Are You Training Hard Enough?

In a post I wrote a while back about the ten biggest bodybuilding mistakes, I listed not training hard enough as the number one mistake. How hard is enough, though?

To stimulate increases in strength and size it is minimally necessary to 1. work your muscles harder than they are accustomed to, which means 2. always attempting to improve your form, lift more weight or perform more repetitions on each exercise than you did before. These are the two most fundamental principles of building muscular strength and size: overload and progression. If these two things are not the primary focus of your training, nothing else you do is going to make any difference.

To stimulate the greatest possible increases in strength and size it is necessary to work as hard as possible. Do not make the common mistake of confusing doing more exercise for working harder. Working harder means putting more effort into each exercise, and if your level of effort is high enough you will neither need nor be capable of performing a large volume of work.

To work as hard as possible simply means;

1. doing as many repetitions as you are physically capable of
2. in good form
3. with an adequately heavy weight

Physical Versus Psychological Limits

Most people quit an exercise for various psychological reasons long before they’ve reached their true physical limits. Beginners and others unaccustomed to training at a very high level of intensity often mistake a moderate level of fatigue for muscle failure, quitting when the exercise starts to get hard rather than when more reps become impossible. Many simply quit when the exercise becomes too uncomfortable for them, lacking the necessary mental toughness to push through the discomfort of burning muscles, a rapidly pounding heart and being out of breath. Some quit when an exercise becomes harder because they fear they will injure themselves.

The gap between psychological and physical limits narrows and the tolerance for muscular burning and exertional discomfort improves for most people after they’ve been training for a while, but even advanced trainees may quit far short of a true all-out effort if they’ve never experienced it. Even many advanced trainees overestimate how intensely they actually train and underestimate the level of effort they are capable of. A good solution for this is to work out with a trainer or partner that knows how to motivate you to go all-out. The judicious application of high intensity training techniques like forced reps and negatives can also help you develop the ability to push yourself harder during training.

If you quit an exercise when it gets harder due to fear of injury, consider it is not the amount of weight or how hard you are working but the integrity of your form that determines your risk of injury. As long as you maintain reasonably good form and use a competent and attentive spotter or the appropriate safety equipment when necessary there is no reason to fear injury.

Also consider no matter how fatigued you become, you are always much stronger holding or lowering a weight than you are lifting it. As long as you don’t just let go, you will not drop a weight on yourself.

Good Form

The goal of an exercise is not to make a weight go up and down. Lifting and lowering a weight is just a means to accomplish the real goal, which is to work the targeted muscles intensely enough to stimulate strength and size increases. To accomplish this you need to maintain the proper body position and move along the correct path over the correct range of motion to maintain a high level of tension on the target muscles while avoiding positions which may result in other tissues being exposed to potentially harmful levels of force.

As an exercise becomes harder do not significantly alter your body position or path or range of movement or attempt to yank, jerk or otherwise quickly move the weight to make it easier to lift. If you do, the work is either shifted away from the target muscles towards other muscles or leverage is changed reducing tension, and you are no longer accomplishing the real goal, or you increase the risk of injury due to the sudden, uncontrolled increase in force resulting from rapid acceleration. It is neither necessary nor beneficial and potentially dangerous to attempt to continue beyond the point where can not lift the weight in correct form by cheating.

Maintain your focus on the real goal – high intensity muscular work – and don’t sacrifice form and risk injury for the sake of a few more less productive reps. How you lift the weight is far more important than how many times.

How Heavy?

The weight should be at least heavy enough to be moderately hard to lift right from the start. It should not be so heavy, however, that you are unable to perform at least a few repetitions in good form.

Assuming a moderate movement speed, within reason repetition range doesn’t appear to make as much of a difference in muscular strength and size increases as the effort put into an exercise. Some people will find they do better with or prefer slightly higher or lower reps, however most people will get good results with any reasonable range from as low as three to as high as twenty, as long as they are working as hard and progressively.

I recommend a middle range of 6 to 10 repetitions as a starting point for most trainees and most exercises. A higher rep range may be more appropriate for beginners when learning a new exercise, and lower rep ranges would be necessary when using very slow repetition methods.

The High Intensity Mindset

High intensity training is as much a test of mental toughness as it is of physical strength, and your mindset going into the workout has a big impact on how hard you’ll be able to train. I have found the following to be effective in establishing the proper mindset for going all-out during your workouts.

Commitment

Although you may enjoy the mental and physical challenge of a hard workout, a workout is not an end in itself, but a means to accomplishing specific goals. Keeping your goals in mind will help you stay motivated. Think about how important those goals are to you and make a commitment to yourself to give your best effort, to not have any doubts after the workout as to whether you could have gotten another rep on an exercise or worked even just a little harder.

Focus

To put a 100% physical effort into an exercise you have to focus 100% of your mind on it. To prevent your mind from wandering or the things going on around you from distracting you during your workout, take a few minutes before you start to clear your head and get focused. Sit down, close your eyes and focus only your breathing until you are able to block everything else out and your mind is not wandering. Then take a few minutes to visualize yourself performing each of the exercises in your workout perfectly, easily beating your previous weight or reps on all of them. Finally, take a brief moment to think about your goals, your motivation for training.

Before each exercise, take a few seconds to close your eyes and regain your focus if you start to feel distracted.

Putting “Pain” in Perspective

Intense burning in the muscles, a rapid heart rate and labored breathing are normal sensations resulting from high intensity muscular work, and not real pain or an indication of physical harm. These sensations are not a cause for concern. What they do indicate is that you have reached the most productive part of the exercise.

When you begin to experience these sensations do not assume you are approaching your physical limits or the end of the exercise. Remind yourself the sensations are temporary and harmless, and the real exercise is just beginning. The burn in your muscles is your cue to work even harder, and the more they burn the harder you will work. Again, think about your goals and remind yourself they are worth working through the temporary and harmless discomfort.