If you are going to work out, why not do your best to make it an ideal workout? In my way of thinking, an ideal workout is a workout, or a series of workouts, that produces the most consistent results over the long-term. Some people may wonder why I spend so much time writing about strength training thresholds. The reason is because after 40 years of training experience, I found that strength training thresholds provide the best way to figure out how to create an ideal workout.
Maximum Effort is Not Ideal Effort
In the beginning of my training experience, I equated an ideal workout with putting forth the maximum amount of effort on every set. I believed that I should repeat sets until I was exhausted as this would force my body to respond. It took me a while, but I eventually learned that putting forth a maximum amount of effort does not force your body to respond. Your body responds to ideal workouts that create ideal conditions, not the harshest, most brutal conditions.
Developing a Feel for the Ideal Workout
I believe that there have been lifters from past eras who knew how to zero in on the ideal workout after they gained enough experience to develop a feel for an effective workout. Freddy Ortiz, Leroy Colbert, Bill Pearl, Paul Anderson, John Grimek, and many more, were able to build amazing size and strength before they had access to all of our modern scientific information about the best way to work out. Even in more recent times lifters such as, Richard Hawthorne, Victor Richards, and Phil Heath rely at least to some degree on how they feel from set to set in order to determine exactly how hard and how heavy they will push and how many sets they will do. These lifters have experienced tremendous success by working out according to what many would refer to as “feel.” However, it seems to me that those who lift by “feel” don’t always have a clear explanation that transfers into helping the rest of us to know exactly what we should feel. Lifters who go by feel can tell us how many sets and reps they performed in a given workout, but most don’t have a precise way to define the amount of effort they use. This is something that some lifters and coaches have attempted to clarify compared to the early days when I began lifting weight.
Percentages
One way of describing how much effort to put forth when creating an ideal workout is to use percentages. Percentages generally define training in terms of lifting a specific percentage of your single rep max for a specific amount of reps. Without percentages, coaches often lack the ability to clarify an exact amount of effort the lifter is to use. For example, without percentages, a lifter may be instructed to do 5 sets of 5 reps while using a weight that requires a lot of effort to lift, but not so much effort that he is forced to struggle in order to lift the weights. It is now more common to tell a lifter to use 75% of his max for 5 sets of 5 reps. Percentages tell a lifter exactly how much weight he should use in order to come as close as possible to produce a precise amount of effort. This is a step in the right direction when looking for a way to create the conditions necessary for an ideal workout.
Training Thresholds
My way of putting the ideal workout into words is to define various strength training thresholds. For example, I will instruct lifters to reach the rep speed threshold by repeating reps of a set as long as they can maintain a steady even rep speed. If they exceed this threshold, rep speed will slow down which means they have pushed beyond the ideal amount of effort for an ideal workout. In a similar fashion, I instruct lifters to repeat sets as long as they are at full strength. If they cross the threshold of being at full strength, they have gone too far and will perform sets in a weakened state, which I believe is less than ideal. When it comes to lifting heavy singles or doubles, lifters can keep adding weight until they lift so heavy that they can no longer maintain a smooth nonstop lifting motion. Adding weight past this point means they have crossed a threshold for quality lifting form that will cause a deterioration in regard to the ideal way to perform a rep. These thresholds provide lifters with a good way to know when they are training according to the standards of an ideal workout, and when they are not.
RPE: Rating of Perceived Effort
Some coaches and lifters pursue an ideal workout through the use of RPE, as RPE is used to achieve an ideal amount of effort. RPE stands for Rating Of Perceived Effort. This rating is based on a scale of 1 to 10 where 10 corresponds to maximum effort, or the maximum number of reps that a lifter can possibly perform with the amount of weight he is lifting. An RPE of nine means that a lifter is stopping one rep short of max reps; an RPE of eight means that a lifter is stopping two reps short of max reps; an RPE of seven means that a lifter is stopping three reps short of max reps, and so on. The most prominent authority that I know of who bases his own workouts plus the workouts of those he coaches on RPE is Mike Tuchscherer. Mike is often credited as the first lifter to base his workouts on RPE and is the creator of Reactive Training Systems.
One of the goals of those who use Mike Tuchscherer’s reactive training systems method is to track enough workouts over time to discover their ideal RPE. The RPE that a lifter finds he is most responsive to is his target RPE that he should strive to hit in each workout. In addition, lifters tend to have a fairly specific percentage of their single rep max that they respond to better than other percentages. Lifters who use RPE are to track their progress with different percentages in order to find which percentage creates the most consistent progress. Lifters must also find the number of sets and a training frequency that they respond to best. If they succeed at finding the ideal for each of these training variables, they will be on their way to creating the ideal workout plan for themselves. Even so, most coaches will admit that the ideal workout is a moving target that can change from time to time, and a lifter must constantly monitor his or her progress to adjust each training variable in pursuit of the ideal workout.
Methods That Have Worked For the Masses
A final way to determine the best way to create an ideal workout is to start with a system that has been created according to what has worked for thousands of lifters. Prilepin’s chart which was based on research that was done on thousands of Soviet athletes is an example of this. Prilepin’s chart gives you a range of reps that you should perform for each set when using a certain range of percentages of your single rep max. A range of total reps that you should use for each percentage is also listed.
There are many strength training programs out there that will probably work for the majority of lifters. The Starting Strength Method, The Texas Method, The Westside Method, The 5-3-1 Method, Bigger – Leaner – Stronger, these are all popular methods that have worked for a lot of lifters. These methods tend to be good and provide good workouts for the majority of lifters, but if you want to be the best you can be, a good workout isn’t as good as an ideal workout. The ideal includes the details that must be discovered by each individual lifter.
If you are serious about gaining as much strength as possible, you can’t help but strive to go through a process of trial and error in pursuit of the ideal workout, or the ideal training method that works the best for you. If you don’t know where to start, I suggest starting with the information in this article. It is doubtful that you will find an instant answer that will lead you directly to the ideal workout the first time you try it, but you will get progressively closer to it if you systematically pursue it. Best of training to you.