Simple enough, but here’s a key question: How difficult are these hard sets supposed to be?
If you want to get the most out of double progression, you want to end each of your hard sets one or two reps shy of technical failure, which again, is the point where you can’t do another rep with proper form.
In other words, you want your hard sets to be pretty dang hard.
Why not go to absolute muscle failure? Mostly because it’s not necessary for muscle and strength gain and often leads to a breakdown in form, which increases the risk of injury.13
As our muscles become fatigued, we lose the ability to accurately feel what we’re doing with our bodies and can think we’re maintaining good form when we’re not.14
This is especially true in the case of compound exercises like the deadlift, squat, and bench press, which require more technical skill than simpler isolation exercises.
We’ll talk about progression in more detail in chapter 29 and learn what to do if you don’t get your four reps after moving up in weight or run into other snags.
The Right Rep Tempo
“Rep tempo” refers to how quickly you lower and raise the weights, and there are two basic schools of thought on it:
You should perform reps fairly quickly.
You should perform reps fairly slowly.
People who advocate for a slow tempo often say that “muscles don’t know weight, only tension,” and the more tension they’re subjected to, the more they’ll grow in response.
Furthermore, by slowing your reps down, you increase the amount of time your muscles remain under tension, and this, they claim, produces more muscle gain than faster reps.
While it’s true that slow reps do indeed increase time under tension, it turns out that this isn’t important enough to warrant special attention.
The primary reason for this is that the slower you perform an exercise with a given weight, the fewer reps you can do with it.15 Depending on how slow your tempo is, you might get half the reps or even fewer than you would at a faster tempo.
This is important because, as we’ve noted earlier in this book, the total reps performed with a given muscle group over time is a major factor in muscle gain.16
Some people would say that super-slow training compensates for the reduction in reps by increasing the difficulty of the reps you do perform.
While slow reps do feel more difficult than normal ones, research shows that they result in less work done, which reduces the muscle- and strength-building potential of the exercise.17
Slow-rep training has also been directly put to the test in a number of studies, which show that it produces inferior results compared to normal tempo training. For instance:
A study conducted by scientists at the University of Sydney found that people following traditional “fast” training on the bench press gained more strength than with slow training.18
A study conducted by scientists at the University of Wisconsin found that even in untrained people, a traditional training tempo resulted in greater strength gains in the squat.19
A study conducted by scientists at the University of Oklahoma found that four weeks of traditional resistance training was more effective for increasing strength than slow-training.20
Therefore, I recommend that you follow the traditional “1–1–1” rep tempo for all weightlifting exercises.
This means the first part of each rep (either the eccentric, or lengthening phase, or in some cases, the concentric, or contraction phase) should take about one second, followed by a one-second (or shorter) pause, followed by the final part of the rep, which should also take about one second.
For example, if we apply this to the squat, it would mean sitting to the proper depth in about one second, pausing for a moment, and standing up quickly.
How to Warm Up for Your Workouts
What many people do to warm up for their resistance training workouts is rather pointless.
You know, 20 minutes on the treadmill, followed by stretching; rubber-banded twisting, hopping, and bending; and so forth.
There are much more productive ways to warm up, and that’s what we’re going to talk about here.
Most people think that you warm up to make sure your muscles don’t tear when you work out. By raising the temperature of your muscle tissue, it should be less injury prone, right?
Animal studies have suggested this is true.21 When rabbits’ muscles and tendons are warmer, for example, they can handle more force before they tear.
We’re not big rabbits, though, which is why animal research can’t be applied directly to humans.
When you work out, your body isn’t whistling Dixie while you load it with heavier and heavier weights until it breaks. It has a complex system to manage how its muscles contract, and it involves a lot more than muscle temperature.
In other words, we don’t know if warming up our muscle tissue before loading it actually makes it more resistant to injury.22
Some studies indicate that it does, while others suggest otherwise. When viewed as a whole, there seems to be a slight trend toward the former findings, but it’s insignificant in the bigger picture.
That doesn’t mean that warming up can’t decrease your risk of injury, though. While warming up properly may not help prevent an acute injury to muscle fibers, it absolutely can help prevent injury on the whole.
The reason for this is simple: it helps you improve your technique. If you’ve ever done any heavy compound weightlifting, you know how hard it can be to maintain proper form as you approach technical failure.
You’ve probably felt your knees cave in while squatting, your wrists go crooked while benching, and your lower back curve while deadlifting.
One of the best ways to avoid these mistakes is to do warm-up sets before your hard sets to troubleshoot your form and “groove in” proper movement patterns.
Think of your warm-up sets as practice, which is, of course, the best way to get better at anything. The more times you squat, bench, and deadlift perfectly, the more that will become your default way to squat, bench, and deadlift.23
This is especially important for beginners. When you first start weightlifting, you can get away with bad technique because you’re not strong enough to cause major damage. It’s hard to get hurt when you’re squatting half your body weight for 10 reps.
As you get stronger, though, that all changes. Weights get heavier, and poor form becomes more dangerous.
Studies also show that a short warm-up routine can significantly boost performance levels, which can translate into more muscle and strength gain over time.24
Your muscle cells are powered by tiny chemical reactions that are affected by temperature, and a little warmer than normal appears to be better for contracting effectively.25
Warming up also increases blood flow to your muscles, which enables your body to deliver them more oxygen and nutrients that are needed for generating energy.
So, how should you warm up for your Bigger Leaner Stronger workouts, then?
To ensure that each of the major muscle groups you’re going to train in a workout is warmed up and primed for optimum performance, you’re going to do several warm-up sets with the first exercises for each of those muscle groups.
For instance, let’s say you show up to do a lower-body workout that entails squatting, leg pressing, and leg curling, in that order.
You would first warm up for the squat, and then do your hard sets. Next is the leg press, but you won’t need to warm up first because the major muscle groups involved are the same as the squat’s. The same goes for the leg curls—your hamstrings will be more than ready to go after the squatting and leg pressing.
In this way, your warm-up sets for the squat serve as your warm-up sets for the entire workout.
Let’s say you were going to do a who
le-body workout, however, that entails squatting, bench pressing, and shoulder pressing, in that order.
In this case, you would warm up for the squat, do your hard sets, and then warm up on the bench press before doing your hard sets because squatting doesn’t involve your “push” muscles. Then, you would move directly into your hard sets of shoulder pressing because the shoulders are a major player in the bench press.
One more example for the sake of clarity. Let’s say you’re going to do a “pull” workout that calls for deadlifting, barbell rowing, and biceps curling, in that order. Based on what you now know, how would you do this workout?
You’ve got it. Warm up on the deadlift first, followed by your hard sets, followed by the hard sets of the next two exercises without any further warm-up sets because they train the same muscles as the deadlift.
The last question to answer, then, is how to warm up on any given exercise.
Here’s an easy and effective routine that will warm you up without doing so much that your performance on your hard sets is compromised:
Do 10 reps with about 50 percent of your hard set weight, and rest for a minute.
Do 10 reps with the same weight at a slightly faster pace, and rest for a minute.
Do 4 reps with about 70 percent of your hard set weight, and rest for a minute.
And that’s it. You’re now ready to do your hard sets.
Intensity and Focus: Your Two Secret Weapons
You probably know what a great workout feels like. You’re full of energy, you’re completely focused on the task at hand, the weights feel light, you’re able to push yourself a bit harder than you expected, and you leave the gym feeling invigorated, not wiped out.
Most people assume that physical factors alone determine whether you have a great workout or not. They’re wrong. While eating right, getting enough sleep, minimizing stress, and so forth are major ingredients, there are mental components as well.
Two of the bigger ones are training with intensity and focus.
I’m not talking about grunting and groaning your way through every hard set with death metal blaring in your headphones or putting on a show before stepping into the squat rack.
By intensity, I mean the level of physical and mental effort you give to your workout. It’s how intent you are on pushing yourself to make progress.
A high-intensity workout is one where you feel like you didn’t leave anything in the tank. You hit every set with determination and didn’t miss reps that you could have gotten if you had really tried.
By focus, I mean the amount of concentration you apply to the task at hand.
A focused workout is one where you have your attention on the work in front of you, not on the TV show you watched last night, your Instagram feed, or the argument you had with your partner.
I don’t want to get too “woo-woo” on you and say you need to mentally visualize every set before you perform it—although research shows this actually can increase performance26—but there’s definitely something to be said for just doing what you’re doing while you’re doing it.
I designed Bigger Leaner Stronger to help you maintain a high level of intensity and focus in your workouts, but the program can’t supply them. You have to.
The Deload Week
A deload week is a weeklong reduction in training intensity (weight lifted) or volume (number of hard sets).
For example, if your training routine consists of 80 hard sets per week, a deload week might cut the volume in half (40 sets, for instance) or dramatically reduce the intensity (50 percent of your normal hard set weight is common).
The primary purposes of deloading are fourfold:
Alleviating “accumulated” nervous system fatigue
Reducing joint and ligament strain
Reducing the risk of injury
Reducing psychological stress
A distant fifth would be reducing the demands placed on your muscles, but this isn’t as important as the other points.
The basic theory of deloading is based on research on how the body deals with physical stress. Here’s the basic outline:
You provide a stimulus (exercise).
You remove the stimulus (rest and recovery).
Your body adapts to deal with the next stimulus better.
This adaptation is what allows you to gain muscle and strength, increase speed and agility, and improve technique, and it’s known as supercompensation. Here’s how this process looks visually:
Like maintaining good sleep hygiene and managing energy balance properly, deloading is a tool that falls under #2 above (removing stimulus), and its purpose is to help with #3 (adapting).
There’s no “one-size-fits-all” answer to how often you should plan deload weeks because some people’s bodies can take more or less of a beating than others’ before needing a break.
That said, a reasonable recommendation is to plan a deload week every 8 to 10 weeks of heavy, intense training. If you’re in a calorie deficit, make this once every 6 to 8 weeks due to the added physical stress and impaired recovery.
Age and training history are factors too. One of the major (but not only) shifts that occurs with working out in your 40s and beyond is you need to give more attention to recovery.
You can probably train just as hard as the boys and girls in their 20s, but you probably can’t recover as quickly.
I’ve also found that, rather counterintuitively, people new to weightlifting need to deload less frequently than veteran weightlifters. In fact, in some cases, people new to lifting haven’t felt the need for a break in 6, 8, even 10 months. And that’s fine.
As you progress in your training, your workouts get harder and harder, both in absolute weight moved and willingness and confidence to push yourself to your limits. This puts more and more stress on your body, which increases the need for deloading.
Regardless, if you’re new to weightlifting, you should plan regular deload weeks. This will ensure you don’t accidentally slip into a state of overtraining by being stubborn and refusing to cut back (guilty as charged).
As you learn more about how your body responds to training, though, you can get a bit looser with your deload timing.
You’ll begin to recognize the need for a deload—the most common signs being that your progress is stalling, your body is extra achy, your sleep quality has declined, you have less motivation to train, and your workouts feel much harder than they should. And you can respond accordingly.
How to Avoid Weightlifting Injuries
Many weightlifting injuries aren’t caused by training too intensely in any individual workout, but by failing to fully recover from previous workouts.27
Sure, you can find videos of people who have ripped a pec while benching, collapsed while squatting a bending barbell, or jackhammered their lower back with a heavy deadlift, but these worst-case scenarios rarely happen.
The reality is most weightlifting injuries are insidious and give you plenty of time to change course before the bottom falls out.
For example, your knee feels a little stiff the day after heavy squats, but you shrug it off and keep going. A few weeks later, it’s starting to hurt while you squat. “No pain, no gain,” you say, and keep going. A few more weeks and, well, now it just hurts all the time.
These are called repetitive stress injuries, or RSIs, and they’re the bane of every athlete. They’re not painful enough to put you on the sidelines, but they cause just enough trouble to hinder your performance and progress.
Fortunately, a bit of rest is all it usually takes to eliminate RSIs. In fact, that’s the only way to do it. Once an RSI has set in, you must avoid the activity that caused it (and will continue to aggravate it), along with any other activities that will prolong it.
This usually means avoiding a specific exercise but some
times requires that you stop training a muscle group altogether until the injury has healed.
You learned in chapter eight that weightlifting isn’t nearly as dangerous as many people think. As with any strenuous physical activity, however, if you do it enough, you’re probably going to experience an RSI of one type and severity or another along the way.
In other words, while true injuries aren’t necessarily inevitable, minor aches, stresses, and strains are. That doesn’t mean we can’t take preventive actions to stave them off for as long as possible, though.
Let’s learn how to do that.
If It Hurts, Don’t Do It
This might seem like common sense, but we all know that “common” sense isn’t really all that common.
The rule here is simple: if something hurts, stop immediately.
I’m not talking about muscle soreness or the burning sensation that occurs as you approach technical failure, but pain. If a rep hurts enough to make you wince, that means you need to stop. Pain is a warning that something is wrong, and if you don’t listen to it, you’re asking for trouble.
So, when you hit pain, stop, rest for a couple of minutes, and try the exercise again.
If it still hurts, do something else and come back to it next workout and see how it goes. If it’s still a problem, substitute it with a different exercise. Don’t think that you “have” to do any specific exercise in any workout, even if it hurts.
If you aren’t sure if what you’re feeling qualifies as pain or the normal discomfort of training, ask yourself these two questions:
Is the pain on both sides of my body or just one?When you perform exercises correctly, both sides of your body are fairly equally subjected to stress.
Thus, if one side starts to hurt more than the other, it’s more likely a sign of trouble rather than merely muscle burn or fatigue.
Is the pain concentrated around a joint or other specific spot?These are the types of pains that you’re most likely to encounter because muscle strains and tears are uncommon.
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