Episode 6: When to Add More Weight to the Bar

Nov 6

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To keep getting stronger, you need to challenge your muscles with more stimulus over time.

In this episode, I share valuable insights on how to determine the right time to progress in your training program, whether you're focused on muscle building or high-intensity strength training. Join me as I breaks down the key differences between these two approaches and explain how to gauge progress effectively.

This episode was recorded during a live stream on the Jaydigains Twitch channel. Join live streams every Tuesday and Friday on Twitch.

(00:00):
Hi there. Welcome to the Jaydigains Coaching Corner podcast. I'm Jayd Harrison, AKA Jaydigains, and I'm here to share some training tips and nutrition tips to help you build a healthy fit lifestyle. In today's episode, I'm going to share with you a coaching call that I had with some of my clients in my Coaching Corner Discord server. Every month I host a one to one and a half hour training session with my clients and subscribers in my Coaching Corner Discord server. These calls are like a private live stream where you get to ask your questions in the chat and I respond to them live, and I usually have some kind of a lesson or a message prepared to share with my subscribers as well based on the kinds of questions that I've gotten from my clients throughout the week or things that we have talked about on stream.
(00:44):
If you would like to participate in those coaching calls, you'll just need to join my Coaching Corner Discord server and I'll provide the link for that below. You'll also need to make sure that you are a subscriber plus and that will get you access to the monthly coaching calls in the future. I do plan on adding more coaching calls throughout each month, but for now we're having them on every fourth Sunday of the month. I hope to see you there. Now let's get into today's episode. One of my clients asked a really great question during the coaching call, which was How do I know when to progress in my training program? Now, this person is someone who is a power lifter and has followed a couple of different programs before coming to work with me as his personal trainer, and in the last couple of months of working together, we have been focusing just on muscle building and keeping him consistent on his fat loss.
(01:35):
But as we get into bulk season the winter, he wants to switch back into focusing on strength training or moving big weight. So in the coming weeks, I'm going to be putting him through what's called a max test. And a max test is when you test your 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 rep maxes on a given lift to see where your strength is. The goal of this kind of a test is to see how much weight you can possibly lift in 1, 2, 3, 4, or five reps at a time. Doing max tests is a great way for you to see where your current strength is. It also gives you an idea of what kind of weight you should be using in your workouts in order to build more muscle and build strength. Many power lifting programs recommend that you train with a given percentage of your one rep max or your estimated one rep max in a lift when you test your maxes every six to 12 months.
(02:30):
This gives you an idea of your progress as you get stronger over time. Ideally, we want to see those numbers going up over time, so six months from now you'll want to be able to lift more weight in 1, 2, 3, or four or five repetitions. Now testing your progress in this way is very different from the way that you would get a sense of progress when you are doing a muscle building phase and when you're in a muscle building phase, a bodybuilding or accumulation phase of your training, it's going to be a little different in assessing when it's time to progress. IE add on more repetitions, more sets, or more weight. So in this episode, I do talk about the difference in what it feels like to do these two different styles of lifting and how we can get a sense of when it's time to add on more based on whether you are in a muscle building phase or if you are working for strength and intensity.
(03:21):
So I hope that you find this discussion really helpful. I will say before we get into this that if you are in the first year or two of your resistance training journey, first off, welcome. We're so happy to have you as part of the club, but you should be focusing mainly on muscle building, developing your mobility and learning the technique of different lifts during this first year to two, getting into higher intensity lifts where you're lifting a really heavy load is something that you really want to reserve for when your technique and your muscle mass are solid. So you want to have a good foundation of a year to two of consistent lifting before you head into higher intensity lifts. The people that I'm talking to in this coaching call are experience lifters and they have been working with me, each of them for at least a year, and before they started working with me, they did power lifting.
(04:10):
Okay? So these are experienced lifters who are ready for those high intensity lifts, but in working with me, they're getting a stronger sense of the differentiation between the different styles of training and lifting. So if you're just a beginner or you're in that first two years of your training, put this information in your back pocket because you're going to need it later on. When it comes time to testing your one rep maxes and beginning to work with higher intensity load, make sure that as always you listen to your body anytime you train. All of this information is given for educational purposes only. You are responsible for your own gains, but if you are looking for a coach, I am taking on clients currently. So go to my website, jd gaines.com or jade harrison fitness.com and you can check out my coaching program there. I also do have some DIY workout programs.
(04:59):
If you would like to start building muscle using my programming and my videos, that will get you into the community and you'll be able to join the coaching calls live. So check out that information on my website. Wherever you are, make sure that you subscribe to this channel to get notified anytime I post a new episode. And also make sure to follow me on my social medias. I'm JD Gaines everywhere, and without further ado, let's get into it. Here is how we kind of differentiate in terms of when to progress. When you are in a muscle building workout or a muscle building phase versus a high intensity workout or strength training phase where you are trying to hit high intensity numbers, it's going to feel very different on your body and knowing when to progress is also going to feel very different. So let's talk about the muscle building phase first. When we're doing muscle building workouts, our goal is muscle fatigue. Our goal is to approach muscle failure because that's what our bodies
(05:56):
Need in order to build muscle, in order to put on more lean muscle tissue, we need to actually break that tissue down. We need to cause little tiny microscopic tears in the muscle fibers. So the way that we typically do this is with what's called higher volume work, higher volume exercises. So you may do your big lifts, you might do squats, bench deadlift, or you might just do bodybuilding style exercises like chest press with dumbbells, single leg dead lifts with dumbbells, right machine work. And each of these exercises, your goal is to fatigue the working muscles to the point that you are close to muscle failure. In some exercises, you may actually be asked to go to muscle failure, get to an RPE 10, but typically I'm going to be suggesting an RPE eight, nine or 10, sometimes a seven, leaving three reps in the tank depending on what the lift is and what we're trying to work on.
(07:00):
Now that RPE seven, eight or nine or 10 is going to feel like muscle burning for a lot of people, right? That's what a lot of people associate the approaching muscle failure with is a burn. Not everybody feels the burn, okay? But often people do associate approaching muscle failure in a hypertrophy exercise as like burning in the muscles and that burning that you feel is lactic acid setting in and the muscles as your body goes through the lactic acid system for giving the muscles energy, we know that we need to progress when we are able to do the max number of repetitions. I usually give you guys a range of repetitions for each exercise six to 12 or something like that. When you're able to do the max number of repetitions with whatever given weight and it feels like an RPE seven, like you have three reps left in the tank, that's when you know it's time to progress.
(07:58):
So ideally, pay attention to the RPE that I give you if it's a RPE seven, whatever weight you need to use to stick within that range of repetitions and feel like you have three reps in the tank. If it's RPE eight, I want you to use whatever weight allows you to get the recommended number of repetitions and feel like you have two reps in the tank. If it's a RPE eight, if it's RPE nine, then I want you to use whatever weight within the recommended number of repetitions that leaves one rep in the tank, and if it's RPE 10, you're going to failure, okay? So have your safeties up, have your safeties up all the time. But in accumulation or muscle building, that's what we're generally going for. So I usually will put what weight I think you probably need based on the numbers and what I'm seeing in your videos in trainer eyes, what the recommended amount of weight is.
(08:52):
If you feel like you had five reps in the tank using the weight that I recommended, then go ahead and add more weight. Just try to only add no more than 20% at a time, so add 20% to the weight that you're lifting, go for another set and listen to your body scale of one to 10 where you at on RPE and adjust and add more until you are at the RPE. That's suggested where you're finishing your sets and you feel like you have only two reps in the tank or only one rep in the tank or three reps in the tank depending on the RPE, and that's how we handle it with accumulation. RPE is ultimately our number one guide, and it's very similar when we head into intensification or into your higher intensity lifts. It's similar, but reading RPE is a lot harder when you get into your high intensity lifts because it just doesn't feel the same as it did when you were at your hypertrophy.
(09:49):
You're not going to feel that burning, so it's a lot harder to judge like how many reps did I have in the tank? I don't know. That's another reason why people like to use percentage of their one rep maxes. I like to do a max test after you've reconditioned or after you have built up your work capacity with some muscle building for a good couple of weeks, if not months. When we test our maxes, we can use that whatever number that we lift, we can use that to inform what weight we should be training with. In our practice training sessions in general, depending on the block that you're in, you're going to be working with a lower percentage of your one rep max when you are in a muscle building phase or an accumulation phase. And then when you enter into an intensification phase, then you're going to be working with slightly higher percentage of your previous one rep max.
(10:42):
And then when you get close to peaking when you're going to test again, then you're going to be lifting as much as 90, 95 and a hundred percent of your previous one rep max so that when it comes to you actually retesting, you hopefully see those numbers improve and go up. So we have our high volume sets. Generally you're going to be working with between like 50% to 80% of your one rep max. That's generally what we go for. Sometimes 85%, okay? And we're going to be doing higher numbers of reps, okay? Something like 5, 6, 7, 8, all the way up to 12 or 15, and our goal is to feel the burn or approach muscle failure. If you don't feel the burn, you'll feel the effort because your muscles just reach a point where they're just, you can't move at the same rate. It starts to slow down or you feel like you're just, your muscles are going to give out.
(11:44):
The muscles. Giving out is a lot closer to what you experience in high intensity sets or high intensity days or blocks and high intensity lifts. We're going to be working with 85% to 100% of your previous one rep max, and we're going to be sticking to a low number of repetitions. One rep per set, 2, 3, 4, up to six six is really on the border there between strength and power versus hypertrophy. So usually when working with smaller number of reps, but a much higher weight that's closer to your tested one rep max and RPE feels a little different there. The rate of perceived exertion is going to feel less like, oh, my muscles are burning and more like the weight just isn't moving, or now I'm slowing down, or I am going to have to change something about how I'm doing this lift in order to get the weight to move.
(12:44):
So those are the things that we look for at higher rates of perceived exertion with higher intensity lifts with your strength lifts and very few people feel a burn when they approach failure in a high intensity lift because you're just not exhausting the lactic acid system in the same way that you would when you're doing a longer set, but you will experience just like it's not moving or it's very, very slow and I just can't get it quite back up. And so that's why I say this is a skill that has to be practiced over the course of a couple of weeks to a couple of months because learning what it feels like when you are approaching failure with a high intensity lift, it takes some adjustment when you have been doing muscle building for a long period of time, even if you have previously done high intensity lifts in the past, you're going to have to reteach your system and reteach your brain what it feels like as you're approaching the higher intensity stuff, and you're going to have to learn how to push in a completely different way and grind in a completely different way than how you had to when you were approaching muscle failure in muscle building.
(13:55):
For me, I do and I do prefer to teach people to listen to their bodies, learn what it feels like to lift at these higher intensities. This is why I'm such a big proponent of RPE. It's always a good idea to listen to your body to stay safe. Safety is my number one concern with all of you guys when you're working one-on-one with me. My number one concern is keeping you safe and injury free. So that's why learning RPE is such an important part of my programming, and there are criticisms of RPE for sure. There definitely are criticisms of RPE because your perception of how hard you're working, it's subjective. So what feels like an RPE seven one day may actually be an RPE five things feel harder than what they actually are or things feel easier than what they actually are. If you suspect that you are sandbagging, if you suspect that you can lift more than what you actually are, if you feel like you're being held back or if you feel like you're holding yourself back following a program that just says this percentage this week, this percentage that week, and you just have to follow the numbers regardless of how you feel, we can train that way.
(15:08):
You don't necessarily need to think so much about how the weight feels to judge whether you need more weight or not because you're just following the program. So that makes it very easy to just kind of turn your brain off and just no think, just lift, right? Because if we we're just going by numbers, then we're sort of progressing on a bi-weekly or tri-weekly basis where we're adding more reps or we're adding a higher percentage of your one rep max. That is a way to train just purely off of one percentage of one rep max. It's very challenging and you have to be in the right mindset. You have to be on your game. You have to be consistent in your sleep, you have to be consistent in your nutrition. You have to be very consistent in following your workout plan on a week by week basis so that you're properly recovering.
(16:02):
Because if you're not getting your recovery time and you're also not getting the frequency and the consistency, you're going to have a really hard time keeping up with that percentage progression, which is why what I like to do is work roughly within a certain percentage of your one rep max, but I'm always going to give you a range of reps that I want you working with so we can progress using a certain weight and we're going to stick within three to six reps or one to three reps or two to three reps, three to four reps, something like that. That way you have that space to listen to your body, and if you're having a day where everything feels really hard, you have the percentage of your one rep max that you're supposed to lift. But if you're just feeling like crap, then you can just lift three reps instead of going to six that day.
(16:49):
And then if you're having a really solid day, you take your percentage of the one rep max that's suggested and then go to six. And if you do a set of six and you feel like, wow, I feel super duper strong, then add on another 10%, no more than 20% at a time. That's what I encourage you guys to do. Listen to your bodies and your training should be responsive. I think when we are trying to train according to keeping you injury free, I think that that's the smartest way to train. If we were leading up to a powerlifting competition, it might be a little bit more disciplined in terms of following the program on a week by week basis, making sure that we're hitting this number of reps total with this percentage. We might be a little bit more disciplined about it. That's something that we're going to have to kind of adjust and play by ear based on one, how you're feeling.
(17:43):
Huge. That's huge to me. How are you feeling? How do the lifts feel? How are they moving? Are you feeling any pain while you're doing them? Two, how are you recovering after your lifts? Because high intensity lifts, a lot of times you don't feel that burn, but in your 24 to 48 hours after lifting, are you experiencing any joint pain, any inflammation, that kind of thing. And then also, are you able to progress over time? If I give you a higher percentage that I want you to lift with, are you able to do that? So I'm going to pace you gradually through this so you have in terms of when to progress, I'm going to be also looking at your lifts, and this is why it's such a good idea to be taking your videos and sending them to me because I can watch you and see how fast the weight is moving, see if we're getting any form failure as we get into these higher intensities. And I can help you to judge when it's time to put more weight on the bar. Now, not everybody trains according to one rep max. You don't necessarily have to in order to make progress, in order to build muscle and in order to get stronger.
(18:50):
It is a very effective way of training, and it can be very nice because it does help you to know on a week by week basis exactly what you should be lifting in terms of what weight you should put on the bar. I like to start everybody off in, let's get a max test. Let's get a starting point. Use that as a percentage point for what our lifts are going to be moving forward and try to add more weight over time to our one rep maxes. I think that that's a really great way to pace yourself and to see yourself getting measurably stronger.
(19:19):
Thank you so much for watching or listening to this episode of the Jaydigains Coaching Corner podcast. Make sure to subscribe to the channel if you haven't already, and leave a comment in the comment section if you're here on YouTube to let me know what you thought about the episode. If you would like to receive emails from me with coaching and nutrition tips, make sure to sign up for my email list on my website. Just go to jaydigains.com. I will talk to you guys again soon. Thank you again for being here with me, and don't forget to drink your water, eat your veggies and protein, and I'll see you next time.

ABOUT JAYD HARRISON

Jayd Harrison (Jaydigains) is a personal trainer and content creator. She helps people to build muscle, burn fat, and clean up their diets with her online coaching programs and social media content. Check out some of Jayd’s coaching videos on Youtube, or join Jayd live on Twitch and follow on social media: