A Dynamic Workout for a Dynamic Life: Exercising in 2024
“Your body doesn’t know you’re in a gym, your body just responds to stress.”
I often find myself saying this to clients when they get frustrated with their suggested rep ranges. The fact of the matter is, we don’t need to live and die by those ranges. Rather, we need to examine our body’s capacity to perform movements properly.
Our focus is movement quality over quantity. Reps in Reserve (RiR) is a training technique we utilize to encourage quality movement while reducing the risk of injury/pain due to poorly executed repetitions of a given exercise. RiR refers to the number of repetitions you can complete, with good form, AFTER a set has ended. If you can’t perform another rep, your RiR = 0. An RiR of 0 represents muscular failure, try to avoid this unless specified by your coach. We believe in most cases, RiR is superior compared to a rigid rep range. RiR is a better expression of the human experience. It is more adaptable to the many outside influences that can (negatively) influence your performance in the gym.
For example, let’s say week 2 you complete 2 sets of 12 reps on your first exercise. Then, on week 3, you complete 11 reps on set 1 and then only 8 reps on set 2 with the same weight as last week. What happened? Are you getting weaker? Probably not. Are you a failure? Absolutely not. There could be many reasons why this occurred, and none of them suggest a detriment in your determination, tenacity, or grit. Here are a few plausible explanations why your reps went down during week 3: lack of sleep, low blood sugar, exhausting weekend of yard work, a hangover, work stress, financial strain, marital issues, the list goes on and on. What do these things have in common? They’re all stressors.
Keep in mind, exercise is also a stress. We literally need to break your body down in the gym before you can recover and grow stronger. So, if your body is breaking down in other domains of life, your workout will likely be affected. Life is dynamic, so your workouts should be too. When you’re having a good week, push yourself. When you’re not, don’t beat yourself up if you need to pull back. This is why RiR can be useful. For the example above, (2x12 reps on week 2 vs 11 and 8 reps on week 3) both weeks could result in an RiR of 1 or 2 despite having a different number of reps completed. Because of your sleep deprivation during week 3, 8 reps felt just as difficult as 12 reps did the previous week when you were well rested.
“Your progress in the gym will look like progress in the stock market.”
Imagine you purchased 1,000 shares of Amazon stock when the company went public in 1997, and haven’t checked your brokerage account since, you wouldn’t feel rich because a stock is not cash in your hand. However, if you sold those same shares today, you would see just how far that initial investment has come. Think of your workouts in the same way. You’ll have daily fluctuations, plateaus, soaring highs and crashing lows. Despite the potential turbulence, If the long-term trend is positive, you can still achieve your goals. So, if you find yourself stuck in a downturn and are having trouble seeing the big picture, ask us to go through our records and pull out some of your earliest exercise programs. Chances are it will be hard not to see your progress.
The effect of exercise can be hard to see in the short term, as the payoff comes later. All in all, if your performance in the gym decreases occasionally, this is normal and expected.
Here's to a more positive relationship with exercise, and stress in general, in 2024.