#156: Strength Training Terms Explained: What Matters & What Doesn't

If you’ve started strength training, you’ve probably seen terms like RPE, RIR, volume, frequency, training to failure, unilateral vs bilateral, lengthened position training, drop sets… and wondered:

Do I actually need to care about this?

In this episode, I walk you through the most common strength training terms you’ll see online and explain them in plain English. 

More importantly, I tell you which ones really matter if you're a woman in midlife whose goal is to build muscle, get stronger, improve your health, and prepare your body for the decades ahead.

If you’re in your first year or two of lifting, this will help you stop overthinking and focus on what actually moves the needle.

I cover:

1. What a program really is and why it matters
2. Sets, reps, rep ranges, and what “lifting heavy” actually means
3. Training close to failure vs going to failure
4. Frequency and volume
5. RPE and reps in reserve
6. Lengthened vs shortened training
7. Unilateral vs bilateral training
8. Partials and drop sets

And I’ll tell you what you need to care about, and what you can safely ignore for now.

If you want to lift in a way that builds real strength and muscle in midlife without getting lost in jargon, this episode is for you.

If you’re enjoying the podcast, and would like to support my work please consider buying me a cup of coffee – link’s in the show notes! 

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Transcript

#156: Strength Training Terms Explained: What Matters & What Doesn't

 [00:00:00] Welcome to 40+ Fitness for Women. I'm Lynn Sederlöf-Airisto, your host, and I'm a certified menopause fitness coach. And today I'm gonna go through the common strength training terminology you've probably heard online. I'll explain what each term means and whether you need to care about it.

Okay. And I am assuming that you are strength training for the health benefits, for some aesthetic benefits and the quality of life today and the decades ahead. So let's get into it.

So if you're strength training and you really wanna get results out of what you're doing, you need to be following a program, not just haphazardly doing something you are really going to make so much more progress if you have an actual program.

 So the program is your plan. Okay? And your program should be [00:01:00] created based on what your goals are. So for example, programming in learn to Lift and in my membership is to get your whole body strong. On the other hand, another program, one that I did for one of my one-to-one clients was an upper body only because she was really concerned with getting her upper body fit for her wedding.

 And that plan is then laid out according to how many times you train. Also, how long you want to train. All right? But you want to have a program, and your program will tell you what you're going to be doing on every day that you train. So it will give you the list of exercises that you are to do. And an exercise is something like, a bicep curl. The person who creates the program should be very intentional in [00:02:00] choosing the specific exercises that they have in there, and they're thinking about, you know, which exercises go together, what makes sense? Okay. So you have a list of exercises in there, and for each exercise you are told how many sets of that exercise you'll do.

So a set is one time that you're doing that exercise for a certain number of reps. Okay, so let's say you are doing. Split squat. If you're doing two sets of a split squat, you'll go and you'll do split squats, a certain number of reps that you're gonna do. Then you'll take a break, and then you'll do a second set of split squats. Okay. So those are the sets, and you'll be given a rep range. So rep range, on the other hand is [00:03:00] how many reps of that particular exercise you should aim to do. So for example, in my programming, for most of my members, and in learn to lift it is 8-12 reps. That means you wanna choose a weight where you can perform 8-12 reps, and that's, that's what you wanna aim for.

Now the next thing that we talk about a lot is lifting heavy, and I've done a whole separate podcast episode on that, so I will link it in the show notes

but a quick summary is that lifting heavy. There are kind of two meanings to that word. The first is that you are lifting a weight that is heavy for you. In other words, one where you are actually challenging your muscles, where you're not just feeling the burn. Or just tiring out your muscles with some [00:04:00] endurance type of exercise that happens to use some resistance that you're lifting heavy enough that you get close to. And here's another term, the point of muscular failure. Muscular failure and feeling the burn so badly that you can't go on are two totally different things. So let's be clear on that. So muscular failure would be, when you pick up that dumbbell to start doing your bicep curls. And then you realize , Oh, I, I don't, I don't think I can do a full one again. So that is lifting heavy. For you. 

And then the other side of lifting heavy has a lot to do with this rep range, that I talked about a little bit earlier. So 8-12 is a rep range where you lift moderately heavy weights. If you [00:05:00] know that you're going to be doing eight to 12 reps of something, you're not gonna pick up something you can barely move because. You're not gonna be able to move it 12 times, but if you knew that you only had two or three reps to do, then you could pick up something substantially heavier. And that is the second type of heavy that people talk about is when you are lifting in low rep ranges and therefore you are actually picking up bigger weights than if you're lifting in higher rep ranges. So that type of heavy is very much, tied to what kind of rep ranges you have, and then you'll be lifting even lighter weights. If you're working in higher rep ranges, like let's say a rep range was 20 to 30 reps, then you'll have to pick up even a smaller weight. Okay. And that'll be like the [00:06:00] opposite of lifting heavy.

Okay, so we just went over the heavy for you. Heavy and training to failure, all of which I talk about on other podcast episodes. So I will list those for you in the show notes so that you can go dig deeper into those topics.

All right, and outta the things that we've talked about so far, which ones should you actually care about? Well, you should definitely care about your program. Get a good program. The quality of your program is going to matter. Exercise selection is going to matter. And how many reps, how many sets, all those things. I see so many programs out there, oh my God, with so many exercises listed, and they make you do so many sets that honestly like. I, I look at those and I think, oh, you know, I'm exhausted before I [00:07:00] started. Just from just too much. It's just too much. So programming makes a difference. You do need to care about how many reps and what weight you're using, and you need to write it down. So please track those things. If you're going in without a tracker, you don't know what exactly you did last time, then fix that. I have a free tracker that you can use. Link is in the show notes, so go download that and start tracking. Do that as a very minimum from this episode. 

 And another thing that you wanna care about, and this is not right in the beginning of your journey, but when you feel a little bit more comfortable with the weights, when you've started, like to really get the hang of the movement patterns, your form is looking pretty good, then you wanna start playing with. Training close to failure. Okay, so really practicing [00:08:00] testing where your boundaries are and feeling what it feels like to get close to failure, because it's only when you are pushing your body, your muscles to the edge of their. Capabilities that your body gets the signal that, Hey, I need to put some more muscle on this person. And that's when muscle growth and strength starts to happen. Okay, so training close to failure is important. Going to failure is not necessary. They used to believe that it was, but recent research has shown. Getting close to failure is definitely good enough. Now I've done a podcast episode on working to Failure.

What is failure? And it is important in the sense that you can't learn where your limits are unless you [00:09:00] kind of test them, right? Otherwise they're just theoretical. So for that reason, I do think there is a lot of value in training to failure on safe exercises after you've been lifting for a few months to go through this phase where you're training to failure, and then every now and again, go ahead and go to failure on those safety exercises to again, you know, just recalibrate. Am I actually guessing? Guessing correctly that I'm close to failure or not? And sometimes it can feel really satisfying to just push your body to where you're like, okay, I can't get another one up. You know, it just feels good. So. Yeah, that about failure. Two other terms that you hear a lot are frequency and volume, and now those are two things that I've seen defined in very many different ways. But I do wanna discuss them because of whether they matter or not, [00:10:00] because they kind of do. So frequency is something that.

I'm gonna define it as how often you are stimulating that particular muscle group. So frequency would be like once a week, twice a week, three times a week. And let me say that there are old school weightlifters who trained like one muscle group. A day, and then they train five days a week. So any particular muscle will get worked once a week and it worked for them.

Okay. So we're not all the same and there are a lot of factors going on, but in general. A frequency of a couple times a week, of hitting a particular muscle is what you will need to get results. But if you notice that that's not really moving the needle and everything else is set, like you're going close enough to failure, you know you're challenging your body and [00:11:00] all that kind of thing, then you might want to increase frequency 

 Then there is volume. So volume is how many sets, like working sets. Not warmup sets, working sets where you're training close to failure. You put a particular muscle or muscle group through over the course of a week, so that's your volume. And there have been various studies done on volume and they do see a correlation of more volume. With more growth in strength and muscle. So more is more, but it's not a linear progression. There's a point of diminishing returns. So if you're doing. One set two sets, three sets, four sets, five sets, six sets of the same exercise in the same session. Each one of those sets [00:12:00] is going to bring less stimulation to your muscles.

So to summarize, the frequency is how often in a week you are hitting a particular muscle group, and the volume is how many working sets you are doing to hit that particular muscle group.

And now the recovery piece. Recovery matters because the thing is that when your muscles are stimulated by your strength training, they start to develop. Like they start to react and that reaction goes on for, well, they tried to study this maybe 24 hours, maybe, you know, 48 hours. And. During that time, it doesn't really make sense to stimulate them again because you're not gonna, you're not gonna really do anything else to them. Plus certain types of strength training. Like [00:13:00] doing longer sets or choosing particular exercise variants. Are going to mean that your muscle needs to recover for a longer time before it's ready to go again.

So these are, there's so much, there are really so many factors that go into. Really optimizing strength training and, and I was thinking this episode was gonna be super straightforward, but actually when you start talking you start to realize there's a lot of nuance in this and there's a lot to think about when one is creating programs because these are all the pieces that I'm keeping in my mind that we need to pull together in order to make effective programming.

So one of the other things you may hear about is muscles being trained in a lengthened versus a shortened position. And there is some research to indicate that some of the muscles, [00:14:00] when you train them in a lengthened position, it's more effective for muscle growth. But there's a trade off with that because training in a lengthened position also requires more, recovery for that muscle after the training session. So shortened length training is more recoverable than lengthened length training. This is all details, which hopefully you are not going to have to worry about. This is what the person who programs your sessions is worrying about. They are worrying about, okay, is there too much lengthened training in this particular session? Is there enough recovery going on? Am I alternating between training this muscle in a lengthened versus shortened position? Okay. These are things that hopefully you are not thinking about.

And I would say that if you're in your first year or two of strength training, [00:15:00] like just get a good program. Honestly, don't, don't even. Bother to learn this stuff unless you're kind of a freaky science person like I am who wants to understand all the ins and outs of everything. And, and kind of related to this is, you know, our muscles like the, you've probably understood or heard triceps. There are three heads of the tricep. There are two heads of the bicep, your hamstrings. Right. They're, these are not just one muscle, they're like groups of muscles working together. And so when you do different exercises that work those muscles, you work them in different ways, you work different areas of that muscle and in different ways, so, so yes.

Optimally, you change how you're kind of challenging that muscle as you go through the [00:16:00] months and years that you are training. And again, this is, I'm just explaining this to you because you may have heard it online, but this is something that hopefully the person who is programming your strength training is thinking about.

They are changing those things up. Okay. 

Now related to this, again, is unilateral versus bilateral training. Okay. Unilateral means that you are training one side at a time. Bilateral is where you're using both limbs at the same time. So anytime your hands are holding onto the same barbell or bar or whatever, so both hands are contributing to pulling that thing .

Okay. If you're using dumbbells, then each of your hands has its own challenge, right? So they're working separately. You know you're doing bicep [00:17:00] curls. Your right arm cannot help your left arm if you're using a barbell. On the other hand, to do bicep curls, one hand can help the other hand by pulling a little harder on that bar.

 so that you don't end up with a lot of, imbalance in your two sides. It is best that you program in over time, that you're sometimes working unilateral and sometimes bilateral Now. The problem with unilateral training is it takes longer because you do the right side, you do the left side, and that just takes longer.

 These are things that you need to take into account in your programming if you're doing it on your own. But hopefully you have somebody doing your programming for you and they are taking it into account.

Hey. And now we have four more terms that I wanna go over because I see them all the time, and even beginners are seeing them in the apps and other places. So the first two are related [00:18:00] or they're kind of measuring about the same thing. They are RPE, which is rate of perceived exertion, and the second is RIR. So that's reps in reserve. So some programs will try to tell you how intensely you should be training or ask you how intense did you feel like you trained. And so the rate of perceived exertion you rate on a scale of one to 10, like how hard was this? Okay. And. So that's kind of an objective measure. I use this, um, actually when I do my HIIT training, like, so cardio training afterwards my sports tracker will ask, you know, how hard was this for you?

And then you'll rate it and actually my app. Asks, uh, my [00:19:00] students also, how hard was this for you? And you will rate it. And I have to say that even when I'm training close to failure, I rarely feel like, oh my God, it was almost maximal, you know, because strength training is just not like that when you're doing it for health. and, aesthetic benefits like we are. But, but anyway, so that's what the RPE is for, and the 

RIR is reps in reserve. So earlier we talked about how you want to be training close to failure because those last reps closest to failure are the ones that stimulate muscle growth. There's a model it says that those last five reps before you hit failure are actually the ones that are stimulating, muscle growth.

It's called the stimulating reps model. Yay. So anyway, so when you're judging RIR, you're making the [00:20:00] assessment when you finish, or your coach may be telling you that, Hey, leave. One rep in reserve, leave two reps in reserve, leave three reps in reserve. Or you think, you know to yourself that, Hey, I'm gonna do a little bit of a lighter or less tiring training session, so I'm gonna leave more reps in reserve.

So that's what that is. Do I think you need it? I think as long as you're aware of the fact that you need to be training with enough intensity in order to stimulate muscle growth. In other words, you need to leave, max 2, 3 reps in the tank, then, you know, that's fine. Sometimes I will write a note to myself that zero reps in reserve, 'cause maybe I'll only get. You know, six reps when normally I can do eight, so something's going on with me and I write down 0 RIR. I know that I tried my best, I was [00:21:00] like maximal effort and my body just wasn't, wasn't with me today. So in that sense, it can be useful that you can sort of let yourself know that, hey, I had a rough day. And then maybe if that keeps happening over and over again, you can start to look for trends or something.

Okay. And then the last two things you will see in some programming are partials and drop sets, and those are kind of. Fun maybe. I think honestly, straight sets is what they call it. When you just do reps and you record that and you go close to failure and you do your program and you go home and you watch your muscles grow, that's straight set. All right. No shenanigans, no fancy schmanzy things. Partial reps are when you are like doing let's say, bicep curl, and you only come a pathway and you straighten your arms. [00:22:00] That's like a partial rep. That's what that is. Or you might do it at the top, partial rep at the top where you don't straighten your arms all the way. You only straighten their half the way, and then you go back up. Okay, so those are partial reps. Makes sense, right. And I think some trainers like to program them because they're kind of fun, make things a little different. And yeah, if you wanna do 'em, I guess try them out. But I don't think they're needed at all, and I don't program them myself.

And then the last one is drop sets. So drop sets are. Something you probably see a bunch of the men at your gym doing, which is that they lift really, really hard. They go all the way to failure and then they put down the weight they have, they pick up one that's a little bit smaller. Then they go as [00:23:00] far as they can with those, which might be like another two reps. Then they put that down and then they pick up a little bit lighter weight, and then they do another couple reps, and this is. Something that I have read about. And I've been trying to figure out like, okay, so could that be of any use? Until I see real evidence that that is useful, or at least as good as straight sets. I'd say, yeah, nah, I'm not gonna do that. Okay. 

All right, so we went through a ton of stuff here.

I have a lot of additional information in the show notes. If you want to look deeper into some of these topics that we covered today. 

And with that, I leave you until next week and wish you happy training.