Mike Boyle had a great discussion on Instagram several weeks ago about adults lifting to failure and using low rep schemes.
It sparked a lot of arguments among people about which approach is best and whether there’s always an answer to this question.
We discuss whether adults should lift to failure on low-rep schemes in this week’s episode.
We’ll go over what we do at Champion, how we mostly agree with this, and why we may work low reps for a very certain population for a specific reason.
To view more episodes, subscribe, and ask your questions, go to mikereinold.com/askmikereinold.
#AskMikeReinold Episode 382: Should Adults Lift for Less than 5 Reps Per Set?
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Transcript
Meredith Fagan:
We got Mac from Boston. He says, “Hi, Mike and team. I noticed a recent series of Instagram posts by Mike Boyle that you commented on. He was stating that he does not prefer to have adults that are training with him perform less than five reps per set during their lifts. I’d love to hear the team at Champion’s thoughts on this. Do you have your adult clients at Champion perform sets with repetitions less than five when working on strength?”
Mike Reinold:
Awesome. Great job. Meredith. Has everybody seen the Mike Boyle Instagram series? Yeah, everybody checked it out. Oh, I forgot. Kevin’s not on Instagram. That’s right. Kevin’s real. The gist of it is right there. But I mean, you know Mike, he’s strong-minded but also with so much experience that it’s hard to not listen when he says something. That’s my take. And I kind of commented that to him. It’s like when Mike speaks, I think there’s a lot we can all learn from that. So I don’t want to get too far with that. But yeah, there’s a big series. He had posts for several days where he just kept going. And the internet trolls just keep chirping, and they’re arguing on whether or not adults, so not competitive powerlifters and stuff like that… So honestly, us. Let’s be honest, us. Should we be doing more than five?
And I mean, we all do it sometimes, and then we all probably regret that we did it sometimes when our back gets sore and stuff. But I don’t know. Why don’t we throw this and just start with Diwesh, just straight from the gym? Diwesh is our sports performance, our director of our gym. But basically, what are your thoughts here? And I think then us old-timers maybe can jump in because I think we can relate to the question a little bit more. But Diwesh, what’s your initial thoughts? What’s our approach at Champion? Because I think that’s what people want to hear, too, is other thoughts. Are we in agreement? Are we close? Are we off? What do you think?
Diwesh Poudyal:
Yeah. I would say, I mean, this is something that I’ve definitely evolved over time a ton. I think most young strength coaches, and I know Mike Boyle’s kind of admitted to this too, is early on I feel like you get so into the powerlifting world because that’s where most people start and you kind of start basing a lot of your philosophies out of that model, and you start having everyone do heavy sets of two and three and sometimes even one rep maxes and stuff. And I think slowly you start really realizing what general fitness is all about, and honestly, what even just overall fitness and performance is all about. So I would say I’ve come to the point now where I wholeheartedly agree with that statement from Mike. And I’ll take it even a step further and say I would agree for it a lot even outside of just the adult population. Even our athletes, we really don’t push super, super crazy heavy weights. And sometimes we’ll go down to a heavy set of three, but we’ll do that for maybe two, maybe four weeks total, and maybe that’s twice a year. And then we really back away and start working on a lot of these athletic qualities that mean a lot more for their sport development and their athletic development.
But kind of hanging onto the question for adults, I really don’t see a need to push adults to super, super heavy weights past five reps because their goals are so general. A heavy set of three, a heavy set of two, heavy set of one is a very specialized goal that you’re basically telling us that you want to be a competitive powerlifter. So unless someone comes in with that goal, I don’t think I need to be that specific in my training to attack that specific of a goal. We can really just focus on having a good baseline ability to produce force, be generally strong-ish, improve cardiovascular output, be generally fit cardiovascularly, make sure that we’re keeping an eye on mobility, stability, motor control, generate some power through lower half, upper half to make it a lot more well-rounded rather than trying to make it all about “let’s get as humanly strong as possible at the age of 56.”
Mike Reinold:
Especially where how many adults come to a gym or whatever, and it’s actually their first experience, or maybe their training age and their movement age isn’t very good. I mean, doing sets of twos and threes or something like that, and you’re barely even used to lifting as an adult, it just seems crazy.
Diwesh Poudyal:
Yeah. So I would wholeheartedly agree. I’m in the agree camp with Mike Boyle on this one.
Mike Reinold:
It sounds like, Diwesh, that you feel like there’s so many other things we need to work on anyway.
Diwesh Poudyal:
Correct.
Mike Reinold:
That takes time to just do five sets of three with adequate breaks in between and stuff. One clarifying question, and then we’ll throw it around for some other opinions. Do we really think it has something to do with how many reps, or is it just working to failure to an extent? Should we clarify that point a little bit? What do you think, Diwesh?
Diwesh Poudyal:
Yeah, the reps actually don’t matter, and you can even look across to hypertrophy research on this. Obviously, coming up in strength conditioning, we learned from the textbooks like, “oh, you want to improve hypertrophy, you go eight to 10 reps or eight to 12 reps.” We actually have a lot of research coming out that’s talking about sets of five are just as good for hypertrophy, which leads me to think that sets of eight are probably just as good for strength, by the way. Meaning mechanical tension is mechanical tension. And then the other concept that I think is important for people to learn, too, is this concept of tonnage that we talk about. When it comes to building strength, it’s not just about on a set of squats or on a singular rep of a squat how much weight you have on the bar, but it really is a total equation of sets times reps times load across the entire session.
So, how much total tonnage and how much increase in tonnage week over week, that’s what’s really going to get you stronger. That’s kind of the physiological adaptation that you’re making. It’s not like you’re going to make a crazy, crazy adaptation going from 335 on a deadlift to 340 on a deadlift. That’s probably got a very minimal amount of physiological adaptation that your body’s making. Whereas if you go from two sets of 10 at 200 to three sets of 10 at 200, the exact same weight, now that total tonnage is significantly higher week over week. So I think it’s important to keep in mind that it’s a lot less about total load per individual rep and it’s total load per session or per week throughout a joint or throughout a body part.
Mike Reinold:
That makes a lot of sense. And I always think, because I’m always thinking, are there… You don’t want to say anything’s never always on social media, because this is just not true. Because I’m thinking Lenny’s been doing 20-pound goblet squats for two, three reps for 10 years now. And I would say it’s been safe for you.
Mike Reinold:
Yeah. I don’t think you’ve got past that. Am I wrong?
Lenny Macrina:
You got to be careful.
Mike Reinold:
Dave, what do you think? Jump in here, buddy. I know you got some more.
Dave Tilley:
Yeah. I thought it was funny because I’m 36, not 56, but I’m the five by five king. Literally almost everything that I do for deadlifting, squatting, benching, is a five by five because it’s the perfect intersection of “I feel like I’m doing something useful” and “I don’t feel like crap after.” I’m sore. I’m a normal kind of fitness tired. But I can’t think of the last time that I was really banged up and sore for more than two or three days. And maybe I’m just becoming slowly an old fitness boomer that Diwesh will program for. But I very much view the lens of I want to be able to work out, be healthy, be fit, and not hurt. That’s really all my goals are these days. And I think the vast majority of people who are working out in adult fitness for us, and maybe at Boyle’s and other places, are they want to get a good workout in and they’re using fitness to then enjoy their life and have other things that they want to do.
They want to hike, they want to maybe ski, they want to play games with their kids. And they don’t want to have, “Oh, my back’s killing me because I went out and threw the football around or did some hiking with my family.” And I think a lot of people on the adult fitness side that I just chit-chat with at Champion, it’s like I don’t want to say that we’re just a checklist for them. They love being there. It’s exciting. But it’s not like, “Oh my God, I’m so excited to go hardcore train for this goal, and I’m only focused on this one thing in the gym.” We are very much a vessel to make their quality of life higher. And so with that being said, most people are just kind of trying to do what they need to do to be healthy and fit, and they don’t want to have an injury associated with that.
And honestly, I think that a lot of the choices we make from the PT side, helping to advise on clients who are coming back and forth, it’s all about the risk of irritation or re-injury alongside that performance goal. So we’re making a lot of choices based on the risk-to-reward ratio. I have some of the gymnasts or some of the people that I think we work with… Could you deadlift super heavy? Sure. But we could also single hip thrust and do some other hinge variations and get a lot of other opportunities there without going into a 5, 4, 3, 2 heavy deadlifting single because it’s just about risk. It’s about the risk of what is going to happen if we keep pushing and pushing. So yeah, maybe it’s just me seeing myself become a Boyle client or a Champion client, but five by five is pretty much universally how I hang out.
Mike Reinold:
And I want to reframe a little bit what Dave said too, because I agree with what Dave just said right there. He talked about risk-reward. And I think this is a lot of time where physical therapists get crapped on a little bit by the strength and conditioning, is that we’re too focused on risk and less focused on reward. I think the other way to phrase what Dave just said, though, is it’s a workload progression. Risk-reward is like it’s a workload progression. You can work up to anything. But the majority of time, if you’re jumping in with some crazy set rep schemes that are aggressive in there, your workloads aren’t prepared for that. You’re just nothing. Your body’s not ready for that. Your tissue’s not ready for that. You haven’t done enough loading to get to that point. It’s not just risk-reward. It’s risk-reward at this point in time.
And if that just means your workload’s off and you do want to get to that reward, and you’re willing to accept the risk, you just have to build that workload progression to get there. Because I don’t want the strength coaches to jump in and say, “Well, of course the PTs are going to side with Boyle” and say that he’s right because we’re conservative, but we’re not conservative. We push the envelope all the time. So, all right, Dan Pope just joined in. We’re going to throw him into the fire. We’re commenting on the Mike Boyle post. I think we prepped you ahead of time on this. So Dan, you’re in your forties now, right? You 40? You 40 yet?
Dan Pope:
I’m a 40-year-old man.
Mike Reinold:
Yeah, that’s right. Exactly. Yeah, that’s right. I was going to say, I thought so. Okay. So you’ve been lifting your whole life. Talk to me about the evolution just real quick, wrapping up this episode, because I want to hit also the concept we talk about at Champion all the time. I remember teaching Diwesh this his first week with us, almost. It’s like, look, all you 24-year-old strength coaches think you should program all the 45-year-old moms like how you want to lift, but that’s just not realistic to our bodies. So tell me a little bit about the evolution because you’ve experienced it, Dan. Boyle’s saying adults shouldn’t be dropping into single-set low rep sets. What do you think from your experience, and how have you evolved as a trainee, and what do you do with your clients, and what would you recommend?
Dan Pope:
I can see that for sure. I thought a decent amount about this question beforehand. I think it’s kind of twofold because, as we age, one of the biggest things we lose is power. And we know that as you drop your reps, you build more strength, you build more power. It’s probably important that we keep some lower rep sets into our patients’ programs as we age, but I think you have to be much more judicious. And as you age, it is a little unfortunate, but our bodies don’t tend to handle as much stress as they once did. And this is something I’ve talked to Diwesh quite a bit about. I do a lot of high rep sets now, and I stay away from lower reps. I do from time to time. I may hit them maybe for a few months out of the year because I think it’s still important. I feel like partially, I’m being a bit of a baby because you do see some people out there that are older that are lifting heavy weights, and then they are doing a good job with it. We know that the lower rep sets can be good, but I think you just have to be much more judicious.
And you have to be careful for prior histories of injuries. So if someone has a history of low back pain and you’re pushing heavy deadlifts, it might not be the best thing for that person. Or maybe you ramp them up very slowly and only hit it for a month or two, and then go back to a higher rep set kind of scheme. So I guess to actually answer your question, I used to not think about whether or not I could do low rep sets at all. I just always did whatever I thought was best for my goals. And over the course of time, the weights kind of forced me to think more about that. So yeah, as a younger trainer, I would prescribe people whatever the heck I thought was best for them based on their athletic goals and needs. And now I think a lot more about their age. And I’m sure, and I’m only 40, but I’m sure it doesn’t get better as I age. Probably need to think about this more and more each decade of life. So I think Mike Boyle is kind of polarizing with his opinions, and this is another one where it’s like, well, there’s some nuance there, but I do really like the idea of being careful about low rep sets as you age.
Mike Reinold:
Love it. Yeah, good stuff. Kev, what do you think?
Kevin Coughlin:
Yeah. I thought of a few use cases where I do think it makes sense to go lower rep with higher load. I think one is obviously if it’s the person’s goal and they come in and they say they want to squat as heavy as possible, like Diwesh said, if it’s a powerlifter, and I know Dewey and Kaz have been going through a heavy bench press program. So yeah, that. We want Kaz to bench 300 plus pounds. He’s doing low rep for some of that, and that’s just something he wants to do for fun. I think the other thing is thinking about endurance athletes, where if they’re running or training volume is very, very high, a lot of times they feel better in the gym. And I would say this is true of people I’ve worked with and just anecdotally myself. When volume’s pretty high, tissue damage seems to increase, and you’re a lot more sore between runs. But keeping, in a safe way, keeping some heavy load, lower volume strength training sessions in the programming, I think those athletes tend to feel a little bit better. And I think it can be done in a safe way, and that’s not necessarily going to failure, but maybe working at higher percentages of one rep max where it’s kind of balancing out the high volume they’re getting with running.
And then the last thing I’d say from a PT perspective, I’ve thought that with some of our knee patients, when to clear them for returning to sport, we’re really asking them to do a one rep maximal effort knee extension. And I do think that having some higher effort lifts in the gym like that, where they’re used to exerting a very high effort, which is different than when you’re lifting eight to 12 reps, I feel like you don’t get the same even neural output. So sometimes I’ll program maybe sets of three or sets of five for those folks where, not a max effort, one rep max to failure, but if they’re far enough in their rehab and their movement quality is really good, I think sometimes those higher effort lifts prepare them for the testing a little bit better. So I think it could be important there as well.
Mike Reinold:
Wow, that’s a good one, Kevin. I like that. That was good. And I think that was as close to a mic drop comment as we could have gotten there from Kev. So we’re going to wrap it up there. It was perfect. But I think when Mike speaks, and I tell him this all the time, when Mike Boyle speaks, I listen because he’s so experienced, and I’ve always thought that he’s just got such a great sense behind him and such practicality behind it. So I completely agree. The only thing I would just… I would never say always or never, and I think Kevin just showed some great use cases as an example. Dan talked to some use cases. Dave talked – I mean, everybody talked about use cases where there may be some. It’s just such a small percentage, and I think that’s the main goal. So Mac, hope that helped.
If you haven’t checked out, check out Mike Boyle on Instagram, and you can kind of follow that. Probably going to be by the time this episode comes out, it’s probably going to be late to jump in on the conversation, unfortunately. But I thought it was a great conversation, and I think we’re going to see conversations like that over and over again, so stay tuned for that. But anywho, appreciate everything. Head to Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and make sure you subscribe so you get notifications of the next episode. And we’ll see you in the next one. Take care.
