Background: Male, 40, lifting seriously for ~6 months. Before that, about 2 years of aimlessly familiarizing myself with the gym and overcoming the intimidation of simply being there. I mainly visited the gym for the treadmills and would wander around the weight room for 15-20 minutes afterward but could never get into a flow state until earlier this year when I finally noticed my first real strength gains in January.
My reason for posting today is because I recently watched a youtube video providing a summary of the Schoenfeld meta-analyses on volume/intensity and effective reps. What I don't get is the experience of it. When I'm grinding a heavy triple, there's this narrow window of total focus and there's zero ambiguity of when I can do 1 more rep (or 0 more reps) because I have tons of experience at low-rep sets at ~90% of my 1-rep-max.
If I'm being honest with myself, I kinda hate doing sets of anything higher than 5, even on my favorite exercises. One of the most helpful things I've ever read in my life online from a fitness discussion & comments section was when someone said they mentally reframe Romanian deadlifts as kettlebell swings and that instantly clicked for me and has made me so much stronger at that exercise, nearly overnight. It becoming my 2nd favorite exercise (after seated dumbbell shoulder presses as #1).
What I'm hoping for today is to hear from more experienced lifters who actually enjoy that rep range of 8-12 or 6-15. Instead, I find it confusing, unfamiliar, and mentally uncomfortable primarily for these 3 reasons:
- no matter where I stop barring absolute momentary muscular failure, I always finish the set feeling angst of not knowing truly how many RIR I still had left in me. Not knowing whether I had 2 vs 3, or 3 vs 4 RIR, it is totally a trivial and unimportant issue yet it drives me crazy for no good reason.
- for longer sets, it stops feeling like lifting and starts feeling like a chore I'm waiting to finish, similarly to if your dentist told you to wear 20-pound weighted gloves and to brush your teeth until your wrists hurt.
- the difficulty in finishing your final planned rep (when you plan to leave 1 or 2 RIR) for a working set of 8-12 reps has a different type of mental difficulty than the difficulty I'm familiar with at working sets in my 6-rep-max range. The final rep of a short sets gives me the feeling afterward of having accomplished something significant but the final rep of a long working set gives me the feeling afterward that I'm punishing myself (perhaps because my brain does not connect the effort to the reward yet).
This is not a rant however, I'm just trying to look for some ideas on positive re-framing. Especially as I have branched out into other exercises where doing shorter working sets of my 6-max range do not make sense due to form issues when using weights that are at too high percentage of your 1-rep max (such as lateral raises or French presses).
TL;DR: I need help understanding how to enjoy (or at least positively reframe) my lifting experiences at the gym from lifters who enjoy performing their working sets in the 6-15 or 8-12 rep range as someone who exclusively prefers heavy triples and heavy singles.
I think a lot of this is just person preference, or psychological. I like heavy sets (4-5 reps) for some stuff (typically the powerlifting moves) and lighter sets for others. One thing I noticed is for isolation stuff, heavy sets tend to break my form down worse than compounds. Trying to do an overhead triceps extension at 3 reps would end with me trying to bounce at the bottom and worse - using my legs to help drive the start of the movement. Sets from 8-12 really help lock in form and actually hit what you want it to hit.
As far as RIR goes, the only way to know is to test it. On heavy lifts, have a spotter, call out near the end of the set when you think you have 2-3 left and literally go to failure and see how close you are. Same with lighter exercises, but no need for a spotter. Just call it out or mentally note where you think you have 2-3 and check.