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The Best Workouts I’ve Ever Had Shared these Common Factors

With our “Train Like Your Trainer” program starting next week, I’ve been reflecting on my personal workouts over the last 16 years and I’ve started to think about the common factors among the best workouts I’ve ever been through.  By “best” I mean those workouts that stand apart from the rest in terms of intensity, challenge, focus, and fatigue.  The list below sheds light on the commonalities in most of the best workouts I have ever experienced.  Collectively, they serve as a guideline for productive training not only for me, but also for almost anyone interested in engaging in intense, evidence-based resistance exercise.  Of course, this is not an all-encompassing list of evidence-based exercise tenets, but guidelines to maximize one’s individual workouts. 

Strength-Training for Women: An Interesting Myth

Most of the classic myths pertaining to strength training for females are slowly waning.  These myths include, “Strength-training will make women bulky,” and “Women should strength-train with lighter weights and do more repetitions to become toned.”  Decades of research have combated, albeit not completely eradicated, these myths.

Intensity Defined

The scientific literature clearly delineates that “intensity” is the primary stimulus for our bodies to change and improve as a result of engagement in a resistance exercise program.  Intensity is most important controllable factor (uncontrollable factors include percentage of fast twitch or slow twitch muscles fibers, muscle belly length, tendon length, and muscle insertion) in an individual’s response to an exercise program.  It appears that the other variables of an exercise program, although important, are simply not as meaningful as the intensity with which we exercise.  This leads us to an important (and often ignored) question: What is intensity?  Intensity can be defined as a percentage of our momentary ability to perform an exercise.  Stated other wise, it has nothing to do with the amount of weight we lift, it has everything to do with our effort.  Lifting a relatively heavy weight for 6 reps or a relatively light weight for 20 reps are both deemed “intense” so long as it is utterly impossible to lift a 7th rep or a 21st rep.  When looking to produce better results, faster results, or to break through a plateau, the first place to turn your attention to should be your training intensity.  Most well intended trainees err in almost the opposite direction.  They add more exercises, add more sets, and/or increase the number of weekly workouts.  All of these are steps in the wrong direction.