Make every rep count!

“I don’t count my sit-ups; I only start counting when it start hurting,
because they’re the only ones that count” ~ Muhammad Ali

We’ve all heard it time and again – make every rep count. Of course! That’s why we go to the gym. That’s why we train. Obviously, make every rep count. But what does it really mean? In the simplest terms, it means that if you’re going to the extent of exercising, make damn sure it pays off. Let’s face it, training is hard. If you disagree with that statement, or think I’m exaggerating, it just shows that you’re doing it wrong! It’s meant to be hard. That’s the idea! So, if you’re going to do something that’s difficult and uncomfortable, you’d better make sure it’s worth all the trouble. I’ve been as guilty as anyone else over this, for years. You think you’re doing everything right, and you think you’re taking care to attend to the details, but if you’re a bit slapdash about the execution of an exercise you’re just wasting your time. You’re kidding yourself! And what’s worse, you’re wasting valuable energy.

So instead of that energy being used productively and producing the desired result (whether that’s to build muscle or to burn off fat), it’s being needlessly squandered. That’s a terrible thing, when you think about it – to go to all the effort of training and end up just wasting your time and energy. If that rings a bell with you, maybe it’s time to step back and take a good long look at what it really means to make every rep count.

How to make every rep count

If you want to change the way you train, change the way you think about your training. You’re not a weightlifter, as such. That’s one of the most common mistakes – to see yourself as a weightlifter. Sure, you’re lifting weights, but that doesn’t mean you’re a weightlifter. If you’re training to build muscle, focus on exactly that. Whether you lift heavy weights to achieve your goal isn’t really of any importance. In fact, some of the strongest and best built men don’t lift particularly heavy weights, at least not most of the time. As with so many things, it’s not so much what you do, more the way that you do it 🙂 Take a look at gymnasts – they’re incredibly strong and they have jaw-dropping physiques, yet for the most part they use bodyweight exercises rather than weights.

It all starts with mental focus

Start to think of each exercise as a way of building muscle, nothing else. Remember that, it’s your top priority. In fact, your only priority. Focus only on that goal. Now, ask yourself, how do you build muscle. Is it by lifting heavy weights? Is it by lifting much lighter weights? Does the amount of weight on the bar even matter?

I think that last question is probably the one that’s most relevant. The weight matters, of course, but not nearly as much as we like to think. The single most important aspect of building muscle is … tensing that muscle. As we flex the muscle, we force more and more muscle fibres to contract forcefully, which sends a strong message that they’d better build up to prepare for the expected onslaught to come. And we force more oxygen-rich blood into the muscle to feed it with energy and nutrients, which helps to actually build the muscle.

But boy, it gets tough!

When you lift weights, you tense your muscles. And the more reps, the more difficult it becomes to tense them. So we have to work harder and harder to do it. And, for most of us, most of the time, that’s when we quit. It becomes very, very uncomfortable to keep up the tension, even to the point of being acutely painful, and the natural reaction is to stop immediately. But that’s what separates the men from the boys, as they say. Anyone can go to the gym and bang out set after set of all kinds of exercises, but how many keep increasing that muscle tension when the going gets tough? Most people (I’d guess upwards of 90%) quit as soon as it starts to hurt.

To be fair, that’s not at all surprising. If you start to do anything and it gradually gets more difficult, the normal thing is to quit once it becomes painful. It’s up to you to make sure you buck the trend. You have to fully expect it to get painful, and then fight through that pain. Just make sure you know the difference between muscle ache (which is the natural outcome of repeated reps), and injury pain. Don’t try to fight your way through any pain that’s the result of an injury – that’s your body telling you to stop, right now. If you don’t, you risk making the injury much worse, and last much longer.

Those last few reps make all the difference

You have to make your mind up that you’re going to fight to get those last few reps. If you’re doing a set with a weight that allows you to fairly easily complete seven or eight reps, you have to make sure you keep going past eight. You might only manage one more, but do it as strictly as you can. Grit your teeth and try another, and if you can’t get past the halfway point, call it a day. But you have to feel that you really couldn’t go any further. Don’t cheat yourself out of the last rep, or couple of reps. Give it all you’ve got! And to make every rep count (not just the last few) you really need to focus on your form. There’s a time and a place for relaxing from strict form, but most of the time you need to be very strict with yourself on this point. If you use sloppy form, chances are you’re not tensing your muscles fully.

An exercise, in action

For example, let’s say you’re doing standing barbell curls. Hold the bar with your elbows slightly flexed before you start the movement, and consciously drop your shoulders so there’s no tension there – you want to make sure they’re not playing any active part in the movement. Now make sure your stance is the way it needs to be. Keep your back straight and your chest high. Pull your belly in and keep your abs tensed. Now your whole body is fairly rigid and no part of it is going to steal some of the action from your upper arm muscles. Curl the bar slowly up, keeping your upper arms tightly in position and close to your body … you only want to flex your arms at the elbow and make your upper arm muscles do all the work. I know this probably seems obvious, but it’s easy to get it wrong. You can move your elbows forward a bit as you lift, and you can snatch the weight up … you can move it fairly quickly … and you can hunch forward a bit … you can swing the weight forward at the start of the curl … and you can rest a moment at the top by taking it to the full vertical. There’s loads of ways to screw it up. But there’s only one way to make sure you’re doing it right. Stick to using good form.

Stick to strict form, and be your own harshest critic

Keep an eye on the details and make sure you’re complying with your own strict demands. So … curl the bar slowly up, but don’t bring it too far up. If you carry on till your forearms are completely vertical you’ll be taking some of the tension off the working muscles. At the top point (just short of vertical) flex even harder for a moment or two, then start to lower the weight. Lower it s-l-o-w-l-y and stop just before lock-out. Again, you don’t want to give your muscles the chance to relax. Keep the pressure on them!

As soon as you hit bottom, start to curl again. One single rep, done this way, might take you anywhere from six to nine seconds. If you’re used to working faster (and with slacker style), it will feel very different. In fact, it might even hurt after just two or three reps. That might be because you’re so unaccustomed to doing it this way (the proper way!), or more likely you’re using too much weight. Like I said earlier, it’s not so much what you do, more the way you do it.

Or, to put it another way, it’s not so important to use a heavy weight, much more important to lift it slowly, deliberately, and with mental focus. After about six or seven reps it starts to become really difficult, and the reps start to hurt. Focus, and try to force one or two more reps. Don’t give in to the temptation to slacken your form; keep your body in the correct position and make sure you don’t swing the weight. Make your muscles do the work.

A single set like this is worth a dozen badly done sets. It will force your upper arm muscles to work like they’ve never worked before. And it will force them to fire up the growth process, in order to better deal with the tremendous tension you’re putting them under.

It’s only the start

There’s more to a great workout than that, of course. If you approach each set with this type of attitude you’ll be on your way to a memorable workout, and one that will actually kickstart the muscle building process. But there’s a lot more you can do.

You can superset your exercises – performing a different exercise right after the first one to make what in effect is a double set. You can work on giant sets – doing three or more exercises back-to-back for an extended set, that is. You can slow the reps down further, stopping at the halfway mark for a second or two, or at three or four points if you like. All these variations make the reps, and the sets, much harder. But they stop you getting stale. If you keep doing the same exercises, the same way, your body quickly gets accustomed to them.

Keep changing them, shifting the tempo, changing the order of them, and sometimes using very light weights for much longer sets. Do anything to create variation and you can be pretty sure your body will respond positively to the ‘new’ stresses you’re imposing on it. Another simple variation is to strip a weight off each end of the bar after a hard set. Take a short break, then go again. Strip another disk off each end and off you go again. Keep doing that for several sets, till you’re using a really light weight but still finding it very difficult to do the reps. And always stick rigidly to keeping strict form (unless you’re specifically easing off for a good reason).

Keep your workouts fresh, and keep getting results!

Make every rep count, that should be a rock solid cornerstone of your training, but don’t let your training get stale. Yep, make every single rep count, but never let your workouts become repetitive.