The point of lifting weights is to challenge your body so that your body can rise to the challenge by building muscle. The more you lift, the stronger you get. Yet too many people are advised not to ever put any damn weight on the bar.
This ubiquitous message – that light weights are good enough and heavy weights aren’t that important – may seem friendly at first, but it makes people fail. Internalizing this message can consist of perfecting your technique until you feel you have “earned” your right to weight gain, or your choice of accessories, the specific foods you eat, or the supplements you take , rethink.
This shyness of being heavy is particularly common among women, although people of all genders can be susceptible to it. Lots funny fitness products immortalize this message and convince us with their marketing that their cheap, light product is just as good as a whole gym full of barbells. Heavy weights can be scary; It’s no wonder people are reluctant to actually lift them.
You can do better than squats
This particular swear word was inspired by a shape article I saw it the other day, although I want to make it clear that this is a phenomenon that is bigger than any single article. The articles tweet Promises readers “more booty and thigh lift benefits from every squat” and the heading aims to show you six ways you can do “false squats”. The article is illustrated with a picture of a woman doing a squat without adding weight.
G / O Media can receive a commission
The truth is, if someone is crouching with no weight and wants to get more out of every squat, they’re going to have to use a goddamn weight. Air squats are a great way for beginners to get started, but once you’ve done ten or so it’s time to move on. Beyond this point, air squats give you a slight incentive to improve muscle endurance and possibly cardiac endurance, however they do very little for your overall strength. You will still feel tired by the end of your workout, but you haven’t done much to improve your strength for the next time. Or to put it another way: sticking to a variant that is too easy means making yourself fail.
The tips in the article are all small technical improvements. While these aren’t all bad advice, none of them will have nearly the same impact on your thighs and bum as loading the bar.
(And while we’re at it, why do articles for women assume we want to “contract” our muscles, which isn’t even a thing? Why can’t it be about getting stronger or building muscle, which is resistance training? does it actually do?)
People tend to choose weights that are too light
I’ve seen this anecdotal times: a person, often a woman, comes up with the idea of doing strength training. So far, so good. You pick up a light weight and lift it. Large! But instead of trying the next higher weight to see if you can lift it, stick with the lighter one.
I’ve casually coached a few friends and acquaintances (and my own children) and often have to ask the person, “Can you do more?” And often, someone who thinks they’ve done a challenging workout can put on significantly more weight when he knows that this is what someone expects of him. For example, two hundred pounds instead of 100 pounds on the leg press.
There have been several studies asking people to choose a weight to exercise and then test their strength to see if that weight was actually a good choice. in the this study, women picked weights that were between 42% and 51% of their maximum reps when asked to pick a weight for a set of 10 reps – an actual maximum of 10 reps is usually 75%. This study in both men and women, the average choice of people was found to be below 60%. We are sand dredgers ourselves.
Stop thinking about it
Seeing the question-and-answer threads in fitness-related subreddits is fascinating. I recently saw someone complain about not getting results from weight training. So what supplements should you take? I saw another person, a beginner who was probably using too light weights from the start, was advised to lift even less so that she could focus on her “mind-muscle connection”. Every day there are tons of shape checks from people who use way too light weight and tons of questions about what type of curl is best for the biceps, or if it’s okay to split your workout over X days.
These are all details. The mind-muscle connection makes no difference in muscle activation if you lift enough heavy weights. Even the best supplements won’t make a significant difference in muscle growth if you don’t lift enough weights.
So if you want to focus on these things, this is great – just do it while you lift enough heavy weights. If you want to perfect your deadlift form, this is great! Work on it as you lift heavy weights accordingly. Would you like to try a different curl variation? Cool, as long as you know that if you make them heavy enough and you do enough of them, all curls will build muscle.
You blow up a plateau by lifting more
Another aspect of this reluctance to lift heavy is the constant fear of injury and overtraining. Actual overtraining is a disease studied in endurance sports; It’s not the same as feeling a little tired or sore after lifting. Injuries are also exaggerated in the minds of many people, and it’s not just because your shape is a little imperfect or your weights are a little heavier than last time. Sure, if you’ve never squatted more than 100 pounds, stepping 315 pounds off the rack might be a bad idea. But if you work to a heavier weight over time, it is not dangerous.
And one more word on how you can lift more: you can do more sets of an exercise. Minimalist programs are popular with beginners and busy people, but if you have time to do more than the bare minimum, it will pay off. And if you only do the bare minimum, it may not work for very long. As Greg Nuckols points out in an article with the appropriate title “more is more”:
If you’re not making progress, your default thought shouldn’t be simply, “Time to find an exciting new program!” It should be either “Time to add more work to my current program” or “Time to find a new program that does more Volume needed as my current one ”.
So don’t be afraid to lift more. Especially after you’ve exercised and seen no results, or if your newbies gains have subsided, wonder if you can exercise more – and if you don’t want this, do you have a good reason or are you? are you just nervous about it?
