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.
Well said. I only have 2 long-term goals with respect to the gym and 1 is functional strength and the other is maxing my seated dumbbell shoulder press 1 rep max -- hopefully either the 80's or 100's since it gives me something to work hard for and will keep me motivated to go to the gym daily for the next 5-10 years. My medium term goal is to be able to do 1 pullup or chin-up.
I log all my workouts and I'm extremely motivated by seeing my numbers (slowly) climb up. I'm already way stronger than I ever could have believed I would be (although still not very strong compared to most people who go to the gym regularly) but I'm in surreal territory and feel incredibly lucky to be strong for the first time my whole life. It's exhilarating and makes going to gym everyday more fun than a visiting a major theme park.
You're spot on about injuries -- I had low back pain for 5 years that has thankfully lessened by about 95% and I definitely don't want another injury. I'm going to try the high-rep thing for 3-4 months but if I don't enjoy it, I will just revert back to what I love (heavy triples) even if I don't gain much anymore since it's a better hobby than video games or Netflix. Plus, I think there's a great amount of pride just for showing up to the gym. The amount of mental toughness it takes just to show up is small, but less than half of men have it, probably less than 25%.
You might enjoy something like Bullmastiff by Bromley. Higher rep powerbuilding that's well organized and slowly build towards heavier sets as the weeks go on.
I'll look into this now, thanks for sharing!