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Quick Wits: How to Train, Warmup, and Avoid Missing Reps in Your Workouts · Wits & Weights | Strength & Fat Loss Over 40

• 0:00
  Philip Pape: On today's Quick Lits, we are answering questions about how to train, how to warm up your lift, how to choose an initial load so that you can get all the reps but not go too lightly, how to rest so you get sufficient time between sets, how to progress and which movements to do week after week.
• 0:18
  Philip Pape: And then how to manage recovery so that you can train hard, but not so hard that you stop making progress.
• 0:24
  Philip Pape: Welcome to the Wits and Weights podcast.
• 0:31
  Philip Pape: I'm your host, philip Pape, and this twice-a-week podcast is dedicated to helping you achieve physical self-mastery by getting stronger, optimizing your nutrition and upgrading your body composition.
• 0:38
  Philip Pape: We'll uncover science-backed strategies for movement, metabolism, muscle and mindset, with a skeptical eye on the fitness industry, so you can look and feel your absolute best.
• 0:49
  Philip Pape: Let's dive right in.
• 0:50
  Philip Pape: What you are about to hear is an excerpt from a video in the monthly workout programs course in Wits and Weights Physique University, where I go over how to train, training principles, how to warm up, an exact protocol to do so, as well as the success factors so that you can continue making progress.
• 1:12
  Philip Pape: And the reason I'm sharing all this is because this week and next week, wits and Weights Physique University is open for enrollment and as a thank you for listening to this podcast, I would love to give you a free month of workout programs from the program.
• 1:27
  Philip Pape: All you have to do is click the link in the show notes and I will send it to you, no strings attached.
• 1:32
  Philip Pape: You will get the exact Google sheet with all seven programs, that's, three novice programs, one late novice program, two intermediate programs and a female lower body focused program.
• 1:41
  Philip Pape: They're all focused on strength and physique development and a female lower body focused program.
• 1:44
  Philip Pape: They're all focused on strength and physique development.
• 1:47
  Philip Pape: And you'll be getting the exact sheet that I am dropping for the first month of Wits and Weights Physique University as a thank you again for listening to this podcast.
• 1:56
  Philip Pape: So again, just click the link in the show notes to get your free physique focused workout programs.
• 2:02
  Philip Pape: The next section I want to cover is how to train.
• 2:04
  Philip Pape: All right, this can be a giant topic in and of itself, but I'm going to just stick to the basics of what's most important, all right, first of all, always warm up with the lift, meaning you don't need other warmups unless it's super cold and you just need to physically warm up the body, like with some cardio on a bike, but besides that, you don't need to stretch.
• 2:25
  Philip Pape: You don't need to do any fancy dynamic warmups that you learned in your CrossFit class.
• 2:29
  Philip Pape: Trust me, I've been there you just need to warm up with the lift itself.
• 2:32
  Philip Pape: You can use the partial range on the lift to warm up.
• 2:36
  Philip Pape: If you're very tight, like if you're going to squat and your shoulders are tight, you can stretch under the bar for a bit until you get that full stretch and can get it on your back, for example, for us older folks and I actually have a whole section here on how to warm up that I'm not going to explain in detail here.
• 2:54
  Philip Pape: It's very self-explanatory, but that is my suggestion on how to warm up the lift.
• 2:58
  Philip Pape: And you don't have to warm up if you've just warmed up.
• 3:01
  Philip Pape: If you've just done a lift of a similar body part and you're already warm, just go into the working set.
• 3:07
  Philip Pape: Second, I get this question all the time.
• 3:09
  Philip Pape: Well, what do I start with when I've never done the movement before, or when I'm doing a new program?
• 3:14
  Philip Pape: And even if you're intermediate or advanced, you want to find the sweet spot for that first week, and the way I like to do it is you know, you go through your warmup and, as you're warming up, you're going to get a feel for how close you are to that stressful point where it starts to feel heavy and then you want to settle on a weight that is not pushing yourself to failure, but also not easy.
• 3:38
  Philip Pape: So it's like two to three reps in the tank, right when you do, let's say, it calls for a set of five and you go ahead and you do five and you're like I could maybe get into more reps.
• 3:50
  Philip Pape: Okay, that might be the spot you want to be at, because then the subsequent sessions, week after week, you're just going to go up from there.
• 3:56
  Philip Pape: Once you have your baseline, you're just going to go up from there and that's going to be how you progress.
• 3:59
  Philip Pape: Just don't start too light, okay.
• 4:02
  Philip Pape: The next one is long enough rest periods, very, very important.
• 4:05
  Philip Pape: Okay, this actually, I'm actually going to fix this.
• 4:09
  Philip Pape: This is not correct.
• 4:10
  Philip Pape: Three to five minutes or longer for compound lifts.
• 4:12
  Philip Pape: One to three minutes for direct isolation work, because I actually how to train number three Okay, getting real time updates here as I make these videos.
• 4:22
  Philip Pape: All right, the next one and, by the way, the reason we want long enough rest periods is to get all the reps and actually demonstrate an objective progression week to week, because if the rest period is all over the place, that's another variable we're changing.
• 4:35
  Philip Pape: If we were rested a minute last week but three minutes this week, or vice versa, it's not going to be an indication week to week that we're actually progressing or not.
• 4:43
  Philip Pape: The next one is very important.
• 4:44
  Philip Pape: Uh, and that's why I'm dropping them monthly and not like weekly or whatever, because I want you to know this is a long game.
• 4:55
  Philip Pape: You want to pick a program, run it, for you know, run it for six to 12 weeks, with deload if needed.
• 5:03
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 5:04
  Philip Pape: And then number five I want you to train hard.
• 5:06
  Philip Pape: I want you to train hard, but not to the breaking point, not to where your form breaks down.
• 5:11
  Philip Pape: All right, usually this is not all the way to failure.
• 5:14
  Philip Pape: Rarely it is so like if you're doing bicep curls, yeah, go to failure, but for the most part you're one to two reps shy of failure, and that proximity to failure is an indication that you are training hard.
• 5:25
  Philip Pape: All right, we already talked about the warmup.
• 5:26
  Philip Pape: You can read this for yourself.
• 5:28
  Philip Pape: And then success factors are just.
• 5:29
  Philip Pape: You know, to prevent the question hey, I just missed my reps.
• 5:34
  Philip Pape: What do I do?
• 5:36
  Philip Pape: I would rather you say I did everything I could to not miss my reps and then I missed my reps.
• 5:40
  Philip Pape: What do I do?
• 5:41
  Philip Pape: Two different things, because most of the time when somebody says they missed their reps, they are deficient in one of these areas.
• 5:47
  Philip Pape: If you take care of these areas and you miss a rep, well, you may just be plateauing and need to change your programming.
• 5:53
  Philip Pape: Okay, so what are they?
• 5:55
  Philip Pape: Number one rest long enough between sets.
• 5:57
  Philip Pape: Talked about that already.
• 5:58
  Philip Pape: Number two increase the load each session, but just the right amount.
• 6:02
  Philip Pape: Don't go too much.
• 6:03
  Philip Pape: You know, if you start going up 10 pounds a week on your deadlift and then all of a sudden you just, it feels just extremely heavy, maybe you should have gone up five pounds the most recent increase or even on a press or bench press or something, two and a half pounds.
• 6:19
  Philip Pape: You know, using microplates you never want to jump up too much, and I see this a lot of times with dumbbells when people use dumbbells, because the dumbbells jump in like big increments.
• 6:28
  Philip Pape: It doesn't seem like it, but when you go from, you know, 20 to 25, that's what?
• 6:34
  Philip Pape: Uh, 20% plus is what 25% increase.
• 6:37
  Philip Pape: Usually we'll want to go up by like five or 10%, and so that's where microplates come in, even for dumbbells, but also for barbells.
• 6:45
  Philip Pape: Okay, make sure you're recovering.
• 6:47
  Philip Pape: I mean, really these last two are all the other things in your life that could affect you.
• 6:51
  Philip Pape: The third one here is really the big stuff the eating enough calories, sleeping enough and using active recovery, which is a lot of walking, movement and strategic cardio, and then everything else that could cause stress or interfere with your lifting.
• 7:04
  Philip Pape: That could be your schedule, your kids, your work.
• 7:08
  Philip Pape: Whether it's causing stress or not, it may interfere in some way and make you inconsistent.
• 7:13
  Philip Pape: If that's happening, you know, if you're working out in the morning one time and the afternoon another, that could also affect your ability to hit the progression.
• 7:21
  Philip Pape: So keep all those in mind.
• 7:24
  Philip Pape: This is videos being made based on the first month's workout programs.
• 7:27
  Philip Pape: Um up for your feedback and improvements along the way.
• 7:30
  Philip Pape: Maybe we're going to add another program or two in here if the demand calls for it, and keep making this better and better and helping all of you get swole, get jacked, get strong, build the best physiques ever and have fun working out and training.
• 7:42
  Philip Pape: What you just heard is an excerpt from the introductory course in the monthly workout programs within Wits and Weights Physique University.
• 7:50
  Philip Pape: But again, if you want the full month of workout programs absolutely free, whether or not you are enrolled right now, go click the link in my show notes.
• 7:59
  Philip Pape: Thank you for tuning in to another episode of wits and weights.
• 8:05
  Philip Pape: If you found value in today's episode and know someone else who's looking to level up their wits or weights, please take a moment to share this episode with them and make sure to hit the follow button in your podcast platform right now to catch the next episode.
• 8:19
  Philip Pape: Until then, stay strong.