Quality Volume Work on High Incline Presses

Not exactly. There is no rule in terms of reps. It is much more a "reactive" based thing than a prescription of sets and reps.

It's much like doing staged sets or something but taking the prearranged number of reps out of it. It may end up looking like that above but it doesn't have to.

Essentially it is a way of getting a whole lot of volume at a high percentage of max without sacrificing quality. So you wanna stick to trying 3 reps if you feel good about it but 2 reps or 1 reps are fair game. On paper it will end up "looking" like a great many things that it is not. Like clusters, or staged sets, or density training, etc..

Rest periods would be a short as possible while maintaining quality and as long as needed. So like you start with a goal of 3 reps and down to 1 as a possibility, you'd start with a shortish rest period of 2.5 to 3 minutes and up to 5 or more..

You are not watching the clock so much as being somewhat aware of it, lol.

This is not something that has been written out and analysed in great detail and that is the point. You wouldn't write anything down until you've done it.

I think if you look through the "records" Anuj, you may find my original descriptions? They go into a bunch of detail. It's very effective for sure.

Rather than something like that above you could very likely end up with something like:

155x3
155x1
165x3
175x2
177.5x3
185x3
185x1
190x3

etc..Microloading is encouraged. The reason you would choose to do 1 rep would be based on the quality and speed of that rep. Say you started with the 155 and it was a bit harder than you thought. Quality was good but questionable for that weight. So you have a long rest and try 155 again finding it a breeze. No use in wasting yourself for more reps.

So you put it down and take a good rest and load up again. You continue reacting in this basic way throught. So you find yourself acclimating or what have you..

Kane, I know you're familiar with the basic idea here. But in this case you are not looking at any sort of max or any sort of round about percentage. You take your sweet time and go as far as you can in whatever step-wise manner necessary as far as you can go.

So "quality" means here quality of movement and HEAVY. We're not looking for crowded sets. Just sheer numbers at as high an intensity as possible. The nature of it is going to keep the intensity maneagle of course..i.e. go for 3 reps and the open-ended nature of it is going to allow you to get as heavy ass possible instead of just counting reps and sets. What you get is a way to build up a surprisingly large amount of volume at a high percentage. Don't expect to set new pr's based on this. This is practice time. Being that I usually reserve this for something I haven't done in a while a lot of apparent strength will tend to be garnered.

In other words if I haven't done overhead press in a minute then I might feel I need some "quality time under the bar". So I'd use this "quality volume" method a couple times and when I went heavy after that I'll do much better from having that honeymoon period.