Last week I posted about my wife reaching her goal of doing 13 chin ups. As I mentioned, she was following a training  protocol from Clarence Bass.

In this approach you intentionally stay under your fatigue thresh hold, decreasing the intensity and increasing the quantity. Your body is able to recover more quickly, allowing more sets to be performed. More sets result in greater efficiency and synaptic facilitation.

Bass credits his friend Pavel Tsatsouline with the idea. His theory was the way to do more was to “grease the groove” by doing more. That’s a different approach for Bass who says he’s more of a low-volume, high-intensity guy. Just goes to show, there are many different effective ways to train.

Here’s how it looked for her:

Her goal was 13 chins so she did 3 sets of chins each day (morning, noon, and late afternoon). She did this Monday thru Friday.

Starting out, she did 8 reps for each set. On some days she would do a max set on the last set of the day. Soon she bumped those up to 10 reps.

In the strength training sessions of boot camp she limited herself to just the chins done in that class. During these classes she would also do some weighted chins or negative chins, otherwise she trained with body weight only.

It took Lisa 4 weeks to add that extra rep but since then she is almost at 14. Her next goal is 15!

Stay tuned.

Tags: chin ups, chins, chinups, clarence bass

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 13th, 2009 at 10:55 am and is filed under Rob Hudson. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.