ORIGINAL: muley69
Weight Training is for building muscle mass. To build muscle mass most effectively, you need to go heavy. You need that muscle to fail.
Right on, I'm a high weight, low rep lifter myself. My reps look about like this 1x15 warm up, 1x10, 1x7, 3x3, max lift. Since I work out at home and don't have a partner I am unwilling to do a 1 rep max lift do to safety reasons. Spyro, heres my problem, on abs I was doing a decline bench situp routine with a 50 lb plate on my chest, I got to 80 situps and thats just getting redundant, so I switched to crunches and same thing, it require too many to be effective, do you have a solid ab workout routine that doesn't take so long and so many reps? After awhile I start to question the effectiveness of doing 80 reps. Thanks.
I do cardio at home but my lifting at the gym... Much easier to do failure sets that way
As far as ABs go, the ones that I have always concentrated on were...
Weighted Crunches
Weighted Sit-ups
Weighted incline Sit-ups
Just like every other part... ABs are done once a week...
Your problem is that you are using a plate on your chest... to avoid the very problem that you are having, IMO, the low pulley is the best aparatus to use since you can add enough weight to keep the reps under 12 per set. Every week, increase the weight from 5% to 15%.
Otherwise, you are going to have to increase the weight, in plates, on your chest... holding a stack of plates becomes pretty tough...