Most of you will find that light weights do not have a significant effect on short term strength gains. Likewise, light weights will have little effect on long term strength gains if you don’t use them in a progressive manner. In other words, if you can bench 300 pounds, but you always do your first three warm up sets with 100 pounds, and you keep using 100 pounds for your first three sets for the next three years, those warm up sets will contribute little if anything to your strength gains. However, if you do something as simple as add 1 pound to your first three warm up sets every other week, you will be doing those sets with 175 pounds in three years and those small additions of weight will start to have a positive effect on your strength. Even if you only increase by ten pounds over the course of a year, it’s going to add up to a significant amount after five to ten years.
Little changes that don’t seem to make any difference at all after a month can accumulate to make a big difference after five to ten years. Gradually adding on weight to your lightest warm up sets will allow your body to make easy adaptations. Easy adaptations are the key to long term sustainable progress. Don’t be blinded by your desire to make rapid gains to the point where it never occurs to you to do some simple math. Here is some simple math for you, 20 x 10 = 200. Now let’s translate that into a situation where a teenager starts lifting weights the age of 15. As a beginner, he does his first three warm up sets with 50 pounds and adds a pound to his warm up sets once every month for ten months out of every year. Every year he is able to use 10 more pounds for his warm up sets than the previous year. In 20 years he will be 35. By that time, he will be able to use 250 pounds for his warm up sets, and those are just warm up sets, he’ll be able to lift even more for his work-sets. Those who are patient and systematic will reap the benefits of long term planning.
Problem: Slow Progress Is Annoying and Boring
Slow gains are better than no gains, but slow progress can also be annoying if you know you can make a lot of progress in a short amount of time. The majority of the most popular training methods are great for helping you to make rapid progress. Five Sets of Five, Three sets of Five, Starting Strength, 5/3/1, The Westside Method; all of these methods will deliver fast results. All of these methods include the use of heavy weights and provide enough training volume to stimulating gains, but not so much volume that you can’t recover between workouts. If you want to gain strength quickly, you can learn the basics of these methods by referring to the following link:
The Only 5 Strength Training Programs You’ll Ever Need
Of the books I have written, I prefer Strength To The Max and A Quick Guide to Strength, if the goal is quick gains. However, if you want to pay attention to the little details that make a difference over time, I suggest The 1 x 100 Challenge, 12 – 10 – 8 – 6, and The High Frequency Strength Training Pyramid. All of these books can be found on this website and some of them are free at this time. Even if you already have a preferred method, there are still concepts that you can learn from these programs such as microloading and progressive loading in conjunction with your warm up sets. These concepts will help you to make long-term progress.
Long Term and Short Term Planning: Do Both
Of the various training methods, one of the benefits of the Westside system is that it includes both heavier weights and weights that are moderately heavy. In the beginning, the heavy single rep max effort training may have the most profound effect on your strength gains. However, if you base all of your progression off your single rep max effort training, you may find it very hard to keep making progress. If you use your speed days and your assistance exercises in a progressive manner as a basis to keep making progress, the system will work a lot longer. The heavy days will help to keep your strength close to peak levels, and the lighter weights will help you to make sustainable long term progress.
If you want the best of both worlds when it comes to short term planning and long term planning, include some heavy lifting at least once per week and do some lighter lifting on a regular basis while having a systematic plan for gradually adding weight to all your sets, including warm up sets. Best of training to you.