What are people's thoughts on the best approach for combining strength and hypertrophy training into one workout plan? I'm doing a six day PPL split that involves starting each workout with a compound lift (bench and OHP on push day, deadlift on pull day and squat on leg day), then moving onto more hypertrophy-focused work, but I'm finding that I'm taking a lot out of myself with the initial compound lift and although I've seen some decent strength and size gains I'm wondering whether it would be better to split my workouts so that one focuses solely on strength and the other on hypertrophy. For example, my first push workout of the week would be low rep, high weight for every exercise (5x3-5), then the second push workout of the week would focus on higher reps at a lower weight (something like 3x10-15).
Has anyone tried both of the above approaches and found one works better than the other?
The stimuli are different and will also depend on your training history: if you go in hard for one, you will see faster progress than if your trying for both (in very general terms)... howevevr, the biggest bodybuilders are also very strong, and the strongest power/weightlifters are also pretty big.
For strength training, you're trying to get your nervous system to increase its central drive, and then cope with those monstrous impulses as they are carried to and then hit your muscles - low reps at relatively high intensity (80% and above). Hypertrophy is a different kettle of fish as the objective is to create as much oxidative and mechanical damage as possible (so relatively low intensity - around 50-70% depending) and an absolute shedload of reps without proper rest periods (60 seconds tops).
I also don't know your training regime, so it's difficult to tell...
Practically - for most lifters - we overthink things and then over-reach: the simple fact of your "taking a lot out of yourself" problem is that your confusing your training stimuli:
1) You are going too heavy with your hypertrophy rep ranges and doing too much intense volume
2) You are going too heavy with your compound lifts and doing too much intense volume...
See a pattern?
If you want to get huge and strong, you can either:
a) Periodise your training (3 strength weeks followed by 1 or 2 of hypertrophy)
b) Reduce the number of strength reps, or the weights being moved for the hypertophy (but keeping the reps high).
I have a similar (ish) regime (when I'm training... which isn't at the moment), where I have a heavy compound for a few reps (around 15 total), followed by genuinely unpleasant high-rep/low rest hypertrophy work. I'm not as strong as I once was, but it keeps me entertained (bear in mind I used to train betwee 5-7 times a week - sometimes twice a day).
There was someone else who said they did something in 30mins i think though.
