Workout of The Week (#79)

6-12-15 Strength & Hypertrophy

The 6-12-25 method was something I first saw posted by Charles Poliquin. I was recently relistening to a podcast with Charles and thought this would be great to share in our weekly workout. Those familiar with poliquin training principles have seen that he likes a lot of agonist supersets. Tradtionally, people use supersets antagonistically by pairing a push and a pull movement for example. Agonist supersets on the other hand will involve using the same muscle group back to back.

Antagonist Superset

A1. Bench Press (Push)

A2. Chin Ups (Pull)

Agonist Superset

A1. Bench Press (Push)

A2. Pushups (Push)

In a previous post I discussed some mechanism of hypertrophy. 6-12-25 basically implements all aspects into a single giant set. The goal of the method is to hit something heavy, medium, and light. The heavy set is for strength and to recruit higher threshold motor units, the moderate/medium set is your traditional hypertrophy rep range that allows you to stimulate sufficient mechanical tension for growth, and the light set is for the metabolic response (“The Pump” Brah).

The 6-12-25 method is stressful, but you don’t need 20+ sets a day to get good results with it. I recommend only doing one 3 week cycle of 6-12-25 before moving into a different training cycle. You could hit two cycles back to back (6 weeks total) if you’re feeling good still, but I would then rotate exercises to avoid accomodation.

Parameters

3-5 sets, 3 exercises, 6 reps on the first, 12 reps on the second, 25 reps on the third. Perform 2-3 series of exercises per workout (Ex: A. Chest, B. Back)

Warning, the pump will be brutal.

The Workout

Start with a good warmup. If you don’t have a spotter, I recommend not using clips. With this training method the first set you do should be your heaviest. Your goal is to hit a 6 rep max, or as close as possible, every single set. The set of 12 should also be a challenge, there are no easy sets allowed. Unless of course you just hate results, then don’t use heavy weights ;)