Prolonging the Effectiveness of 10-8-6-15
"I read your Ectomorph Training article on Bodybuilding.com and had a few questions I wanted to ask you regarding what you wrote. I hope you don’t mind answering these questions for me. I’m quite new to bodybuilding and consider myself an ectomorph, I’m tall (6 feet, 2 inches) and weigh about 75kgs which I think is around 165lbs. I have worked out previously but have always struggled to really notice much of a gain in muscle size. But I found your article very interesting, because what you described about ectomorphs needing a low set workout, with long rest periods made a lot of sense to me. Sometimes I think my previous workouts may have been too demanding and involved (especially for beginner workouts), and I was spending too much time running around the gym doing different exercises instead of concentrating on a few solid compound movements. Anyway here are the questions:
1) How long should someone relatively new to bodybuilding follow the program you have outlined in your article? I’m thinking at least 3-6 months, or is that to long?
2) What kind of weights should be used for the pyramid rep range of 10-8-6-15? I’m thinking that the first set is relatively heavy, with the second and third set where you really hit the heavy weights hard and then drop it back for the final set of 15. Can you please clarify this for me?
3) Are there any additional exercises that should be thrown into the workout in your article to change things up a bit, or is everything written there sufficient to continue growing for the entire length of the program?
“I personally would love to give your workout a shot and continue doing it for as long as it is going to continue being effective. It sounds like a great program! I am also about to purchase your book on Amazon.com and hope that your book will contain further answers in my quest to building a bigger/stronger body.”
Thanks,
Sven
My Answer: Well Sven, if you’re new to bodybuilding, then give the Hypertrophy Training for Ectomorphs program a try for 4-6 weeks at most. Three to six months would be way too long, and you would stagnate within the first 2 months. Newbies can stay with a given program a lot longer than older lifters and still make progress. But 3-6 months would be way too long, even for a newbie.
To extend the effectiveness of this program for an extended period of time, you can rotate your exercises for each body part. So you can change the exercises from workout to workout, as long as you stick with just 4 sets of one exercise for each muscle group. This will add some variety to the program without overburdening your nervous system with too many exercises.
With regards to the amount of weight used for each set, you’ll have to find out when you lift. Choose a weight that you think you can perform 10 reps with. If you can do ten or more for the first set, then add some more weight to hit the next set’s target: 8 reps. Just add or subtract weight to hit the target rep for whatever set you’re performing.
