If you’ve lifted with the goal of increased strength in the past, then you’ve likely hit a plateau. You’ve had some good gains, maybe even great, and your max has been sky rocketing to your pleasure. But now it’s stopped, and you need a new plan to smash through to even greater strength gains.
To start with, we’ll address a common myth about heavy singles, doubles, and high weight, low rep schemes in general. Many people associate this style of workout with a high chance for injury, which is understandable. If you go on any social media site you’ll see people struggling with a weight that is clearly too much for them to lift.
For some, they’ve heard tales of popped blood vessels, bloody noses, muscle tears, or other injuries coming from people lifting big and heavy weights. I’m not going to tell you that those particular cases have never happened, either, but the important thing to remember is that most of these people either used way more weight than they needed too, or they performed the rep with poor form. And because of that, I will say, if you’re not good with the form of big compound workouts like squats, bench, or deadlift, you’re probably not ready to move into a heavy single rep scheme.
I would even argue that when it comes to heavy singles, doubles, or even tripples that you’re more safe than when you’re knocking out a high rep workout with medium weight. If you know how to do the exercise properly, you remove the risk of flagging in the middle of the set and having your form break down in the first place.
What Are Heavy Singles
To start with, a heavy single is not your one rep max. A one rep max is the maximum amount of weight that you can lift for a single repetition for any given exercise. To avoid injury or over taxing your body, you should only do a one rep max every eight to twelve weeks. Not that one rep maxes are bad, as they’re a great way to measure your progress and boost your confidence.
A heavy single is a training method to assist in the development of technique, speed, and confidence. Singles are done at about 90% of an athlete’s one rep max. Training heavy singles is a great scheme to add to your program because of it’s ability to not only increase your proficiency in a lift, but in creating the mental and physical toughness gained from knowing you could grind out the heavy weights when you need to.
How to Incorporate and Perform Heavy Singles
If you’re new to lifting, like I’ve said before, you should probably start with something a bit less intense than these. Say, if you’ve been working with hypertrophy ranges of ten to twelve or higher, try something like five sets of five to start with. Starting Strength or Stronglifts are both good programs to start with.
But if you do have experience with heavy sets of three to five reps, you’re more than likely ready to try singles, but for the first workout you should likely do a little less than the normal 90% of max to start with until you get the hang of it.
For the heavy singles segment of your workout, make sure you ramp up to that ninety percent and not just start at it dry. You want to reach that number with about eight to ten sets, starting at about sixty percent of your max and working your way up. For that first set or so, though, I’d recommend using something like the barbell only or 135 for a few reps just to wake up and get prepared, physically and mentally.
For this workout to work optimally, make sure you’re combining heavy lifting, sufficient volume, and a density of work. The heavy segment was what I described above, and is usually the easy part of the workout. After that you need to work on the volume and density.
To do this, use a load between 70 and 85% of your one rep max, and try to do as many as you can with as little rest as possible between sets. You’re still only going to be working with one rep per set, but you’ll be doing things like performing thirty singles with eighty percent as quickly as you can, or as many singles as possible with eighty five percent within seven minutes.
Either one of these workouts can build size and mass by themselves, but doing both will help you break through your goals more quickly, and help you make your workouts as dynamic as possible using only singles.
