10 sets of 2 or 5 sets of 5?

[Matt Cricchio]

A bunch of us over here did the P-Menu Mass Gain program. Among other things we noticed that many people's max consecutive unweighted pull-ups went up. One guy went from 22 consecutive to 43.

This got me thinking. If I wanted to do some weighted pull-ups and dips once a week, upping 10lbs every two weeks, to increase my max consecutive unweighted reps in those movements should I do 10 sets of 2 or 5 sets of 5?

Or should I do something else all together?

I'm doing pyramids, tabatas, and max in 2:00 of pulling movements 4 days a week already. I'd think one time a week of weighted stuff would be effective but not limit recovery.

[Neal Winkler]

Strength is best developed in the freshest state possible, so more sets/less reps even when using the same weight. i.e. 245# for 10X2 is better than 245# for 5X4.

[Steve Shafley]

10x2 with corresponding loads would be the way I would lean towards that.

That's almost entirely devoted to increasing your weighted pull-up 1RM though. Having a huge 1RM in the chin was way more transferable to repetition chins, than the other way around.

[Allen Yeh]

Originally Posted by Matt Cricchio

A bunch of us over here did the P-Menu Mass Gain program. Among other things we noticed that many people's max consecutive unweighted pull-ups went up. One guy went from 22 consecutive to 43.

This got me thinking. If I wanted to do some weighted pull-ups and dips once a week, upping 10lbs every two weeks, to increase my max consecutive unweighted reps in those movements should I do 10 sets of 2 or 5 sets of 5?

Or should I do something else all together?

I'm doing pyramids, tabatas, and max in 2:00 of pulling movements 4 days a week already. I'd think one time a week of weighted stuff would be effective but not limit recovery.

I'd keep the reps between 2-3 as not to limit recovery. For a while I was doing weighted chins/dips 2-3x a week and following Robb's recommendation of 3-5 sets of 2-3 reps in his fighter prep article and I'd vary the rep scheme every time I did them.

[Steve Liberati]

or...

you could work on muscle ups and absolutely demolish your pr's for both pullups and dips.

[Matt Cricchio]

Thanks, guys.

I went with Shaf and did the 2X10.

What kind of rest are we talking here? How would you increase load?

I rested 3-5 minutes between the sets. It took me about an hour to do both pull-ups and dips. I'm only doing these one day a week so I was going to up the poundage by 10 every 2 weeks. Sound about right?

[Steven Low]

Last meso (6 weeks) I did:

weighted pullups from 50 -> 55 -> 70 -> 75 -> 85 -> 90 lbs

Made that progress with 4-6 sets of triples on one workout a week. Of course, I was doing other high intensity work on one arm pullup which helped A LOT.

If you were doing just weighted stuff I'd do 3x a week with a DUP type system where you modulate the reps probably 7,5,3 or 6,4,2 for m,w,f. The body seems to work best when you modulate the reps and not keep stuff constant... kinda like how a 2x heavy and 1x light can almost be better than 3 heavy workouts a lot of the time.

[Allen Yeh]

Originally Posted by Matt Cricchio

Thanks, guys.

I went with Shaf and did the 2X10.

What kind of rest are we talking here? How would you increase load?

I rested 3-5 minutes between the sets. It took me about an hour to do both pull-ups and dips. I'm only doing these one day a week so I was going to up the poundage by 10 every 2 weeks. Sound about right?

The way I was doing mine was taking minute rests between each exercise but I was alternating exercises.

one set pullups, rest 1 minute, one set dips, rest....etc

You'd be done in half the time.

[Mark Joseph Limbaga]

2x10.

The secret is to imporve performance and to manage your fatigue.