Latest / Wits & Weights | Strength & Fat Loss Over 40 / How Hard Should You Really Be Lifting After 40? | Ep 485

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How Hard Should You Really Be Lifting After 40? | Ep 485 · Wits & Weights | Strength & Fat Loss Over 40

• 0:00
  Philip Pape: Let's say you're at the gym and you just finish a set, you rack the bar or dumbbells, and you're like, oh, that was a hard one.
• 0:06
  Philip Pape: Maybe I've got one or two reps left in the tank.
• 0:08
  Philip Pape: I'm doing awesome.
• 0:09
  Philip Pape: Progressive overload.
• 0:10
  Philip Pape: But here's the problem.
• 0:12
  Philip Pape: There is a decent chance that you had five or six reps left, not just two.
• 0:16
  Philip Pape: And maybe you have no idea because you really haven't felt what real failure is like.
• 0:21
  Philip Pape: Today I'm going to pick apart some of the common advice about not going to failure and being careful and all of these pieces of advice that actually might hold you back and give you a simple way to find out where your actual limit is so that every set you do counts.
• 0:35
  Philip Pape: This is about training hard.
• 0:37
  Philip Pape: What does the research say about how far off we are versus where we need to be, how close to failure you need to train to build muscle, and then how to actually fix how hard you train, as well as a little trick I have toward the end of the episode.
• 0:54
  Philip Pape: Welcome to Wits and Weights, the show that puts a popular piece of fitness advice under the microscope, finds the hidden reason it doesn't work, and gives you the deceptively simple fix that does.
• 1:04
  Philip Pape: I'm your host, Philip Ape, and today I want to talk about effort.
• 1:08
  Philip Pape: Because if you're doing strength training over 40, especially, and you feel like you're working hard, you're following a program, you're showing up three, four, five days a week to the gym, and the muscle isn't developing the way that you expected, or you're not getting stronger, or you're hitting a wall, this episode is for you.
• 1:26
  Philip Pape: There is a specific reason it happens.
• 1:29
  Philip Pape: Remember, I'm an engineer.
• 1:30
  Philip Pape: I like to solve problems, and we can solve this for ourselves.
• 1:34
  Philip Pape: It's often not the reason you've been told or that you think.
• 1:37
  Philip Pape: It isn't that you're too old.
• 1:39
  Philip Pape: It's not about your hormones.
• 1:41
  Philip Pape: It is not usually your program either.
• 1:44
  Philip Pape: It is that the effort that you think you're putting in and the effort you're actually putting in are far apart, and the gap between them is even bigger than you thought.
• 1:53
  Philip Pape: And that's why you're hitting the wall.
• 1:55
  Philip Pape: And you're like, okay, great, Philip.
• 1:57
  Philip Pape: So that I'm done.
• 1:58
  Philip Pape: Thank you for the advice.
• 1:58
  Philip Pape: I'm gonna go in the gym and I'm gonna train hard.
• 2:00
  Philip Pape: No, we can be very objective about this.
• 2:02
  Philip Pape: This is a skill, and we're gonna break it down.
• 2:04
  Philip Pape: And then at the very end, I'm gonna give you a little trick that I like to use, a mental trick in the gym.
• 2:09
  Philip Pape: But we need to set the stage.
• 2:11
  Philip Pape: And what does the research say about training hard?
• 2:14
  Philip Pape: And what do you often hear about maybe not training too hard?
• 2:18
  Philip Pape: What's useful, what's not, what's helping your results, what's not.
• 2:21
  Philip Pape: How badly do we misjudge our own effort?
• 2:24
  Philip Pape: And then how do we take the guesswork out of it?
• 2:26
  Philip Pape: All right.
• 2:27
  Philip Pape: So you probably often hear in social media maybe you're overtraining or you're working too hard or you're doing too much.
• 2:33
  Philip Pape: Um, this is often marketed, especially toward women.
• 2:36
  Philip Pape: Ah, you're doing too much.
• 2:37
  Philip Pape: And it gets conflated with what the heck are we talking about?
• 2:40
  Philip Pape: Well, we're usually talking about stressful cardio, right?
• 2:43
  Philip Pape: Too much chronic cardio or not getting enough sleep and recovery, things like that.
• 2:47
  Philip Pape: But you also hear it when people talk about proximity to failure.
• 2:51
  Philip Pape: And they say, well, leave a few reps in reserve.
• 2:53
  Philip Pape: You don't need to train to failure to build muscle.
• 2:55
  Philip Pape: And I've even shared the evidence on, you know, one to two, three to four reps from failure to get the mechanical tension necessary.
• 3:03
  Philip Pape: You don't have to go to failure.
• 3:04
  Philip Pape: And you should stop before your form starts to break down.
• 3:08
  Philip Pape: And then also you should be careful, especially at your age.
• 3:11
  Philip Pape: How many of you be careful?
• 3:13
  Philip Pape: Don't look too heavy, you know, watch out.
• 3:15
  Philip Pape: And I want to be clear that a lot of that advice is good advice, depending on what we're talking about, because I'm not telling you you need to grind every set into the ground, because that definitely is going to backfire.
• 3:28
  Philip Pape: That can get you hurt, that can get you over-reached, over-trained, under-recovered.
• 3:34
  Philip Pape: The research definitely does support leaving something in the tank.
• 3:37
  Philip Pape: And we're going to get to that.
• 3:38
  Philip Pape: But the catch here, why I'm creating this episode, is that's only if you know what failure is like.
• 3:44
  Philip Pape: That's only if you know what training to failure really is and really means.
• 3:47
  Philip Pape: That is for lifters who can push a set to the absolute limit and then deliberately back off to reps.
• 3:53
  Philip Pape: And for that person, if you say two R-I-R or eight RPE, they know what to do.
• 4:00
  Philip Pape: But this is why I don't like reps in reserve for beginners.
• 4:04
  Philip Pape: It took me a long time to get to where I really, really knew what failure is.
• 4:08
  Philip Pape: And even to this day, when I go into the gym and I'm thinking about it and I'm trying to train hard and I'm pushing toward those limits, it takes mental and physical effort to do that.
• 4:19
  Philip Pape: So, let alone a newer lifter, like many of you probably are, you're trying to figure this out for yourself.
• 4:25
  Philip Pape: You don't really know where that wall is.
• 4:27
  Philip Pape: So it ends up holding you back because of that.
• 4:30
  Philip Pape: Okay, now a lot of you came to lifting later in life, like I did.
• 4:35
  Philip Pape: You know, I didn't really start lifting properly till I was about 40 years old.
• 4:38
  Philip Pape: Or maybe you're getting back to it after years away.
• 4:40
  Philip Pape: Maybe you started in your 40s or 50s or 60s or 70s.
• 4:44
  Philip Pape: I mean, look, you can start.
• 4:45
  Philip Pape: I hope you're if you're 85 listening to this, if you've never lifted weights, get started.
• 4:49
  Philip Pape: This is this is the perfect time to start, is now.
• 4:51
  Philip Pape: But maybe you've spent most of your life training on machines or in classes or boost camp, boot camp classes, or YouTube videos, or whatever, P90X, things like that where it's not really the structured progressive training and you've never really approached a true limit.
• 5:07
  Philip Pape: You may have done it to where you're sore or you're sweating or somebody's pushing you rah-rah with like music, but that's not the same thing when we talk about you know, strength training and mechanical tension progressive overload.
• 5:19
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 5:19
  Philip Pape: Also, you might be a little bit afraid because you don't get injured or you're not sure about form.
• 5:24
  Philip Pape: I just spoke to somebody uh recently who's joining Eat More Lift Heavy, and you know, he said he had hired a trainer maybe six months ago.
• 5:31
  Philip Pape: One of the reasons was accountability, but the other reason was form and he didn't want to get injured.
• 5:37
  Philip Pape: I'm like, that is super, super smart, right?
• 5:39
  Philip Pape: Nobody wants to get injured.
• 5:40
  Philip Pape: We want to have the right form.
• 5:41
  Philip Pape: And so when someone says, Well, no, you need to train hard, you have to have a lot of effort, that's one of the fears that goes through your head.
• 5:47
  Philip Pape: But it also means you might never have been close to that edge.
• 5:52
  Philip Pape: You don't know where that edge is, that wall is.
• 5:54
  Philip Pape: And so when someone says, Hey, leave two reps in the tank, you can't if you don't know what the tank limit is.
• 6:01
  Philip Pape: Right now, I'm not saying go David Goggin style, where it's like, you know, when you think you're at 100%, you're only at 30% or whatever.
• 6:11
  Philip Pape: It's not necessarily that either.
• 6:13
  Philip Pape: It's a more objective thing in between.
• 6:15
  Philip Pape: So you often are probably ending your sets in the gym every time almost because it's uncomfortable, because your breathing has changed, maybe you feel a little bit out of breath, because the weight started to feel heavy and your brain's like, okay, that's probably enough.
• 6:28
  Philip Pape: Don't push it, or I'm gonna lose form here, or something's gonna get broken or injured.
• 6:32
  Philip Pape: Tell me if that isn't right.
• 6:33
  Philip Pape: You've had those thoughts in your head.
• 6:34
  Philip Pape: I have as well, right?
• 6:35
  Philip Pape: Or you feel a little bit of a tweak, or you feel like your back is rounding on an RDL or deadlift or something like that, and or there's a little bit of a grind that you think is a grind, even though you probably do have more reps than you think.
• 6:48
  Philip Pape: And then you think, okay, that was a strong effort.
• 6:50
  Philip Pape: That was a good set.
• 6:51
  Philip Pape: My quads are sore, my whatever is sore.
• 6:53
  Philip Pape: Good.
• 6:54
  Philip Pape: Now, if even if you're doing that, you're probably leagues ahead of many others who don't even train, obviously, and who don't, or those who go to the gym and really aren't training.
• 7:03
  Philip Pape: Even if you're if you are training with a structured program, then great, that's awesome.
• 7:07
  Philip Pape: Like that's the first step.
• 7:08
  Philip Pape: But today we're talking about training and getting the most out of it.
• 7:11
  Philip Pape: Because I don't want you to waste your time in the gym.
• 7:14
  Philip Pape: I don't want you to take more time than you have to.
• 7:16
  Philip Pape: I know folks that can train two or three days a week and get super, super effective workouts because they know how to train hard.
• 7:21
  Philip Pape: And others that go in with these like body part splits four, five, six days, and they're not making progress because they're not training hard.
• 7:27
  Philip Pape: They're just going in and putting in quote unquote work, but it's not effort.
• 7:32
  Philip Pape: So if, you know, you're standing in front of the mirror, you're trying to flex your muscles, you're like, why does my body look the same, independent of fat loss, let's say, because that's a different factor.
• 7:40
  Philip Pape: And you're like blaming your age or your metabolism, or hey, I'm not a responder, or the program.
• 7:46
  Philip Pape: The real answer is that maybe you've been way inside your comfort zone and far short of the stimulus that actually builds muscle.
• 7:55
  Philip Pape: So let's quickly look at the research here, and then we'll parlay that into practical tips as always.
• 8:01
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 8:01
  Philip Pape: There's a researcher named James Steele and a group that includes Jurgen, Giesing, and James Fisher, and they ran a study that a lot of people should be aware of.
• 8:10
  Philip Pape: They took 141 people, so it's a decent sample size, not massive, but it's not, you know, eight people.
• 8:15
  Philip Pape: And they had them predict how many reps they could go or or do on a given exercise.
• 8:19
  Philip Pape: And they had them actually go all the way to failure.
• 8:22
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 8:22
  Philip Pape: They pushed them to true failure where they couldn't move the weight anymore, their muscles give out.
• 8:27
  Philip Pape: And everyone underestimated across the board where they thought their limits were.
• 8:32
  Philip Pape: They stopped or they thought they they thought they'd stop well before they had to.
• 8:37
  Philip Pape: The least experienced lifters were off about four to five reps where they thought they were near their limit, and then they had like a half a set left, right?
• 8:45
  Philip Pape: When we're talking about, you know, 10 to 15 reps, that's a lot.
• 8:49
  Philip Pape: And the more experienced lifters were closer.
• 8:52
  Philip Pape: They were off by about one or two reps.
• 8:55
  Philip Pape: Now, when you pool all the research together on this, and there's a really good review by Israel Halperin and colleagues that does that, they the average miss across everybody, the average miss is around one rep.
• 9:07
  Philip Pape: So if you've been lifting hard for years and you really know your body, your guesses are probably pretty decent.
• 9:13
  Philip Pape: And I'm not talking to you.
• 9:14
  Philip Pape: I'm talking to the person who came to this later in terms of doing it properly.
• 9:19
  Philip Pape: The person like you, dear listener, who's been told to be careful their whole training life, because for you, the four to five rep gap is probably more like reality.
• 9:30
  Philip Pape: And that's what we're gonna fix today, right?
• 9:31
  Philip Pape: You feel like you're near the edge, but you're not.
• 9:34
  Philip Pape: That's pretty wild, actually, if you think about it.
• 9:36
  Philip Pape: Just quick tangent, right?
• 9:38
  Philip Pape: You could be smart, dedicated, consistent, going to the gym, doing everything the program says, and still be so far from what's real effort that you're essentially doing a really good warm-up and calling it your working sets.
• 9:52
  Philip Pape: And it's not because you're lazy, it's not because you're trying, you go through all the trouble to get to the gym on a regular basis, but because you haven't calibrated effort.
• 9:59
  Philip Pape: That's it.
• 10:00
  Philip Pape: You just haven't calibrated the effort.
• 10:01
  Philip Pape: Like, what does it really mean?
• 10:02
  Philip Pape: So, okay, Philip, great.
• 10:04
  Philip Pape: Now, how close do I need to get?
• 10:05
  Philip Pape: Do I have to go to failure?
• 10:06
  Philip Pape: I want to connect that to muscle.
• 10:08
  Philip Pape: And we've talked about this in some recent episodes.
• 10:10
  Philip Pape: And the answer obviously is no, you don't have to go to failure.
• 10:13
  Philip Pape: There's the analysis in just a couple years ago, 2024, by Zach Robinson, Michael Zordos, and colleagues.
• 10:19
  Philip Pape: You guys know Zordos from Mass.
• 10:21
  Philip Pape: And they looked at this across dozens of studies.
• 10:23
  Philip Pape: So this is a meta-analysis.
• 10:25
  Philip Pape: They found that getting close to failure does build a bit more muscle, but the effect is small and mostly shows up in the last few reps before failure.
• 10:33
  Philip Pape: So training with one to three reps in reserve is fantastic.
• 10:38
  Philip Pape: It builds muscle really, really well.
• 10:40
  Philip Pape: You don't have to hit true failure, you know, zero reps left on every set.
• 10:45
  Philip Pape: In fact, if you're big compound lifts like squats, deadlifts, all the heavy stuff, you probably shouldn't because of the fatigue costs.
• 10:51
  Philip Pape: It's very, very high, as well as the safety and injury costs potentially.
• 10:55
  Philip Pape: I don't want to overhype that, but it's really more about the fatigue.
• 10:58
  Philip Pape: It's the systemic fatigue.
• 11:00
  Philip Pape: And so you're kind of balancing the two.
• 11:02
  Philip Pape: So if you sit with those, that's really the whole premise of this episode.
• 11:07
  Philip Pape: You don't need to go to failure.
• 11:08
  Philip Pape: One to three reps is plenty, but that only works if your one to three reps is actually one to three reps and not five or six.
• 11:17
  Philip Pape: So it's not that it needs to be one to three.
• 11:20
  Philip Pape: It's that you need to be at your actual one to three reps.
• 11:25
  Philip Pape: So the fix isn't to train harder exactly.
• 11:29
  Philip Pape: It's to find out where that edge is so that you know that you're training harder, if that makes sense, right?
• 11:36
  Philip Pape: Like hard is this subjective thing, but we can make it objective.
• 11:40
  Philip Pape: And I think it's a good moment to pause here because I said something a second ago that I want to give you a free tool for right now.
• 11:47
  Philip Pape: I said that the real judge of whether you're training hard isn't the feeling, it's whether your reps and weights are climbing week over week, right?
• 11:54
  Philip Pape: Because that is showing you that you're getting close to failure and getting the mechanical tension.
• 12:00
  Philip Pape: And we call that progressive overload.
• 12:02
  Philip Pape: Like that is the game.
• 12:03
  Philip Pape: And a lot of people hear progressive overload and they think it just means add weight or reps every week.
• 12:10
  Philip Pape: And you can't add five pounds to the bar forever, right?
• 12:13
  Philip Pape: Like we talk about you hear that in programs like Starting Strength, which are designed for novices, novice and linear progression.
• 12:18
  Philip Pape: You can't just add five pounds to the bar forever.
• 12:20
  Philip Pape: There are a bunch of ways to push the load up, to add a rep, to shorten rest periods, to change how you run a set, to change the order of exercises.
• 12:29
  Philip Pape: There, to do it to modify two variables at once, to increase the sets without increasing the load and the reps.
• 12:36
  Philip Pape: So there's so many permutations on how to do progressive overload.
• 12:41
  Philip Pape: And that's where like good programming comes in and good experience and knowledge comes in.
• 12:45
  Philip Pape: So I do have a free guide that lays all that out, every method, when to use each one.
• 12:49
  Philip Pape: My own favorite way to run a rep range so the weight goes up in a somewhat consistent fashion.
• 12:56
  Philip Pape: And I think it pairs well with today's episode because once you have the effort calibrated, like knowing that you're close to failure, then you combine it with the progressive overload scheme and oh, you are golden now to really start making progress.
• 13:09
  Philip Pape: So totally free guide, go to wits and weights.com slash free.
• 13:12
  Philip Pape: It's called the progressive overload guide.
• 13:14
  Philip Pape: I'm gonna include a link in the show notes, or you can go to witsandweights.com slash free to find it and many of our other resources.
• 13:20
  Philip Pape: Progressive overload guide, again, link in the show notes.
• 13:23
  Philip Pape: All right.
• 13:24
  Philip Pape: So what is the deceptively simple fix, as I like to say?
• 13:28
  Philip Pape: Well, it's a calibration drill and a shift in your mind.
• 13:32
  Philip Pape: Okay, we're gonna do both.
• 13:33
  Philip Pape: So the calibration drill is to pick an isolation exercise, not a squat or deadlift, not a heavy barbell, anything, just something where if you fully fail, nothing bad's gonna happen.
• 13:43
  Philip Pape: So this could be a leg extension, this could be a dumbbell curl, curls are classic.
• 13:47
  Philip Pape: It could even be a machine chest press, right?
• 13:50
  Philip Pape: Where you could just like let go and it just resets to where it is without any harm.
• 13:54
  Philip Pape: It could be a leg curl.
• 13:56
  Philip Pape: Something we're running out of gas and just like hitting complete failure means the weight just can't move anymore, and you just have to like set it down or drop it or whatever.
• 14:05
  Philip Pape: Now, take that exercise and actually go to true failure.
• 14:09
  Philip Pape: Okay, don't just go to where you're uncomfortable.
• 14:11
  Philip Pape: You have to mentally push past that point and go to true failure.
• 14:15
  Philip Pape: We're not not talking about the heaviness of it or telling you how many reps, just the point where you are trying with everything you've got to move the weight.
• 14:25
  Philip Pape: Your brain is connected through your nervous system to those muscles and it will just not move.
• 14:30
  Philip Pape: Okay, many of you have been there, you've done that, many of you haven't because you get uncomfortable and you stop, or you're counting reps.
• 14:37
  Philip Pape: Don't do that.
• 14:37
  Philip Pape: Go all the way to the point where your brain says stop, and then I want you to go past that where it gets hard, and then I want you to go past that to where you normally stop, and I want you to go past that again until your body, until your body, not your mind, says, sorry, I just can't do it for you.
• 14:54
  Philip Pape: Your brain is well past your body at this point.
• 14:57
  Philip Pape: That's what I want.
• 14:58
  Philip Pape: That maybe that's more of the Goggins mentality, but do it.
• 15:01
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 15:02
  Philip Pape: And I want you to count the reps as you do it.
• 15:04
  Philip Pape: However many reps you got past the point where you normally would have stopped, that is the gap in what you think is hard versus what is actually hard.
• 15:14
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 15:14
  Philip Pape: I know it sounds simple, but have you done that before?
• 15:17
  Philip Pape: Have you done an MRAP?
• 15:19
  Philip Pape: Have you pushed a complete failure?
• 15:20
  Philip Pape: I take this for granted because when I got into, I'll say exercise, it was through CrossFit.
• 15:26
  Philip Pape: And one of the benefits of CrossFit was that you did push yourself a lot.
• 15:30
  Philip Pape: It's, you know, Metcons, it's wads, it's sometimes stupid stuff with bad form, but because of the more conditioning aspect of it, you pushed, pushed, pushed, pushed, pushed, and you kind of developed that mental toughness and it it carried over nicely into training.
• 15:47
  Philip Pape: But even then, when I got to like heavy squats, sets of five, it was very hard to push close to failure.
• 15:53
  Philip Pape: Now, the nice thing about beginners using sets across, like sets of five, three by five squats, is that if you're lifting the weight, if you're adding weight to the bar each session, it's going to push you to those hard moments that you wouldn't have pushed yourself.
• 16:07
  Philip Pape: But for today's exercise, I'm talking about an isolation movement like a curl and just mentally going all the way to your brain, till your body physically can't do it.
• 16:17
  Philip Pape: Like it's physically, you try and you shake and it just doesn't do it.
• 16:21
  Philip Pape: All right.
• 16:21
  Philip Pape: Now, the first time you do this, you're like, oh, oh, that is fit.
• 16:26
  Philip Pape: Wow.
• 16:26
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 16:27
  Philip Pape: Like I thought I was doing the 25-pound dumbbell.
• 16:30
  Philip Pape: I thought I would get, you know, 12, but I got 20.
• 16:33
  Philip Pape: Like I got 20.
• 16:34
  Philip Pape: Well, that's insane.
• 16:35
  Philip Pape: That's what they've been talking about.
• 16:37
  Philip Pape: I'm serious, guys.
• 16:38
  Philip Pape: Now, for some of you experienced lifters listening, you're like, God, Philip, shut up.
• 16:41
  Philip Pape: Like, I know how to train hard.
• 16:42
  Philip Pape: Okay, fine.
• 16:43
  Philip Pape: Maybe this episode isn't for you, or maybe it's a good boost of inspiration to recalibrate your own toughness.
• 16:50
  Philip Pape: So that calibrates, that's the drill that I was talking about.
• 16:53
  Philip Pape: It helps you calibrate and give you a reference point.
• 16:55
  Philip Pape: And now when you go back to your normal training, you you know better what one to three reps in reserve is.
• 17:00
  Philip Pape: Now, you can't just do this once.
• 17:02
  Philip Pape: You've got you've got to always be training that that maximum and feel what it is.
• 17:06
  Philip Pape: In fact, when we talk about PRs and you getting stronger, it's going to shift where that failure point gets higher and higher.
• 17:13
  Philip Pape: And of course, you don't have to do this every session.
• 17:16
  Philip Pape: I'm not even suggesting that at all.
• 17:17
  Philip Pape: There are some interesting programs.
• 17:19
  Philip Pape: We have one called Ironclad in Eat More Lift Heavy.
• 17:22
  Philip Pape: And it's modeled off of some set-based progression, some wave, what do they call it, undulating periodization, fancy term.
• 17:29
  Philip Pape: But basically, it's designed with max reps for some exercises.
• 17:33
  Philip Pape: In other words, if you're going to do three sets, you might do two sets of six.
• 17:38
  Philip Pape: And then the third one, you go to six, and then you keep going to failure.
• 17:42
  Philip Pape: And you do that simply to understand: am I really where I need to be?
• 17:46
  Philip Pape: Or should I increase the weight much more next time than I would have otherwise?
• 17:50
  Philip Pape: Like, should I go up 10% instead of just 5%?
• 17:53
  Philip Pape: Or am I truly at failure?
• 17:55
  Philip Pape: And maybe I just need to stay where I am and add reps, or go up, you know, just a few percent.
• 18:00
  Philip Pape: But if you want to do this for yourself just randomly, I would do it every couple weeks on a safe isolation movement just to keep yourself calibrating and then calibrating, and then it inspires you to really train hard.
• 18:13
  Philip Pape: So that's the drill.
• 18:14
  Philip Pape: Now, what the shift in mindset I was talking about is to, I want you to stop trusting your feelings.
• 18:22
  Philip Pape: Now you're like, what?
• 18:23
  Philip Pape: Shouldn't you go with how your body feels?
• 18:25
  Philip Pape: Shouldn't I be listening to my biofeedback?
• 18:27
  Philip Pape: That's not what I'm talking about.
• 18:29
  Philip Pape: I'm talking about the feeling in your mind that you're actually training hard when it's something else going on.
• 18:38
  Philip Pape: Examples are you're breathing heavy and out of breath.
• 18:42
  Philip Pape: That doesn't mean you're near failure.
• 18:43
  Philip Pape: That just means you might not be very well conditioned or have good work capacity.
• 18:46
  Philip Pape: That's a separate issue.
• 18:48
  Philip Pape: Or a weight that feels heavy.
• 18:51
  Philip Pape: Not enough, guys.
• 18:52
  Philip Pape: Not enough.
• 18:53
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 18:54
  Philip Pape: Because I can't tell you how many times I push an exercise and it feels heavy.
• 18:59
  Philip Pape: And I'm like, oh, can I do another one?
• 19:01
  Philip Pape: And I'm like, of course I can do another one.
• 19:02
  Philip Pape: And you have to mentally shift it to just try.
• 19:06
  Philip Pape: That's the thing you have to try.
• 19:08
  Philip Pape: It's that voice that tells you, hey, I I've done eight reps and last time I did seven reps.
• 19:15
  Philip Pape: So that must be hard.
• 19:17
  Philip Pape: That must be heavy.
• 19:18
  Philip Pape: That must be the heavier, heaviest thing I've ever done when you can actually do another two reps.
• 19:22
  Philip Pape: So the only honest and objective signal we have is I'll say bar speed really.
• 19:30
  Philip Pape: Did the bar slow way down and did you have to grind on the last reps?
• 19:33
  Philip Pape: And also, could you not do one at all physically, like we talked about before with the isolation work?
• 19:38
  Philip Pape: Now I'm not saying you need to go to complete failure on things like a squat.
• 19:42
  Philip Pape: I mentioned that already.
• 19:44
  Philip Pape: But there's probably still a gap there.
• 19:45
  Philip Pape: Does that make sense?
• 19:46
  Philip Pape: And another good signal that you're maybe not training hard enough is that you're just not progressing, assuming everything else is on point, your nutrition, your recovery, your sleep, your movement, which that's a big assumption because a lot of people don't have those on point.
• 19:59
  Philip Pape: Or maybe you're in a fat loss phase or something like that.
• 20:01
  Philip Pape: So I'm not saying train to failure on everything.
• 20:03
  Philip Pape: Please don't.
• 20:04
  Philip Pape: Failure on big compound lifts is a great way to get hurt and to fry your recovery for days.
• 20:10
  Philip Pape: And the extra muscle is not worth it if you would even get it because the recovery would be shot.
• 20:16
  Philip Pape: Leave those at like one to three in reserve, but it has to be a correct one to three.
• 20:20
  Philip Pape: I'm also not saying pain, you know, more pain, more gain, right?
• 20:24
  Philip Pape: Old school.
• 20:25
  Philip Pape: We're not chasing soreness.
• 20:27
  Philip Pape: We're not chasing suffering.
• 20:28
  Philip Pape: We're chasing an accurate objective gauge of your effort so that sustainable effort lands in this productive zone for you.
• 20:37
  Philip Pape: And I'm definitely not saying you have to like train like a CrossFitter or try to, you know, push to failure and grind on everything.
• 20:44
  Philip Pape: In fact, the research on older lifters is very, very encouraging that just about everything doesn't have to be fit at failure, but you have to get within those reps of failure.
• 20:55
  Philip Pape: And again, hitting back to what we're talking about before, you have to know where that is.
• 20:58
  Philip Pape: There's also decent evidence that women tend to handle this kind of work well and recover at least as fast as men, if not more so, between sets on average.
• 21:08
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 21:08
  Philip Pape: Again, individuals vary widely.
• 21:11
  Philip Pape: So I don't like to make general, you know, gender-based statements, but that's what we see on average.
• 21:16
  Philip Pape: It's really about aiming accurately with effort that you can recover from so that the work you're doing pays off, right?
• 21:24
  Philip Pape: And so the effort you feel and the effort you're actually producing are probably different at the moment.
• 21:30
  Philip Pape: And calibrating yourself, even with like a set to failure every few weeks, will help you close that gap.
• 21:35
  Philip Pape: All right, before we wrap up, I want to give you a little trick.
• 21:38
  Philip Pape: It takes 10 seconds, a trick that I promised you early on that will give you an extra awareness of your effort.
• 21:44
  Philip Pape: Real quick, though, if this episode was like an aha moment for you, if you realize that you've been training comfortably short of the stimulus needed to build muscle this whole time, and if you're tired of guessing on your own, this is what we help you fix inside.
• 22:00
  Philip Pape: Eat More Lift Heavy.
• 22:02
  Philip Pape: EatmoreLiftheavy.com.
• 22:03
  Philip Pape: This is our 26-week coached program for adults over 40.
• 22:07
  Philip Pape: A huge part of what we do is we teach you to read your own effort and your own data across the board, not just training, but nutrition, biofeedback, all of it, so that you stop guessing.
• 22:19
  Philip Pape: You stop wondering whether it's working and you see that it's working.
• 22:23
  Philip Pape: And part of that comes through the community of, hey, is this working?
• 22:27
  Philip Pape: Here's my data.
• 22:28
  Philip Pape: And we can help you say, you know what?
• 22:29
  Philip Pape: Yes, you are losing fat because your waist is going down or because or you are getting stronger because your lifts are moving in this way.
• 22:37
  Philip Pape: And if they're not, here's what you can do about it.
• 22:39
  Philip Pape: We help you build in that calibration, set up your training around it, train the right way with the right program for your lifestyle, for your equipment and goals and all of that.
• 22:48
  Philip Pape: And so we're in your corner the whole way.
• 22:50
  Philip Pape: If you are looking for that kind of guidance, go to eatmoreliftheavy.com.
• 22:55
  Philip Pape: That's eatmore liftheavy.com.
• 22:57
  Philip Pape: The cool thing is if you scroll down on the page, you could see exactly what each of the 26 weeks has in store, what you are going to learn, what skills you're going to build.
• 23:06
  Philip Pape: I think it's very unique in this industry to have that kind of education along with the accountability and the results.
• 23:13
  Philip Pape: So go to eatmoreliftheavy.com, check that out.
• 23:17
  Philip Pape: All right, here's a trick that can help you fix your effort even further.
• 23:21
  Philip Pape: And this is before you start the set.
• 23:22
  Philip Pape: So if you're doing a rep range, I want you to pick the number that you're going to hit and say it out loud.
• 23:28
  Philip Pape: And what I mean is, let's say your program has six to ten reps for the exercise.
• 23:33
  Philip Pape: And last time you got six with this current weight.
• 23:37
  Philip Pape: So you got the minimum of the rep range.
• 23:40
  Philip Pape: Now, most people are going to go in and they're going to think, okay, if I got a little stronger, I should probably be able to hit seven reps now at the same weight, right?
• 23:47
  Philip Pape: Is that is that what you think?
• 23:48
  Philip Pape: Right.
• 23:48
  Philip Pape: I'm raising my hand.
• 23:50
  Philip Pape: That's often where my mind goes.
• 23:51
  Philip Pape: I'm like, well, okay, this week, if I hit seven, I know I'm a little stronger and I'm pushing.
• 23:55
  Philip Pape: But that's a problem because when you do that, when you say I'm going to hit seven, your brain is going to allow you to only go to seven and then you're going to stop.
• 24:04
  Philip Pape: And you might have had one, two, three more reps left that week.
• 24:07
  Philip Pape: You don't know how much more stronger you actually are.
• 24:10
  Philip Pape: You also don't quite know if you trained hard enough last time.
• 24:13
  Philip Pape: So I want you to flip it around.
• 24:14
  Philip Pape: I want you to go in on that six to ten, and I want you to aim for the top of the range.
• 24:19
  Philip Pape: If you got six last time, is what I'm saying.
• 24:21
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 24:22
  Philip Pape: I want you to say, I'm going to hit 10.
• 24:24
  Philip Pape: Like that is my goal.
• 24:25
  Philip Pape: I'm going to hit 10.
• 24:26
  Philip Pape: And then when you get to the seventh rep, you're like, nah, I got three more reps.
• 24:29
  Philip Pape: I'm going to 10.
• 24:30
  Philip Pape: And you will surprise yourself more often than not.
• 24:33
  Philip Pape: You might only get nine, but that's still two more reps than what you were aiming for at the seven and three more than last time.
• 24:38
  Philip Pape: Does that make sense?
• 24:40
  Philip Pape: And then when it comes to rep range progression, we call it double progression.
• 24:44
  Philip Pape: Once you have hit 10 reps on a six to 10 for that first set, you're going to add weight the next time to bring the reps back down, but you're always going to aim for 10.
• 24:53
  Philip Pape: Now you could push it further and say, you know what, I'm going to try to get 12, even though my range is six to 10.
• 24:58
  Philip Pape: But you get the idea.
• 24:59
  Philip Pape: All right.
• 25:00
  Philip Pape: I hope that helps you guys train harder so you get more out of your gym time.
• 25:05
  Philip Pape: Until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights.
• 25:08
  Philip Pape: And remember, the effort that builds muscle isn't what feels hard.
• 25:12
  Philip Pape: It's the effort you can actually measure.
• 25:14
  Philip Pape: I'm Philip Hape, and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.