[Scott Johnston]

Mairsile:

Thanks for writing in with your questions. Welcome to EE and I am sorry for your confusion.  Both those workouts have been around for over 10 years and have gone through several revisions. You may be looking at versions that were made at different times.  So there are several versions floating around and it is likely that this was a copy and paste error.

If you can send me links to where you have found these I will be sure we bring them into agreement so others are not confused.  Please email me at Scott@evokeendurance.com.

But to answer your questions;

1) So which is it with exercises like that? Should I be just holding it for 10 seconds and making it harder until that’s all I can do? Should it be 5-6 seconds? Or should it just be however long I can hold it, even if that means minutes? 

As the instruction says, to build strength you need to have enough resistance that you can only do 5 reps or hold for 5 seconds (there is disagreement on this for isometrics and some people will say 10 seconds). But the point is you must not be able to hold this position for “minutes” or do 20 reps or you will be building endurance.  The core muscles are mainly made up of slow twitch fibers so they already have a lot of endurance.  So, training them for strength is more important. And we do this with low reps and high resistance.  In the 3Point description, the point I was making is the same for any of these core exercises.  When your form breaks down you have achieved the strength training effect.  Ideally, you will have enough load/resistance that this happens someplace around 5 reps or 5 seconds.  Realize that doing exactly 5 seconds or 5 reps is not some magic number.  If the load is high enough maybe you can only hold for 3 seconds.  That is still going to give the desired strength training effect.  

2) For the General Strength exercises: These are meant as conditioning. They are to prepare you for the heavy loads in the Max Strength phase.  These are “General” in nature so they challenge the range of motion and to condition the tissues to loading that they might not otherwise be able to handle.  As these are conditioning exercises, I recommend doing 10 reps and if the exercise is single leg like the box step up do 10 reps/side.

My apologies for the confusion and please do let me know where you found these documents so I can correct them.

Scott