You are less stable with a feet up bench or larsen press, so it’s harder.
Right, but is this because your brain limits effort when it senses you are not fully 100% stable? (i.e. central governor theory?) I noticed this yesterday when breaking branches off a low-hanging tree. When I bend lower (like the start position of a squat), I am able to apply drastically more force in my arms, wrists, and forearms.
I was reading a very confusing explanation for why it's important to keep your butt on the bench (rather than letting it go into the air), something about leg drive?
In competitive lifts, it is a disqualification if your butt comes off the bench but the explanation I read from ai sounded not believable (that leg drive gives you an extra 10 pounds of strength from your feet by pushing/sliding your feet away from you?)
I understand that the Larsen press (with feet off the ground) variation of benchpress is harder, but I don't understand why from a kinematics/mechanistic POV... 🤦♂️
But still, great lift. You are about 100 pounds stronger than me. 💪
Shifting your mindset toward hyper-targeted hypertrophy work allows you to view moderate rep ranges as a strategic tool for building a bigger muscular base, which ultimately skyrockets your heavy single-rep strength.
I'm so glad I came back to this thread and saw your comment. I now begin every one of my important lifts with a set in the 8-12 rep range and I tell myself it's to train my ability to push mind when my body is screaming at me to quit. I also finish every import lift with a drop set so I'm experiencing this at least twice every gym session.
I googled this. It always means the 1-leg version right?
I cant screew in anything cause its illegal
Often it's better to ask forgiveness than to ask permission. Putty is your best friend and you can always claim it was there before you signed the lease. Especially if the wall is the "normal white" color of most apartments.
I don’t actually understand your question, but congrats on the PRs!
Declining marginal utility -- i.e. an empirical observation that the extra satisfaction you get from hitting subsequent PRs (in the same lift) declines over time. Like the 6th slice of pizza being less satisfying than 4th slice or 2nd slice.
The only PR that I can imagine would be immensely satisfying is 100 pound dumbbells on the seated shoulder press but nothing else really seems special or significant. Here was a reddit thread I bookmarked 2-3 weeks ago because I knew that 185 was right around the corner for me back then and I wanted to predict how good it would feel compared to how it actually felt when I got it a couple days ago.
Overall, hitting 185 on the Incline Bench Press (I never do normal bench press) felt about 1/20th as satisfying as hitting 60# dumbbells on seated shoulder press on May 9th of this year. And hitting 65# on July 26th felt maybe about 1/5th as satisfying as when I first achieved 60# on May 9th of this year.
Nothing is inevitable. You have to work hard.
Very true which is why I try to cultivate lifelong habits. Being obsessed with strength training forces me to be more health-conscious in all other aspects of my life, which should hopefully help me live longer and be more capable of doing physically challenging tasks in old age (such as beekeeping, fishing, etc..).
Great response, I totally forgot that getting new PRs is woefully harder as you get closer to your natural limit.
Also fully agreed on last paragraph, which is why I clipped this and added it to my quotes collection:
An athlete who had reached the pinnacle of his sport was once asked what he wished someone would have told him when he first started playing his sport. He replied, “I wish that someone would have told me that when you reach the top, there's nothing there.” Many goals reveal their emptiness only after years have been wasted in their pursuit.
I don’t really know how that would translate to working out but I would expect your ‘starting’ muscle glucose to be lower if you’re cutting.
To add to this, your muscle cells that are most active during intense exercise move Glut-4 transporters to the surface of cell membrane to prioritize glucose uptake even in the absence of insulin. Today for example, I trained shoulders and ate 30g of sugary carb snacks immediately after my workout.
Otherwise, muscle cells only take in glucose from your blood when insulin is also present since your muscle cells defer to more important organs (such as brain) and don't take in glucose until your pancreas gives the okay-signal.
lifts are going up over time and muscle size is growing over the years.
Do you enjoy lifting? Do you have a favorite lift? And if so, how much do you enjoy it compared to getting an extremely favorable parking spot at a busy store due to perfect timing? (or finding $20 you forgot was in your jacket pocket from the week before)
My reason for asking is because I watch my past video recordings of my attempts at setting new 1RM attempts at my favorite exercise and even on my failures, I still look very giddy and excited before my attempt -- with a huge smile and an undeniable look of genuine excitement/enthusiasm that very few things in life give me nowadays.
Well said. I only have 2 long-term goals with respect to the gym and 1 is functional strength and the other is maxing my seated dumbbell shoulder press 1 rep max -- hopefully either the 80's or 100's since it gives me something to work hard for and will keep me motivated to go to the gym daily for the next 5-10 years. My medium term goal is to be able to do 1 pullup or chin-up.
I log all my workouts and I'm extremely motivated by seeing my numbers (slowly) climb up. I'm already way stronger than I ever could have believed I would be (although still not very strong compared to most people who go to the gym regularly) but I'm in surreal territory and feel incredibly lucky to be strong for the first time my whole life. It's exhilarating and makes going to gym everyday more fun than a visiting a major theme park.
You're spot on about injuries -- I had low back pain for 5 years that has thankfully lessened by about 95% and I definitely don't want another injury. I'm going to try the high-rep thing for 3-4 months but if I don't enjoy it, I will just revert back to what I love (heavy triples) even if I don't gain much anymore since it's a better hobby than video games or Netflix. Plus, I think there's a great amount of pride just for showing up to the gym. The amount of mental toughness it takes just to show up is small, but less than half of men have it, probably less than 25%.
I'm very OCD and ritualistic at the gym. I do a thing with my fingers and a thing with my neck immediately before every hard lift, similar to that famous Australian olympics girl 12 years ago:
Somehow it makes the weights feel lighter and makes my grip feel stronger without additional effort. Other people might think I'm crazy though but I'll keep doing what works for me... 😅
a way to look at it might be that you’re super setting? for me, the number of reps is kind of irrelevant - no matter how many i’m doing, i want to be about at failure by the end. if i’m not, then i know i can go up in weight next time (which is a nice reward in and of itself), or i can add an additional set in to try to hit failure. the “success condition” centers around hitting the target number and the muscles feeling the impact.
This is a great alternative to viewing it and I plan to drop the weight back for 3 weeks about 5-10 pounds from my working sets in the 8-12 rep range so I can hit 3 sets of 12 reps several times and "move up" after a couple weeks at easy weights. I don't need to worry about RIR immediately, I just need to build the habit first (at easier weights) before entering a grinding mindset. This way I won't necessarily associate the pain and mental angst with the rep volume, which should help break my confirmation bias about the reason why I hate the 8-12 rep range.
Being cheated on was gut-wrenching. The worst part is I forgave her and she did it several more times. In hindsight, I was afraid I would not find a prettier woman than her. I was 20 years old and she was 18. Luckily though women do not stay pretty forever and now she's old/ugly like all people our age. (trying to be humorous as beauty is only skin deep and not as important as money)
It sounds like your stabilizers are fatiguing faster than your big muscles
Great post and I appreciate your response. In the future though (for other exercises), what detail from my post gave you the biggest indication that my stabilizer muscles are fatiguing faster than the intended big muscles? Was it the higher rep count on set 2 than set 1 of my working sets? Or was it that I'm only on my 3rd week of practicing my dedicated tricep exercises?
Extend your warmup set or do two warmup sets (possibly with even lower weight).
Allow for a bit longer rest between the warmup set and the workout set.
Try both and see if either one or both makes a difference.
I fully agree with this! It seems that my body was converting my first working set into a warmup set so I should just embrace that rather than complain about it online. I will experiment around a little bit with it like you said and try lower weights but maybe my body needs a warmup set on my working weight? If so, I'll just do about half the reps of a normal working set and count it as a warmup set and see if that fixes my problem.
What does your program say to do? This is completely exercise dependant as well as personal preference. 12 reps is completely arbitrary, as is 6 reps. Find what works for the lift and your body.
I typically refer to fitness youtubers with my top-3 being Flow High Performance, Jeff Nippard, and Mike Israetel. I forget the reason but they say some muscle groups benefit from volume in the 12-15 rep range, particularly lateral delts, triceps, and a couple others. All my heavy lifts (bench, squats, deadlifts, seated dumbbell shoulder press) I do sets of 3 reps simply because I find that rep range most enjoyable and because I've had remarkable success with that protocol despite (falsely) believing my whole life (prior to this year) that I was incapable of getting stronger or building muscle. But outside those 5-6 heavy lifts I do, I just defer to fitness youtubers since I'm still a beginner.
Who knows. It doesn’t matter. Push hard on each set, focus on form and controlling the weight, progressively overload according to your plan, and you will get big and strong. These little things will sort themselves out automatically over time
None of my gym sessions ever go more than 30 total reps (with rare exception). Yesterday I did 5 total sets across 4 different exercises (Zercher Squats, Assisted Pullups, Assisted Dips, Seated Dumbbell Shoulder Press) and today I did 4 total sets across 3 different exercises (Seated Dumbbell Shouler Press, Romanian Deadlift, Close-Grip Cable Row).
Other than that, im out of ideas
My suggestion is to cut back your volume to 20 total reps per day and no more than 3 sets. If this "fixes" your energy problem then your problem was too much volume. The solution is to reduce your volume down to bare minimum then slowly add volume each week until you find your "sweet spot" where you still have enough energy to do more important tasks.
This constraint also forces you to be more mindful of your own "fatigue cost" of every exercise at the gym. For example, seated dumbbell shoulder presses cost me no fatigue as far as I can tell. High fatigue (speaking for myself only) are exercises which I find uncomfortable or psychologically difficult to do, even with little to no weight (such as hack squats, back squats, and skull crushers).
I have made unbelievable strength gains as a beginner in my 40's. Not much muscle gains but I don't care since that's nearly impossible to measure accurately and the increments are too easy to lie/cheat your way to size gains. Connor Murphy did a whole video about it around Covid or just before where he shows the importance of clothing, light, camera angle, pose, and 2-3 other variables which seem unimportant but massively affect how jacked you look.
Other than that, I've been experimenting with supplements lately and I've mostly copied Derek's (from More Plates More Dates) Gorilla mode pre-workout formula that he lists for free on his website the ingredients and amounts. Here is my "economy version" but Derek's formula is better:
I'm fascinated by your knowledge of various fastening/affixing hardware (such as a shaft collar, which I didn't know exists but can see its immense usefulness). Did you learn about all these devices from your job? If so, where does someone like me learn about all these various cheap metal apparatuses since I enjoy building my own stuff as it relates to my various hobbies, including but not limited to, climbing/fishing/beekeeping? This type of knowledge would be extremely useful if I can find out where to attain such knowledge! Just looking to be pointed in the right direction so I can get started more easily, such as maybe a couple keywords or search terms to lead me down a deep-dive rabbit hole.
oh wow, I completely overlooked this. I have not done a decline bench press in more than 20 years (because my gym doesn't have one).
Right, but is this because your brain limits effort when it senses you are not fully 100% stable? (i.e. central governor theory?) I noticed this yesterday when breaking branches off a low-hanging tree. When I bend lower (like the start position of a squat), I am able to apply drastically more force in my arms, wrists, and forearms.
I was reading a very confusing explanation for why it's important to keep your butt on the bench (rather than letting it go into the air), something about leg drive?
In competitive lifts, it is a disqualification if your butt comes off the bench but the explanation I read from ai sounded not believable (that leg drive gives you an extra 10 pounds of strength from your feet by pushing/sliding your feet away from you?)
I understand that the Larsen press (with feet off the ground) variation of benchpress is harder, but I don't understand why from a kinematics/mechanistic POV... 🤦♂️
But still, great lift. You are about 100 pounds stronger than me. 💪
I'm so glad I came back to this thread and saw your comment. I now begin every one of my important lifts with a set in the 8-12 rep range and I tell myself it's to train my ability to push mind when my body is screaming at me to quit. I also finish every import lift with a drop set so I'm experiencing this at least twice every gym session.
I googled this. It always means the 1-leg version right?
Often it's better to ask forgiveness than to ask permission. Putty is your best friend and you can always claim it was there before you signed the lease. Especially if the wall is the "normal white" color of most apartments.
Declining marginal utility -- i.e. an empirical observation that the extra satisfaction you get from hitting subsequent PRs (in the same lift) declines over time. Like the 6th slice of pizza being less satisfying than 4th slice or 2nd slice.
The only PR that I can imagine would be immensely satisfying is 100 pound dumbbells on the seated shoulder press but nothing else really seems special or significant. Here was a reddit thread I bookmarked 2-3 weeks ago because I knew that 185 was right around the corner for me back then and I wanted to predict how good it would feel compared to how it actually felt when I got it a couple days ago.
Overall, hitting 185 on the Incline Bench Press (I never do normal bench press) felt about 1/20th as satisfying as hitting 60# dumbbells on seated shoulder press on May 9th of this year. And hitting 65# on July 26th felt maybe about 1/5th as satisfying as when I first achieved 60# on May 9th of this year.
Very true which is why I try to cultivate lifelong habits. Being obsessed with strength training forces me to be more health-conscious in all other aspects of my life, which should hopefully help me live longer and be more capable of doing physically challenging tasks in old age (such as beekeeping, fishing, etc..).
Great response, I totally forgot that getting new PRs is woefully harder as you get closer to your natural limit.
Also fully agreed on last paragraph, which is why I clipped this and added it to my quotes collection:
To add to this, your muscle cells that are most active during intense exercise move Glut-4 transporters to the surface of cell membrane to prioritize glucose uptake even in the absence of insulin. Today for example, I trained shoulders and ate 30g of sugary carb snacks immediately after my workout.
Otherwise, muscle cells only take in glucose from your blood when insulin is also present since your muscle cells defer to more important organs (such as brain) and don't take in glucose until your pancreas gives the okay-signal.
Do you enjoy lifting? Do you have a favorite lift? And if so, how much do you enjoy it compared to getting an extremely favorable parking spot at a busy store due to perfect timing? (or finding $20 you forgot was in your jacket pocket from the week before)
My reason for asking is because I watch my past video recordings of my attempts at setting new 1RM attempts at my favorite exercise and even on my failures, I still look very giddy and excited before my attempt -- with a huge smile and an undeniable look of genuine excitement/enthusiasm that very few things in life give me nowadays.
I'll look into this now, thanks for sharing!
Well said. I only have 2 long-term goals with respect to the gym and 1 is functional strength and the other is maxing my seated dumbbell shoulder press 1 rep max -- hopefully either the 80's or 100's since it gives me something to work hard for and will keep me motivated to go to the gym daily for the next 5-10 years. My medium term goal is to be able to do 1 pullup or chin-up.
I log all my workouts and I'm extremely motivated by seeing my numbers (slowly) climb up. I'm already way stronger than I ever could have believed I would be (although still not very strong compared to most people who go to the gym regularly) but I'm in surreal territory and feel incredibly lucky to be strong for the first time my whole life. It's exhilarating and makes going to gym everyday more fun than a visiting a major theme park.
You're spot on about injuries -- I had low back pain for 5 years that has thankfully lessened by about 95% and I definitely don't want another injury. I'm going to try the high-rep thing for 3-4 months but if I don't enjoy it, I will just revert back to what I love (heavy triples) even if I don't gain much anymore since it's a better hobby than video games or Netflix. Plus, I think there's a great amount of pride just for showing up to the gym. The amount of mental toughness it takes just to show up is small, but less than half of men have it, probably less than 25%.
I'm very OCD and ritualistic at the gym. I do a thing with my fingers and a thing with my neck immediately before every hard lift, similar to that famous Australian olympics girl 12 years ago:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bx0bi1CjGBY
Somehow it makes the weights feel lighter and makes my grip feel stronger without additional effort. Other people might think I'm crazy though but I'll keep doing what works for me... 😅
This is a great alternative to viewing it and I plan to drop the weight back for 3 weeks about 5-10 pounds from my working sets in the 8-12 rep range so I can hit 3 sets of 12 reps several times and "move up" after a couple weeks at easy weights. I don't need to worry about RIR immediately, I just need to build the habit first (at easier weights) before entering a grinding mindset. This way I won't necessarily associate the pain and mental angst with the rep volume, which should help break my confirmation bias about the reason why I hate the 8-12 rep range.
Much appreciated! 👍
Being cheated on was gut-wrenching. The worst part is I forgave her and she did it several more times. In hindsight, I was afraid I would not find a prettier woman than her. I was 20 years old and she was 18. Luckily though women do not stay pretty forever and now she's old/ugly like all people our age. (trying to be humorous as beauty is only skin deep and not as important as money)
Great post and I appreciate your response. In the future though (for other exercises), what detail from my post gave you the biggest indication that my stabilizer muscles are fatiguing faster than the intended big muscles? Was it the higher rep count on set 2 than set 1 of my working sets? Or was it that I'm only on my 3rd week of practicing my dedicated tricep exercises?
I fully agree with this! It seems that my body was converting my first working set into a warmup set so I should just embrace that rather than complain about it online. I will experiment around a little bit with it like you said and try lower weights but maybe my body needs a warmup set on my working weight? If so, I'll just do about half the reps of a normal working set and count it as a warmup set and see if that fixes my problem.
I typically refer to fitness youtubers with my top-3 being Flow High Performance, Jeff Nippard, and Mike Israetel. I forget the reason but they say some muscle groups benefit from volume in the 12-15 rep range, particularly lateral delts, triceps, and a couple others. All my heavy lifts (bench, squats, deadlifts, seated dumbbell shoulder press) I do sets of 3 reps simply because I find that rep range most enjoyable and because I've had remarkable success with that protocol despite (falsely) believing my whole life (prior to this year) that I was incapable of getting stronger or building muscle. But outside those 5-6 heavy lifts I do, I just defer to fitness youtubers since I'm still a beginner.
Fully agreed and well stated! 💪
None of my gym sessions ever go more than 30 total reps (with rare exception). Yesterday I did 5 total sets across 4 different exercises (Zercher Squats, Assisted Pullups, Assisted Dips, Seated Dumbbell Shoulder Press) and today I did 4 total sets across 3 different exercises (Seated Dumbbell Shouler Press, Romanian Deadlift, Close-Grip Cable Row).
My suggestion is to cut back your volume to 20 total reps per day and no more than 3 sets. If this "fixes" your energy problem then your problem was too much volume. The solution is to reduce your volume down to bare minimum then slowly add volume each week until you find your "sweet spot" where you still have enough energy to do more important tasks.
This constraint also forces you to be more mindful of your own "fatigue cost" of every exercise at the gym. For example, seated dumbbell shoulder presses cost me no fatigue as far as I can tell. High fatigue (speaking for myself only) are exercises which I find uncomfortable or psychologically difficult to do, even with little to no weight (such as hack squats, back squats, and skull crushers).
I have made unbelievable strength gains as a beginner in my 40's. Not much muscle gains but I don't care since that's nearly impossible to measure accurately and the increments are too easy to lie/cheat your way to size gains. Connor Murphy did a whole video about it around Covid or just before where he shows the importance of clothing, light, camera angle, pose, and 2-3 other variables which seem unimportant but massively affect how jacked you look.
Other than that, I've been experimenting with supplements lately and I've mostly copied Derek's (from More Plates More Dates) Gorilla mode pre-workout formula that he lists for free on his website the ingredients and amounts. Here is my "economy version" but Derek's formula is better:
I'm fascinated by your knowledge of various fastening/affixing hardware (such as a shaft collar, which I didn't know exists but can see its immense usefulness). Did you learn about all these devices from your job? If so, where does someone like me learn about all these various cheap metal apparatuses since I enjoy building my own stuff as it relates to my various hobbies, including but not limited to, climbing/fishing/beekeeping? This type of knowledge would be extremely useful if I can find out where to attain such knowledge! Just looking to be pointed in the right direction so I can get started more easily, such as maybe a couple keywords or search terms to lead me down a deep-dive rabbit hole.
This is chatGPT's recommendations, if I don't hear back I'll just start with this list. 😁
That 70 pound concentric with 200 pound eccentric combo setting was hilarious!