Great post as always.

Just got done reading Sahrmann’s Diagnosis and Treatment of Movement Impairment Syndromes” and I am about to dig in to Gray’s new book.

My question for you in terms of regarding is how you allocate study time. For example, do you concentrate on one book until it is complete or move between several?

I try to alternate periods of relatively heavy reading (see above) with a week or two of articles, blogs, webinars, etc before returning to another concentrated topic.

I would be interested to learn more about your research/study process. Thanks again for the great stuff and I look forward to learning more from you.

Best,

Chris

Rock on
Mike T Nelson PhD(c)

I have to wonder if the training age of the folks in that study and the relatively brief time-period examined (not that a training-related study would be able to continue indefinitely as it is) impact upon the results.

In beginners and early intermediates, it is generally accepted that anything will tend to work quite well, be it for strength or hypertrophy, for a time provided it is not entirely asinine. And as training age increases, longer rests for various goals, including hypertrophy, may be needed…….or perhaps, more precisely, would be employed anyway in order to further enhance strength and increase hypertrophy potential from future training efforts with other parameters. But then again, I suppose most trainees will gravitate toward performing a blend of work starting with a primary movement with longer rest and moving along toward more structural and metabolic work with shorter rests, so perhaps it is a moot point anyway, doubly so for when people use antagonist pairings to increase training density and decrease overall session time.

At the end of the day, I guess we’ll always come back to tailoring the rest periods to what the given client needs to maintain an optimal level of performance. On any given day we may need a bit more or a bit less, but no one-size-fits-all prescription will necessarily be the “right” one.

With all the complex and interacting factors involved, I am hardly smart enough to draw any accurate conclusions myself, but thank you for sharing the link to that. I always enjoy reading stuff from those much smarter than me and then trying to piece together where it all fits into the overall scheme of things.