For the past 26 weeks I’ve gone through the MaxCapacity program 2 times (2 * 12 weeks + 2 weeks rest time between), and I can tell you that the program is all but easy. I really like it, but no matter what others say – I don’t recommend it for beginners (I did, and it didn’t work out so well). So, if you can’t do like 10 pushups straight, there’s really no sense in trying this workout as it will leave you disappointed.
The app (Android and iOS) is free to download, so this is a review in a way to say thanks to the author Samy Peyret (you can support him by buying his book on Amazon).
So, the main breakdown is pretty simple; you have to exercise only for 16 minutes, 3 times a week for 12 weeks. Honestly, if you don’t have 16 minutes for exercise, then something is seriously wrong, but that’s another topic… Exercises are very well planned and they grow in toughness as the weeks go by. Main idea is that in 3 weeks you do the same set of 4 different exercises on Monday, a different set of 4 exercise on Wednesday and a different set of 4 exercise on Friday. You rest on Saturday and Sunday.
First week is a 50/10 regime, meaning that you are doing the exercise for 50 seconds and then you rest for 10 seconds – you should log your best (usually the first set) score. Second week is a tabata (20/10) regime, and here you should log your weakest score (usually one of the last sets – here you have 8 sets since the exercise is only 20 seconds long). The twist comes in the third week where you have to beat the time and do the calculated amount of repetitions ([max 1st week score + min 2nd week score] * 3) as fast as you can – and if you can do it below 16 minutes, you Rock.
I logged each and every set (you can download the full excel file: MaxCapacityTrainingLog), and as you can see it turns out that the second time I got to do the exercises, I did them with a whopping 24.32% increase in number of repetitions, so yeah – it works in only 16 minutes 3/week! The 24% increase is the average of all the exercises, some of course vary as you can see in the aforementioned excel file. The biggest advancement I noticed was with the diamond pushups, where I did a 150% increase in number of repetitions for the max count, and 135% in total sum!
So, to sum up – very much thanks to the author for making this a free resource. If you like it, you can support him by buying his book on Amazon.
An example of the first week the first time I went through the program compared to the second time I went through it:
Monday
[table id=1 /]
Wednesday
[table id=2 /]
Friday
[table id=3 /]
Give it a try and hit me back with your numbers and let me know what you think!
App idea alert!: Maybe a good idea would be to make a repository of scores so that one could see where he stacks up between others!?