How Much Should I Lift?

Learn how to gauge how heavy to lift with the following checklist…

This way, you’ll have a system in place that helps you know how hard to push yourself.

This can be applied to any exercise that you’re doing, as long as you’re training for hypertrophy/aesthetics.

If you’re purely training for strength, you may be fine with mechanical failure in your workouts! Let’s dive in..

✅ Warm Up

It’s important to warm up, as you want to make sure that your muscles and cardio system are ready. This time also helps you get a handle on how you’re feeling, so you’ll better be able to know how hard to push yourself.

If you’re sore, you may want to focus just on getting a good pump, versus really trying to push yourself.

If you haven’t eaten enough, you may decide to work more on form, partial reps, pause reps, and also not push yourself. If you’re feeling great, that’s a green light for training hard. Let’s go!

 ✅ Track Your Weights

I can’t stress this one enough. It’s so helpful to know how much weight you’re lifting for your targeted exercises.

Otherwise, you’ll play a guessing game each week and you may waste multiple sets trying to figure out what weight, sets, and reps to do.

If you have your weights and exercises from the previous week, it’s easy to add a little weight, add a rep or two, or add complexity to illicit changes in your physique.

📝 Ideally, you’re looking at a 5-10% increase each week during a training block.

 ✅ Train Close to Failure, but not Absolute Failure

As a general rule of thumb, think about getting between 1-4 reps from failure. This will be enough to spur changes in your physique without over-taxing your central nervous system.

The central nervous system can take up to twice as long to recover as the muscles, so it’s important to protect it.

Otherwise, you may be looking at having to take an extended amount of time off (longer than a normal deload), if you push past overreaching into over-training.

Two Types of Failure:

1. Muscular Failure

This is when the target muscle gives out.

For example, on lat pulldowns, this can happen when your lats just feel fried and you just can’t pull the bar all the way down.

2. Mechanical Failure

This is when you’re able to perform more reps, but you will recruit other muscle groups to get the job done.

For example, on lateral raise, your delts may fatigue and your traps will take over.

This can cause your traps to be sore and to grow…which can be undesirable.

So, keep an eye out for form breakdown, as these can be wasted reps.

Please let me know if this helps and if you try it!

Want to cover a specific topic…let me know in the comments below 🙂

Thanks for reading, watching, and sharing!