Today culminates the 3-part series of stuff I’ve learned over the past 20 years of training myself and roughly 2,000 other fine folks. You can check out part 2 HERE, which also has a link to part 1 in it.

#23: As relative intensity goes up, your focus changes

When you use higher rep sets, like in the 20-50 rep range, the main goal is to develop mental toughness and work capacity. For this the goal is to do the movement efficiently enough and to make sure you just stick with it until the end without giving up. For the 8-15 rep range, The goal is muscle fatigue, compounded with the classic pump feeling bodybuilders tend to chase.

For 5 reps and under, the goal is to move weight from A to B, and usually as much as possible, which means specific attention has to be paid to technique and execution. If the weight is heavy enough, the wiggle room for error is almost non-existent, whereas for something like a 20 rep set, you can botch a few reps but still keep rolling along like nothing happened.

How you focus your energy will be determined as much by how much relative intensity is being used, but also what you want to get out of the exercise itself.

#24: Men tend to have better neural efficiency, women tend to have better work capacity

In comparing total scores for 1 RM and reps at a percent of 1RM, men tend to have a significant advantage to producing power and moving more weight, but at every single multiple rep range, women tend to lift a higher percentage of their max for more reps, in some cases massively so. I had one woman bang out over 20 reps at 80% of her 1RM for deadlift, whereas the closest any male client could get was 12 reps at the same relative percent of their max. For one, the males total was higher, but using a formula like Wilks showed it wasn’t a massive difference at all, but the woman crushed the man.

To use this to your advantage, you could use a very basic equation I’ve found to hold up well. The classic charts of predicting a total lift for a percentage of 1 rep max tend to be based more on men than women, but women tend to be able to lift a few more reps at the same percent of max. At the higher intensities, it could be an extra 1-3 reps, moderate intensities it could be anywhere from 3-6 more reps per set, and for the lower intensities, women smash the heck out of men.

#25: Cardio is very important, regardless of what the bro on the internet says

You could definitely lose weight with just resistance training. You could definitely lose weight with just cardio. You would be dumb to use only one and shun the other. The benefits from strength training are well known: maintain or gain muscle mass, increase resting metabolic rate, look hot naked, etc. The benefits to cardio shouldn’t be avoided either: improve oxygen delivery through working muscles, reduce rest period durations needed, burn more calories, help maintain the health of the cardiopulmonary system.

Think of it like driving a car and shifting gears. You have to be able to work through all of the gears to keep the car riding well. Sure, you could exist just revving the hell out of it in first get, but it won’t help you get up to speed on the highways unless you’re ripping around in a McLaren.

Resistance training is a phase of intense pressure on the cardio system and rest. There’s not much middle ground, so doing cardio help build in those other gears of your ability to produce work and manage stress on your system. Every time I focus on cardio I tend to lose weight. As long as I maintain some resistance training on a regular basis, I stay pretty muscular.

When I’m referring to cardio here, it’s not the HIIT stuff you hear about, or the bastardized Tabata’s that have nothing to do with the original procotols set out, but about lower intensity, more aerobic work, with the odd bout into anaerobic intensity. Understanding how to pace yourself versus just going all out as hard and as long as you can is massively important to learning how to do work for long periods of time.

#26: Nothing else can give you motivation. That has to come from you

We’ve all seen the motivational “posts” on social media where someone posts a half-naked pic of themselves and calls it motivational. I’m sure to some seeing images like that is inspiring, but the odds are not in their favour of being motivated to work out and chase this dream themselves. Perhaps the ones being motivated are the ones doing the posting.

One of the hardest parts of fitness is finding a way to accomplish the consistent. There’s not much of a tangible reward to working out like there would be to many other things. If you have dirty laundry and wash it, you have clean laundry. If you have a project to complete around the house and you complete it, you can enjoy or use what you completed where you couldn’t enjoy it before.

For fitness, it’s not that simple. You don’t get the immediate payoff other than the endorphin release. You get a slow and steady realization in ways that aren’t as typically obvious. Climbing that flight of stairs is easier. Your belt fits looser. You can lift more weight than a few workouts ago. It’s not like doing renovations where your energy input is immediately observable.

That being said, it’s a long-term investment to see those kinds of changes in your physical appearance and physical abilities. It’s not going to be enough to watch an episode of the Biggest Loser (and not want to throttle the trainers on there) and then state you want to get in shape for the next few months. It sounds good when the show is on tv, but the next morning it’s a different story.

What’s important to you is what’s going to drive you. If it’s not important enough, you’ll not be able to use it as adequate motivation. Find something visceral and a part of your entire raison d’être that makes you compelled to workout, and then follow it into the depths of hell and beyond.

#27: Alcohol, if used properly, could be considered an effective workout enhancer

This is a holdover from my old competitive athletics days. There was more than a single occasion where the boys and I would go out and tie a few on, then break into the schools weight room and see who could squat or deadlift the most. It sounded good in our heads at the time.

The funny thing is, more than a few PRs fell during those sessions. Maybe it was because alcohol made us feel less pain, thinned our blood sufficiently to allow greater oxygen delivery, or made us attempt weights we would otherwise not use, but it seemed to on occasion be effective. There were also events where we totally bombed and performance significantly suffered, which also brings us to a side effect of this concept that also produced the greatest abdominal training modality we’d ever known: vomiting.

#28: Dairy does not produce the same effects.

At all. Like, not even close. Even if you’re not lactose intolerant, it just doesn’t help at all.

#29: Circuit Training does not produce the same strength development as straight sets

If you’re doing a circuit of 3 or more exercises, the relative intensity you can use with each exercise will be less due to the progressive demands of the sets. Working at a lower intensity will allow you to complete the sets and get the metabolic effect you’re likely looking for, but if you’re looking for strength development, using circuits may not allow enough recovery to see the full benefit of the weight being used.

There’s pros and cons to both straight sets and circuit training, so use them as you need for the goals you wish to attain. Also, vary them on occasion to help give some recovery from the heavier strength work and also hit up some weights you wouldn’t use with the circuits.

#30: Foam rolling should not be fast, but shouldn’t last long.

It pains me when I see people hit up a foam roller with the speed that makes me think they’re trying to start a fire with their IT band. They roll from hip to knee and back again in less than a second and then continue to do the same thing while saying it doesn’t feel like it’s doing much.

The mistaken belief is that foam rolling stretches the tissues, so going faster over it would stretch it, uh, faster. Maybe it’s going to pump more fluid through the area and do it quickly. I don’t know.

What I do know is the majority of alterations achieved by foam rolling are neural in nature, meaning the stimulus has to be on the receptors long enough to impart change. For this reason, the stimulus needs to be a bit longer to elicit a change in the tissues. It’s called self myofascial release and not self myofascial stretching for a reason. The release is the stimulation of the neural receptor and then downregulation of tension being applied through the tissues.

For this reason, when rolling, find a tender spot and park on it for a little while. Movement should be minimal with the goal of having the tissue reduce tension before moving on to another spot. However, after 60 seconds of the tissue hasn’t released, give up and move on to another section so that you don’t make the tissue angrier than it already is. There’s a definite ceiling to the time the body will respond best to release work like this, and it seems to be around that 60-90 second mark, so spending minutes and minutes at a time on one spot is somewhat counterproductive.

#31: Carbs are way simpler than most people make them out to be.

Eat carbs. Try to go for less processed if possible, and limit the sugar intake to minimal. On days when you’re training eat a few more carbs. On days when you’re doing longer workouts or when you’re doing long duration endurance activities, eat more carbs. Not a crazy amount, just a bit more than usual. If you’re not working out and you’re having a pretty sedentary day, you don’t need a lot of carbs, but still have some source.

You’ll hear the low-carbers chime in to say this is a bad idea, but for the vast majority of the population, they feel better and think better when they have some carbs in them. For the endurance folk who say they can train their body to use fat preferentially over carbs, I would say I hop they never plan to race because they’re going to be going slow. I would say go with what feels best and tends to make you have the best performance, which seems to be the “system” I outlined earlier.

#32: Spine flexion is important, jut not with compressive load, and once you lose it it’s tough to get it back.

A lot of the time flexion gets a bad wrap. It’s one of the movements that does lead to disc injuries, but specifically when there’s more compressive and shear loading on the spine. For instance, doing an unloaded cat camel stretch won’t destroy your back, but doing a max weight deadlift with your back rounded over like a question mark might increase your risk of damage.

You still need flexion throughout your day. As someone who had a severe flexion intolerance for about a decade as a result of some low back injuries, I can tell you basic things like sitting, driving, or anything else where flexion is common makes it troublesome to tolerate. Even at points where I had no back pain flexion would cause some concerns. Over time I was able to get some flexion back but still struggle with it from time to time.

#33: Ice and heat have benefits, but both are usually overstated.

For most sore muscles, heat works excellently well. For inflammatory issues and pain, ice works very well. Some people swear by intense cryotherapy treatments, which they say make the body incredibly low on inflammation. My response is “come visit Edmonton in February.” No one’s ever taken me up on this offer.

Others say heat doesn’t make a difference in how muscles and joints operate. I would argue by saying retirees tend to move to warmer climates much more regularly than they move to cold climates, likely because they feel better in those areas. Golf is golf, and whether it happens in the tundra or in the Everglades it’s the same game, but if you feel better when you are in an environment over another, you’ll want to stay there more. These are just observational notes, but it seems to hold fairly well across the population.

#34: Take Deloads every now and then

Deloads are when you reduce your training frequency, intensity, or environment for a short duration to allow some recovery from previous training stressors. A lot of people try to push through them, but this can be a bad idea. First, muscles recover from training at a different speed than other soft tissue does. Muscles have specialized satellite cells that heal and remodel muscles a lot faster than tendons or ligaments, which don’t have as much of a direct blood supply. For this reason, the deload gives those soft tissues time to recover and play catch up before their next training stress.

Second, a deload allows you to have a life once in a while. It’s somewhat weird when people say they want to keep up with their workouts while on an exotic vacation. Maybe they’re going to spend a week on a beach in the caribbean or will look to backpack across Europe and want to know what they can do in the gym on a daily basis.

Just don’t You’re on vacation, so enjoy it. Do vacation activities like walking, hiking, shopping, dancing, or whatever the kids do to music these days. Enjoy your vacation and have a life once in a while.

A good system to use is for every 12 weeks of dedicated training, take at least one week of a deload where you reduce the volume and frequency by half. If you’re in a very intense training system to peak for an event, it may need to be one week every 6-8 weeks.

This concludes our list of stuff I’ve learned from lifting weights for the last 20 years. There’s obviously a few more things, but the numbers were convenient.