This video isn't meant to talk down towards people who go to the gym and don't push themselves so don't get me wrong, at least those kinds of people are getting off their buts and doing something to better their health and fitness, even if they are not really training to get all that much stronger.
The problem is, I see a lot of people at the gym doing the same workout every time, never really getting stronger and kind of just going through the motions, not pushing themselves, not taking it to the next level. Sure they are getting blood to their muscles, raising their heart rate and burning calories at the same time. But to be honest, many of these people doing what they are considering to be weight training is really just a more diverse form of cardio.
If you are lifting 50% of you max for 20+ reps every time you workout and not going to failure, then you are basically telling your muscles that there is no need to get any stronger so guess what, they don't get any stronger. You need to tell your muscles they are weaklings by overloading them to the point where there is no choice but for your muscles to get stronger in order to accomplish this new workload you are exposing them to.
And guess what, you don't even need to workout longer or more often to do this, you can even workout less often and for shorter period of time if you use a high intensity workout approach. At the end of the day, your objective is to get to your hardest working set as quickly and safely as you can and exhaust the muscles to the point of total failure, even if you have to cheat the last few reps or even not get full range of motion on the last couple reps.
Here is one example of what I am talking about and I am not bashing people that do CrossFit since I am one of them, but in all fairness I do my CrossFit in moderation and pick workout days that compliment my weight training days. People often make fun of CrossFiters because they work so hard but seem to never really get all that jacked. Often the goal of the CrossFit athlete is to have amazing conditioning with useable strength and there is no doubt that a CrossFit workout will get you in amazing usable condition. The downside is that the high workload done at many CrossFit gyms can be counter productive to getting "strong" in other word it can eat your gains and in some cases lead to strain and injury! That said there are top CrossFit athletes that have proven conditioning and strength can both be obtainable but these athletes do dedicated strength training with very heavy weights on a regular basis.
OK, so here it is in a nut shell, train hard not long, make your last working set as intense as you can to the point of complete, muscles exhaustion and failure. Keep challenging yourself each workout, a plateau happens when your brain has decided you can not go any further so change the way you think and train like the person you want to be, not who you think you are.
Saturday, January 31, 2015 at 6:28PM ;)
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