#80: Are you training with enough INTENSITY?

How hard you train matters. If you're not training close to your maximal, you may be leaving results on the table. 

In this episode, I share: 

• Three myths about what builds muscle
• How to ensure you're training with enough intensity
• A couple of exercises you can see what going to failure feels like
• Tips for beginner weight trainers
• Tips for more advanced lifters who are training to failure
• What training to failure looks like in practice

Link to video showing involuntary slowdown >> 
Link to video showing training to failure >>

Enjoy the show!

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction
• 0:00 Practical Tips for Beginners and Advanced Lifters
• 0:35 Client Success Story
• 2:34 Understanding Intensity in Weight Training
• 2:44 Three myths about what builds muscle
• 5:02 What is Intensity?
• 6:11 Training to Failure
• 16:36 Conclusion and Next Steps

Transcript

Are you training with enough INTENSITY?

Welcome to 40+ fitness for women. I'm Lynn, your host, and I'm a certified menopause fitness coach, helping specifically women in midlife to build the bodies that they want to spend the rest of their lives in. And one of my big focuses is, is on weight training. And so these last few episodes have been around weight training.

So last week we talked about lifting heavy. And the week before that, we talked about how following a structured program will help you get better results. And I have to say that I was so excited when I saw the progress pictures of one of my clients, 

she sent them over. I think it was on Thursday and she's been with me now for about five months and training at home, mostly with dumbbells. She does have a bench, uh, and she does have a couple of machines, but training mostly at home and just being really consistent and applying these principles that we are talking about today. And it's interesting because she sends me form videos.

quite regularly, actually. And I'm really starting to see the muscle definition. She sent, uh, over a form video this morning of her doing a lower body exercise. So it wasn't even an upper body day for her. And I could see her shoulder muscles, her arm muscles very clearly in the video. So Just a reminder to y'all who are getting started on your journey, that these things really work when you start applying them and you do them consistently over time.

And it will always take longer than you want it to. In fact, this client was just, Kind of, um, feeling frustrated a few weeks back that she wasn't seeing as much progress as she wanted. And it always feels like if you just wait a little bit longer, it'll come there's going to be like that one day that it just suddenly starts to show. 

And of course she could feel it long before that she was lifting all the time, lifting more and more and more than before. So her strength, that was not at all in question it was just waiting for that wonderful visual change in her body. Anyway, always love those stories.

So today we are talking about intensity which is one of the key factors in building muscle. And I want to say that there are a few things that intensity is not that burning feeling that you get. That's a feeling that's very familiar to a lot of women who have gone to group fitness classes and worked with low weights or even body weight exercises and feeling that burn and thinking, Oh, this hurts so much.

This must be so effective. Nope. This is not that. That is not terribly effective for building muscle. It is not about getting sore. This is another myth that if you feel sore then it must be working. No, that is not the case. Most likely when you first start weight training, you will feel sore. And then because you're doing the same exercises over and over again for probably 10, 12 weeks, I hope at least, and then you are feeling of soreness will go away. You might get it every now and again, but soreness is not really correlated with effectiveness in building muscle. So that is another myth. So intensity and soreness, not related.

And the third myth that we have is about muscle confusion. I remember this was told to me actually by a fitness instructor at my gym who said Oh you know because les Mills Body Pump They do this that they have you do the same exercises or they put out a new set every few months and at my gym like the instructors are forced to use that current, uh, set of exercises for at least two months.

And this, um, instructor complained that, Oh, they won't let us switch. And it's not so effective for your muscles if you're not switching. and Man he was really wrong. That is not true. So muscle confusion or having to switch your exercises or variety needed, that is not intensity. That is not needed for muscle growth.

So, what is intensity? So intensity has to do with how hard you are pushing your muscles. Because remember, your body doesn't just put muscle on itself willy nilly. It does it if it has a reason to believe that you need it. And the reason to believe comes from the fact that you're doing things that your body is not quite Able to do yet, or that it's very challenging to do.

And in our normal day to day life, there isn't a whole lot of that. It happens in situations like maybe lifting a heavy suitcase every now and again, but what we want to do is we want to make sure that we're maintaining our muscles and building our muscles. And so we are. Kind of tricking our body into that by doing the weight training by setting up an artificial situation where we are telling our bodies that we actually need to be stronger have more muscle than what we have right now. And intensity is the way that we trigger it. 

So, you've probably heard about training to failure so intensity and training to failure, they are related concepts.

What you want to do is push your reps to the point where you are not able to do another one with good form. Okay. And I'm going to have some caveats around this. So listen up but I first want to explain like the general idea here and then we'll talk about who should be doing this and at what point and what about beginners that kind of thing okay.

So the thing is that most of us are probably not lifting with enough intensity. You want to be lifting almost maximally, and this has to do with the lifting heavy piece as well, because if you're not lifting heavy enough, you're not going to be able to lift, you know, with enough intensity. So you want to go close to failure.

So let's talk about failure for just a second. So if I think it is a really good idea for everybody to kind of understand what failure feels like and the best places to practice going to failure are some safe exercises. So if you think logically about some of the exercises that. You know, are on your program, which are ones that if you were all of a sudden not able to do it, that you would end up in trouble.

 So, for example, if you are doing squats, all right, that's not one that I would necessarily recommend anybody trained to failure unless you have super amazing form. And you have set up your squat rack. And so you know how to bail on a lift that you're failing. So I would say in general for like 99% of the population don't take your squats to failure.

But think about if you were doing pushups okay so that's an easy one that actually any one of you can even test at home today. Doesn't matter if you can do full pushups or if you do pushups with your knees on the floor or even pushups against a wall. But choose a level of pushups where, um, you know, five feels like a lot.

And then aim to do as many as you possibly can. Well, at some point, you're going to end up where your arms your elbows are bent because you're at the bottom of the pushup. And then you're going to try to push yourself up and you're going to be like okay can't do it and then you're going to plop on your stomach.

That is not dangerous, luckily or you're going to put your knees down or whatever. You're just going to stop. That is going to failure I mean it is no scarier than that if you're doing a bicep curl going to failure just means that you're trying to bend your arm bend your elbow bring that weight up and you just can't get it all the way up.

That's another place where you can practice going to failure in a safe way okay there's no danger there if you don't get it all the way up it's not going to like fall on your foot it's not going to break your lower back or anything like that. 

So it's a good idea I think to know where that is because The fact is that when they've studied this, they've noticed that people, they think they're going to failure or they think they're training with a lot of intensity.

And it turns out that they are so far from failure that they actually would have the strength to do more now if you listened to two episodes ago where I was talking about the benefits of tracking your lifts and you are tracking your lifts then this is Most likely not going to be a huge problem for you because.

Um, when you're tracking and you're continuing to apply progressive overload, in other words, when you've gotten to a certain weight and you're able to do a certain number of reps and every time you try to add another rep or two, and when you get to the top of your rep range, you know, you increase your weights.

If this all sounds like gibberish, go back a couple episodes and listen to that. But if you're tracking and applying progressive overload. You're kind of naturally doing this, right? You wouldn't be progressing if you weren't training with enough intensity to cause adaptations in your body. So progressive overload and tracking will is a really great tool for making sure that you're training with enough intensity.

And I'll just remind you that I have a free tracker that you can download so link in the show notes.

And one way that you can tell that you're getting close to failure is that you will sense an involuntary slowdown on the concentric part of the motion. Now, the concentric part is the part where the muscle is flexing so in the bicep curl it's going to be when you're actually bending your arm in the pushup it's going to be when you're straightening your arms.

You'll just notice in the beginning you might be able to be like one two one two one two one two and then all of a sudden you're like one two one two okay well maybe that was a little fast but but you get the point. Like, you'll just notice that okay this is not going as easily as it was a moment ago and that tells you that you are getting close to failure so that's a really good sign for you to look out for. 

 And if you want to see like if it helps you to actually see what this looks like, I have created a video of me working to failure. So you see what failure looks like and also of me working and showing the involuntary slowdown that happens so check the links in the show notes for those

okay so practical tips now if you are a very very beginner lifter now if you are just starting on your weight training journey, you do not need to be worried yet about training to failure. What you need to do is have your program have your rep range and start tracking and applying progressive overload in the very beginning.

When you're starting your weight training you are learning the most the exercises the movement patterns and that is what you need to be focusing on getting those right. and you will Kind of automatically get stronger in other words get to increase your weights do more reps because your body is learning the movements and then as your body learns the movements your muscles are able to start working and getting stronger. 

So that period of time kind of depends on how often you're training, what your workout background is and all these kinds of things but it can take months before you hit a point where the progressive overload is just not like tick, tick, tick, tick, tick all the time.

You may be able to increase your weights without having to get very close to failure or really seeing this kind of involuntary slowdown

now when you're like more of an intermediate lifter so if I think about Somebody who has been lifting consistently three or four times a week following the same program, most likely the same exercises because it's going to get a little bit messed up when you switch out exercises you will be able to start really training close to failure after three to six months.

So the ramp up period for weight training is fairly long to just sort of get acclimated to this new form of exercise. And then if you are already a more advanced lifter, you may want to consider things like the following which is your recovery period. 

So while it's nice to practice training to failure to get familiar with what that feels like to get close, which of course you'll only get to know because you have trained to failure so you you start to recognize that, ah I'm getting close to where I'm not going to be able to do another rep with good form. Then you can start this like optimizing in the sense of not going all the way to failure in all your sets.

So in fact when you're a more advanced lifter a more experienced lifter then most likely you'll only want to go to failure on your last set. And that has to do with recovery how much time it takes for your body and your muscles to recover from a particular session. 

And then as always this is so so individual but I know that for me if I know that I'm going to be training the same muscles again like two days from now, because you always want at least the 48 hours of rest, then I will train a little bit further from failure than if I know that I have you know three days to recover because I have noticed this effect.

So if I'm doing my training sessions cause I do two upper two lower per week that's my goal. Sometimes it's upper lower and and bowl. 

But if I'm doing two upper and two lower and I go lower upper lower upper like on four consecutive days then I will train farther from failure on those first two sessions.

Just so I am more recovered for the last two sessions. So, just something to keep in mind, a few little tips and tricks.

Okay so today we talked about lifting with intensity and this goes very much hand in hand with the previous two episodes so if you haven't listened to those listen to them they were on why you need to be lifting heavy and also on why tracking your training is going to help you make progress more quickly.

All right and that was it for this week and looking forward to talking again next week. In the meanwhile, happy training