind out more reps on heavier lower-rep set…

And maybe those with an even mix of fiber types (like Doug) or those who lean more slow-twitch (like me) need higher reps to get to the high-end motor units via a more complete fiber cascade:

Type-1 (endurance) —> 2a (endurance/power) —> 2b (power)

Lower-rep sets get to the 2b fibers quickly without that extended fiber-array cascade….

Or perhaps fiber type has nothing to do with it. It could simply be a case of nervous system proficiency vs. deficiency—I would be more in the deficient category.

Again, this is just me spit-balling, but it may have application to your experimentation in the gym.

In the next training newsletter, I’ll have some random thoughts from Doug plucked from his correspondence with me over the last year before his passing.

Till next time, train hard—and smart—for BIG results.