I totally agree with Fighting Scott: things are simple…maybe the problem is explaining how to feel you are doing things the right way, so here’s my own little two cents worth of advice:
1-) Each rep should feel like you contract the muscles as hard, as deep as you can feel them do so and lower the weight with control, focusing on keeping the muscles tense. Let the weight guide you, pick one you start to feel at the second rep, third at most.
You shouldn’t slow it down too much, odds are, just focus on lowering it under control, not on lowering it slow, but still, keep force on the bar to resist it, not too much, but enough so the muscles are tense almost as much as when you lifted the weight.
You have to lift with 100% force ont he bar, means if you aren’t lifting 100% of your 1RM, the bar will move fast, but it doesn’t mean it’s going to use momentum and let you simply shoot it up without exerting force during the full ROM.
2-) each set shouldn’t go close to failure, in fact, each set should make you anxious for another one by letting you feel your own power on the bar:
About this concept, I have replied to a thread on the article by Scott Abel “Max Load Training in the Real World” and this is a bit of my latest contribution. If you recall your other thread of “100 reps to bigger muscles” or the “BDSM muscle” one, Louisluthor, this is Boneco’s method:
I once posted on a thread and described my way to measure up the benefits of a workout, and what I said, pretty much summarized into a couple sentences was:
“… you can more more weight by unloading the bar and do more reps and more sets than by going heavier and having to rest longer and do less sets or going too light and crank one rep after another and another…”
I stand by that, as I have a friend which i also mentioned, who uses an EDT-like principle to try and do his most work on each set and each workout by peaking up.
What’s peaking up? If I can do a set of 10 reps with my 12 RM, by rep 5 I am at the top of the curve, I’m moving at my best speed and producing force, but by the 7th rep I will feel it harder, heavier, my speed will slow down a little bit and I’ll get tired. So the trick is to stop at the 6th rep and just rest as little as possible, like an EDT protocol.
The benefits? You keep more energy so the reps are all done at 100% force and quality whereas if you did crank out the 10 reps with the 12RM load you’d have 7 good reps at most and 3 mediocre ones. I don’t care if someone says the alst 2 or 3 reps of a 10-rep set are the best ones for how hard they are to perform, that’s bullshit, doesn’t make sense to me.
Think of the muscles as workers, you can pull double shifts or work them hard on 8-hour shifts knowing afgter the 6th hour, they will be a little sloppy, not too much but while they were giving 100% to the factory, now they give just 80-85% at most, more like a 70%.
¿ Wouldn’t it be better to have 6-hour shifts then if you will use the same amount of workers and don’t have money to hire any extra ones, and which is economically the same as you pay them for the hour ?
It’s like they say here “Same cake size, different number of slices to share” and makes perfect sense to me to do more sets, with a good load rather than do less sets, tire myself out and see that my workout isn’t in the 95-100% efficiency zone and drops as low as 75-80%, yes?
I hope that was somewhat useful, and by the way, congratulations for being alive with your Dominatrix girlfriend, it’s cool that you found love and you seem to have survived it, nice to see you too Pump, Merry Xmas to you guys.
