"Backoff" sets and muscle hypertrophy and strength gains.

I read this very interesting article about some research that was done testing different approaches to strength training and hypertrophy. For people who don't know what I'm talking about, think of it this way - There are two ways to "grow" muscle. One is through "strength" - basic lifting and force exertion. The other way is through "hypertrophy" basically, just making the muscle "larger" (more fibers).

Now that may seem counter intuitive because many people will go, "But wait dude... doesn't bigger muscles mean more strength anyway?" and while yes, that's true, the take away is that if you focus on just building strength you can get stronger without getting "huge muscles". Think of it as a difference in the density and quantity of muscle fibers in your body.

Anyway, I am doing a strength training program for fitness. I am absolutely growing muscle during this period of time and getting stronger, but it's not hypertrophic muscle development. I am doing a "powerlifting" workout (a basic one, but one nonetheless) and not a "body building" workout.

The article that I linked to at the top of this post goes into some detail about combining strength exercises (high load, 80-90% of your max) with a hypertrophic load (50% of your max until failure) and the results are actually somewhat surprising.

It seems if you introduce what people are calling a "backoff set", basically 50% load of your 1RM at the end of your normal 80-90% load and then do that for high reps (or until failure) you gain not only muscle size, but also increase the rate at which you gain strength.

From the reading I've done it seems that the effect favors mostly developing strength faster with some additional increase in muscle size, or perhaps maintaining muscle size for guys with already hypertrophic muscles. For me, it'd be the former.

I'm interested in this because not only would I like to get stronger as well as develop my muscle size faster, the extra repetitions could be a fantastic way to burn more calories (I'm still trying to lose fat after all!)

So for my next workout this Friday, I'm going to aim to do about 60% of my normal 5x5 (assuming that's already at 80% ish) with an aim at a single set of 30 reps at the end of every normal exercise. This will effectively double the amount of reps I am doing per workout, but I think that after 5 weeks of training my body is probably in good enough shape to handle it.

We'll see how it goes!