I have ended my 6 week cycle of the 100 rep challenge.  And one thing to say about it... a good workout, solid, methodical, and fresh.  How often do you go to the gym and bust of 100 of anything? Not as often as we probably should.  It not just builds a good kind of fitness, but also builds a discipline that can translate into future workouts.

One of the most forgotten aspects to working out is that the muscles love variety, it's good to throw something new at them, and not just the amount of reps, sets and weights; but also new movements, new routines and a new focus of different muscle groups.  Even for the most trained and tuned athlete to specific positions, they will often come across a "wall" that will keep them from dropping time or pushing more weight or going higher, which is why they follow very specific routines that change from time to time, and this gives them an ability to continue progression without any loss of performance.  It comes down to training enough to establish muscle memory, but not too much to overdo muscle programming, eventually muscles will become so used to certain movements and weights that they will become lazy and stop adapting for different movements and resistances.

Now, upon ending the 100 rep challenge, I now move on to something new.  I have been reading a lot about strength training and how to train for specific targets i.e. strength, size, power, speed, etc etc.  There's a lot of literature about how to train with weights and what exactly to do to gain in certain aspects of your game. I am kind of interested in What I have been reading about lifting for strength. Dr. Jim Stoppani has published thoughts on studies performed on Fast reps, and reps to failure. Supposedly, the idea here is that quick reps develop strength quicker than the accepted standard of lifting weight in the 1-5 rep range. On top of this, lifting to muscle failure recruits more muscle fibers, essentially enabling better muscle growth.  The articles dig down into the actual amount of Muscle protein synthesis taking place during specific workouts and the end results after so much time.  So, I am going to implement some of these things, and I am going to do them doing a variation of a workout done by Vernon Davis of the 49ers.  It's looks promising. A new week and a new workout to follow!