This article contains reference to online content created by Arnold Schwarzenegger's 'Pump Club' newsletter. For the full article, click here.
Health and fitness is a journey that never ends - and we're always learning new things, from new training techniques to new thinking around diet, mental fitness and more...and it's great to keep us moving forward. Which leads me on to this article as seen in Arnold's 'Pump Club' newsletter - there's also a wonderfully detailed and very scientific back up to it that, if you have the time, you can read here.
In short, the article concerns workout training, volume and growth...and long confirmed something I've always believed in - and endorsed by some trainer friends of mine, particularly my own trainer - a great chap with the rather excellent name of Jackie Wilson.
In short, doing more movements, lots of variations or reps in your workout can actually lead to less gains for your muscles and you can easily lead to performing 'junk reps' - effectively where you are just exhausting the muscle for no growth returns. This also applies to the number of quality reps that you are doing...if you can do say 12 reps and then stop because you've completed your rep count, you're not improving anything, your body is simply doing what it is capable of doing; you have to work your muscles to where they can't complete the rep that then stimulates it to grow and thus get stronger (or progressively overload to use the correct term). But people can confuse this with doing more reps and sets....like most things in life, but particularly important when it comes to weight training, it's the quality, not necessarily the quantity of your training that makes the difference.
Jackie's approach to training is simple: two sets per exercise of quality reps to failure, but usually within the 4-6 or 6-8 rep range, particularly on the bigger, more compound movements. (this is following 2-3 sets of warm up weights of say 2-4 reps building up and warming up your muscles...NEVER go in cold to high weight). For example, if you can bench 90kg for 6 good reps - and by the last rep, this is everything you've got - then you increase the weight to say 95kg to get 4 reps. Once you've got 4 of those, aim for 6 and, once there, increase the weight....and so it goes on, but critically every time you lift, you're pushing yourself, either in quality reps or volume of weight.
This keeps the progressive overload constant an stimulates that all-important growth. Plus, by recording these gains and differences, you have the data to reflect the results from all that hard work - along with what you see in the mirror, of course!
As the saying goes, less is more, but it's the quality that's in the less that makes the difference
Keep working, keep pushing and change will happen!
