Physical activity that puts demands on the body has many benefits that vastly outweigh the risks.  From increases in strength, injury prevention, improved mental health, and longevity; we KNOW resistance training is wildly beneficial.

One thing to remember however, is that exercise is a stressor on the body.  This means that from time to time we may experience discomfort, pain, and injuries.  

The goal of this article is to explore pain with regards to resistance training and understand how to navigate through and around pain appropriately within your workouts.

It's important to note that cardio shouldn't be done at the expense of losing lean body mass. With increases in cardio, we often need increases in calories or sleep needs to help protect lean mass and to keep recovery and biofeedback in a good place.

The goal is to optimize overall health without sacrificing other aspects of it.

Believe it or not - There is now research that shows a strongcorrelation between loss of lean body mass and a rise in all cause mortality and muscle mass as an indicator for an increase in longevity. Do your cardio - but don't forget to prioritize strength training & adequate nutrition!

Spoiler alert: The answer is it depends. Numerous factors need to be considered when assessing the appropriate amount of work to be programmed to maximize your gains. Things like:

Training age/experience (are you brand new to resistance training or have you been lifting for years and years)

Exercise selection (are you performing compound or isolation movements, are you biasing long muscle lengths vs short muscle lengths, etc)

Nutritional Status (are you hypocaloric, hypercaloric, eating in maintenance, low carb, etc)

How much volume have you been doing recently?

Are you making progress at the current level of volume you’re performing?

You may have heard of “tempo work” in your training prior to today, but perhaps you've yet to utilize it in your own workouts. Tempo, or time spent under tension, is something we use at Level TEN - often to help clients not only gain strength, but improve control in their exercises.

So what is tempo? Tempo is the speed at which you perform a repetition of a given exercise. This is also sometimes referred to as TUT or Time Under Tension. You’ll see them used interchangeably.

As coaches we typically program or offer up a general guideline for our clients on how long they should rest between sets of their exercises. This is a vital part of programming workouts as most people simply don’t think about how long they truly should rest between sets.

First let me state that rest periods are extremely goal dependent. I like to think of prescribing rest periods into 2 main categories:

Conditioning or Metabolic - Shorter rest.

Strength or Hypertrophy - Longer rest.

This is a simplification, but just know that rest periods will directly affect your ability to chase a certain goal.

When it comes to efficiency and exercise, we’re referring to a measure of how much EXTERNAL work you get for a certain INPUT of energy.

Exercise efficiency is broadly defined as “the ratio of mechanical work rate over energy expenditure”

WHAT DOES THIS MEAN?

Essentially it means, the more we do something, the more effective our body becomes at doing it.

When we think of individuals who should incorporate power, or velocity based training in their programming we think of explosive athletes. Football players, sprinters, shot put throwers, and the most obvious, olympic weightlifters.

The goal for all of them is to generate force at the highest speed possible.

But what about the everyday, average person who is simply trying to get a little stronger or put on some muscle mass? They surely don’t need to train for power, right? While they probably don’t need to train for power the way these athletes do, there are still benefits for the average person to incorporate into their training plans.

So what exactly is mechanical advantage?

Mechanical advantage is the ratio of the moment arm through which an applied force acts to that through which a resistive force acts.

Now, if you are thinking what in the world does that mean, you are not alone. In simpler terms, it is essentially how much or how little force your muscles need to generate in order to lift a weight.

Therefore, although you might be lifting a 25lb dumbbell, depending on the lever system in your body, you might actually need to apply more (or less) muscular force than 25lbs to lift that weight.

This is arguably the most common phrase used in the “fitness industry”, more specifically in the lifting community. And for good reason.

It’s a, if not, THE key element to seeing the progress that we want to see. But from what I frequently observe in discussions and posts regarding it, there’s definitely some confusion about what this term really means.

Hopefully by the end of this article things are a bit more clear.