Dude, your pain is irrelevant.
How many times have you heard, ‘No pain, no gain‘? Every gym echos with the same, vague, stupid advice. As if pain was a bone fide measure of whether you did a productive workout and whether new muscle will grow on you this week. Those four words capsulize so much of what is wrong in the world of strength training
How about ‘No progressive overload, no gain.‘?
Or, ‘No high intensity of muscular output, no gain‘?
Or, ‘No adequate rest, no gain’?
Those can be objectively measured. Not only can pain only be subjectively approximated from workout to workout over the months, more importantly, it has absolutely no bearing on muscle gain. None! If pain built biceps you could just ask your friend to wallop yours with a baseball bat. (Actually, that might build his biceps a little, but not yours. Haha.)
I know the concept is supposed to be that you exert yourself so hard that it causes pain in the muscle. Taken farther, most of us have also heard, “You haven’t done a real workout unless you puke.” Same basic principle. But the truth is you could lift until your muscles were screaming with pain and you throw up to boot and it still won’t mean you stimulated new muscle growth. Not unless you surpassed your previous numbers for your intensity of lifting. I said numbers. Measurement. That’s what makes a training method rational and scientific. To be doing any measurable activity in the 21st century by subjectively ‘feeling’ the degree of pain or nausea is just plain stupid. But that is the predominant culture inside almost every gym – macho, bonehead advice that is a throwback to otherwise lost times.
Nothing is sadder than seeing a guy drive a modern car with a GPS system to a gym, use his iPod to keep cadence on a sophisticated treadmill, track his bodyfat percent and resting heart rate assiduously but not have a clue what the intensity numbers are for his lifting exercises. It means he’s a person who sees, understands and uses the value of technology every day but as soon as he heads into the weight room he happy reverts to 19th century technology – and dumb advice like ‘no pain no gain‘ in place of the reason and science that got him this far.
Here’s a better gym slogan: Friends don’t let friends do bonehead workouts. Please spread the word that there is a way to easily measure the progress, or lack of, for every muscle on every exercise during every workout – tell people about Static Contraction Training. Thanks.
Static Contraction Sustainable Workouts
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Somewhat relevant to the topic of pain, does pre-exhausting your muscle trick your brain into perceiving the weight you’re lifting to be heavier than it actually is? I was wondering if that was why doing multiple sets for a specific muscle does build strength and size albeit less efficiently.
Say, if your gym is very crowded and all the weights are being used across the place, could you possibly do a few conventional sets ( in strong range, of course ) with the weights that are available and then do a set of static hold ( with less weight than you normally could lift ) to achieve at least similar if not equal neuro-muscular output and intensity?
Thanks, Bertrand. I don’t know if your brain is tricked or how that could be determined. But here’s my question; suppose your gym is busy so you do those extra exercises – are you going to do that exercise exactly the same way for the rest of the year so you always have apples-to-apples data on the progression of your intensity and strength? I doubt it. So pretty soon you’ll be working blind. When you start measuring and keeping data you never want to start making up new routines just because a machine is occupied. Measurement makes a science.
Another very good article! The only true way to track strength increases is by keeping track of your numbers.
This looks like a good place to hop in, give a report and ask a couple questions. I began my day zero workout “A†last night. I had intended to start over a week ago but pulled my right Achilles tendon in an aerobics class and had to let that heal. Didn’t want to be limping around the gym.
The most difficult thing about starting SCT, for me, was getting up the nerve to lay claim to one of the six power racks and then proceed without feeling overly intimidated by all the college jocks around me. As I said in a previous post, I’m 63 years old and although I’m not totally out of shape, I’m far from a gym god, which some of these dudes are. It is a very busy gym (services 4,000 people a day!) on a college campus so I had to wait 30 minutes just to get a rack. Then I had to experiment getting it set up with the cross bars at the right height, finding the right weight and so on, while the jocks were no doubt wondering what this old guy was doing. You have to admit, when you go to all this trouble to set up the rack and load a barbell with a lot of weight and then hoist it a couple inches for five seconds, it looks pretty pathetic!
Anyway, talk about “no painâ€, although it was strenuous during the seconds of static contraction, when I was finished with the workout I felt like I hadn’t done anything at all! I’m so used to the three sets of whatever, each to form exhaustion, with my muscles feeling “worked out†afterward, my brain is going, “That’s it? That’s all there is to it?? This can’t be right!†I chuckle because having read what you’ve written, Pete, I’m quite willing to believe you have the numbers and experience to back up your claims. All I have to do is follow the plan and verify it for myself. If I do it right I should see progressive strength gains. No guesswork.
Speaking of numbers, here are mine (including 45lb Olympic barbell) in the order I performed them. Shoulders: 105 lbs. Biceps: 100 lbs. Triceps: 125 lbs. Trapezius: 245 lbs. Abdominals: 90 lbs. I’m surprised my triceps could hoist more than my biceps but I kept adding weight until I got that number. Leads me to think I could have gone heavier on the biceps but was afraid to. Same with the shoulder shrug. I couldn’t believe I could shrug that much weight but there it was: two 45lb plates and a 10lb plate per side plus the weight of the bar.
I also have two questions: The first has to do with the Lat Pull-down I’ll perform next time. In “Train Smart†you say, “Position the seat so the handle is at the full limit of your reach.†Maybe I’m missing something but I don’t see a way of adjusting the seat height on the lat pull-down machines. I would have to load the stack, use my body weight to pull the stack up as I sit down with arms outstretched, and THEN contract the lats to pull the stack up. Is that correct form for SCT?
The second question has to do with leg presses and walking. I walk a lot. Yesterday I walked about 9 miles (according to google maps), about twice my average. I hadn’t walked for two weeks as I let my Achilles heal so was catching up. Today my legs are a bit sore. I’ll walk to work and back later today, which is about a 4 mile round trip. Is it ok for me to keep walking this much or will it significant slow down my recovery time after a “B†workout?
Thanks Pete!
Mike, virtually everyone lifts more with their triceps than biceps. Triceps are very powerful. Soon you’ll be hoisting over 300 lbs, I’m sure. (Make sure that 5 seconds is all you can do. If you can hold it 7 or 8 seconds you need to put it down and add more weight.) I don’t think I’ve ever seen a lat machine with no adjustment. The designer must think all humans are the same height. (Wouldn’t surprise me. Haha) All you need to do is pull from fully extended (or close to it) down about an inch or two and hold it there. Use your lats, not your biceps to pull down. Keep walking, the intensity is minuscule compared to leg presses. However, you might need a bit longer between workouts as any activity can delay recovery. Just watch your numbers and look for those yellow flags of non-progress.
Thanks, Pete. I’ll check out the lat machines more closely on Saturday or Sunday when I do the “B” workout and perhaps ask one of the gym staff if I can’t figure it out. I do understand the form principal. Sort of like a reverse shrug, pulling the shoulder blades downward with arms outstretched to life the stack.
Good to hear I can keep walking. It’s something I truly enjoy that is also healthy for me! 😉
Pete, what would you suggest doing when you still want to build muscle but you’ve reached the maximum weight possible on certain exercises? Either due to lack of enough weights available, or for instance, on a deadlift when the barbells no longer have enough space on them for more weights.
I know there are cheat moves for ones such as the lat pulldowns.
This is a pretty good problem to have. A decent barbell will hold about 700 lbs so progressing beyond that is an accomplishment. If you are truly out of weight and can’t get access to more, then your only option (until an SCT machine is available) is to add more volume to your workout. If you want to do that in a serious way you might consider the Power Factor Workout as it does not operate inside a 5-second window and lends itself to longer exercises without losing the ability to measure. In fact, the Power Index measurement was created for that very reason – to measure sustained intensity. It’s on this page:
http://www.precisiontraining.com/products/power-factor-workout/
If pain was an indicator of muscle growth or muscle strength,I would be a 300 pound freak.Especially from all the bad or half assed training I used to do.Stick with actual calculated measurements,and you will all go a lot farther.Weight on the bar goes up for me,I am in the right direction even with out any pain..
What you say here makes a lot sense, Bob. What else would one do other than add more weight? If form stays the same on a given exercise and the weight/resistance increases, you know you have gotten stronger. I don’t know how else you could tell if you’ve truly gotten stronger. I agree that “no pain, no gain” is not the way track progress. I’m not saying there’s no value in pain being an indicator if some physical activity is having a negative/dangerous effect on the body. But if we are truly wanting to track progress how do you do this by “feel”?
Muscular failure, 5 seconds, if you can do more the weight is too light. Stick to that time frame as much as possible. Pete talks about this in his books and articles.
I ‘ve been thinking a lot lately about the “no pain, no gain” business. A couple of things that many trainers and trainees talk about are the benefits of doing reps immediately after each other and that the later reps or the last rep to failure are more important than the preceding reps. These are the times where you can really start feeling pain. At least I do.
If your goal is more endurance then I can see where dealing with the pain is just part of it. You have to get your body to adapt to performing at a steady state for a certain period of time depending on the sport or activity. Some would say even this doesn’t require a great deal of training time.
If the goal is strength/hypertrophy and you do “Static Contraction Training” you might feel some unpleasantness but it will be very short. If one was to do a more conventional, full range rep workout or a Static Contraction workout with more than one contraction per exercise is there any reason to have to delve into and endure the pain zone. Now keep in mind I’m talking about strength/hypertrophy, not edurance or metabolic conditioning. I’m just asking the question to everybody that if you’re trying to get stronger or bigger do you really have to venture into the pain zone? If you’re going to do more than one contraction or more than one rep why not rest for a bit when you hit the pain zone, the proceed with your next contraction or rep? I know this is not exactly time efficient just something to think about.
I made some statements in this post and in some other posts on here that I really don’t have the knowledge to make. I don’t want to lead anybody astray in their training.
Hi Donnie;
I have been known to have the open mouth insert foot syndrom; which is a pretty good exercise for flexability when you think about it!
LOL! Thanks Tom. I appreciate that man. 🙂
Pete,
I’ve been using SCT for about 9 months and I have made good progress on most excersises. I have maxed out the leg press at my gym to holding 1080 lbs. for 24 seconds. Since there is no room for more weight, can an SCT leg press excersize be done safely unilaterally?
Also, I believe I have an earlier release of your book. In the book, you say to increase weight when one can hold the weight for 15 seconds or more. I’ve read here in multiple places that you now recommend 5 seconds. For me, there is a very small difference in weight between holding for 8 seconds and not being able to budge the weight at all. What should I do when this happens.
Thanks,
Mike
Weight trumps time. Try to lift the heaviest weight you can even if it’s for only 3+ seconds. (15 years ago we were doing 20-30 second holds. Now we know that more weight is much better than more time.)
What about my first question about doing the leg press unilaterally? is it safe? I maxed out the weight with two legs.
A lot of people do it unilaterally. But you have to be careful not to torque your pelvis.
I tried it unilaterally today. After reducing the weight to 540lbs, half what I could push with 2 legs, I couldn’t budge it with either leg. I’m curious why with two legs I can leg press 1080lbs for 24 seconds (in strong range of course), but with one leg I can’t even budge half. Is it something neurological?
Yes Pete,well said re the no pain no gain junk.There is a terrible tendency in the fitness world to substitute slogans for reality and careful consideration.Exactly the same thing in the world of politics I would argue work to the detriment of all.
Sadly some people prefer in my observations slogans repeated by the many to a reasoned argument from the few.Sometimes people ask questions and if they don’t receive the answer they want to hear blank you out.
I recall a young trainee that told me that he trained his biceps everyday and he was in such pain that he could not lift his arms up properly.Apparently he also did excessive sets as well.His friends{the many} told him that meant that his arms were growing{or perhaps would grow}.When I told him that pain did not mean growth and was more likely to be a signal of distress from his body and that he should stop training for a while and seek medical advice I saw him switch off-I had plainly not told him what he wanted to hear.
Now if someone had said{and you have Pete}-No brain no gain-it would be a slogan worth repeating.
Bob a simple and very direct and true comment that hits the nail right on the head with a few well chosen words.Thanks.