Ep. #852: The 5 Commandments of Successful Strength Training

Instead, I’ll give you a simple and intuitive method for figuring out your starting weights and then properly progressing to heavier loads. But first, let’s discuss the final strength training precept on our list. Two to four rest, two to four minutes in between hard sets.

Muscle for Life, which is releasing on January 11th and which is currently on pre-order. And if you go to Muscle for Life book.com, muscle f o r lifebook.com, you can learn all about the big book Launch Bonanza that is underway and will continue for a couple of more weeks where you can enter to win over $13,000 of awesome stuff that I have collected up from many different companies to give away real stuff.

PDFs that I say are worth $97, I’m talking about thousand dollars exercise bikes. Five, six, $700, sets of adjustable dumbbells, a hundred dollars kitchen appliances, and a lot more real stuff like that. Stuff that many people buy every day, and that’s muscle for. Dot com. And so today’s episode is a chapter of the book that is all about strength training.

It’s called The Five Commandments of Successful Strength Training, and it is a comprehensive overview of the 20% of strength training. Principles and techniques that provide 80% of the results, and that is true regardless of your experience. That is true for novices and advanced trainees. So regardless of how jacked you are, this chapter applies to you.

There are several points that. Touches on including frequency, both in terms of how many strength training workouts you should do every week, and how often you should train each major muscle group. It talks about how many hard sets you should be doing per workout and per major muscle group, it talks about how heavy the weights should be in terms of percentage.

One rep max and it talks about rest time, how long you should be resting in between each set. Now of course, if you are an intermediate or an advanced weightlifter who has gained most of the muscle and strength that is genetically available to you, there are some additional. Principles and some additional techniques that you will want to know about stuff I talk about in my book, Beyond Bigger, Leaner, Stronger, for example, but the information shared in Muscle for Life and in this chapter of the audio book teaches you the training maxims and methods that are going to produce most of your progress.

So let’s get into it, shall we?

The five commandments of successful strength training opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work unknown. If you’re like most of my listeners, you want a specific body. If you’re a guy, you wanna be muscular and lean, but not hoing. You want dashboard, abs striking chest, back and arm muscles and strong, solid.

If you’re a gal, you want to be toned, but not skinny, and definitely not skinny fat with shapely legs and perky glutes, a flat defined stomach and a feminine, but sculpted upper body. You can have these things. You don’t need top shelf genetics or a lifetime of training to look and feel like a million bucks.

You must know what you’re doing though because you can’t become an Adonis or Aphrodite by just cutting your carbs and counting your steps. Instead, you need to take a different approach to your fitness. One that’s more challenging, but also more rewarding. It begins like this. Out of all the things we can do in the gym, we wanna devote most of our time and efforts to the actions that produce most of the results.

In other words, we wanna apply the Parato principle to our training, which states that in many domains, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the cause. This postulate originated with the Economist Wilfredo, Pareto, and we can observe it nearly everywhere we look. Research shows that around 20% of patients account for 80% of healthcare spending.

In the United States, 15% of baseball players produce 85% of the wins, and 20% of criminals commit 80% of the crimes. The Pareto principle also applies to. Where a pocket full of training maxims and methods produces most of the progress. What are those vital principles? We can express them in a simple formula, three to five, five to seven, nine to 15, 60 to 82 to four.

Know that isn’t a secret code that you have to break, but it does contain the secrets to building the body you’ve always wanted. Here’s the full prescription. Do three to five strength training workouts per. Train major muscle groups at least once every five to seven days. Do nine to 15 hard sets per workout.

Train with 60 to 80% of one rep max. Rest two to four minutes in between hard sets. Let’s go through those instructions one at a time and learn how to combine them into a workout plan that really works Three to five. Do three to five strength training workouts per. Search the hashtag, hashtag no days off on social media, and you’ll find a lot of very fit people bragging about their dedication and determination.

While I applaud the effort, intense training, six or seven days per week is a one way street to physical and psychological burnout, especially when cutting strength training isn’t easy. Your joints, tendons, and muscles take a beating and your nervous system red lines. Although this is a healthy and necessary part of getting fitter and stronger, it also accumulates fatigue that leads to reductions in speed, power, and technique.

Some research shows that this response to training may be more of a mental or emotional state rather than a purely physical phenomenon, but it’s real and you need to know how to deal. If you ignore your body’s signals and keep pressing on, you can develop symptoms related to overreaching, including soreness, fatigue and weakness that don’t go away with rest, trouble sleeping, reduction in appetite, and unintended weight loss, irritability, anxiety, impatience and restlessness, irregular heart rate, inability to focus, depression.

Therefore, I recommend three to five days of strength training per. Which is enough to achieve your fitness goals without putting your health or wellbeing at risk. This is why all of the muscle for life workout routines entail three strength training workouts per week and encourage up to two hours of cardiovascular exercise per week as well.

There’s a time and place for more strength training up to five workouts per. But chances are you’re new to my approach to fitness, and therefore don’t need to do more than three sessions of strength training per week to make fantastic progress. So why spend more time in the gym than you need to? A caveat though, as you gain experience on this program and start seeing results, you’ll probably begin to feel like your rest days are wasted.

Opportunities to build a little more muscle or lose a little more. Remember, however, that downtime is a vital component of Muscle for Life because it allows you to relax and recharge and give your all to your workouts every week, five to seven. Train each major muscle group at least once every five to seven days.

How frequently you should train each major muscle group, the primary muscles involved in pushing, pulling, and squatting that you learned about in the previous chapter. Depends on your schedule, your goals, and the difficulty of each workout. A good rule of thumb, however, is to train all the muscles you most wanna develop at least once per week.

For instance, if you’re training three days per week and are most interested in developing your upper body, you’d wanna emphasize your push and pull muscles over your squat muscles by, let’s say, using sessions one and three for both pushing and pulling while training your lower body in session.

Similarly, if you most want to develop your lower body, you’d wanna spend more time squatting than pushing or pulling. How many push pulls squat and other strength training workouts you can do every week depends on how difficult they are, and the difficulty of strength training workouts mostly depends on their intensity, the amount of resistance used in exercises and volume, the amount of work.

The more weight resistance you use on exercises and the more sets you do in a session, the harder the workout is to do and recover from. Therefore, the higher the intensity and volume of individual workouts, the less frequently you can do them. This means, for instance, that you could do two or even three squat squatter push workouts per week, but they could only be so difficult.

You could only use so much weight and do so many sets in each. In case you’re not familiar with a term set, it’s a group of consecutive repetitions or reps, which are individual complete motions of an exercise. If you do 10 pushups before resting, that’s one set of 10 reps. The key then is striking a balance between working out too hard and not hard enough, which brings me to the next point, nine to 15.

Do nine to 15 hard sets per workout. Each muscle for life workout will entail warming up and performing 12 hard sets, meaning your difficult muscle and strength building sets, which will take you about one hour. That means I’m asking for as little as three hours of your time each week, or about as much time as the average American spends in front of the TV or on social media every day.

This is probably less effort and time than you expected given the results. I’m promising, especially if you’ve seen popular strength training workouts that call for 25 to 30 hard sets or more session. Such workouts are popular, but often inefficient and even counterproductive because you can only train an individual muscle group so much in a single workout before reaching the point where further effort fails to produce further muscle.

Research shows that this threshold is likely between eight and 10 hard sets, depending on how much resistance you’re using and how fit you are. Just as the number of hard sets per muscle group per workout is important. So is the number of hard sets per muscle group per week. A growing body of evidence shows that someone new to proper strength training didn’t do more than 10 hard sets per major muscle group per week to gain considerable muscle and.

And intermediate and advanced trainees need to do upward of 15 to 20 hard sets per week to continue making progress. 60 to 80, Train with 60 to 80% of your one rep max in muscle for life. You’ll use weights that are between 60 and 80% of your one rep max, which is the most weight you can move on an exercise for one.

This will mean doing anywhere from eight to 15 reps per set before stopping to rest. Much harder than many people who do resistance training are used to because a lot of fitness programs involve lightweights and many reps, which is an inefficient way to train. While training with lighter loads can cause muscle growth, research shows that it only results in significant improvements when sets are taken to or close to muscle failure.

The point where you can no longer complete a full repetition. There are two problems with his style of training. First, doing 20 plus reps per set is extremely unpleasant. Sets take longer, feel harder and cause more fatigue than lower rep high load training and second training. The muscle failure regularly isn’t optimal because it can increase the risk of injury by increasing the weight and doing fewer reps per set.

However, as you will on this program, You can produce a powerful muscle building stimulus without having to bust a gut or extend yourself to muscle failure. Now, you may be hoping it’s easy to calculate your one rep maxes to ensure you use the proper amount of weight in your workouts. You may also be concerned that this system will be complicated or that you’ll mess it up.

Fear not because no math will be. Instead, I’ll give you a simple and intuitive method for figuring out your starting weights and then properly progressing to heavier loads. But first, let’s discuss the final strength training precept on our list. Two to four rest, two to four minutes in between hard sets.

Since most people go to the gym to move and sweat, sitting around in between sets seems like a waste of time. So they keep rest periods short or even skip them. Preferring to always stay in motion. This is fine when you just wanna burn calories, but if you wanna gain muscle and get stronger, it’s a mistake.

Strength training involves pushing your muscles to their limits and then backing off. And resting enough between sets is a vital step because it gives your heart time to settle down and gets you ready to give maximum effort and your next heart set. Science agrees too. A study conducted by scientists at the State University of Rio Deja narrow.

Found that resting three to five minutes between sets allowed participants to do more reps use heavier weights, and get in more total training volume. Similar findings were demonstrated in another study conducted at Eastern Illinois University. In this case, researchers concluded that when training with heavy weights, two to four minutes of rest between sets produces the best results.

In practice, you can rest slightly less two minutes. Between hard sets for smaller muscle groups like the biceps, triceps, and shoulders, and slightly more up to four minutes between hard sets for your larger muscle groups like your back, chest, and legs. Don’t be surprised if that much rest feels strange to you.

At first, you may even feel guilty as if you’re sitting around more than working. Trust the process. However, watch how your body responds to the workouts and rest easy. Literally knowing that the lulls are contributing significantly to the whole. As for what to do while resting between sets, most important is actually resting so your body is ready for another round of intense exertion.

That means you should mostly be sitting or standing, not doing trics or cardiovascular exercise. Another must is keeping track of time so you don’t actually under or over rest. The Stopwatch app on your phone is a simple tool for this. Beyond that, whatever you do or don’t do while resting is up to you, but most people find they enjoy their training more if they stay off the internet, social media, and email, and instead focus on how their workout is going, how their body is feeling, and what they hope to accomplish in their next.

In fact, studies show that envisioning the successful completion of a resistance training set beforehand can increase performance. Now that we’ve gone through the entire formula I introduced you to at the beginning of this chapter, let’s discuss other aspects of strength training that are vital for optimizing your results.

How to achieve progressive over.

One of the most important parts of strength training is progressive overload. No matter how much thought you put into frequency, intensity, volume, or any other factory related to workout programming, if you don’t get progressive overload you won’t make it very far. It’s the key to avoiding stagnation and breaking through training plateaus when they inevitably occur.

There are a couple of practical ways to achieve progressive overload in strength. One of the best methods is known as double progression. In double progression, you work with a weight in a rep range, a minimum and maximum number of reps to strive for in a set like 10 to 12 reps, for instance. And once you hit the top of that rep range for a certain number of hard sets in a row, you increase the weight.

Then if you can finish your first hard set with the new heavier weight within at least a rep or two of the bottom of your rep, Continue working with that weight until you can hit the progression target again. So with this approach to progressive overload, you work to increase your reps and then cash in that progress to increase your weights.

Hence double progression. To see how this works in action, Let’s say you’re following one of the men’s intermediate programs, which has you working in the rep range of eight to 10 reps for many exercises and requires three hard sets of 10 reps in a row on an exercise. Before increasing the weight, you start your pushing workout, which begins with three sets of the dumbbell bench press.

So far, you’ve worked up to 50 pounds on this exercise, and this time you get 10 reps on all three sets. Hooray, Time to progress. That means the following week when you do this workout again, you’ll use 55 pounds on the dumbbell bench press. Since you’re working in the eight to 10 rep range, your goal is to get at least six reps on your first hard set within at least two reps of eight.

The bottom of your rep. If you can do this, your progression has succeeded and you’ll now work with 55 pounds until you can do three hard sets of 10 reps in a row and so on. And what if you can’t get at least eight reps in your first hard set with 55 pounds? We’ll talk more about progression in this program, including this point and others in chapter 12, How to use a proper range of motion.

Range of motion refers to how much you flex or extend a joint during an exercise. Flexion occurs when you reduce the angle between two parts of your body, shortening the angle between your forearm and upper arm when curling a dumbbell, for instance, extension occurs when you increase the angle between two parts of your body, like when you stand up from a chair, which increases the angles between your thighs and torso and your thighs and shin.

When you perform a strength training exercise, there’s a limit to how much you can safely and comfortably flex and extend the major joints involved, your knees and hips in the squat, elbows in the barbell curl, shoulders, and elbows in the bench press and so forth. A proper range of motion in a strength training exercise is a full one, which involves moving the major joints to their natural limits of flexion and extension beyond which injury could.

For example, with the pushup, a full range of motion requires that you lower your chest until it touches the floor elbow flexion, and then presses upward until your arms are straight, elbow extension, and with the pullup, you must raise your body until your chin is above the bar elbow flexion, and then lower yourself until your arms are straight.

Elbow extens. Using a full range of motion when strength training is important because it increases muscle and strength gain, and may also reduce the risk of injury because when you use a partial range of motion, the stress produced by the exercise is concentrated on smaller areas of your joints. When doing a partial squat, only lowering your butt a foot or two, for instance, much of the stress is concentrated on the tendons at the front of your.

As you keep lowering your body, though the burden shifts to other tendons and ligaments by using a full range of motion, then you allow your entire joints to share the strains of strength training, and this reduces the chances of localized irritation and inflammation, how to use proper form along with a full range of motion.

You also need to control how your body and weight are moving in each. You should always feel like you’re using your muscles to execute the movements, not gravity or momentum. For example, when doing pushups, instead of relaxing your chest and arms and allowing your torso to drop toward the floor, you wanna keep your upper body muscles tight as you lower your chest, similarly on the chin up, instead of swinging your knees to help you ascend, and then allowing your body to drop down.

You wanna keep your legs motionless as you pull yourself up, and then smoothly lower yourself down To use a full range of motion and proper form in your workouts. You need to know how to do exercises properly, of course, but you also need to use the right amount of weight. We’ll talk about how to determine your training weights later in this section of the book, but know this for.

If you use too much weight, you won’t be able to complete your workouts as prescribed without shortening the range of motion or spoiling your form, which compromises the effectiveness and safety of your training. So in summary, proper form is achieved when an appropriate weight is moved through the right range of motion with the right technique.

How hard your hard sets should. To get the most out of double progression, you must ensure that your hard sets are hard enough to produce high levels of tension in your muscles. Here’s how to do this. End all hard sets of body weight exercises. One rep shy of muscle failure, which is the point where you fail to complete a rep.

That is continue hard sets of body weight exercises until you feel you have zero good reps left in the. And all hard sets of machine dumbbell and barbell exercises. Two to three reps shy of muscle failure, one to two good reps left. Why the difference in difficulty? You can work harder in body weight exercises because failure is less exhausting and dangerous than with machines, barbells and dumbbells.

So if your workout calls for pushups, you’d end each hard set at the point where you feel you can’t complete another. And with, let’s say the barbell bench press, you’d push your hard sets to where you feel you can do one or two more reps. And how do you gauge how close you are to muscle failure? It’s mostly a matter of trial and error, but once you start training, you’ll quickly become attuned to your proximity to failure.

An easy way to develop this intuition faster is as you’re approaching the end of a hard set to ask. If I absolutely had to, how many more reps could I get with good form? Your instinctive answer will often be accurate, especially as you become more experienced. It may not seem like it, but you’ve just learned one of the unsung keys to successful strength training.

Knowing how hard to train in your workouts. Many people don’t work hard enough and wonder why nothing changes, and many others work too hard and wonder why. They’re always stuck in a rut and. You now know how to thread this needle effectively. How to use a proper rep tempo. Rep tempo refers to how quickly you do in exercise when strength training, and there are two schools of thought here slowly and fairly quickly.

People who advocate for a slow tempo often say that muscles don’t know weight only tension, and the longer muscles remain under tension, The more effective the. Thus by slowing down your reps, they claim you can produce more muscle growth than with faster reps. But research shows otherwise slow rep training has been put to the test in quite a few studies, and in each instance, a faster rep tempo produced better results.

Time under tension isn’t important enough to warrant special attention because if you perform an exercise slowly, you have to reduce either the load or the number of reps or both compared to a faster tempo as load and reps are major factors in how much muscle and strength you gain from training reducing either and especially both is detri.

Therefore, I recommend that you follow a 1 0 1 rep tempo for all strength training exercises. This means the first part of each rep should take about one second, followed by a momentary pause, followed by the return to starting position in about one second. If we apply this to a simple exercise like the body weight squat, it would mean sitting down in about one second, one 1000, pausing for an instant and standing up at the same pace.

Don’t worry about trying to achieve this tempo perfectly. You’re doing it right when you’re moving through the first part of an exercise in a swift but controlled manner, barely pausing and finishing the rep as quickly as possible while maintaining good technique. How to avoid injury. Many strength training injuries aren’t caused by training too hard in any individual workout, but by failing to recover from previous workouts.

Here’s a common scenario. Your knee feels stiff the day after a lower body workout, and you shrug it off a few weeks later, it starts to hurt while you squat. No pain, no gain. You say, and keep going. A few more weeks and now your knee doesn’t want a knee anymore. These are called repetitive stress injuries, RSIs, and they’re the bane of every athlete.

Not painful enough to put you on the sidelines, but troubling enough to hinder your performance. Fortunately, a bit of rest is all it usually takes to eliminate RSIs. In fact, that’s the only way to do. 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 prolong the problem.

This often means avoiding specific exercises, but sometimes also forces you to stop training a muscle group altogether until the injury is healed. Strength training isn’t nearly as dangerous as many people think, but as with any strenuous physical activity, if you do it enough, you’ll probably experience at least a mild RSI of one kind or another along the way.

That doesn’t mean you can’t take preventative actions to stave them off for as long as possible, though. Let’s learn how, if it feels bad, don’t do. The rule here is simple. If something hurts or feels off while you’re doing a set stop immediately. I’m not talking about muscle soreness or the burning sensation that occurs as you approach failure, but pain or strange sensations, especially in or around your joints.

If a rep hurts enough to make you wince, for example, it’s a warning that something is wrong, and if you don’t listen to it, you’re looking for. RSI can be insidious, and the early symptoms don’t always manifest as pain. Instead, your elbow feels weird on the last few reps of dumbbell pressing. Your knee feels funny during a squat workout or your back feels tight when deadlift.

While such sensations aren’t always a sign of an rsi, they should get your attention like a weird noise while driving. So when you hit pain or strange, stop rest for a couple of minutes and try the exercise again. If it’s no better than next time around, do another exercise that feels fine, and then come back to the problematic one in your next workout and see how it goes.

If it’s still an issue, substitute a different one again and stay away from the offender until it’s no longer bother. If you aren’t sure whether what you’re feeling qualifies as worrisome or as the normal discomfort of training, ask yourself these two questions. One, is the pain on both sides of my body or just one?

When you perform exercises correctly, both sides of your body are subjected to stress fairly equally. Thus, if one side burns more than the other, it’s more likely a sign of trouble rather than of muscle burn or fatigue. Two, Is the pain concentrated around a joint or other specific spot? These are the pains you’re most likely to encounter.

Muscle and joint aches and stiffness usually go away while you warm up, but genuine problems won’t and can get worse Progress gradually. One of the easiest ways to get hurt in strength training is through zeal. Maybe you’re feeling strong one day or you wanna impress someone in the gym or just progress faster so you load the bar with a weight that makes your spy sense tingle.

This is almost always a bad idea. It increases the likelihood that your form will break down and it can place too much stress on your joints and ligaments and impair recovery. A slow and steady philosophy is much smarter and ultimately more effective. For instance, if you’re new to strength training and you can increase the weight for most exercises every week or two, for the first several months, you’re doing great.

And as you become more experienced, gaining just one rep per week on your most difficult exercises, and thus adding weight every few weeks is respectable. A winning motto for strength training is progress. Understanding that sometimes you’ll advance quickly and other times slowly, but so long as you’re moving forward, you’re playing the game.

Be a stickler for good form, bad form can allow you to move more weight, but it also reduces the quality of the training and increases the risk of injury. This runs counter to the purpose of strength training, controlling heavy loads through full ranges of motion with good technique, not haphazardly lifting as much weight as possible.

This is especially important with the most effective push, pull and squat exercises because while they’re not dangerous, they involve the heaviest weights and most technical. So don’t sacrifice form for the sake of progress or convenience. Instead, learn proper form for every exercise you do and stick to it.

You now possess a powerful plan for long-term fitness success, a moderate dose of relatively short, invigorating strength training workouts that produce consistent results and never leave you feeling agonized, exhausted, or burned out workouts that you’ll delight in rather than. Although simple, my strength training strategy has enough horsepower to radically transform your body and health and enough latitude to accommodate just about all bodies and biases.

So if you’ve had a falling out or five with fitness, here’s your chance to fall back in love with it. And if this is your first foray, you’re in for a good time before you can begin your muscle for life workouts. However, we need to discuss another element of the training methodology. Exercise selection.

Key takeaways, How frequently you should train each major muscle group. The primary muscles involved in pushing, pulling and squatting depends on your schedule, your goals, and the difficulty of each workout. But a good rule of thumb is to train all the muscles you most wanna develop at least once every five to seven.

You should rest slightly less. Two minutes between hard sets for smaller muscle groups like the biceps, triceps, and shoulders, and slightly more up to four minutes between hard sets for your larger muscle groups like your back, chest, and legs. In double progression, you work with a weight in a rep range, a minimum and maximum number of reps to strive for, and a set such as 10 to 12 reps.

And once you hit the top of that rep range for a certain number of hard sets in a. You increase the weight. Proper form is achieved when the right weight is moved through the right range of motion with the right technique. End all hard sets of body weight exercises. One rep shy of muscle failure, which is the point where you fail to complete a rep and end all hard sets of machine dumbbell and barbell exercises.

Two to three reps shy of muscle failure. Two to three good reps left. Use a 1 0 1 rep tempo for all strength training exercise. If something hurts or feels off while you’re doing a set stop immediately and rest for a couple of minutes before trying the exercise again. If it’s no better than next time around, do something else.

Then come back to the problematic exercise in your next workout and see how it goes. If it’s still a problem, substitute a different exercise once again and stay away from the offender until it’s no longer bothersome. A winning motto for strength training is progress. Understanding that sometimes you’ll advance quickly and other times slowly, but so long as you’re moving forward, you’re playing the game well.

That is it for today’s episode, and if you are still listening and you liked it, you’ll probably like the rest of the book, Muscle For Life. Again, go to Muscle for Life book.com and learn all about the Give. Preorder the book. Enter the giveaway and you can do other things to get additional entries into the giveaway.

You can help spread the word about the book launch. You can subscribe to my YouTube channel, to my other social media accounts and other things. Again, all of the details are over at Muscle for Life Book. Dot com. And if Muscle for Life is not for you, maybe it’s for somebody you know. If you know somebody who is looking for an enjoyable and a sustainable fitness regimen, that’s gonna help them lose fat and build mean muscle eating foods they love and doing just a few challenging but not grueling workout.

Per week, and especially if these people are in the 40 plus demographic, if they have a lot of weight to lose, if they’ve never done any Weightlift or maybe even any resistance training before, Muscle for Life is a better book, and the programs are better for them, men and women than my bigger, leaner, stronger, or thinner.

Leaner, stronger programs or books because bigger, leaner, stronger, and thinner, leaner, stronger. Are written for a younger demographic, are written for people who are ready to start squatting, deadlifting, bench pressing, overhead pressing, and who are ready to get serious about meal planning. And those books have sold hundreds of thousands of copies and helped tens of thousands of people that I know of lose fat, build muscle, get healthy.

So great information. It works great programs, they work, but there are a lot of people out there who, if I were training them personally, I would not start them on bigger, leaner, stronger or thinner, leaner, stronger. We would have to work up to that, and that is what Muscle for Life is for. So again, go to muscle for lifebook.com to learn more, and if you are interested in the book for yourself or for somebody else, I would recommend going now because the giveaway is ending in a couple of weeks.

And if you put it off, you might forget and then it might be too late.