An Old Lie Told a New Way

 

"But Mike!" says the natty zealots, who in the next breath say that high volume only works for enhanced lifters. Guess the same isn't true for their prime example. 

Ten-minute abs used to be popular among the general population. It fell out of popularity when people realized it was only a marketing scheme. Defined abs, it turned out, requires more.

This same marketing tactic has been dusted off and is being repurposed today. But it is not limited only to abdominal muscles. The gurus of today’s vast media ecosystem have expanded it to include all muscles. Because, you see, a few sets a few times per week is plenty. “But!” the gurus add, “Only if you train them sufficiently hard.”

I’ve been doing this long enough to know that humans are great liars and incredibly adept at lying to ourselves, with the gym, it seems, being the motherlode of all lies (perhaps second only to your uncle’s fishing hole where he once caught a state record trout that somehow got away). Of all people whom I’ve trained and witnessed train, the beginners always seem to train the hardest—so they claim.

Why is this? The answer is simple: they have little reference to their ability, for it has only begun to develop. And so, the beginner achieves failure every set because doing so defines hard training (to them). After all, if the first set is pushed to failure, it is the most productive set.

But time and again, they set an achievable failure. I’ve seen it countless times. I’m sure my more experienced readers have too.

“See all those sets he’s doing. He could only do those if the sets were easy. I train to failure,” says the beginner.

“How many reps do you think you’ll get this time?”

“Well,” the beginner replies, “I got eight last week, so maybe nine or ten.”

“Okay, let’s see.”

The beginner performs their set, and alas, they complete nine or ten reps, with the last being “failure.”

But it wasn’t. I know this because their data scales linearly. Failure doesn’t. The beginner isn’t training to failure; they’re training to mild discomfort. They’re training to achieve the sense of failure so that they can claim they train “hard,” thereby making them superior beginners; an apprentice wearing the master’s clothes. They’ve done nothing but don the outward appearance of advanced training, reasoning that doing so makes them more advanced than they truly are.

“I bet you $100 that you can do more reps than that.”

“But I just hit failure.”

“Do it again. If you get one more rep than the last set, my $100 is yours.”

This is an actual conversation I’ve had. An actual challenge I’ve made that I lost $100 on. Why? Because when achieving failure was the goal, an achievable limit was predetermined. So the beginner failed, thus reaching their goal (simultaneously inflating their sense of progress). But when a new goal was introduced, to win, their predetermined limit went out the window and, in fact, they realized they could do more (consequently dismantling their understanding of progress).

“How did you do that?” I asked.

“Because I really wanted your $100.”

“You mean last week you didn’t really want those additional reps?”

Cue the look of dejection as the beginner’s mask is lifted. They weren’t lifting to failure. They were lifting to, at best, their technical limit (the point at which their form begins to deteriorate the slightest bit), which is not the same as muscular failure. Or, even worse, and more common, they lifted until they thought they should stop (psychological failure). That’s where the problem rests: our minds interfering with our muscles, our consciousness inhibiting our physicality. The feedback of one thing to protect another. Usually, the ego, counterintuitively, at the same time, the physical, for in the gym, how we look and what we do is the outward expression of the inward.

And so, failure is achieved because failing to train to failure is the true failing: a reality that today’s optimalist cannot risk because doing so would mean their training wasn’t “hard enough,” thus making them weak cognitively and physically (Don’t ask how much they lift. That doesn’t matter… they train to “failure.”) These are the ones who advocate for “hard-core” workouts under the guise of intellectual superiority. “I see you haven’t read the latest study…”  

But another set? “That’s excessive,” they’ll say. “It isn’t optimal.” The first of many excuses leveraged to support their position that less is more. Anything beyond one “hard set” is “diminishing returns,” by which they mean “irrecoverable fatigue.” More reps mean “junk volume,” their boogeyman, which brings with it suboptimal results. But it is obvious that their results are determined by how much they can get with what little they do. So they do less, justifying it with a proclamation of effort (“I train hard!”) rather than posting results.

Maybe the only lifter intimate with true muscular failure. Shame it was all junk volume.

Have some who train with little volume built impressive physiques? Yes, however, unseen is the case of a rank beginner doing so. Often, the popular examples are lifters who’ve trained with much higher volumes for a long time prior, who then switched to workouts with far fewer sets. This matters because all those years of more sets meant more practice, which produced skill, an asset owned by experienced lifters who can and do get more out of less. This is a trait that, by definition, beginners do not have. Yet, they fall victim to the professional grifters who market the easiest way to train by repackaging an old lie: that of superficial difficulty, reliant on looking like they’re training hard by gnashing their teeth and screaming obscenities. The beginner, seeing this example, mimics it, achieving nothing more than strange glances in the gym.

“Why’d he yell when the last rep looked like the one before it?”

“Because that lets us know he’s training harder than us.”

That isn’t a knock against getting loud in the gym. It is more an admission of guilt, for I, an experienced lifter, have done it countless times. Not too long ago, I set out to achieve a series of high-rep squat sets. These were all personal records. I filmed every one of them. I filmed the training sessions that got me there. I’ll be the first to tell you that on many of those sets I had a “hard” number in mind, and when I hit it, guess what, it felt hard! So I grunted, yelled, or cursed. But upon watching the video, I realized my mind had deceived me. (Gasp!) The hard rep moved like the one before it, and the one before that. Damn! I had more reps in me, but mentally I had predetermined what hard was going to be, so I squatted until the number told me it was hard. I did not squat until I had failed, bar crashing on the safeties as I collapsed under the weight. Had I, I could have squatted more reps.

Was 30 there that day? Probably. I gave up because in my mind, 25 was going to be hard.

How many times have I calculated failure before getting under the bar? And of those times, how many failures weren’t genuine, but manifested? Set limits I placed on myself, based on what… training data and how I was feeling that day? Heuristics can be helpful, sometimes. Other times, they’re deceiving. “I did 10 reps last week; this week I’ll do 11.” The video said I could probably have done 15, had I not defined failure as a meager one more, barely beating my last workout.

So, after decades of rigorous training, I look at these minimalists, those who train so because it means they train hard, and I wonder… are they? It looks like it, sometimes. But looks can be deceiving. Even the feeling of the weight—our perception—can be a lie. Why, for many years now, I have advocated honest self-assessment, with one of the primary means being videotaping sets. Not only personal records but also working sets, and comparing across them to see how performance deteriorates or improves. One of the reasons why, in General Gainz, I’ve used bookend Rep Maxes (RM): When the lifter does a first-set RM, followed by their Volume Drop Sets (VDS), ending with a last-set RM where they try to get as close as possible to the first RM. Sometimes, my first-set RM was outperformed by my last-set RM. It has happened to me and many of my clients.

How, after so much volume beforehand, is this possible? Because skill, therefore capacity, can be improved within the workout. But this cannot happen when only a single working set is performed with an exercise. That will have to wait until next week’s workout, a delayed effort, which to me seems suboptimal.

Am I applying my understanding of my own psychology as a lifter to the masses? Yes. But it isn’t unreasonable. We’re not so different. I’ve lied to myself in the past about my effort, and I’ve seen it firsthand in the countless gyms I’ve been a member of, and now in the gym I own.

You dreamed of training to failure, but you failed to achieve it, making you a failure. How does this make you feel?

There are more experienced and educated lifters than me who post challenging sets, sets they say are to failure, sets that ended with reps that moved just like the ones before them. Sets that were loud and angry because they made for a good social media post. Good marketing for the avowed hard-training, hard-core, tough guy brand. An attractive brand to the new lifter because it comes with an immediate identity, that of effort, of trying hard, long before the results can speak for themselves. Results that arguably would come faster if they did more, if only for the sake of skill development. More so when considering the compounding effect that improved work capacity yields: if you do more, you can do more.

And more is more.

While less is less.

There’s no other way around it. Is one hard set enough to provoke growth? Yes. But again, effort can be faked—even subconsciously. This is true not only for new lifters, but also for the old ones, as I have already admitted guilt. Effort feels good. It tells us we’re doing a good job. That we’re pushing ourselves. That we’re trying. Volume, on the other hand, does not. It goes on telling us that more rest is needed before the next set, and as we’re sitting on a bench, our ego whispers that we could quit the workout and still benefit, end the session early, and that it would be better to do so, going home to eat, when muscles grow, when we’re resting. So the sooner we stop training, the faster we’ll grow.

This is one of many lies riding passenger in the vehicle that is this training approach. Saying a muscle has been stimulated means it requires rest. Yet the muscle has barely been trained, and so, it barely grows. “But I am growing!” protests the driver.

“But you are still small and weak.”

“Because I’ve just started lifting.”

“You’re drag racing city blocks between stop signs.”

“Because that’s the fastest way from point A to point B.”

“Is it?”

Volume is the interstate. It allows for greater distances to be covered more easily. (Gasp!) Did I just write the naughty word? Say the quiet part out loud? Yes. When training with higher sets and reps, more of them will be easy. The confusion here lies in the misunderstanding that “easy” means worthless, or, to use fad terminology, “not optimal.” This couldn’t be further from the truth.

Easy sets develop work capacity, meaning one’s ability to recover from training. Recovery is growth. At the same time, easy sets develop skill, meaning one’s ability to perform quality training. Quality is growth. Easy sets develop the ability to perform hard sets skillfully, allowing more hard sets to be done in training and recovered from. Don’t interpret this as easy training, for I have not written that all sets should be easy. Only that more easy sets should be done because they inform hard sets, improving one’s understanding of hard and the ability to achieve truly demanding output. This is especially true for beginners who, by their nature, have limited understanding and ability.

This brings me to my conclusion: limited definitions of terms and concepts achieve limited ends. I mean by this, the instances where training to failure isn’t taken literally, only that technique has slipped. Or when failure is momentary, and for that reason, more is not attempted. When failure was predetermined, thus not truly experienced. When failure was used in the name of efficiency, rather than effort, because it would require effort to do more, but that would require more time dedicated to training, something many who’ve been sold this ticket would rather not do. Except they want the identity as someone who pushes themselves, who overcomes, so they do it as little as possible, painting a thin veneer of struggle over an otherwise comfortable and luxurious existence. For that is the nature of the gym, convenient access to gradual, achievable stress. The only way to reconstruct it otherwise is to create a façade of hardship, so training to failure becomes the goal rather than becoming big and strong, because becoming big and strong doesn’t require training to failure.

This is a companion piece to my post Minimal is not Optimal.

I see you didn't cite the latest study.