Am I training hard enough? Or am I training too much? These are often questions we hear from all weight trainers and both are great questions. Getting the right balance between intensity and to much raining is the key to better results.
Lacking true intensity
The purpose of weight training is to exhaust the muscle being trained, so that it is overloaded and must adapt and become stronger and more efficient. When you stimulate your muscle to more weight, volume, duration, decreasing rest, adjusting tempo, the chance of muscular fatigue is increased. Remember, your muscles only understand what they feel, they do not care nor can they read how much weight is on the plates. It is only when the muscle is exhausted ‘more’ than the previous workout that maximum growth can occur.
Here are some time-tested principles to apply for continual ‘intensity’:
- Do more ‘work’? Work can mean, do more sets but keep the weight the same or keep the number of sets the same but lift more weight.
- Increase the weight, but if you are not doing the same range of motion as with a lighter weight, you will be doing the same amount of work, or less.
- Expose your muscles with more time under tension. Perform the same weight and same number of sets but slow the speed of tempo – basically, move the weight slower. Don’t be surprised if you have to actually decrease the weights with this simple technique.
- Do the same amount of work in half the number of sets. This is difficult but possible. If it takes 8 sets to fully fatigue your triceps, than try and fully fatigue them in 4 sets.
- Reduce the amount of time you spend resting between sets.
- Overall, shift your mindset to intensity instead of volume – focus on a lower number of sets and a shorter time in the gym, but with a higher degree of focus, I’m confident that you will make continual muscle gains by applying these principles consistently and honestly.