The Working Man's Weightlifting Show
Brothers Nick and Stephen Wiley invite you to The Working Man's Weightlifting Show, a relatable podcast for ordinary people who are committed to realistically incorporating health and fitness into their already busy lives. In an industry crowded by flashy aesthetics, photo-shopped abs, full-time camera crews, and misleading marketing, Nick and Stephen leverage their combined 30+ years of weightlifting experience to help clear the air on everyday fitness issues. Common discussion topics include no-nonsense nutrition, exercise tips for the manual labor workforce, best practices for office workers, building home gyms, recovering from injuries, workout programming, and much more.
The Working Man's Weightlifting Show
Weightlifting Frequency & Volume
In episode 78, hosts the Working Men discuss the interplay between training frequency and volume, highlighting how each affects strength gains and recovery. Topics include:
• Importance of frequency in workout routines
• Effects of job routines on physical fitness
• Correlation between training volume and muscle recovery
• Insights into hypertrophy and strength development
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Hello and welcome to the Working Man's Weightlifting Show, the show where working men talk about weightlifting. I'm your host, Nick Wiley, and I'm joined tonight by my co-host and younger brother, Mr Stephen Wiley. Stephen, welcome to the studio. How are you doing? Thank you, I'm doing well. I welcomed you as if it's not half yours, but you know it is in my house.
Speaker 1:It's probably not half mine Well legally it's all mine, Just to set the record straight, you did contribute a massive amount of physical labor in the construction of this facility, so in spirit it is partially yours.
Speaker 2:As well as all the homes I've worked in.
Speaker 1:That's right Anyway well, thanks for joining us. If you're new here, what do we do in this show?
Speaker 2:It's in the name, really. Yeah, it is.
Speaker 1:You want me to expand on that?
Speaker 2:Oh, yes, yeah, we lift weights and talk about it on the show. That's right. As working men, that's right.
Speaker 1:That's right, but specifically we both work in different sort of walks of life. I like to call myself sort of a sky blue collared worker. I am an IT consultant and occasionally have to go out in the field and pick things up, and then Stephen is in manual labor. You do what for a living, exactly? Tile and flooring Installation, installation, yeah, which is extremely arduous and uh intense on the body. So that means different things for uh, those who are engaged in the lifting of weights, and so hopefully that's interesting to you. If you uh fall into one of those two categories, or adjacent, adjacent colors of collars, I'd like to see the AI transcribe that. Anyway, welcome aboard, and this is going to be a quick one. Today we're getting in and out because it's already freaking late and we have to lift weights in the morning we do so you know why am I so animated tonight?
Speaker 1:I don't know what happened. I'm kind of juiced up.
Speaker 2:You probably made a real coffee.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it might have been the wrong bag of coffee. Anyway, what do we do? Typically, we go into a topic, but before we do that we do maybe a recap. But before we do that, we like to talk about the sponsor for today's episode. Which drumroll? Please be cool if you were sitting behind your drums, which we can see from here. Yeah, I'm not back there. You're not back there. But yeah, you know, it's a pretty special sponsor. Who is it? Apparently it's your cell phone. You texted us, you told me to buy this watch, and then it, it dings and I can't not look at it. It's just us. You know, we've tried to get money involved here, but so far it's a free endeavor, as they say. We almost got a sponsor. We did, we did. We've turned a couple down and we're going to keep doing that until we find the right one. That's the heartwarming way, what that really means.
Speaker 2:You know one of them has like blown up. It's in every store that I go in.
Speaker 1:now You're talking about the well we can't say yeah, we can't say it, I'm just saying Nick caused us not to make money.
Speaker 2:That's true.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I did not want to take on a sponsor for something that I couldn't use.
Speaker 2:He could use it, and now I realize I could have, but at the time I did not.
Speaker 1:I did not believe that I could Um just saying, we could have money yeah that's true, it's true, but anyway, until such time as a sponsor is officially involved, uh, we get to say what we want, and you know we're not really owned by the man. True, so we can, but we're broke.
Speaker 2:I'm trying to frame it nicely. I'm kidding.
Speaker 1:Anyway, what you can do to help us. If you'd like to, you can leave us a review on your favorite podcasting app. That goes a really long way toward kind of making us stick out in the rankings and bringing in new listeners. Also, the other thing you can do that would be amazing cost. Nothing is just tell somebody about the show. If you like us, if you dislike us, pass it on, and we would be truly appreciative of that. And if you really want to give us money, there are ways to do that. You can buy merch at shopworkingmansweightliftingcom and you can also just donate directly at supportworkingmansweightliftingcom. Other than that, thanks for being here and lending us your ear, as I like to say.
Speaker 1:Moving on, let's do a really quick recap. This is kind of an exciting one for me, so I'm just going to keep going which is that I'm finally back in the gym after the birth of my second son, which was approximately four, four and a half months ago, and frankly, I had not really done much lifting before that for the last couple of years, which is part of the reason we had a bit of a hiatus on this show. But I'm back. I feel really fired up for some reason. I know, you can't just live off motivation alone in the gym. We've talked a lot about that sort of discipline over motivation, but for some reason, I don't know, my 37th birthday is in a couple of weeks and I feel the Grim Reaper upon me and I guess there's something about it. As you know, having a second kid, like I, just I feel I can, it's, I don't feel that bad, but I can see this future where, like, if I didn't take it seriously now and sort of course correct, I would sort of I could see myself just just becoming full job of the hut because I'm so sedentary in my work. That's a big thing, you know, we talked about that with our jobs.
Speaker 1:Like I, you know, I go out and visit people maybe a couple of times a week, uh, for work, but rarely is it actually strenuous and other than that, like, I'm behind a desk and often don't even stand up for hours at a time, and so it's like I don't know, I just worry that that would not be a good path to be on, and so, yeah, I want to be strong for my boys and I'm excited to do it. So I am back doing a program that's new for me, which is starting Now. I keep saying starting strength, it's Strong Lifts Plus is that what it's called, I think which is two days of, like, heavy lifting and then one day of upper body hypertrophy, and I'll probably do you know, I'll do a review of that program or we'll do a review of that, because you're kind of doing the same thing or a similar thing. Yep, review of that. Um, cause you're kind of doing the same thing or a similar thing.
Speaker 1:So we'll talk about that after we've been on it for a few months and we like to do reviews of programs that we do. So stick around for that if you're interested. But, uh, that's my recap, been doing it, really enjoying it so far and, um, feeling good. So how about yourself?
Speaker 2:Um, yeah, Um, yeah, no, you said everything.
Speaker 1:Not much left, yeah.
Speaker 2:I mean we're both pretty much doing the same program with some swaps in some of the lifts. But yeah, at the moment, yeah, I've been very much enjoying the lifting days. I've been very much enjoying the lifting days, and that's kind of where that program has a little bit to do with our topic for today's episode. Sure, but yeah, so far the program, if you're in a place where you enjoy heavy strength training, where you you know like a sort of like powerlifting but I wouldn't really call it a powerlifting program at all but you know, in the lower rep ranges, heavyweight but you also enjoy some bodybuilding type movements, it's a nice blend of the two where you kind of scratch the itch of both styles in the same week and it kind of keeps it exciting Nice.
Speaker 2:But yeah, I mean not a lot to say at the moment about that, but I have been getting stronger again at squats and deadlifts where I've taken a long break off of really pushing myself hard. Nothing too insane at the moment, not hitting any PRs or anything, but definitely getting some mojo back, I would say.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's been a while since I've seen you like immediately complain about your back or something like that yeah yeah, which used to happen more regularly than you would have liked, than you would have liked, and we always like to remind people that, like so many of the fitness influencers you see, either work desk jobs and just work out really hard in the gym, or or they are just full-time influencers. So, um, what you don't understand is, like someone who installs flooring and tile, the number of reps that your body is going through on a daily basis of repetitive tasks on your back, your joints, your everything is so high. It's unbelievably high For sure. So that is going to alter, like what you're, you know, able to do and or what you should do. Maybe it's a better way to say it.
Speaker 1:We've done episodes on that so you can kind of look back at the catalog and if you're interested in that topic. But you know, just I'm saying that out loud because it's not like I mainly don't want somebody to think that we're like peddling some kind of experience or knowledge or advice.
Speaker 1:That's like also, by the way, we're constantly fighting injuries. It's like, well, you know, that's more from the thousands of tiles, yeah, so you know. Anyway, moving on to the topic of the day, this was your idea. Yeah, frequency and volume, and I'm going to say it in a more ASMR sort of way. I'm going to say frequency and I'm going to say it in a more ASMR sort of way, I'm going to say frequency and I'm going to say volume. Wow, I'm going to delete all that later. Anyway, what are your thoughts?
Speaker 2:I had to set it up to get you off your feet, man. Yeah, so training, frequency and volume. If you don't know what that means, if you're very new to the term one of the dumber things I've ever done.
Speaker 1:Immediate, immediate regrets. Sometimes I'm silly and it works that one didn't work delete later, go ahead, proceed okay.
Speaker 2:Training, frequency and volume. If you don't know what that is, it is simply how often you train and basically how much you train, or how many. To break it down in workout terms, it's like how many sets you're doing and how often you do that often you do that, how many times do you hit the same muscle or body part or whatever? So for us, a quick example would be we've talked about like starting strength on this podcast before. You squat three times a week. That is very high frequency because you're squatting, you're literally squatting three times a week. Um, strong lifts, like you just mentioned. The same thing, if you do the normal program, you squat three times a week. High frequency, um, the the confusing part, I guess, would be volume. Can you can have high frequency and like low volume. Volume just means how much so you know like volume, uh, in a cup glass full of water. High volume it just means how much so you know like volume in a cup glass full of water. So if it's high volume, it's full of water, it doesn't mean just because you're hitting it frequently, it doesn't mean the volume is necessarily high. So, like with starting strength, it's really just three sets of five reps. That's not really super high volume.
Speaker 2:You'll see some programs out there, you know, where you're doing five sets of 10. Five through one is one of those programs where you do three working sets of five, three, one set and then you do five sets of 10 after that. That's super high volume in my opinion. Some people might be able to handle more than that. I think that's insane volume, especially if I could deadlift or a squat, and I honestly. I just saw a little podcast snippet of Wendler literally saying he probably shouldn't have done five sets of 10 deadlifts when he did it, but he wanted to try it when he wrote the program.
Speaker 1:Just to insert very quickly, just for if anybody's unfamiliar um, the 531 is a very popular weightlifting program that has many different sort of templates within it and Jim Wendler is the guy who wrote those programs. Yes, you can look him up. He's written several books and has a website, Is it? What's the website called?
Speaker 2:It might be jimwendlercom. Honestly Okay, I'm not. There's a lot of forums online about it.
Speaker 1:We've done episodes on 531.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we did it for years, yeah, years and years.
Speaker 1:And the one you just mentioned is not the only one Five sets of 10. Is that boring, but big, I guess. But there's other templates within it, so I just want to make sure that that was what you were referring to is clear.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so basically that's what that means. Um, the program Nick and I are doing right now, the strong lifts plus, uh, the frequency goes way down. So you actually squat once a week, you deadlift once a week and then you, well, I should say, the frequency of like lower body basically goes way down. Um, so you're so you're kind of just having to focus on like one heavy squat day, one heavy deadlift day, then you do, you still do some upper body work on those two days and then the third day is like all upper body hypertrophy, like you've mentioned earlier.
Speaker 2:For me, I mean, my thinking for the episode is just if anyone has, if you're wondering, like if you do a program that's high frequency or like a full body three day a week or something and you're kind of getting beat up feeling. So for me, personal example, my knees were really starting to bother me at work. My strength level was going up, I was hitting all my reps, I was doing strong lifts uh, mad cow. You've heard us talk about the past. I like that program a lot. I was just doing that, constantly squatting three times a week, hit every one of my reps. I honestly I don't think I ever failed a single set. But and I was getting stronger and I felt good, but my knees were killing me, like when I say killing me, I mean it was like I was fine to do the lift, but I'd be like sitting at the table or sit down at my desk to like do anything and I would my knees would just hurt and the they hurt a little bit at work. I mean, usually I get, once you get moving, you kind of get warmed up at work and it's not that big of a deal, but like the initial shock of getting on my knees at work was really starting to hurt.
Speaker 2:So what I decided to do is I wanted to lower the frequency. So I was looking for a program to get off of squatting three times a week and I was honestly going to just make a program of my own. And then I saw this StrongLifts Plus that you were talking about and I had forgotten about it. I did it a long time ago for a really short period of time, but I was like, shoot, I'm just going to, since I'm already in the app, using the app and all this stuff we've talked about which we like that. I was like I'm just going to lower the frequency but try to keep the numbers the same. So I've continued to hit my reps every week.
Speaker 2:That's what I was worried about the lack of frequency. That frequency also helps you with practice. So like, if you're not very good at a squat, you do it three times a week. You get better, like you're better at the movement. Lowering the frequency I wouldn't necessarily suggest to an absolute beginner, because you probably aren't lifting very heavy anyway. Your knees might not be bothering you from that specific movement. Once you get some experience you move into like intermediate levels and stuff.
Speaker 2:I think it's smart to start kind of listening to your body and that's literally what I was doing. I was just like I'm not going to continue to just pound my knees and feel miserable outside of the gym. I love hitting heavy weights, but I also like feeling better outside of the gym. I want the gym to kind of help me feel better. So, as of right now, the lack of frequency has not hurt my progress at all.
Speaker 2:I've still hit my reps. We've been doing this for a few weeks. I think I've hit my reps every time. The deadlifts I don't have to worry so much about, like you said, my back. The other thinking there was that my back does tend to go out on me if I just overuse it, basically in the gym. So now only having to focus on deadlifts on Wednesday, I don't just wear my back out with squats beforehand, bench press beforehand and then deadlift after that. Now I can just start the day on Wednesday with deadlifts and then follow it up with some other movements afterwards. But I'm really trying to be conscious of my body and see what feels better If I'm hurting from this or anything. There still may be some tweaks I do to it in the future, but at the moment for me, lowering the frequency has been kind of amazing, and that was really my thinking, for the episode is just, you know, if you're a person listening, that you really like your program, you're getting stronger, but you just kind of feel like crap. Or you're like me and you are a blue collar guy and you're just using your body all the time and you're just worried that maybe you need to take a little break, give your body a break from just high frequency and hitting something over and over and over.
Speaker 2:I still think full body programs are pretty awesome. This is very much a full body program. Yeah, what we're doing and you can. You know you don't have to just like hold yourself to starting strength or whatever. You have to squat three times a week. You can still do full body and pick a different movement. Yeah, so like, for example, I still use our glued ham developer, I'll do like back raises or I'll do like a Nordic ham curl kind of thing on it. So I'm still hitting legs, I'm just not picking up a super heavy barbell and like pounding my joints with it, right, so really all that to say. I think it's it's good thing to think about that, with the frequency, um, and the volume, just adjusting how much you do it. Volume, I didn't really touch that much on that, but this program in particular, I would say, is pretty high volume for your upper body.
Speaker 2:You do a couple of days and more in the five rep range, three sets, five sets of five somewhere in there, but then I guess it's five sets of five and then on Friday you actually do three sets of eight, so you're kind of hitting that little bit higher rep range. But it's all, more or less all upper body on Friday, so that the volume kind of shoots up. But to me in the kind of work I do, upper body volume doesn't tend to really mess me up at all. The only thing that happens sometimes if I'm working a lot with tiles and I have to spread thinset or adhesive or anything, my elbows or my shoulders would get really tired. But I wouldn't say they hurt real, but they don't, um, they don't like go out like your back might or something yeah, and also they're just gonna do that.
Speaker 2:I mean yeah, yeah, exactly who would do be able to do that work and just feel amazing, right, yeah, yeah, exactly, and usually you don't, I mean usually you're not trapped, like there's certain days where I have a really heavy day of troweling and then other days where it's not, like I'm moving 90 miles an hour trying to do everything. So I get a little bit of break on that, so I don't really have to worry about that too much in the gym. But certainly with my back picking up heavy boxes all day, heavy buckets, essentially doing many deadlifts all day long, many lunges, like you said. So I just to me thinking about that, especially getting older. Like you said, you're turning 37, I'm about to turn 34. I can just tell a difference in my knees and things like that. So I just want to be careful with that and make sure that I'm able to use the gym to help me perform better outside of that how many years into?
Speaker 1:I know I keep harping on your job, but it is part of the show. So how many years are you now into professional flooring? Like when, how? What was your age when you started that? I think I was. I was either 21 or 22. So you're like 12 years in roughly. So that's the other thing I'm talking about.
Speaker 2:But I spend more or less full time on my knees like that.
Speaker 1:That's what I mean, yeah, so it's pretty crazy, it's very hard to parse out what is the cause of the feeling of your knees, but if I'm guessing it's the job.
Speaker 2:Right, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1:Because I, for, for instance, don't really ever experience that from training other than like the phase I'm in right now and how I've been here many times which is like when I first get back to it. So if I've taken a break from lifting and then I go back, you always have that like two week long. Just everything is sore all the time. Yeah, and when that happens, like I like going up and down stairs, I I'm like oh, I have straight jelly legs.
Speaker 1:But I'm I'm starting to get over that hump already, like I feel much better today than I did at this same time last week, like after the same the day before. So, um, I think you know, maybe another week or so I'll be pretty much where I'll be. I'm always probably a little bit more sore than some people kind of talk about, but I think part of that is just like you know, I think some people just experience that more.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:And the reality too is as I is sort of documented on this show is that, unlike you, I have taken many like long breaks away from weightlifting, so I think I just have more sort of ground to make up. You know, whereas you're, you are just very accustomed to being super physical all the time, and so it's like you know that's just not really going to happen to the same degree, right? I guess, before we shut it down, can you talk a little bit about what hypertrophy is and what that means for anyone who's, like, not accustomed or acquainted to that term, and why you would focus on that or not focus on it. I mean, I feel like I have a relative understanding of it.
Speaker 1:But well, actually, let me start. I'll just regurgitate what I think and then you tell me what I'm wrong about. My understanding is that, um, if you lift in the low rep ranges, you are uh, that is better for supporting strength gains but not as effective for growing size of muscles. I don't really know what effect that has on other performance aspects like explosiveness, like for athletes or something like that. I don't know anything about that. We've actually had guests on the past that could talk a lot better about that. But I guess my understanding is, if you move into a higher rep range, like you said eight reps earlier, and then I guess, all the way up to maybe 12 or 15, I think that is correct me if I'm wrong if that's the average range.
Speaker 1:So the goal there is more about building size. Maybe what I'm confused about is I don't really know how they're related. I guess at a certain point maybe you need to grow your muscles so that you can restrengthen them. I mean, I don't really know how that kind of works out.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, that's a good question. So yeah, hypertrophy range, I would say what you would traditionally call it would be 8 to 15, somewhere there. After that they usually call it. You're more or less building like stamina Okay, almost like a fighter. Yeah, like you're just Okay, almost like a fighter, yeah like you're just or athletic stuff.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you're basically doing it so you can get used to doing something repeatedly over and over and over, Something like a kettlebell swing, you know where you might do like a set of 20 or 30 straight or something like that. Yeah, the reasoning where they both kind of relate to each other is and I was confused about that a lot for a long time when I first started Basically you need to get stronger, so you need to lift somewhere in the five reps. It's just been learned, people have learned that that is the best rep range where you can kind of exert the most force. It still helps you grow muscle, but you also get a lot stronger. It doesn't throw you into that higher rep range where you're just failing because it's so many reps You're not. You're strong enough, you can lift more weight, but you're you're failing because of how many reps you have to do.
Speaker 2:Um, so, so the five reps is like kind of the sweet spot, especially for men. I think there's some studies that say women can be closer to like triples, like three, three reps. They can perform better and get stronger like that and I know, like my wife has, she's had a lot of success doing triples like that. But anyway. Five reps helps you get stronger. The higher rep range 8, 12, 15, supposedly helps you grow your muscle more. But why you would want to do that essentially is that people say mass moves mass. It's gonna be really hard to build a really heavy bench press. There are some outliers out there that pull it off, but typically the, the small guys that are really strong are more or less only really strong like a deadlift or a squat.
Speaker 2:They don't ever really get that strong at a bench press because you need more mass. So what they'll usually someone would probably tell you is like eat more. And then, like you know, hammer your lats, like do a lot of heavy rows, croc rows, barbell rows, pull-ups, whatever and builds like really big lats, get some like a big base that you're bench pressing against. And if you look at the guys that bench press a lot of weight, that's typically they're big guys, like they're not little guys. So the part that I was always confused about is that I was like well, you can't.
Speaker 2:What happens is if you just focus on hypertrophy, you're probably going to hit a plateau pretty early simply because you're doing like sets of 12 and you're not, um, you can't really add a lot of weight rapidly to the bar week after week doing sets of 12. Cause you're just like burning so much. Um, you might, some people may be able to, and you probably get pretty big doing that, but it's generally accepted that, like five reps is easier to recover from. You don't get so sore. You're talking about the soreness. That's the other problem. That's what Wendler was talking about with the five sets of 10.
Speaker 2:You get so freaking sore you have trouble like sitting down sometimes if you're doing squats or deadlifts like that, and especially if you're doing both of those in the same week. You know 50 extra reps of deadlifts after you're working heavy sets is a ton of reps of a deadlift or a squat, and I've done that when I, when we were younger, I did both of them pretty frequently like that and it, um, it did. I mean, honestly, that's the worst soreness I've ever had with working out like that. And it that's more or less where the relation comes in is that you know you're getting so sore it's hard to recover. You're. You really can't hit the frequency as high because you're doing the volume is so high, really can't hit the frequency as high because you're doing the volume is so high. So, like you're doing, say you were trying to follow strong lifts or starting strength, and instead of three sets of five you're trying to do three sets of 12. Well, there's no way you're going to do three sets of 12 or five sets of 12 if you're doing strong lifts three times a week, right, and actually add weight to the bar every time. It's impossible. You'll probably Monday hit the 12s and then Wednesday they might be more like 10s and then Friday you might squeeze out eights, but they're all at the same weight because you weren't able to add weight to the bar, because you just can't. You're so sore. Fives you can recover quicker. You're doing heavy weight.
Speaker 2:You're not just like hammering the muscle, you're hitting it just enough that it's going to grow, it's going to get stronger and you will get hypertrophy from that Like, especially if you're untrained 100%, you're going to get bigger. Even me, honestly, later in life, I was able to add muscle by figuring that out and starting to add strength training into my training instead of just straight hypertrophy, because for the first several years I didn't know any better and I just was hammering high rep stuff all the time. So you, it's just easy. Basically, it's like the easiest way to add weight to the bar, which in theory will you will grow and you will also get stronger is to just do it like less reps. So five reps just tends to be a good number. Everybody kind of falls into for that. But yeah, where the relation comes is basically uh, at a certain point you may hit a plateau and you need to get bigger, to lift more weight, basically, and so okay, that's.
Speaker 1:That's, I guess in my head I was. When I first brought it I was sort of thinking that, like, almost like I was intuiting that, but that makes a lot of sense, that you, you basically um need to sort of upgrade the the like you got to build a bigger compartment for your engine in your car before you can put a bigger engine in it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so, and especially with the upper body, like, uh, like I said you, there's a lot of skinny guys and small guys that have deadlifted a pretty crazy amount of weight, sure? Um, look up max tuning right yeah and um, squatting even.
Speaker 2:I've seen. I've seen some really skinny guys do some pretty dang impressive squats for the, for how light they are and how small they are, um, but the bench bench press is always where it. I'm not I'm not saying they're weak by any means, but it's not going to be anything crazy. They're not breaking any records or anything like that.
Speaker 1:Because, it's just simply, it just doesn't move like that that makes sense, and that's the thing that I think we both want to improve.
Speaker 2:And you're doing a lot.
Speaker 1:You're a lot further along than I am. My bench press has been garbaggio for years, so I'm on a path to try to improve that and I would say in general that, uh, my body composition is better below the belt than it is above, if you know what I'm saying. So, uh, you know I'm excited to try to build more like definition, like I definitely have a just a bit blobby up top, you know. And, uh, you know I'm excited to try to build more like definition, like I definitely have just a bit blobby up top, you know. And you know, I think getting, because, frankly, like I just ignored a lot of that stuff for years.
Speaker 1:There was a certain point I don't know when, I couldn't tell you when, but when you started to really educate yourself, and I'm always mooching off your knowledge. When you started to really educate yourself and I'm I'm always mooching off your knowledge I kind of just got this message that, like, nothing really matters except the big four lifts, so just do those. And I couldn't even really do all four of those because I had shoulder issues, but I was just doing that. And now it really shows, cause it's like my legs are a lot stronger, way stronger than my upper body is. And now it really shows because it's like my legs are a lot stronger, way stronger than my upper body is, and now I feel like it's a good idea for me to like balance that out. So I'm excited about that.
Speaker 1:I learned you know approaching it differently this time. It's been a very long time since I've done anything in that higher rep range. Yeah, you know, to any, I guess, meaningful number you know. And one thing I didn't want to clarify for anybody who's like a straight beginner when we talk about different rep ranges like this, it is not the case that you lift the same amount of weight within both ranges. You modify it heavily. So the five rep range you're probably lifting anywhere from, you know, probably somewhere in the 80% of what you're capable of range, is that right? 70, 80%.
Speaker 2:Somewhere probably, yeah, more like 80, 85, somewhere in there.
Speaker 1:And then if you're doing high reps, you're probably more like 50. Am I getting that right-ish?
Speaker 2:It depends, maybe 45. Yeah, it kind of depends on the reps you're doing.
Speaker 1:And certain exercises are also just like. For instance, I'm doing some shoulder I forget what you like lat raises and stuff.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:That's literally. I'm using a five pound dumbbell, but it burns like crazy. And it's like you just cannot lift a lot of weight. It's just something not your body's not built for a very heavy thing. So just you know, bear that in mind when you're looking at these different rep ranges. It's not the same amount of weight. You change based on what you're doing.
Speaker 2:So and I would. I'll add one more thing about the frequency, something you can do. If you are the kind of person that wants to lift every day or do something active every day, you can add more volume and more frequency really with body weight movements. Wendler is another. That's another. One of his new things is his whole like wall restraining, high frequency, high volume, like he does a lot of reps. But there's other guys you can find online that do kind of like calisthenic training. It's a little like push-ups, pull-up, squats, that kind of stuff and they do it every day and you can just hit it over and over because you can recover really quickly from that kind of training. And so you know if you're, if you are looking to like hit something or or if you just want to work out daily because you just want to be, that just feels good to you and it helps you like whatever might help you relax.
Speaker 1:It might help you feel better about yourself, whatever.
Speaker 2:Yeah, look into some, some of these guys that do these body weight programs. You might really really enjoy it. Or you may even add it as like a off day thing for your current program, if you're not. Like I've done that in the past, I don't do it very often anymore because I usually am looking to rest a little bit in between. But but it's fun to do and sometimes they're really enjoyable because you are able to get in the gym like every day and it's just kind of fun that way.
Speaker 1:Very good, good stuff. Well, I think we'll probably wrap it up there. It's getting late and we got to get up and work out tomorrow, not to brag. That was weird too. I'm just. I'm not on it tonight. I don't know what's happening. Anyway, thanks for being here and we hope that you've enjoyed this show and that you'll come back for the next one Again. Do us a big favor if you'd share it with someone else you know who might be into this kind of thing. That is honestly the best way you can help us out, and we truly appreciate that. You can also find us on social media. We're on Instagram at Working Man's Weightlifting. We have a website, wwwworkingmansweightliftingcom, and I think that's all I'm going to say. Until next time. I've been Nick, I've been Steven and we've been the Working man who Lift Weights and talk about it on this show. We will catch you next time. Why am I saying next time? I already said next time. What do I normally say? Good night, bye-bye, I'm out.
