Work Out and See Results Using These Strategies
Are you feeling stuck in your workouts? Is progress lacking?
I’m so glad you’re here because I’m about to show you the easiest ways you can adjust your workouts to make progress and continue to grow.
The easiest way to adjust your workouts is to focus on the reps, sets and weight. Your mind muscle connection will play a big role by using RPE and RIR. What are these?
Mind Muscle Connection (MMC) -This takes time to develop. The longer you train, the more familiar you’ll be with this principle. MMC is when you can feel the muscle you’re training and not just going through the motion of the exercise. It is super important to learn how to engage the muscle you’re training, otherwise, you are kind of wasting your energy and time exercising. Once you develop MMC, you can start using the following:
Adjust Reps, Sets, and Weight — Once you use MMC, you can adjust the sets and reps accordingly. For example, if you’re lifting 12lbs for a Dumbbell Press and pass 12 reps easily, it’s time to increase the weight so you can start feeling more stress in your muscles because that’s how muscle grows. You should increase the weight to be able to do 12 reps with the last few reps feeling challenging.
Reps in Reserve (RIR) — This is a measure of how many more reps you can do in that exercise with mostly proper form. Think of a scale of 1–10, and you are training at a RIR of 3 for Dumbbell Deadlifts for 3 sets of 10 reps. This means you are going to perform 10 reps of deadlifts at a weight that you feel like you can do 3 more reps (RIR) but don’t actually do those last 3 reps. This is where you have to be smart about your weight. Choose a weight where you’ll be able to do 10 reps and have 3 reps left in you but DON’T actually do those reps. Considering the scale of 1–10, the lower number of the scale demonstrates how heavy the weight is. If you can only do 1–3 more reps, you’re most likely lifting a heavy weight. Normally, people use 1–4 reps to make progress in strength. In contrast, you don’t want to aim 6–10 reps because that means you’ll most likely be doing very light weight where there’s not really a challenge happening for you to make progress.
Rate of Perceived Exertion (RPE) — This is another form of measuring progress. This is simply rating how hard the exercise is on a scale of 1–10. So 10 being the hardest (muscular failure) and 1 being the easiest. For example, if you’re doing Dumbbell Deadlifts for 3 sets of 10 with a RPE of 7, it means you’re going to choose a weight where the exercise should feel pretty challenging when you’re lifting. You’re most likely going to go for an RPE of 6–10 to make progress in strength. Aiming for anything from 1–5 won’t help you make progress since there’s most likely not a challenge.
After learning these essential terms to make progress, you can apply them in your training. The more you apply them, the easier it’ll be to use and you’ll be on your way to making progress.
Choose a workout plan that has the capability of logging in your progress with weight, sets and reps. It’s essential to track your progress to see results. Train smart.
