You're probably training to light

One-Off

Tom Curren status
Jul 28, 2005
14,128
10,249
113
33.8N - 118.4W
I know I am but it was Doctor's orders due to cardiac condition. While this is true, I use it as an excuse, whereas I didn't really listen to his orders with regards to running. "Don't run the marathon ," he said. I went ahead and did it anyways.

What I've been doing is 3-4 warm up sets, 5 reps, with increasing weight, until I get to my working set which I usually do 3 sets of 5, and slowly over months work my way up to 3 sets of ten before increasing weight. Then I do back off sets, same weights as my warm ups, but I do them to near failure (bad, wobbling form). The last few reps with the empty bar (overhead press), trying to get to 20, feels much harder than the 3x5 at 95.

I have no idea what I'm doing. A shitload of volume I guess.

I'm on the "something is better than nothing" program.
 

freeride76

Michael Peterson status
Dec 31, 2009
3,336
4,144
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Lennox Head.
'I really think that the median lifter just doesn’t put that much effort into their training. Or, they may overestimate how much effort they’re exerting (a phenomenon that’s also been observed with aerobic exercise; 7). Either way, I think a lot of folks pick some of the low-hanging fruit that’s available to new lifters – some hypertrophy and some strength gains that don’t require very much effort to achieve – and then don’t progress much past that point, because they never start exerting sufficient effort to make more progress.

To be clear, I certainly don’t think the previous paragraph describes all lifters, and I also don’t mean it in a judgemental way. Achieving a ton of hypertrophy and maximizing strength gains requires a high degree of effort, but you probably don’t need to train that hard for general health benefits, for the psychological and mood-related benefits of resistance training, or for positive effects on bone health – I’m not going to tell anyone they’re wrong for training the way they want to train. But, with that said, I strongly suspect a lot of the people who are trying to maximize hypertrophy or strength gains aren’t training with a sufficient level of effort for their goals (i.e., they’re selecting loads that are too light to maximize strength gains, and/or they’re training too far from failure to maximize muscle growth).

Although I’ve consistently argued that you don’t need to train to failure to maximize hypertrophy, findings like those observed in the present meta-analysis (and plenty of practical experience) still lead me to believe that training to failure may be more advisable than the scientific literature would suggest. In a vacuum, it looks like a fool’s bargain: training to failure probably doesn’t lead to more growth on a per-set basis than stopping 2-3 reps shy of failure, but it causes more fatigue, and comes with a higher recovery burden. But, training to failure does have one major thing going for it: training to failure ensures you are putting enough effort into each set to attain a robust hypertrophy stimulus."