The fundamental building block of your weight training

What would you consider the fundamental building block ? 
What would you answer if I asked you what is the most fundamental building block of your weight training sessions ? A set ? Weights ? Time under tension ? Intensity ?
   

The answer

I (now) would answer a rep (and of course something to perform the rep with ;-) I will explain why in this blog post and tell you how I got there... 

Stumbling upon and thinking about the prefect rep

I am always busy with new training variations and optimizing my nutrion. So while surfing in the "information sea" searching for the latest data about training and nutrition I bumped into the following info about weight training (you don't have to read them completely, I will summarize them later):  

1. The Shockwave protocol
2. The perfect rep

These articles made me think how I performed my reps. While I am always striving for perfect form every rep I did surely was not a max effort as described in these articles. I wouild consider only the last reps on the last sets on a good day as a so called 'max effort'. Wouldn't it be great if You could make every rep that max effort ? This would mean training shorter, less stress on the central nervous system and faster recovery.

My own perfect rep
So, how would my own perfect rep look like ? It would be something like this : 

1. explosive concentric phase to recruit as much muscle fiber as possible 
2. sqeese the muscle as hard as I can at the most contracted position to shape the muscle
3. slow eccentric phase to create muscle fiber micro damage and metabolic stress
4. and explode again...

Trying it out

So I decided to give it a shot and applied this method for about 2 weeks for 8 training sessions. Man that was brutal. I applied it also in my warmups. After 5 minutes I was huffing and puffing allready. 

I noticed the following things : 

1. Slight headache form the explosive concentric phase
2. I started getting leaner
3. I started gettting stronger
4. I broke my plateaus on almost every lift
5. Recovery seemed to go faster

The conclusion

It sure is worth a try to perform your reps this way. I made good progress with it. The headache was annoying. Maybe I did to many reps (6 - 10)  this way. I am gonna cycle it in my workouts again but then I will perform 3 - 5 reps with twice the amount of sets.