The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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Doing both goals is possible if you are a novice. In that case I would recommend sticking to the 5-20 rep range and focusing on clean technique. Pushing to true muscular failure is probably not necessary, I don't interpret this as a license to totally slack off though. I would just stop at technical failure or 1-2 reps shy, normally this is perceived as "hard." Especially for people who have never trained hard before.
The terminology used here is... slightly non-standard. The dominant factor for losing fat or gaining muscle, assuming hard resistance training, is energy or caloric balance. If you are not a novice, and you would like to do both, you will either have to separate the goals into distinct periods or (not recommended though @self_made_human might provide a counter argument) hop on anabolics.
@Mewis's description agrees with my own interpretation of the consensus on muscle building stimulus. It's not clear there is an upper bound for the number of reps where hypertrophy stimulus stops, but below 50-60% of one rep max weights getting anywhere close to an effective distance from failure is very difficult. For example, say we define an effective set as within 4 reps of muscular failure. Choosing a weight of 1/2 of 1RM might be anywhere from 20-100 reps for true muscular failure. This is the first problem with very low weights, choosing a target to hit is very hard. Now say the true number of clean reps to failure is 50, reps 40-46 are all going to feel horrible. If you stop at 40 though, we likely haven't gotten 'close enough' to failure to deliver a quality stimulus. This is despite doing a lot of mechanical work/volume. Compare to targeting 80% of 1RM. the number of reps to failure is likely 7 or 8. If you do 5 reps you are for sure within 4 reps of true failure. So you deliver a higher quality stimulus while having to do less total tonnage. At 30% of 1RM your not really targeting muscles in the anabolic or even anti-catabolic sense. You would probably be better off with a different modality of training, like an elliptical or something.
For completeness, for pure strength the 3-5 rep range is generally considered the Goldilocks zone (with occasional singles, doubles, and higher rep work).
I'm no expert on the matter, and my previous post was largely asking for information about the drugs so I could make an informed decision, so I'm going to recuse myself for now!
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