Sporadic Burst of Exercise

6o9fv7jpreb180

Working from home for the next few weeks and have set up a bit of a mix of a gym/office.

My question is this: would I get any benefit from doing 1 set of an exercise as an activity break e.g 10 reps on the bench press? I might do this every half hour or hour. Does the long break between sets make it pointless?

Thanks for any info

Infernal Racket

Lilah Fierce Revenue wrote: »

Working from home for the next few weeks and have set up a bit of a mix of a gym/office.

My question is this: would I get any benefit from doing 1 set of an exercise as an activity break e.g 10 reps on the bench press? I might do this every half hour or hour. Does the long break between sets make it pointless?

Thanks for any info

No to your first question amd yes to your second question.

Cill94

Guy above is incorrect. Anything is better than nothing, and can get stronger doing this. Many people have done it with pull-ups.

I would recommend you keep the weight very conservative as you won’t be getting a proper warm-up in. Best way to do this type of training is set daily minimums and try to raise those over time.

Also make sure you do plenty of rows to keep the shoulders healthy.

the baby bull elephant

Try it and find out, I'd say.

Theoretically it could allow you to add more volume and use higher volume more frequently. I know of someone who is work from home and has been training throughout the day for a few years. He has something like a 230kg bench and a 140kg strict press so it worked out for him!

As Cill says, at the very least it's better than nothing.

Alf Veedersane

Agree with the last 2.

As above, you could potentially accumulate more volume because you could get in more reps per set with longer breaks. The usual caveats apply on shoulder health and pulling exercises as per Cill's post.

rustynutz

Google Strongfirst, they encourages this type of training for strength gains. They have a couple of simple but effective training programs involving kettlebells and barbells

timeToLive

Lilah Fierce Revenue wrote: »

Working from home for the next few weeks and have set up a bit of a mix of a gym/office.

My question is this: would I get any benefit from doing 1 set of an exercise as an activity break e.g 10 reps on the bench press? I might do this every half hour or hour. Does the long break between sets make it pointless?

Thanks for any info

Have a look at the video on this page: https://www.artofmanliness.com/articles/get-stronger-by-greasing-the-groove/

Mellor

Infernal Racket wrote: »

No to your first question amd yes to your second question.

No idea what you are basing that on.


If the goal is burning calories: Spreading reps over the whole day burns the same energy in a short session.

Adding muscle: Would allow you to get out greater volume per day. WVolume is a large driver of growth.

Getting stronger: Large breaks between sets will allow max recovery, and greater effort. This will see most neurological adaption for strength. However, is gaps are too big, you'll lose the benefit of the warm up sets. Probably less conducive to pure strength unless rest limited something reasonable.

warbird

100% Yes to the first idea. Serious benefits. Google 'greasing-the-groove'

Black Sheep

In classic 'grease the groove' you are never close to failure. The overall intensity is low in that sense.

I agree with Mellor that a lot of the adaptation that occurs, allowing you to perform better, is likely down to an increased efficiency that comes with having a lot of practice at the movement in question while 'fresh'. Although people associate 'grease the groove' with better pull-up numbers it also works well with other high skill movements like pistol squats, for example, for this reason.

Obviously what does occur is your overall volume goes up as the movement becomes easier, and when I did 'grease the grove' with pull-ups for several weeks my numbers on both movements went through the roof, hundreds of reps a day.

Johnny Sheaffer (Greyskull LP) who advocates for continuous daily "layering" of bodyweight and who says he was advocating for this a few years before Pavel, does say it can yield physique benefits but he's clear that you need to accumulate pretty serious volume for that to occur. Worth going back to the lack of intensity mentioned when considering this... There's no proximity to failure going on, the way a lot of hypertrophy protocols involve.

My last comment is that Pavel talked about 'grease the groove' as a protocol to get things like pull ups up for a few weeks. He didn't see it as an open-ended thing you keep doing for months I don't think. Johnny Sheaffer does. I would say keep an eye out for overuse, monitor how your shoulders and elbows feel.

Maybe worth considering another high frequency, low volume, low intensity programme that might fit the OP's home set up.

What about another Pavel inspired program, the 40 day workout? https://www.elitefts.com/education/training/powerlifting/my-experience-with-dan-johns-40-day-workout-plan/

In some ways there are a lot of similarities to 'grease the groove'. You're using submaximal effort weights and never going to failure, you're doing quite low numbers of sets, but you're (hopefully) getting stronger due to getting frequent practice in and staying very well recovered all the time...