CLICK HERE for a podcast about this topic (episode 225 of Running Stronger)
When it comes to lifting, you need to lift hard enough to create progress.
But what exactly does “hard” mean?
It depends on a wide range of factors.
For one, it’s going to depend on your goal.
A strength-focused lifter might have to lift to a slightly different level of difficulty than someone who’s focused more on building muscle mass.
It’s also going to depend on your experience with the movement in question.
Sometimes we choose a movement or a lift with the primary goal of “long term skill development” because it will ultimately help make the person strong… even though they might not be able to push the movement particularly hard at this moment.
For example, I’m working with someone right now who has pretty strong legs and used to lift very consistently with her high school team.
It’s just been almost two decades since she was in high school.
So while she ultimately would like to return to heavy back squats and power cleans…
She can’t currently load either of those things heavy enough to create an actual stimulus for her legs.
So we’ve been starting every workout with cleans and back squats as a form of long-term skill development and then getting on a hack squat in order to help make her legs stronger.
For the record, she’s making a ton of progress.
It also depends on where you currently have weak points.
I’m a huge proponent of deadlifts.
They aren’t just a great exercise for your glutes and hamstrings, they’re also one of the only movements that will actually help to strengthen the deep muscles of your back.
(What some people might call your “low back.”)
Yet if you have really strong glutes and hamstrings in relation to your deeper back muscles, then we’re probably going to need to treat the deadlift as a training stimulus for your back more than a stimulus for your glutes.
Simply put, if your “low back” is the limiter, then that’s the area that will be calling the shots and putting up the white flag when it’s time to stop.
So we should respect that.
Yet with all that said, we still need to lift hard.
If you’re doing 10 reps with a weight that you could lift for 30…
Then that isn’t going to make you any stronger.
It also won’t build any muscle mass or bone density.
All it’s going to do is contribute a bit to your levels of fatigue.
And that’s true no matter how bad it feels or how much it makes your muscles burn.
In order to make progress, we have to get within a couple reps of failure.
Now, when we say “failure,” there’s a couple different versions we need to consider.
On the one hand, we have “technical failure,” which is where your form falls apart.
That’s incredibly important for skill movements and stabilizers and all the other stuff I’ve been discussing so far in this post.
We also have “muscular failure,” which is where you try to move the weight and your form looks great and the weight still won’t move.
Very rarely would I have most of the people I train to go past (or even to) technical failure on a complicated movement like a back squat.
It’s just not particularly safe or beneficial because I don’t train strength athletes.
Yet if we’re doing something like a lateral raise or a leg extension, I’ll take people to failure all the time.
And guess what…
It sucks.
When you’re doing something like a leg extension, it might feel terrible by rep 10… even if you could actually do 25.
Which is why when I’m training someone in person, I’ll often have them take safe movements to failure early in our training relationship so they actually know what it feels like.
Because lifting has to be hard if you want to make progress.
You have to take movements close to (or all the way to) muscular failure if you want to build muscle and bone.
And you have to take some movements close to (or all the way to) technical failure if you want to get better at those movements.
Training is not easy.
It’s fairly simple (if you know your anatomy), but you still have to work hard if you want to make physical changes.
The body doesn’t want to change.
You have to force it to change.
And a lot of the time, that just doesn’t feel all that great.
This concept is arguably a lot better presented through video, so if you still aren’t quite sure how hard you need to work in the gym, then click the link below and you can watch me take a lift to both technical and muscular failure (even though it feels terrible WAY before that point).
Hope this was helpful and if you have any questions, don’t hesitate to ask.