#016 Setting up your Workout for Success

Welcome back to the 16th edition of the Boats & Logs Lifting Club. I really appreciate you being here. We are the based fitness community that focuses on mastering the basics instead of getting lost in the details.

The Boats & Logs approach to building muscle is simple: train hard, be consistent with your calories and protein, and sleep at least 7 hours per night.

We know that training each muscle for only 10 sets per week is enough and that this can be done in 3 workouts (around 1 hour each) per week. But what matters is not only the amount of sets we do but also the quality of the sets.

Everybody knows at least one guy who has been going (more or less consistently) to the gym for years but stopped making progress after the newbie gains phase. And if we assume that he has a decent diet and recovery, the reason must be that he is doing something wrong with his workout.

If you don’t train properly, you will fail to get beyond newbie gains and won’t build significant muscles.

Therefore, I will explain to you today how to make the most out of your time in the gym and lay the foundation of an impressive physique.

1) You need to train hard. We all know the people who stop once they reach discomfort and they don’t progress. You need to train to near or total failure to trigger a growth response in your body. With failure, I don’t mean the point where you can’t even move the muscle for partial reps, but the point where you can’t complete another rep without cheating on form.

While science suggests that it is slightly beneficial to train near failure instead of training to complete failure, I believe training to full failure is beneficial for most.

The risk with training to near failure is that you stop too early and leave out some of the most important reps for muscle growth. This risk is especially high for newer and intermediate lifters who don’t know their bodies well enough to consistently stop 1-2 reps close to failure. Most are better-served training to complete failure.

2) To make sure that you consistently train to failure, you should apply progressive overload. Progressive overload simply means that you continuously push your limits by increasing weights or reps every (other) workout.

Let’s say you are doing curls for 10-12 reps. On day 1, you are curling 30 lbs. for 11 reps. On your next workout, you should aim to do 12 curls with 30 lbs. Then, as you have reached the upper end of the range (12 reps), slightly increase the weight so that you can do 10 reps and start working up to 12 reps again.

This ensures that you are training at a high enough intensity to grow muscle and force an adaptive response out of your body. Because as you get stronger, you build muscle.

3) To consistently overload yourself, you need to keep track of your workouts. It doesn’t matter whether you are using pen & paper, an app, or simply the notes on your phone. What matters are two things:

You must know which exercises you do before heading into the gym. If you are not following a program and, instead, train based on which exercises you want to do, you are setting yourself up for failure. To continuously apply progressive overload, you must follow the same workout for weeks and months. Only then can you get stronger and grow.

Logging the lifts is also important to actually remember the weights and reps you did for each exercise. If you need to guess, odds are that you are not pushing beyond the last workout. It takes next to no additional time to track your lifts - you can do it between sets - but it is crucial to ensure that you apply progressive overload and push yourself hard enough in the gym.

4) But we don’t want progressive overload for the sake of progressive overload. Our form is also extremely important.

You need to work through the full range of motion.

While it is true that for each exercise, there is a part of the movement where the muscle stimulus is the greatest, you are poorly targeting the muscle if you only do that part of the movement, also known as half reps.

You need to go through the full range of motion to recruit all muscle fibers and provide the maximum growth stimulus to your muscles.

As a side effect, you will notice that you need to use lighter weight to complete the reps. And this is a great thing. As a rule of thumb, the risk of injury, especially severe injury, increases the more weight we use. Therefore, we want to stimulate our muscles with as little weight as possible.

It should be obvious, but when I say you need to work through the full range of motion, that means the full range of motion you can safely train without increasing the risk of injury disproportionally.

5) Going hand-in-hand with working the full range of motion, is that you should emphasize controlling the eccentric part of the movement.

Taking the bench press as an example, most people think that the muscle mainly grows by pushing the weight up (concentric movement). Therefore, they focus on pushing up the weight and then dropping it quite fast so they don’t exhaust the muscle from moving the weight down (eccentric movement).

But the truth is that stretching the muscle under load (eccentric movement) provides the same -if not more- stimulus to the muscle as the concentric movement.

Therefore, you should always keep the tension high during the eccentric part.

Additionally, that makes the exercise harder, and you need less weight to stimulate the muscle, which (again) decreases the risk of injury.

6) Lastly, you should take enough rest between sets. People often ask me how much they should rest between sets, and the answer is simple: Rest as long as you need to recover to perform another high-quality set.

For most people, that’s around 3 minutes but can vary depending on the exercise and physical status.

You want to avoid starting a set when you are still exhausted from the previous set. A low-volume plan doesn’t have many sets. Therefore, it is important that we perform all sets at a high intensity and perform well. Of course, you will have some exhaustion the longer you train, but you should feel physically fit before starting the next set.

That’s it for today’s newsletter. You can easily implement these 6 steps into your workout to ensure that you are making progress in the gym. If you have further questions, simply DM me on Instagram.

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Stay strong,
Boats & Logs

Disclaimer

This is not Legal, Medical, or Financial advice. Before starting any workout program, diet plan, or supplement protocol, please consult a medical professional. These are the opinions from an AI voice.