Quick Wits: How to Train, Warmup, and Avoid Missing Reps in Your Workouts

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On today's Quick Wits, we are answering questions about how to train, how to warm up your lift, how to choose an initial load so that you can get all the reps but not go too lightly, how to rest so you get sufficient time between sets, how to progress, and which movements to do week after week, as well as how to manage recovery so that you can train hard, but not so hard that you stop making progress.

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“Quick Wits” are short, 3-5 minute episodes between full episodes to give you an actionable strategy or hit of motivation.

These mini-episodes give you practical advice on fitness, training, and mindset based on my everyday experience with clients that you can implement right away.

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Chapters

• 0:00 Training Principles and Techniques for Progress
• 3:07 Effective Training Tips for Success

Transcript

Philip Pape: 0:00

On today's Quick Lits, we are answering questions about how to train, how to warm up your lift, how to choose an initial load so that you can get all the reps but not go too lightly, how to rest so you get sufficient time between sets, how to progress and which movements to do week after week. And then how to manage recovery so that you can train hard, but not so hard that you stop making progress. Welcome to the Wits and Weights podcast. I'm your host, philip Pape, and this twice-a-week podcast is dedicated to helping you achieve physical self-mastery by getting stronger, optimizing your nutrition and upgrading your body composition. We'll uncover science-backed strategies for movement, metabolism, muscle and mindset, with a skeptical eye on the fitness industry, so you can look and feel your absolute best. Let's dive right in. What you are about to hear is an excerpt from a video in the monthly workout programs course in Wits and Weights Physique University, where I go over how to train, training principles, how to warm up, an exact protocol to do so, as well as the success factors so that you can continue making progress. And the reason I'm sharing all this is because this week and next week, wits and Weights Physique University is open for enrollment and as a thank you for listening to this podcast, I would love to give you a free month of workout programs from the program. All you have to do is click the link in the show notes and I will send it to you, no strings attached. You will get the exact Google sheet with all seven programs, that's, three novice programs, one late novice program, two intermediate programs and a female lower body focused program. They're all focused on strength and physique development and a female lower body focused program. They're all focused on strength and physique development. And you'll be getting the exact sheet that I am dropping for the first month of Wits and Weights Physique University as a thank you again for listening to this podcast. So again, just click the link in the show notes to get your free physique focused workout programs.

Philip Pape: 2:02

The next section I want to cover is how to train. All right, this can be a giant topic in and of itself, but I'm going to just stick to the basics of what's most important, all right, first of all, always warm up with the lift, meaning you don't need other warmups unless it's super cold and you just need to physically warm up the body, like with some cardio on a bike, but besides that, you don't need to stretch. You don't need to do any fancy dynamic warmups that you learned in your CrossFit class. Trust me, I've been there you just need to warm up with the lift itself. You can use the partial range on the lift to warm up. If you're very tight, like if you're going to squat and your shoulders are tight, you can stretch under the bar for a bit until you get that full stretch and can get it on your back, for example, for us older folks and I actually have a whole section here on how to warm up that I'm not going to explain in detail here. It's very self-explanatory, but that is my suggestion on how to warm up the lift. And you don't have to warm up if you've just warmed up. If you've just done a lift of a similar body part and you're already warm, just go into the working set.

Philip Pape: 3:07

Second, I get this question all the time. Well, what do I start with when I've never done the movement before, or when I'm doing a new program? And even if you're intermediate or advanced, you want to find the sweet spot for that first week, and the way I like to do it is you know, you go through your warmup and, as you're warming up, you're going to get a feel for how close you are to that stressful point where it starts to feel heavy and then you want to settle on a weight that is not pushing yourself to failure, but also not easy. So it's like two to three reps in the tank, right when you do, let's say, it calls for a set of five and you go ahead and you do five and you're like I could maybe get into more reps. Okay, that might be the spot you want to be at, because then the subsequent sessions, week after week, you're just going to go up from there. Once you have your baseline, you're just going to go up from there and that's going to be how you progress. Just don't start too light, okay.

Philip Pape: 4:02

The next one is long enough rest periods, very, very important. Okay, this actually, I'm actually going to fix this. This is not correct. Three to five minutes or longer for compound lifts. One to three minutes for direct isolation work, because I actually how to train number three Okay, getting real time updates here as I make these videos. All right, the next one and, by the way, the reason we want long enough rest periods is to get all the reps and actually demonstrate an objective progression week to week, because if the rest period is all over the place, that's another variable we're changing. If we were rested a minute last week but three minutes this week, or vice versa, it's not going to be an indication week to week that we're actually progressing or not.

Philip Pape: 4:43

The next one is very important. Uh, and that's why I'm dropping them monthly and not like weekly or whatever, because I want you to know this is a long game. You want to pick a program, run it, for you know, run it for six to 12 weeks, with deload if needed. Okay. And then number five I want you to train hard. I want you to train hard, but not to the breaking point, not to where your form breaks down. All right, usually this is not all the way to failure. Rarely it is so like if you're doing bicep curls, yeah, go to failure, but for the most part you're one to two reps shy of failure, and that proximity to failure is an indication that you are training hard. All right, we already talked about the warmup. You can read this for yourself.

Philip Pape: 5:28

And then success factors are just. You know, to prevent the question hey, I just missed my reps. What do I do? I would rather you say I did everything I could to not miss my reps and then I missed my reps. What do I do? Two different things, because most of the time when somebody says they missed their reps, they are deficient in one of these areas. If you take care of these areas and you miss a rep, well, you may just be plateauing and need to change your programming.

Philip Pape: 5:53

Okay, so what are they? Number one rest long enough between sets. Talked about that already. Number two increase the load each session, but just the right amount. Don't go too much. You know, if you start going up 10 pounds a week on your deadlift and then all of a sudden you just, it feels just extremely heavy, maybe you should have gone up five pounds the most recent increase or even on a press or bench press or something, two and a half pounds. You know, using microplates you never want to jump up too much, and I see this a lot of times with dumbbells when people use dumbbells, because the dumbbells jump in like big increments. It doesn't seem like it, but when you go from, you know, 20 to 25, that's what? Uh, 20% plus is what 25% increase. Usually we'll want to go up by like five or 10%, and so that's where microplates come in, even for dumbbells, but also for barbells.

Philip Pape: 6:45

Okay, make sure you're recovering. I mean, really these last two are all the other things in your life that could affect you. The third one here is really the big stuff the eating enough calories, sleeping enough and using active recovery, which is a lot of walking, movement and strategic cardio, and then everything else that could cause stress or interfere with your lifting. That could be your schedule, your kids, your work. Whether it's causing stress or not, it may interfere in some way and make you inconsistent. If that's happening, you know, if you're working out in the morning one time and the afternoon another, that could also affect your ability to hit the progression. So keep all those in mind.

Philip Pape: 7:24

This is videos being made based on the first month's workout programs. Um up for your feedback and improvements along the way. Maybe we're going to add another program or two in here if the demand calls for it, and keep making this better and better and helping all of you get swole, get jacked, get strong, build the best physiques ever and have fun working out and training. What you just heard is an excerpt from the introductory course in the monthly workout programs within Wits and Weights Physique University. But again, if you want the full month of workout programs absolutely free, whether or not you are enrolled right now, go click the link in my show notes. Thank you for tuning in to another episode of wits and weights. If you found value in today's episode and know someone else who's looking to level up their wits or weights, please take a moment to share this episode with them and make sure to hit the follow button in your podcast platform right now to catch the next episode. Until then, stay strong.