Power Factor Training is a pretty good idea.  Initially, I planned to build upon their equation utilizing a percentage of a one repetition maximum to calculate an adjusted total workload on an exercise thatd look like this:  %1RM x (Total Poundage/Time taken to lift it).  I know, that’s a pretty fucking cool idea, and would be an awesome method to track progress.  I abandoned it, however as it’s unnecessarily complex, essentially useless inside the gym, and I’m an angry, over-educated weightlifter who vastly prefers screaming death metal and violently lifting huge weights in a cloud of chalk dust rather than a spectacled goofball busily scrawling figures, double-entry accounting style, into a lab notebook.  That shit, my friends,  is not my fucking style, in spite of my overbearing erudition and general amazingness.

Fuck.  That.  Shit.

In any event, Sisco and Little, the authors of Power Factor Training, had a pretty fucking cool idea that made sense- it’s not just the total volume of weight you lift, but the amount of weight you lift in a given amount of time that determines total volume.  Additionally, they championed the idea that a full range of motion wasn’t necessary to achieve maximal hypertrophy, as the lifter would be limited by the weakest point in their range of motion, and would thus have their gains retarded by the fact that they have to train with comparatively light weights to “get the full benefit of the exercise”.  This premise, my friends, is where retards really jump on board, due to the fact that they feel justified in doing comically tiny ranges of motion for thousands of reps on machines.  I’ve already stated that I think that shit like deadlift and squat partials are awesome, but that’s because they’re systemic exercises, rather than localized bullshit like the leg press.  These exercises accomplish a great deal, as the stress they place on your body strengthens tendons, jacks up your GH and test, and prepares your CNS to handle much heavier workloads, as I’ve explained here.  Other than fraying your acls, however, the leg press accomplishes two things- jack and shit, and Jack just left town.  That, however, is hardly an impediment to these fucking asshats milling about half the gyms in America, and one of those asshats lifted at my old gym.

“Training to failure in your strongest range of motion with much heavier weights is a lot more intense and demanding than training to failure in your weakest range of motion”(8)  He could not have misinterpreted that statement more ridiculously than he did.

The idea of judging a worout or workload in pounds per minute is cool as shit on it’s face- if I had an assistant with a stopwatch and a notebook, furiously recording everything I did, I might try this method.  As I don’t, however, I’m not getting involved in this tomfoolery.  For those of you who are curious as to how it’s done, you record shit thusly:

Then, you divide your total workload for a given exercise by the time it took you to get it, and you get your Power Factor, which is poundage lifted per minute.  According to Sisco and Little, this is a failsafe methodology for determining the efficacy of your workload, and the ideal number sets and reps scheme for any given person, through trial and error.  Thus, once you’ve tested out certain poundages with a variety of rep schemes, you come up with something like this:

To me, this seems like a tremendous fucking waste of time, unless you conducted it solely on major exercises like the big three powerlifts, and then applied what you gleaned from those exercises to every other lift you did.  Would it be a failsafe method?  Probably not, but for people who spend far too much time obsessing about programming rather than actually doing what they fucking enjoy in the gym, this might be a good idea.  If you, however, find yourself enjoying the shit out of leg presses with a two inch range of motion and don’t have the musculature to justify it, methinks you’ve taken a good idea and made it go horribly, horribly wrong.  This can happen with any training style, lift, or frankly anything you do in your life, and we’ve all seen the results- the chicks who wear more makeup than an LA prostitute; the guys who drown themselves in Axe bodyspray because it smells better than their ass; people who eat ten fucking bags of those dumbass 100 calorie snacks at a time… the list is endless.

In short- don’t be that fucking guy.  If you stumble upon something good, don’t fuck it up and make yourself and the progenitor of that idea look like assholes.  By the same token, keep trying new shit, fucking get educated about what you’re doing, and bust your fucking ass to get better at everything.

Source:
Power Factor Training : A Scientific Approach to Building Lean Muscle MassSisco, P. and Little, J.  Power Factor Training.

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