Sparks and I started going to a gym three times a week, three weeks ago. The gym has a Nautilus Nitro Pro circuit, and we said “nifty!” and made it part of our routine. In the beginning, we both made fast upward progress wrt the amounts of weight we could lift for 8-12 reps.
Last week I made almost no progress at all; I improved from 8 to 12 reps on a couple of machines, and advanced 5-15 pounds on only a couple of others. This doesn’t surprise me at all; I understand that one hits certain limits.
My question is, are those limits going to be extremely long-term or absolute? Am I going to hit an amount of weight on each machine that will be my maximum, forever? And will the weightlifting after that just be a matter of maintaining the strength?
(Note: we know that free weights are “better” and that weighlifters generally progress to those. That isn’t what I’m asking. I’m asking about maximum amounts of weight lifted topping out.)
I’m not an expert, but you’ve only been doing this for three weeks. The first few weeks of weightlifting, one usually does see rapid gains, as your body adjusts and becomes more efficient in the motions you’re using. After that initial body-getting-used-to-weights adjustment, progress becomes slower. I’ve lately been adding an extra 5 pounds every one to two weeks. I assume, yes, of course there’s an upper limit to what your body can do, but you’re not going to find that limit in 3 weeks.
Yes, of course.
If not, you would have people able to lift arbitrarily large weights.
I found that I seemed to have an asymptotic limit when I was lifting - there were certain weights that I simply never could reach (like 250 on flat bench). I suppose that if I wanted to break this limit, i probably could have, but it would have required more time and dedication than I was willing to give.
You probably haven’t hit the real Wall yet, but it does happen. You make real progress quick early on, then it slows down a lot unless you put in a lot of effrt, and then you really do hit a wall where progress is almost impossible without huge effort. And of course, then there’s just the plain physical limit.
related question–if I want to test if I’m ready to move up, do I want to
a) increase the weight for the same number of reps and sets
b) increase the number of reps for the same weight and sets
or c) increase the number of sets but keep the reps and weight the same?
Complicating this a bit, I’m already doing the maximum weight on certain machines, so it’s just a choice of # of reps or # of sets on those machines.
I’m not talking about a philosophy of weightlifting, either: just the easiest first step in order to effect a transition upwards.
First, we’ve done a lot of these threads before, so you might want to dig some up.
Second, there are two ways to build muscle. One is by adding fibers, the other is by feeding those fibers. The former helps to get to higher weights, like asking your friends to help you move the couch. The second helps the muscle keep working, like sleep and food keeps you going to work every morning. By adding more weight, you build more fibers. Focus on this for the first few months. You’ll notice yourself looking sort of fat but in a good way. Then change to longer sets but same/lighter weight. That’ll make your muscles more cut, appearance-wise. That’s where you get the definition.
When you’re building your muscles, the big ones take the load while the little stability-giving muscles don’t get much work in. With longer sets, those big muscles get tired out and the bench-warmer stability muscles get put into the game. Thus, the definition.
Remember, you have to put meat on the turkey before you can carve it.
This is classic misinformation. The appearance of your muscles depends on the amount of subcutaneous fat you’re carrying around, which is primarily a function of your diet. It doesn’t matter what you do in terms of exercise; if you eat like crap, you’ll look like crap.
Also wrong. The stabilizer muscles contract to stabilize a load. Picture somebody doing a dumbbell bench press. Their triceps, anterior deltoid and pectoralis major are all contracting to perform the movement, but about twenty other muscles are contracting to keep their arm pointed straight up and down.
Incidentally, this is why I (and many other people) regard free weights as superior to machines. When you’re lifting on a machine, you’re moving the weight, but you’re not stabilizing it. As a result, you’re not training to do anything except use a weight machine. How many of those do you see outside of the gym?
A lot of this will be matter of personal opinion. People will always give you the advice that worked for them, so take this with a grain of salt.
What I usually do is try to do four to eight reps. If I can’t do that many, I take off some weight. If I can do ten, I’ll add some weight. So, my personal answer would be to keep the same number of reps and sets. However, there will be a point where you reach the plateau the OP is talking about. When that happens, switch it up. Do more weight and less reps or the same weight with more reps for a couple weeks. Switch it up, don’t let your body get used to it, and you should be able to get past that plateau.
As for the OP, I’m a prime example. I haven’t lifted in about three years (since I graduated college and got a job), but I’m coming off a knee injury and need to be fit when the rugby season starts again. I’ve been making monumental gains in the past six weeks. I started out doing 185 on flat bench and was reaching fatigue after five or six reps. Today I did two sets of 225 at four reps. Six weeks ago I was squatting 225 and fatiguing after six or eight reps. Last Wednesday I squatted 315 twice in my last set. Similar story on seated rows and dead lifts, etc. Granted, I’m coming off a solid base that I built in college, but you can see my gains are almost 50% in just six weeks. It is starting to level off, but I’ve already reached the goals I set for myself to achieve by Christmas.
My wrestling coach in high school used to say it took 3 months. Three weeks and your SO and people you see every day will start to notice a difference (with proper diet, of course). But at three months, people you see on occasion will start mentioning that you look good. It’s an awesome feeling.
Stick with it, realize that you’re not going to make huge gains like you were in the first three weeks, but that you’re still getting vastly stronger than you were the week before. You’re going to plateau more times than this one, but use it as a learning experience to get through it mentally, and you’ll do fine when you hit your first plateau after you’re fit.
How about the difference between “endurance” muscles and “instantaneous” muscles. I understand the difference between fast twitch and slow twitch, and I think this is something a bit different. Brandon and I started this conversation, but I haven’t responded to him yet. Sorry Brandon!
My analogy was that If I can lift 225 pounds ten times, I can throw a guy who’s just tackled off of me ten times. But if I can lift 275 pounds once, I can only throw a guy off of me once. I’m not really sure how to articulate my theory, but does that make sense?
I don’t dispute this but it’s hard for me to believe that in these exercises that the stabilizer muscles are under anywhere near the same sort of load as the major ones that are supporting the weight. Aren’t there exercises that specifically target the stabilizer muscles? As a casual worker-outer I don’t hear much about these and couldn’t name any. Also, one of the big *advantages *touted by machines, especially when Nautilus was first introduced, was the isolation of major muscle groups. Is that all just a lot of hot marketing air?
With all due respect you don’t see too many dumbbells or benches outside the gym either I think gyms should have an area for lifting large cardboard boxes with TV’s inside, or moving a bed across the room
In terms of appearance, there’s no real difference between fast and slow twitch fibers unless you’re looking at them removed from the human body. Very few lifters are concerned with such situations. However, there is a reason that most football teams want their players to be able to bench 225 for many reps.
If the stabilizer muscles can stabilize the weights you’re lifting, they’re under enough load. They’re pretty different from the more movement-oriented muscles.
Isolation has its place, and machines do have their role in a program, but that gets a little bit complicated. As a first order approximation, it’s really not bad to say that free weights are better than machines.
They don’t need to be under the same sort of load, they’re supporting less weight. One of my favorite techniques is to lift until muscle failure. Even when doing bench, for example, there’s a lot less stabilizing going on than when doing dumbbell bench. Watch the way somebody does their very last rep on bench; they’ll often times come up some percentage of the way, and then just drop strait back down. However, with dumbbells, the person will often have their arms flop (hopefully forward), making it a very difficult exercise to properly spot (i.e. give enough support to prevent the flop, while still allowing the lifter to properly utilize all their stabilizing muscles).
When the machines are talking about isolation, they’re talking about preventing your other body parts from assisting in the lift. As a side effect, though, they’re also preventing the stabilizing muscles from working as hard. For example, when doing a pull up, a lot of people tend to swing their legs to use their momentum to help them. This is a lot more difficult with a lat pull down machine. Another example would be bicep curls. Many people will swing the weight and use its horizontal momentum to turn it into vertical momentum. Curling on a cable or belt machine doesn’t allow this. There are ways to “cheat” (seated row is a classic example), but the isolation touted is of a different type than not allowing stabilizing muscles to work.
Beginners make rapid progress. Make the most of it, because it won’t last forever. There are two main things that are happening: 1) neuromuscular adaptation, 2) rapid muscular and connective tissue restructuring to adapt to new stresses.
No. 1 is the main thing you’re seeing at first, and which is most responsible for the rapid jumps in capability between sessions. An untrained individual usually isn’t capable of pushing himself hard enough to actually reach the limits of the potential muscular strength. There are a bunch of reasons for it, but even leaving questions of technique and mentally gearing yourself up for the effort aside, your nervous system has to get used to firing signals to recruit all the tissue.
You can be plenty strong enough physically to lift a given weight, but be unable to actually lift it. It’s happened to me before. I was too conservative in ramping up for a max lift and got "tired’ before I went for my goal. I failed on a weight that was over 7.5 kg lighter than a previous max. On a different day, I could — and did — lift more, but because I’d done too many heavy 1–2 rep lifts that session, my nervous system went on a boycott. It was weird, because I wasn’t physically very tired, and felt plenty strong enough to lift it, was all psyched up to go for a new max, but the weight wasn’t budging. I’d read about it, but hadn’t actually experienced the phenomenon before.
The latter is the obvious effect from weight training; the physical changes from training that increase muscle strength and size and cause connective tissue to become more robust. Your bottlenecks there are training intensity, frequency, and recovery; nutrition; and genetic limits. Among other genetic limits, athletes have a generally predetermined ratio of muscle fiber types. That ratio changes to some extent as an adaptation to training, but not very rapidly and not very easily. If you start out with a larger number of fast twitch fibers, you’ll be stronger from the start than someone else, and the neuromuscular adaptations happen a lot faster than the other physical adaptations, so you make more progress in a shorter time.
This is an ultra-condensed version of the relative little that I know about training response. You’ll have to do a lot more reading on your own to really understand what’s going on, and there are still a lot of unanswered questions in this area.
Hmmm. Does it then follow that one strategy would be to work hard for, say, 8-12 weeks to hit a plateau… Ease off into a “minimum maintenance” cycle for another 8-12 weeks… Then restart a harder workout?
But on the other hand if the wall were unbreachable world records would never be broken. Surely, with dedication and training, one could always lift that little bit more.
No.
If you plot athletic records verses time, you will find that they all converge. In other words, someone may someday be able to run a 3:30 mile, but no human (without serious synthetic help) will ever be able to run a 2:00 mile. So, improvement is possible, but it tends to become incrementally smaller.
No. After a certain point, your skeleton can’t support the weight. No one reaches that point because other things give out first. In fact, this is a common problem for powerlifters and other strength athletes: their muscles are strong enough for the weights they’re using, but their tendons and ligaments aren’t.
I’ve hit the wall many times on various lifts in the past two years. I’m after physique change, with strength increase a distant second motive. Conventional wisdom says to keep using the same resistance until 10 or 12 reps can be finished with perfect form, and then increase the resistance by 5%. In my case I’ve found this method not to work. Many of my lifts have churned in the same rep range for a long time until I’ve just increased the load out of frustration and found out to my pleasant surprise that I reach the previous reps with the bigger resistance, ie. I’ve been wasting my time with the old kilos. Making a single solid extra rep with a taxing weight is a big leap, whereas 5% more mass is often doable with just well-targeted fury.
Don’t know if my stamina is exceedingly low or what (I was a rail-thin bookworm until age 25), but increasing reps is exceedingly rare in the big lifts for me. Also, I’m amazed at many BB routines where you’re supposed to churn out like 4x8 reps on a single excercise, that being just one of your chest / back / whatever excercises for the day! Me, I can’t even do any real warmup sets before I fry my capacity to do heroic deeds. So far I’ve avoided injuries and been steadily improving with my “straight-to-work-sets-after-general aerobic-warmup” approach. If I’m to lift 260 lbs. in the deadlift today, I’ll do it first when I’m still fresh, and as many reps as I possibly can with perfect form. 1 RM climbing from 120 lbs. to 330 lbs. in a year of this type of lifting tells me I’m on the right path (Edward Aston, once Britain’s strongest man, agreed).
About three years ago (at the tender age of 58) my wife talked me into joining a gym. For the first nine months or so the weights I was lifting increased steadily. Then I hit a wall - and as a practical matter I’m now lifting slightly less weight than I did at that point. Even though (I swear) I’m trying just as hard.
I figure at this point I’m fighting to stay in the best shape that I can given the fact that my body has reached the declining years. And as a practical matter I can way out-drive my similarly-aged golfing buddies - and walk the course while I’m at it. (And wearing my “Gold’s Gym” cap while doing so seems to help with the intimidation factor.)
Now if only lifting weights would help my putting…
I think gyms should have an area for lifting large cardboard boxes with TV’s inside, or moving a bed across the room 