Here’s How to Sabotage Your Weight Lifting Progress
Don’t turn weight lifting into a cardio session. Keep weight lifting weight lifting
Cardio is great for your heart, mental health, and blah blah blah but please, stop turning your weight lifting workouts into cardio workouts. Here are five things that will sabotage your weight lifting progress (READ: sayonara muscle and strength gains).
1. Superset everything
I touched on agonist-antagonist paired sets aka supersets in this article. It’s a great, time-efficient way of training that I often use with my clients. However, where did I say in that article to turn your workout into circuit training? No need to answer. This is a rhetorical question. Just because your heart rate is through the roof and you’re sweating AF, doesn’t mean your workout is effective.
Instead, stop rushing through the workout and avoid supersets unless you’re short on time. If you use supersets, make sure you use them the way I recommended in the article — superset exercises that don’t compete with one another meaning, they train antagonist muscle groups (e.g. biceps and triceps, chest and back, quads and hamstrings, etc.).
2. Rest only 30–60 seconds in between sets or exercises
If you don’t need 2–3 minutes of rest between sets, you aren’t training hard enough. Seriously, if you rest shorter than that, you’re not training at the required effort level for muscle growth which is within a few reps of failure.
Instead, rest no less than 2 minutes in between sets. Studies have shown over and over that more rest is better for muscle growth. When I program workouts for my clients, a 2-minute rest period is a minimum recommendation. This way, you can put maximum effort into every single set. You’re better off doing fewer sets with higher effort and quality than the opposite.
3. Leave a crapload of reps in the tank, never train to failure
I see people leaving way too fucking many reps in the tank and I see this in the gym way too fucking often and I write about it way too fucking much. I mentioned it here, here, and here so…
