The acidosis from high times under tension is itself a growth factor. There is a trade off in terms of adherence, as in many things. This is why advice for people who would benefit from 1-2 days of moderate strength training each week, say untrained older people, may be different from those who enjoy doing it and have done so for ages. Even then, many useful techniques are best only done sparingly or for short periods.
It’s easy to overcomplicate simple exercises, when these arguments (train until failure or just close?) make little difference in practice. Complexities matter and are interesting to me, but only really matter much once you have many other things in place - including (as you say) consistency, good exercise selection, injury prevention and many other things.
I don’t know, that doesn’t seem to present much against the common view (that I’m seeing) other than maybe saying that the hypertrophy window is wider than generally believed. That wouldn’t surprise me too much. Long distance runners tend to be skinny so, obviously, there’s a point where low weight, high “rep” leaves the hypertrophy zone and enters pure endurance. But compared to how many steps you take, running 12 miles, obviously you’re not getting anywhere close by taking a 15 step yoke walk nor a 30 step yoke walk.
But I think if 60 reps was better than 15, some meat head would have discovered it by now. So while maybe we could achieve hypertrophy as well at 60 as we do at 16, that’s not terribly alluring given the time commitment difference.
Note that I’m not discussing hypertrophy for the elderly in the above.
I know that my watch - in theory - can track heartbeat. And so, in theory, it can monitor how my circulatory system is responding to exercise. And so, in theory, it can guess how many lungs are reacting since they’ll have gone through all the same fitness regimens as my heart.
But, my watch doesn’t actually track my heart beat because doing so takes too much energy and you have to override the default to get it to do it.
My guess would be that your watch is simply taking your activity (e.g. “jogging”), looking up the average amount of lung activity measured across a group of college students for that activity, and showing you that number. Maybe it makes it a bit higher or lower if you do the activity for a longer or shorter duration?
If you look up the most hardcore activity that your watch recognizes (e.g. “pushing a car up a hill” or “sprinting”) and try doing some of that, maybe that will get you to a higher VO2 level. If so, then that’s probably all the watch is doing.
“Lifting weights” doesn’t have to be a huge enterprise. Like most people, I have a favorite spot in my living room where I watch TV, and I keep two 5 pound dumbbells tucked under the end table next to me. While I’m watching TV, I do a number of exercises with them that benefit my biceps, triceps, and pectoral muscles. Strong pecs help keep your breasts perky and your figure attractive. I even do ab exercises with them because the added weight builds you up more.
I suggest getting a couple and trying something like that. You’d be surprised at the results. Weight lifting doesn’t have to be on an Arnold Schwarzenegger kind of level.
Adding onto my response a following on to @Dr_Paprika ’s post.
They’re a few here for whom the details might matter. Most of us, and I include myself here, are not at that level, and rigidly conforming to conventional wisdom is not required.
Taking the poll question at face value. I’m thinking push ups. Someone can max out at 35 reps. Personally I’d go with multiple sets to failure but there are other ways that would work. Also at more than 35 reps I’d move to alternate variations that increase the difficulty. But lots of right ways. And doing more would be one of them.
If you can do forty pushups, you have given your body a better stress test than running on a treadmill, and a study of many firefighters suggests if you can do this, than your risk of heart disease is substantially lower than if you cannot.
Just as it is simplistic to divide heart rate into “fat burning” and other zones for most people, it is an oversimplification to describe hypertrophy and strength zones without considering exercise, muscles involved, reps and total volume (weight times sets times reps). If you can easily do 35 reps if something, you aren’t becoming fatigued enough to activate all of the strength fibres, but you are improving endurance.
It can take very little weight to fatigue a strong person. I sometimes do a shoulder workout using two ten pound dumbbells. One set is four exercises, for thirty seconds each, taking two minutes. The exercises could be front circles (making small circle movements in front of you), alternating raises (lifting each weight in turn from waist to shoulder level), lifting the weights to the side so the arms form a T, Y or W, Cuban presses, circles at the side or back, etc. The beginner goal is to do three sets (six minutes) with no or minimal breaks which is extremely difficult. The advanced goal is to work up to eight sets (16m) without breaks. This is very hard but will make your shoulders bulletproof and greatly reduce shoulder problems when pressing. It’s not like doing high times or reps is unhelpful. But it should feel like hard work, as my example definitely is (even with two or five pounds for many people).
@Dr_Paprika, you are clear that different specific strength training exercises done to different intensities are of different stress on the system and benefit from different amounts of recovery.
Somewhere early in this thread the importance of grip strength was discussed as a correlate for future mortality risk.
Of course grip strength will be helped just by lifting and doing pull ups so on, but trying to get a sense of your guidance for sorts of exercise… someone decides to specifically work on grip strength beyond their regular exercise. Squeeze ball, gripper, whatever. They do multiple sets to fatigue. To fatigue so benefits from recovery but small joints, not huge muscles, not very challenging neuromuscularly … what frequency is okay?
I don’t know what frequency is best. You already grip small items frequently, so maybe better to do small amounts of heavier resistance, not to excess.
Sometimes stores like TJ Maxx or exercise equipment places sell hand grippers. The cheaper ones allow you to set it from 1-100 pounds. If you do it to exhaustion, it might make using your hands difficult and you might possibly need them for other things. You can also buy much more difficult and specific grippers with much more resistance.
I think there is a relation between grip strength and general strength. I think there is a relation between general strength and things like fitness, good nutrition and healthy activities. I think these things increase longevity, but that higher grip strength does not cause longevity but is related more strongly to these other things. A study of a diverse lot of elderly people might include some with difficulty walking or sarcopenia or risk of falls or chronic disease. General strength and health might make those less likely. Grip strength too, but unless you climb mountains the former are more likely to be beneficial.
I am satisfied with grip strength from doing deadlifts, loaded carries and pull-ups (I never use wrist straps). But if I did use a gripper I would not do it to exhaustion. Doing more than five sets would be unlikely to help. If it was hard to do three reps I would lower the resistance. The resistance might be okay if after doing 5-10 reps you feel you could only do one or two more, at which point I would pause. But I think if you did loaded carries by walking while pinching weight plates or holding a heavy weight you would train grip more effectively (time under tension) with more benefit and without the need for hand equipment.
Yes, I used the phrase “correlated with” for a reason. That said I am not so sure myself that the causation arrow is only that direction. There are many ways weak grip strength increases risks and decreases function in and of itself. Still likely mostly a marker, same as doing more than 40 push-ups and many other function correlates. And for many of these measures the correlation is mostly with the weakest quartile having larger risks than the highest quartile having much less.
The question though is more trying to hear the thought process on what sort of exercise demands greater or lesser recovery time. The relative importance of the physical amount of muscles involved, the neuromuscular difficulty, and level of fatigue.
I don’t know how common the practice is. It’s not even obvious on my watch until you go into the settings.
I think it does do some form of test, but it only does it every few minutes and maybe with lower accuracy. It’s not clear exactly what it’s skimping on from what they write in the description.
In general, smaller muscles that take a lot of daily abuse (I’m thinking things like the calves) are better worked out with higher volumes while holding in a muscle-contracted position for several seconds - either by pausing with a calf machine or walking on tiptoe; or increased loads (ballistic, explosive jumping, farmers walk on tiptoe). Using light loads or normal speed does little for them since this is already done frequently.
Hand muscles are smaller and frequently used. You are right good grip can mitigate against falls, hold sharp objects, etc., so it goes both ways to some degree. But if you can deadlift your weight than that will be taken care of. I knew a guy who purchased a series of hand grippers so you could work your way up to thousands of pounds, which no one can do without training. But if he used it when shaking hands, I’ll bet his longevity would decrease…
Below is a portion of your post that got me thinking and considering grip strength training within that theoretical framework.
Small muscles to be sure. But huge brain real estate devoted to them and engaged, depending on the specific training involved. Does that qualify as demand on the nervous system?
My general sense is to avoid putting two “hard” days next to each other, be it hard as an aerobic focus or hard as a strength focus. That’s overall stress response leading to overtraining. But would someone adding in some hard grip strength on an otherwise “easy” day make that day count as “hard”?
My WAG is not. But wonder what your perspective would be.
Does consideration of muscle fiber types recruited matter in the hand?
The idea of recovery involves restoring nutritional things (quite quick), hormonal responses (quick), repairing muscle damage (longer the bigger the muscle, effort, and so the more damage), and resetting the central and peripheral nervous systems (variable).
With decades of lifting experience, it would be unusual for grip to be the limiting factor for me unless I deadlifted above 80% on consecutive days, or did many pull-ups on consecutive days. Even still, I could do a sizeable chunk. The hands are likely used to quick recovery below moderate loads. But very few weightlifting books or research focuses on the hands and they are almost always exercised as part of other movements. I would guess they are hard to fatigue, but think going to failure might be detrimental due to injury risk, limited growth available and their omnipresent use. Can you make your small hands huuuuuge? Tell Trump!
I couldn’t say the fibre make up of the intrinsic hand muscles. It is true the hand occupies a lot of brain space, including motor and sensory components, but there are many hand muscles and movements. I don’t think this relates to fatigue much based on my lifting experience unless really pushing your maximums. When I was younger I trained hard most days with no issues and ate fairly badly. Age, stress and heavy loads involving a high percentage of body muscle are bigger factors in my guesstimation.
That helps flesh out the framework for me thanks. Thinking on it brain processing seems unlikely to be significant to the neuromuscular contribution else pianists and surgeons would be “overtrained” constantly.
Personally the biggest grip training I get is due to my wife’s chronic neck and back aches that result in long massages on a regular basis. My hands are wiped after that … I’ve never lifted heavy enough to feel fatigue in my hands and it got me wondering how that fit into the big picture.
Well, could you do that every day, or would that action be limited by inability or decreased endurance?
Some people who deadlift heavy wear wrist straps because their weakest point is grip, and the straps compensate. I’ve never used them; my weakest point is a few inches of the ground. Very few exercises are hard on the hands.
Most people almost always use their wrists (when expressly bending the wrist rather than keeping it straight) moving their palms forward. If you do wrist exercises with your palm moving backward, you might be surprisingly weak and feel it more than you expect. These are hand and forearm muscles you don’t often use in that way.
