advanced all-round buddies are happy to increase their records by pounds at
each annual national contest.
Many wise old trainees liked to keep their workouts simple and enjoyable. Most
of them still laugh at the so-called scientific formulae and other numbers which
the younger generation seem to pull out of thin air. But in performing an invigo-
rating workout with a familiar, comfortable yet strength-stimulating poundage,
these more down-to-earth guys always left the gym with a confident smile on
their faces. None who I ever knew tortured themselves to failure on a set, or
spent any workout time barfing into a bucket.
A final note pertains to the importance which most old timers devoted to
perfect form on all lifts. Fixed-poundage sets allowed the security that the lift
would always go, so even more attention was devoted to ideal positioning, and
perfect angles of push. ey never went to the wall (or even wanted to think
in terms of any failure) on these sets, where serious breakdown of form could
occur, and thus develop bad habits or injury.. e use of constant working poundages is an advanced training technique
you might want to experiment with. Remember that you must first already
be very strong, and closing in on realizing your strength potential. If you do
try constant working poundages, you would need a few weeks of experi-
mentation in order to discover the ideal working weight for each exercise.
It should be taxing, remember, but not draining. You should be able to do it
twice every – days per exercise, though some of the gifted old timers did
this three times a week, and keep it up for several months at a stretch. If you
do not feel your conditioning and strength increasing as the months go by,
you will probably be using weights that are too heavy for you, or using too
much training volume and/or frequency.Fixed rep target vs. a rep range
. I have a preference for fixed-rep target training rather than using a rep range.
Perhaps you do not, and that is fine so long as what you use is something
you can consistently do well on.. ere is something comforting, controlled and measured about always per-
forming (for a given exercise, for a given training cycle) a particular number
of reps, be it , , , or whatever. If you are using multiple work sets, you
would have fixed reps for each set, e.g., and , or , and , or , and ,
or , and , or and , or (more conservatively) even and , or and ,
or , and , etc. You establish in advance the reps you are comfortable with,
and that are realistic for the style of training you are using. en you adhere