Background: Male, 40, lifting seriously for ~6 months. Before that, about 2 years of aimlessly familiarizing myself with the gym and overcoming the intimidation of simply being there. I mainly visited the gym for the treadmills and would wander around the weight room for 15-20 minutes afterward but could never get into a flow state until earlier this year when I finally noticed my first real strength gains in January.
My reason for posting today is because I recently watched a youtube video providing a summary of the Schoenfeld meta-analyses on volume/intensity and effective reps. What I don’t get is the experience of it. When I’m grinding a heavy triple, there’s this narrow window of total focus and there’s zero ambiguity of when I can do 1 more rep (or 0 more reps) because I have tons of experience at low-rep sets at ~90% of my 1-rep-max.
If I’m being honest with myself, I kinda hate doing sets of anything higher than 5, even on my favorite exercises. One of the most helpful things I’ve ever read in my life online from a fitness discussion & comments section was when someone said they mentally reframe Romanian deadlifts as kettlebell swings and that instantly clicked for me and has made me so much stronger at that exercise, nearly overnight. It becoming my 2nd favorite exercise (after seated dumbbell shoulder presses as #1).
What I’m hoping for today is to hear from more experienced lifters who actually enjoy that rep range of 8-12 or 6-15. Instead, I find it confusing, unfamiliar, and mentally uncomfortable primarily for these 3 reasons:
- no matter where I stop barring absolute momentary muscular failure, I always finish the set feeling angst of not knowing truly how many RIR I still had left in me. Not knowing whether I had 2 vs 3, or 3 vs 4 RIR, it is totally a trivial and unimportant issue yet it drives me crazy for no good reason.
- for longer sets, it stops feeling like lifting and starts feeling like a chore I’m waiting to finish, similarly to if your dentist told you to wear 20-pound weighted gloves and to brush your teeth until your wrists hurt.
- the difficulty in finishing your final planned rep (when you plan to leave 1 or 2 RIR) for a working set of 8-12 reps has a different type of mental difficulty than the difficulty I’m familiar with at working sets in my 6-rep-max range. The final rep of a short sets gives me the feeling afterward of having accomplished something significant but the final rep of a long working set gives me the feeling afterward that I’m punishing myself (perhaps because my brain does not connect the effort to the reward yet).
This is not a rant however, I’m just trying to look for some ideas on positive re-framing. Especially as I have branched out into other exercises where doing shorter working sets of my 6-max range do not make sense due to form issues when using weights that are at too high percentage of your 1-rep max (such as lateral raises or French presses).
TL;DR: I need help understanding how to enjoy (or at least positively reframe) my lifting experiences at the gym from lifters who enjoy performing their working sets in the 6-15 or 8-12 rep range as someone who exclusively prefers heavy triples and heavy singles.
Cant say I’ll reframe you’re viewpoint, but I’ll at least share mine.
Depending on a lift i generally aim for 5-10 or 8-15 range, though it’s not that set in stone and first set of any exercise will always be with higest weight and sometimes most reps as well.
I mostly aim to repetition range because my coordination sucks, yeah training has improved it, but it’s still bad. So with sub 5 rep sets it’s more likely that my form breaks down and i just hurt myself with bad form. With higher rep sets i can maintain better form even up until the last reps.
I do agree that it is kinda harder to gauge reps in reserve this way. It might be more noticable with pulling exercises when it starts to get harder and harder to maintain full ROM and eventually it becomes half repping. I just call it by that point. Or with squats when the Barbell no longer goes up and safeties save me, but still oftentimes the target muscle just refuses to work anymore.
Overall, i just don’t even try to gauge RIR or RPE and i actually doubt that it can be accurately gauged by most people.
I just took the angry yelling mens approach form YT, Greg Doucette and his slogan “Harder than last time” and just try to beat last times numbers, of course while maintaining form, rep speed and ROM as consistent as possible. Reasoning is that i cant grow linearly indefinitely, so eventually ill just reach close enough to failure.
I just assume im close enough to failure to trigger growth, because lifts are going up over time and muscle size is growing over the years. So i guess it works.
For the re framing: the gains, man. You will never see size gains power lifting like you will body building, full stop. Additionally, you’re 40, my friend, and age is not nearly as friendly with the power stuff as it is with the body building. Maybe you’re less injury prone than me, but power had diminishing returns due to lots of annoying tweak injuries because your form is the easiest thing to mess up when you’re going for 1RM and the back is less forgiving than it once was. It’s simply much harder to hurt yourself body building.
Well said. I only have 2 long-term goals with respect to the gym and 1 is functional strength and the other is maxing my seated dumbbell shoulder press 1 rep max – hopefully either the 80’s or 100’s since it gives me something to work hard for and will keep me motivated to go to the gym daily for the next 5-10 years. My medium term goal is to be able to do 1 pullup or chin-up.
I log all my workouts and I’m extremely motivated by seeing my numbers (slowly) climb up. I’m already way stronger than I ever could have believed I would be (although still not very strong compared to most people who go to the gym regularly) but I’m in surreal territory and feel incredibly lucky to be strong for the first time my whole life. It’s exhilarating and makes going to gym everyday more fun than a visiting a major theme park.
You’re spot on about injuries – I had low back pain for 5 years that has thankfully lessened by about 95% and I definitely don’t want another injury. I’m going to try the high-rep thing for 3-4 months but if I don’t enjoy it, I will just revert back to what I love (heavy triples) even if I don’t gain much anymore since it’s a better hobby than video games or Netflix. Plus, I think there’s a great amount of pride just for showing up to the gym. The amount of mental toughness it takes just to show up is small, but less than half of men have it, probably less than 25%.
You might enjoy something like Bullmastiff by Bromley. Higher rep powerbuilding that’s well organized and slowly build towards heavier sets as the weeks go on.
I’ll look into this now, thanks for sharing!
I think a lot of this is just person preference, or psychological. I like heavy sets (4-5 reps) for some stuff (typically the powerlifting moves) and lighter sets for others. One thing I noticed is for isolation stuff, heavy sets tend to break my form down worse than compounds. Trying to do an overhead triceps extension at 3 reps would end with me trying to bounce at the bottom and worse - using my legs to help drive the start of the movement. Sets from 8-12 really help lock in form and actually hit what you want it to hit.
As far as RIR goes, the only way to know is to test it. On heavy lifts, have a spotter, call out near the end of the set when you think you have 2-3 left and literally go to failure and see how close you are. Same with lighter exercises, but no need for a spotter. Just call it out or mentally note where you think you have 2-3 and check.
Early in my lifting career I did a round of super squats, 20 rep widowmaker sets, that really pushed my boundaries for what I thought was possible as far as exertion goes. Ever since then “Higher rep” sets of 10-12 just don’t suck as much to me, and while I still do some 3-5 rep sets I tend to stick with the higher reps to keep my chance of injury lower, plus hypertrophy aww yeah
a way to look at it might be that you’re super setting? for me, the number of reps is kind of irrelevant - no matter how many i’m doing, i want to be about at failure by the end. if i’m not, then i know i can go up in weight next time (which is a nice reward in and of itself), or i can add an additional set in to try to hit failure. the “success condition” centers around hitting the target number and the muscles feeling the impact.
on top of that, i’ve found there is a far better burn and overall feeling of a “good workout” with medium to high reps, which is one of the main rewards to me.
a way to look at it might be that you’re super setting? for me, the number of reps is kind of irrelevant - no matter how many i’m doing, i want to be about at failure by the end. if i’m not, then i know i can go up in weight next time (which is a nice reward in and of itself), or i can add an additional set in to try to hit failure. the “success condition” centers around hitting the target number and the muscles feeling the impact.
This is a great alternative to viewing it and I plan to drop the weight back for 3 weeks about 5-10 pounds from my working sets in the 8-12 rep range so I can hit 3 sets of 12 reps several times and “move up” after a couple weeks at easy weights. I don’t need to worry about RIR immediately, I just need to build the habit first (at easier weights) before entering a grinding mindset. This way I won’t necessarily associate the pain and mental angst with the rep volume, which should help break my confirmation bias about the reason why I hate the 8-12 rep range.
Much appreciated! 👍
“yet it drives me crazy for no good reason” - you said it bro!
I’m very OCD and ritualistic at the gym. I do a thing with my fingers and a thing with my neck immediately before every hard lift, similar to that famous Australian olympics girl 12 years ago:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bx0bi1CjGBY
Somehow it makes the weights feel lighter and makes my grip feel stronger without additional effort. Other people might think I’m crazy though but I’ll keep doing what works for me… 😅
