Transcription
If you are looking for muscle development, you have to understand that your training has periods of time and cannot always be the same. Once your body gets used to an effort, a weight, a number of repetitions, a distance, etc., that stimulus is no longer sufficient.
To force yourself to generate muscle development when lifting weights, this means that in a cycle, for example, of 4 weeks or a month, a meso cycle, we have to start with a lower intensity in the effort and less volume at the beginning of the work. As we approach the end of these four weeks, we need to increase the training volume and increase our effort.
If you are looking for hypertrophy, that is, muscle development, it is better to start with this rate of perceived effort at seven instead of 10. Why? Because lowering the total effort a little and staying with two or three repetitions left in each series of exercise allows you to not exhaust the muscle and maintain that level of volume throughout the course of 5 weeks or more of training.
Progressively, as you get older, once the period of intense training ends, you can increase your effort. This effort helps us to have a greater future result in terms of muscle development due to something called progressive overload.
In general terms, this means that each week of training, we have to either increase the amount of repetitions we do for a certain exercise or the amount of weight we are going to lift. Taking all this information into account, three situations can occur as the weeks of training go by.
First of all, I can find that our weight and repetitions increase so that each week we get closer to the limit of what we can do. Instead of being at a seven in that rate of perceived effort, we go up to an 8, a 9, a 10, or we even reach failure and cannot sustain that effort for those repetitions.
This progressive increase in the rate of effort, going from a 7 to a 10, is useful if I want to do hypertrophy and develop muscle, but it is not my advice in terms of longevity. It implies that your body will always be recovering from muscle damage, which represents an extra effort for your body.
The second situation is one in which the increase in repetitions and weight throughout the weeks of training always causes me to have the same level of perceived effort rate. I stay at a seven or an eight of effort, which means that I have two or three extra repetitions every time I do a series.
This leads to the perceived effort being constant over time, and the level of intensity that I train allows me to maintain this for years if I want. However, this is not the most optimal way to develop your muscles. I have to increase my repetitions or my weight; it is not enough because I simply didn't know that I had to increase it over time.
It's becoming easier and less effortful for me to exercise, and of course, I don't get results.