You have 24 hours in a day. Somedays it feels like you blink and it’s gone. You plan to workout after the kids go to bed but by the time they get down it’s sometimes after 10:00PM. It doesn’t matter what your goals are, we all want more results in less time. And the best results will include resistance training - whether you are 18 years old or 80, whether you have been active your whole life or a lifelong couch potato - resistance training is for you.
The vast majority of what we blame on aging is often just a loss of strength and mobility. It’s more deconditioning than aging, but I’ll save that for another day. The big picture is we all need to be doing some form of resistance training. And we want to maximize the effectiveness of each and every rep. To do that, we need to know a few things.
What are effective reps?
While this is a bit oversimplified, effective reps can be thought of as the last 5 reps before mechanical failure would occur. For example, if you are doing a bicep curl, you reach a point where you are physically unable to complete another rep without either swinging the weight or cheating your form. Let’s say that this happens at rep 15.
If the last 5 reps before failure are considered “effective reps” in this case that would be reps 11-15. Reps 1-10 played very little role in building muscle or strength. Their primary intention was to fatigue the muscle enough for the effective reps to take place.
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