How Hard Should You Really Be Lifting After 40? | Ep 485
How hard are you REALLY training? Is it enough to build muscle?
Most lifters believe they are stopping a rep or two short of failure, when the real gap is far wider, and it often stalls muscle and strength.
Learn about the research on proximity to failure and how badly we misjudge our own effort, including predicting reps to failure and how close to failure you need to train to build muscle. We get into why the common advice to leave reps in reserve backfires for people who picked up strength training over 40, what training to failure does and does not require, and how women and older lifters recover from hard sets.
Plus, you'll learn a calibration drill and a mental trick to make your effort objective so your gym time pays off.
Join Eat More Lift Heavy, the 26-week coached program where adults over 40 build the nutrition and training skills to preserve muscle, lose fat, and manage their physique for life.
Wits & Weights is the evidence-based podcast for strength training over 40, body recomposition, fat loss over 40, metabolism recovery, and healthy aging. Hosted by Philip Pape, creator of Eat More Lift Heavy and Fitness Lab.
Timestamps
0:00 - Effort and proximity to failure
2:27 - Reps in reserve advice when strength training over 40
5:00 - Training hard vs. training volume
7:55 - Accuracy of estimating reps to failure
10:05 - Proximity to failure and muscle growth
12:20 - Progressive overload methods
13:24 - Calibration drill to calculate true failure
16:30 - Recalibrating effort over time
18:50 - Bar speed and effort signals
20:30 - Training to failure for older lifters
22:13 - Rep range goal setting
Episode Resources
Progressive Overload Guide (free) - every method for adding load over time, plus a rep range system that moves the weight up on schedule. Find this and more at https://witsandweights.com/free
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Effort and proximity to failure
Philip Pape 0:00
Let's say you're at the gym and you just finish a set, you rack the bar or dumbbells, and you're like, oh, that was a hard one. Maybe I've got one or two reps left in the tank. I'm doing awesome. Progressive overload. But here's the problem. There is a decent chance that you had five or six reps left, not just two. And maybe you have no idea because you really haven't felt what real failure is like. Today I'm going to pick apart some of the common advice about not going to failure and being careful and all of these pieces of advice that actually might hold you back and give you a simple way to find out where your actual limit is so that every set you do counts. This is about training hard. What does the research say about how far off we are versus where we need to be, how close to failure you need to train to build muscle, and then how to actually fix how hard you train, as well as a little trick I have toward the end of the episode. Welcome to Wits and Weights, the show that puts a popular piece of fitness advice under the microscope, finds the hidden reason it doesn't work, and gives you the deceptively simple fix that does. I'm your host, Philip Ape, and today I want to talk about effort. Because if you're doing strength training over 40, especially, and you feel like you're working hard, you're following a program, you're showing up three, four, five days a week to the gym, and the muscle isn't developing the way that you expected, or you're not getting stronger, or you're hitting a wall, this episode is for you. There is a specific reason it happens. Remember, I'm an engineer. I like to solve problems, and we can solve this for ourselves. It's often not the reason you've been told or that you think. It isn't that you're too old. It's not about your hormones. It is not usually your program either. It is that the effort that you think you're putting in and the effort you're actually putting in are far apart, and the gap between them is even bigger than you thought. And that's why you're hitting the wall. And you're like, okay, great, Philip. So that I'm done. Thank you for the advice. I'm gonna go in the gym and I'm gonna train hard. No, we can be very objective about this. This is a skill, and we're gonna break it down. And then at the very end, I'm gonna give you a little trick that I like to use, a mental trick in the gym. But we need to set the stage. And what does the research say about training hard? And what do you often hear about maybe not training too hard? What's useful, what's not, what's helping your results, what's not. How badly do we misjudge our own effort? And then how do we take the guesswork out of it? All
Reps in reserve advice when strength training over 40
Philip Pape 2:27
right. So you probably often hear in social media maybe you're overtraining or you're working too hard or you're doing too much. Um, this is often marketed, especially toward women. Ah, you're doing too much. And it gets conflated with what the heck are we talking about? Well, we're usually talking about stressful cardio, right? Too much chronic cardio or not getting enough sleep and recovery, things like that. But you also hear it when people talk about proximity to failure. And they say, well, leave a few reps in reserve. You don't need to train to failure to build muscle. And I've even shared the evidence on, you know, one to two, three to four reps from failure to get the mechanical tension necessary. You don't have to go to failure. And you should stop before your form starts to break down. And then also you should be careful, especially at your age. How many of you be careful? Don't look too heavy, you know, watch out. And I want to be clear that a lot of that advice is good advice, depending on what we're talking about, because I'm not telling you you need to grind every set into the ground, because that definitely is going to backfire. That can get you hurt, that can get you over-reached, over-trained, under-recovered. The research definitely does support leaving something in the tank. And we're going to get to that. But the catch here, why I'm creating this episode, is that's only if you know what failure is like. That's only if you know what training to failure really is and really means. That is for lifters who can push a set to the absolute limit and then deliberately back off to reps. And for that person, if you say two R-I-R or eight RPE, they know what to do. But this is why I don't like reps in reserve for beginners. It took me a long time to get to where I really, really knew what failure is. And even to this day, when I go into the gym and I'm thinking about it and I'm trying to train hard and I'm pushing toward those limits, it takes mental and physical effort to do that. So, let alone a newer lifter, like many of you probably are, you're trying to figure this out for yourself. You don't really know where that wall is. So it ends up holding you back because of that. Okay, now a lot of you came to lifting later in life, like I did. You know, I didn't really start lifting properly till I was about 40 years old. Or maybe you're getting back to it after years away. Maybe you started in your 40s or 50s or 60s or 70s. I mean, look, you can start. I hope you're if you're 85 listening to this, if you've never lifted weights, get started. This is this is the perfect time to start, is now. But maybe you've spent most of your life training on machines or in classes or boost camp, boot camp classes, or YouTube videos, or whatever, P90X, things
Training hard vs. training volume
Philip Pape 5:00
like that where it's not really the structured progressive training and you've never really approached a true limit. You may have done it to where you're sore or you're sweating or somebody's pushing you rah-rah with like music, but that's not the same thing when we talk about you know, strength training and mechanical tension progressive overload. Okay. Also, you might be a little bit afraid because you don't get injured or you're not sure about form. I just spoke to somebody uh recently who's joining Eat More Lift Heavy, and you know, he said he had hired a trainer maybe six months ago. One of the reasons was accountability, but the other reason was form and he didn't want to get injured. I'm like, that is super, super smart, right? Nobody wants to get injured. We want to have the right form. And so when someone says, Well, no, you need to train hard, you have to have a lot of effort, that's one of the fears that goes through your head. But it also means you might never have been close to that edge. You don't know where that edge is, that wall is. And so when someone says, Hey, leave two reps in the tank, you can't if you don't know what the tank limit is. Right now, I'm not saying go David Goggin style, where it's like, you know, when you think you're at 100%, you're only at 30% or whatever. It's not necessarily that either. It's a more objective thing in between. So you often are probably ending your sets in the gym every time almost because it's uncomfortable, because your breathing has changed, maybe you feel a little bit out of breath, because the weight started to feel heavy and your brain's like, okay, that's probably enough. Don't push it, or I'm gonna lose form here, or something's gonna get broken or injured. Tell me if that isn't right. You've had those thoughts in your head. I have as well, right? Or you feel a little bit of a tweak, or you feel like your back is rounding on an RDL or deadlift or something like that, and or there's a little bit of a grind that you think is a grind, even though you probably do have more reps than you think. And then you think, okay, that was a strong effort. That was a good set. My quads are sore, my whatever is sore. Good. Now, if even if you're doing that, you're probably leagues ahead of many others who don't even train, obviously, and who don't, or those who go to the gym and really aren't training. Even if you're if you are training with a structured program, then great, that's awesome. Like that's the first step. But today we're talking about training and getting the most out of it. Because I don't want you to waste your time in the gym. I don't want you to take more time than you have to. I know folks that can train two or three days a week and get super, super effective workouts because they know how to train hard. And others that go in with these like body part splits four, five, six days, and they're not making progress because they're not training hard. They're just going in and putting in quote unquote work, but it's not effort. So if, you know, you're standing in front of the mirror, you're trying to flex your muscles, you're like, why does my body look the same, independent of fat loss, let's say, because that's a different factor. And you're like blaming your age or your metabolism, or hey, I'm not a responder, or the program. The real answer is that maybe you've been way inside your comfort zone and far short of the stimulus that actually builds muscle.
Accuracy of estimating reps to failure
Philip Pape 7:55
So let's quickly look at the research here, and then we'll parlay that into practical tips as always. Okay. There's a researcher named James Steele and a group that includes Jurgen, Giesing, and James Fisher, and they ran a study that a lot of people should be aware of. They took 141 people, so it's a decent sample size, not massive, but it's not, you know, eight people. And they had them predict how many reps they could go or or do on a given exercise. And they had them actually go all the way to failure. Okay. They pushed them to true failure where they couldn't move the weight anymore, their muscles give out. And everyone underestimated across the board where they thought their limits were. They stopped or they thought they they thought they'd stop well before they had to. The least experienced lifters were off about four to five reps where they thought they were near their limit, and then they had like a half a set left, right? When we're talking about, you know, 10 to 15 reps, that's a lot. And the more experienced lifters were closer. They were off by about one or two reps. Now, when you pool all the research together on this, and there's a really good review by Israel Halperin and colleagues that does that, they the average miss across everybody, the average miss is around one rep. So if you've been lifting hard for years and you really know your body, your guesses are probably pretty decent. And I'm not talking to you. I'm talking to the person who came to this later in terms of doing it properly. The person like you, dear listener, who's been told to be careful their whole training life, because for you, the four to five rep gap is probably more like reality. And that's what we're gonna fix today, right? You feel like you're near the edge, but you're not. That's pretty wild, actually, if you think about it. Just quick tangent, right? You could be smart, dedicated, consistent, going to the gym, doing everything the program says, and still be so far from what's real effort that you're essentially doing a really good warm-up and calling it your working sets. And it's not because you're lazy, it's not because you're trying, you go through all the trouble to get to the gym on a regular basis, but because you haven't calibrated effort. That's it. You just haven't calibrated the effort. Like, what does it really mean? So, okay, Philip, great. Now, how close
Proximity to failure and muscle growth
Philip Pape 10:05
do I need to get? Do I have to go to failure? I want to connect that to muscle. And we've talked about this in some recent episodes. And the answer obviously is no, you don't have to go to failure. There's the analysis in just a couple years ago, 2024, by Zach Robinson, Michael Zordos, and colleagues. You guys know Zordos from Mass. And they looked at this across dozens of studies. So this is a meta-analysis. They found that getting close to failure does build a bit more muscle, but the effect is small and mostly shows up in the last few reps before failure. So training with one to three reps in reserve is fantastic. It builds muscle really, really well. You don't have to hit true failure, you know, zero reps left on every set. In fact, if you're big compound lifts like squats, deadlifts, all the heavy stuff, you probably shouldn't because of the fatigue costs. It's very, very high, as well as the safety and injury costs potentially. I don't want to overhype that, but it's really more about the fatigue. It's the systemic fatigue. And so you're kind of balancing the two. So if you sit with those, that's really the whole premise of this episode. You don't need to go to failure. One to three reps is plenty, but that only works if your one to three reps is actually one to three reps and not five or six. So it's not that it needs to be one to three. It's that you need to be at your actual one to three reps. So the fix isn't to train harder exactly. It's to find out where that edge is so that you know that you're training harder, if that makes sense, right? Like hard is this subjective thing, but we can make it objective. And I think it's a good moment to pause here because I said something a second ago that I want to give you a free tool for right now. I said that the real judge of whether you're training hard isn't the feeling, it's whether your reps and weights are climbing week over week, right? Because that is showing you that you're getting close to failure and getting the mechanical tension. And we call that progressive overload. Like that is the game. And a lot of people hear progressive overload and they think it just means add weight or reps every week. And you can't add five pounds to the bar forever, right? Like we talk about you hear that in programs like Starting Strength, which are designed for novices, novice and linear progression. You can't just add five pounds to the bar forever.
Progressive overload methods
Philip Pape 12:20
There are a bunch of ways to push the load up, to add a rep, to shorten rest periods, to change how you run a set, to change the order of exercises. There, to do it to modify two variables at once, to increase the sets without increasing the load and the reps. So there's so many permutations on how to do progressive overload. And that's where like good programming comes in and good experience and knowledge comes in. So I do have a free guide that lays all that out, every method, when to use each one. My own favorite way to run a rep range so the weight goes up in a somewhat consistent fashion. And I think it pairs well with today's episode because once you have the effort calibrated, like knowing that you're close to failure, then you combine it with the progressive overload scheme and oh, you are golden now to really start making progress. So totally free guide, go to wits and weights.com slash free. It's called the progressive overload guide. I'm gonna include a link in the show notes, or you can go to witsandweights.com slash free to find it and many of our other resources. Progressive overload guide, again, link in the show notes. All right.
Calibration drill to calculate true failure
Philip Pape 13:24
So what is the deceptively simple fix, as I like to say? Well, it's a calibration drill and a shift in your mind. Okay, we're gonna do both. So the calibration drill is to pick an isolation exercise, not a squat or deadlift, not a heavy barbell, anything, just something where if you fully fail, nothing bad's gonna happen. So this could be a leg extension, this could be a dumbbell curl, curls are classic. It could even be a machine chest press, right? Where you could just like let go and it just resets to where it is without any harm. It could be a leg curl. Something we're running out of gas and just like hitting complete failure means the weight just can't move anymore, and you just have to like set it down or drop it or whatever. Now, take that exercise and actually go to true failure. Okay, don't just go to where you're uncomfortable. You have to mentally push past that point and go to true failure. We're not not talking about the heaviness of it or telling you how many reps, just the point where you are trying with everything you've got to move the weight. Your brain is connected through your nervous system to those muscles and it will just not move. Okay, many of you have been there, you've done that, many of you haven't because you get uncomfortable and you stop, or you're counting reps. Don't do that. Go all the way to the point where your brain says stop, and then I want you to go past that where it gets hard, and then I want you to go past that to where you normally stop, and I want you to go past that again until your body, until your body, not your mind, says, sorry, I just can't do it for you. Your brain is well past your body at this point. That's what I want. That maybe that's more of the Goggins mentality, but do it. Okay. And I want you to count the reps as you do it. However many reps you got past the point where you normally would have stopped, that is the gap in what you think is hard versus what is actually hard. Okay. I know it sounds simple, but have you done that before? Have you done an MRAP? Have you pushed a complete failure? I take this for granted because when I got into, I'll say exercise, it was through CrossFit. And one of the benefits of CrossFit was that you did push yourself a lot. It's, you know, Metcons, it's wads, it's sometimes stupid stuff with bad form, but because of the more conditioning aspect of it, you pushed, pushed, pushed, pushed, pushed, and you kind of developed that mental toughness and it it carried over nicely into training. But even then, when I got to like heavy squats, sets of five, it was very hard to push close to failure. Now, the nice thing about beginners using sets across, like sets of five, three by five squats, is that if you're lifting the weight, if you're adding weight to the bar each session, it's going to push you to those hard moments that you wouldn't have pushed yourself. But for today's exercise, I'm talking about an isolation movement like a curl and just mentally going all the way to your brain, till your body physically can't do it. Like it's physically, you try and you shake and it just doesn't do it. All right. Now, the first time you do this, you're like, oh, oh, that is fit. Wow. Okay. Like I thought I was doing the 25-pound dumbbell.
Recalibrating effort over time
Philip Pape 16:30
I thought I would get, you know, 12, but I got 20. Like I got 20. Well, that's insane. That's what they've been talking about. I'm serious, guys. Now, for some of you experienced lifters listening, you're like, God, Philip, shut up. Like, I know how to train hard. Okay, fine. Maybe this episode isn't for you, or maybe it's a good boost of inspiration to recalibrate your own toughness. So that calibrates, that's the drill that I was talking about. It helps you calibrate and give you a reference point. And now when you go back to your normal training, you you know better what one to three reps in reserve is. Now, you can't just do this once. You've got you've got to always be training that that maximum and feel what it is. In fact, when we talk about PRs and you getting stronger, it's going to shift where that failure point gets higher and higher. And of course, you don't have to do this every session. I'm not even suggesting that at all. There are some interesting programs. We have one called Ironclad in Eat More Lift Heavy. And it's modeled off of some set-based progression, some wave, what do they call it, undulating periodization, fancy term. But basically, it's designed with max reps for some exercises. In other words, if you're going to do three sets, you might do two sets of six. And then the third one, you go to six, and then you keep going to failure. And you do that simply to understand: am I really where I need to be? Or should I increase the weight much more next time than I would have otherwise? Like, should I go up 10% instead of just 5%? Or am I truly at failure? And maybe I just need to stay where I am and add reps, or go up, you know, just a few percent. But if you want to do this for yourself just randomly, I would do it every couple weeks on a safe isolation movement just to keep yourself calibrating and then calibrating, and then it inspires you to really train hard. So that's the drill. Now, what the shift in mindset I was talking about is to, I want you to stop trusting your feelings. Now you're like, what? Shouldn't you go with how your body feels? Shouldn't I be listening to my biofeedback? That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the feeling in your mind that you're actually training hard when it's something else going on. Examples are you're breathing heavy and out of breath. That doesn't mean you're near failure. That just means you might not be very well conditioned or have good work capacity. That's a separate issue. Or a weight that
Bar speed and effort signals
Philip Pape 18:50
feels heavy. Not enough, guys. Not enough. Okay. Because I can't tell you how many times I push an exercise and it feels heavy. And I'm like, oh, can I do another one? And I'm like, of course I can do another one. And you have to mentally shift it to just try. That's the thing you have to try. It's that voice that tells you, hey, I I've done eight reps and last time I did seven reps. So that must be hard. That must be heavy. That must be the heavier, heaviest thing I've ever done when you can actually do another two reps. So the only honest and objective signal we have is I'll say bar speed really. Did the bar slow way down and did you have to grind on the last reps? And also, could you not do one at all physically, like we talked about before with the isolation work? Now I'm not saying you need to go to complete failure on things like a squat. I mentioned that already. But there's probably still a gap there. Does that make sense? And another good signal that you're maybe not training hard enough is that you're just not progressing, assuming everything else is on point, your nutrition, your recovery, your sleep, your movement, which that's a big assumption because a lot of people don't have those on point. Or maybe you're in a fat loss phase or something like that. So I'm not saying train to failure on everything. Please don't. Failure on big compound lifts is a great way to get hurt and to fry your recovery for days. And the extra muscle is not worth it if you would even get it because the recovery would be shot. Leave those at like one to three in reserve, but it has to be a correct one to three. I'm also not saying pain, you know, more pain, more gain, right? Old school. We're not chasing soreness. We're not chasing suffering. We're chasing an accurate
Training to failure for older lifters
Philip Pape 20:30
objective gauge of your effort so that sustainable effort lands in this productive zone for you. And I'm definitely not saying you have to like train like a CrossFitter or try to, you know, push to failure and grind on everything. In fact, the research on older lifters is very, very encouraging that just about everything doesn't have to be fit at failure, but you have to get within those reps of failure. And again, hitting back to what we're talking about before, you have to know where that is. There's also decent evidence that women tend to handle this kind of work well and recover at least as fast as men, if not more so, between sets on average. Okay. Again, individuals vary widely. So I don't like to make general, you know, gender-based statements, but that's what we see on average. It's really about aiming accurately with effort that you can recover from so that the work you're doing pays off, right? And so the effort you feel and the effort you're actually producing are probably different at the moment. And calibrating yourself, even with like a set to failure every few weeks, will help you close that gap. All right, before we wrap up, I want to give you a little trick. It takes 10 seconds, a trick that I promised you early on that will give you an extra awareness of your effort. Real quick, though, if this episode was like an aha moment for you, if you realize that you've been training comfortably short of the stimulus needed to build muscle this whole time, and if you're tired of guessing on your own, this is what we help you fix inside. Eat More Lift Heavy. EatmoreLiftheavy.com. This is our 26-week coached program for adults over 40. A huge part of what we do is we teach you to read your own effort and your
Rep range goal setting
Philip Pape 22:13
own data across the board, not just training, but nutrition, biofeedback, all of it, so that you stop guessing. You stop wondering whether it's working and you see that it's working. And part of that comes through the community of, hey, is this working? Here's my data. And we can help you say, you know what? Yes, you are losing fat because your waist is going down or because or you are getting stronger because your lifts are moving in this way. And if they're not, here's what you can do about it. We help you build in that calibration, set up your training around it, train the right way with the right program for your lifestyle, for your equipment and goals and all of that. And so we're in your corner the whole way. If you are looking for that kind of guidance, go to eatmoreliftheavy.com. That's eatmore liftheavy.com. The cool thing is if you scroll down on the page, you could see exactly what each of the 26 weeks has in store, what you are going to learn, what skills you're going to build. I think it's very unique in this industry to have that kind of education along with the accountability and the results. So go to eatmoreliftheavy.com, check that out. All right, here's a trick that can help you fix your effort even further. And this is before you start the set. So if you're doing a rep range, I want you to pick the number that you're going to hit and say it out loud. And what I mean is, let's say your program has six to ten reps for the exercise. And last time you got six with this current weight. So you got the minimum of the rep range. Now, most people are going to go in and they're going to think, okay, if I got a little stronger, I should probably be able to hit seven reps now at the same weight, right? Is that is that what you think? Right. I'm raising my hand. That's often where my mind goes. I'm like, well, okay, this week, if I hit seven, I know I'm a little stronger and I'm pushing. But that's a problem because when you do that, when you say I'm going to hit seven, your brain is going to allow you to only go to seven and then you're going to stop. And you might have had one, two, three more reps left that week. You don't know how much more stronger you actually are. You also don't quite know if you trained hard enough last time. So I want you to flip it around. I want you to go in on that six to ten, and I want you to aim for the top of the range. If you got six last time, is what I'm saying. Okay. I want you to say, I'm going to hit 10. Like that is my goal. I'm going to hit 10. And then when you get to the seventh rep, you're like, nah, I got three more reps. I'm going to 10. And you will surprise yourself more often than not. You might only get nine, but that's still two more reps than what you were aiming for at the seven and three more than last time. Does that make sense? And then when it comes to rep range progression, we call it double progression. Once you have hit 10 reps on a six to 10 for that first set, you're going to add weight the next time to bring the reps back down, but you're always going to aim for 10. Now you could push it further and say, you know what, I'm going to try to get 12, even though my range is six to 10. But you get the idea. All right. I hope that helps you guys train harder so you get more out of your gym time. Until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights. And remember, the effort that builds muscle isn't what feels hard. It's the effort you can actually measure. I'm Philip Hape, and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.
