Weighed in at 81.9kg this morning, a new low. Still managing to hold onto my strength in the gym. Pec deck, reverse pec deck, OHP, skullcrushers, cable laterals, pushdowns, preacher curls & preacher hammer curls all held strong. On pull day, I tried a new weight on lying leg curls, 70kg for 8, then 60kg for 8, (2/2 tempo). Slight adjustment on machine rows - doing the first set, (the warmup/acclimation set), with a 2/2 tempo as well - so it was 75kg for 6, then 85kg for 10, then 70kg for 10. Pulldowns, hack squats, weighted crunches, all holding on. I did calf raises on the alternative machine with 95kg for 9 which is a PR on this machine, too.
RANT: You can tell people how many sets & reps to do, but intensity of effort is harder to lay out for people to follow. Part of the reason why different people’s training responses sometimes seem so far apart from each other is that it’s driven by differing intensities of effort per set. The average low volume lifter pushes their average set harder than the average high volume lifter.
When you give training advice to people, (unless it’s a biomechanical question, or a question around how to order the training split), then the conversation is under-pinned by the assumption of a certain level of training intensity being applied, by necessity. You can’t prescribe volume in a vacuum. It has to be accounting for the level that each set of that volume is pushed to. The same volume recommendation at 8 reps left in the tank is a whole world away from that recommendation with each set to failure. And a slightly higher volume at a slightly lower intensity of effort can produce equal results to a slightly lower volume at a slightly higher intensity. The volume, intensity & frequency are like numbers that are multiplied together. Your ‘perfect stimulus’ might be 125 ‘stimulus points’, achieved by these three things being at a 5 out of 10, (5X5X5 = 125). You might lower one of these to a 4 or 3 & increase the other to a 6 or 7 & get to a fundamentally similar place. But if you lower any one variable too much, i.e. 5X1X10, (= 50), i.e. training a muscle once a fortnight doing a failure set then passively flexing against the load for 45 seconds after you’ve reached failure, you’ll have likely pushed one variable too high at the expense of pushing another too low, & you’ll be in an unproductive place. But that’s an extreme example. So long as we’re being reasonable, then within a rational limit, volume, frequency & intensity of effort are variables which we can trade between & still achieve a fundamentally productive training stimulus.
Following from this, my personal training philosophy, for hypertrophy movements, is that it makes sense to push an exercise to as close to being unable to perform any more reps as is practical & safe to do so on at least one set of it, (& from there, you do as many sets as it takes to grow, whatever that may be). I’m talking about hypertrophy oriented lifts. Powerlifting or Oly lifting is another story. But for stimulating a muscle, on a safe exercise, you could leave 3 reps in the tank on your hardest set & do an extra set, but… why?
Now, here’s my point: You give lower volume/higher intensity advice to people & a few of them will not make very good gains for the reason that they didn’t train close enough to failure - & here’s the kicker - I don’t really care about them. If you go to the gym & the hardest set of an exercise intended for muscle growth, (not powerlifts or oly lifts), has you leaving multiple reps in the tank on a regular basis, I don’t give a single shit if a consequence of lowish volume/highish intensity training getting really popular means that you’re one of the people negatively affected by this because you take the advice & it doesn’t work well for you.
Let me be clear: Recommend the amount of volume & frequency that tends to work well for the greatest number of people when they apply the effort they’re supposed to. I don’t really want to help people that don’t train hard on a set. People that make threads online asking for advice but who won’t stick out a set for another 10 seconds because it hurts when they still had reps in the tank on a machine row, or a leg curl, or a hack squat. Give the advice that works when you train hard & let these people fall to the wayside. When I started lifting, doing as many reps as possible was the most natural thing for me. Problem was, a lot of the advice I got RE volume was influenced by that volume being credible ‘thanks’ to people who didn’t push each set hard. I want to help young guys who instinctively train close to failure because I see myself in them. It’s not a matter of wanting to sabotage people who are too much of a pussy to do as many reps as possible regularly. It’s a matter of helping the people who deserve to be helped & letting the chips fall where they may for the people who are too lazy & stupid to benefit from the advice.