“Do you hurt anywhere when you get out of bed?”
My wife asked me that this morning while I was making coffee.
“No,” I said.
“What about your shoulders?”
“Nah.”
“Your legs? Hips?”
“Nope.”
“Knees?”
I shook my head.
“So you just get out of bed and feel fine?”
“Pretty much.”
Which is 100% truth.
What makes the conversation so bizarre is that if you’d asked me that before around 2012 I’d have rattled off a shopping list of aches, pains, and partial muscle tears from my rotator cuffs down to my quads.
If you rule out the ordinary and unavoidable nags that come up from time to time, I’m as pain-free as I’ve been since my early 20s before I began chewing up my poor body with stupid powerlifting training.
How the heck does that work? On the wrong side of 45 I’m supposed to be complaining about every part of my body aching. Shoot, I’ve got people reading these very emails, in their late 20s, already complaining of “getting old”.
The secret is found in plain sight in my old book Squat Every Day.
I didn’t put it like this in the book, but here are the three key principles:
1) Training to true maxes beats the crap out of tendons and ligaments that hold your muscles and bones together.
2) Tendons and ligaments have poor blood flow. Blood brings oxygen and nutrients, and it clears out waste products. No blood means no healing.
3) Moving a joint dramatically increases the amount of blood flowing into those soft connective tissues. Moving a joint often sends it a life-giving dose of healing blood.
For decades we’ve all learned that training with weights means:
Train to excruciating failure. No pain, no gain!
Rest at least 7 days before training the same muscle group
What that gets you is a ton of strain on your tendons and ligaments, and then you hang around a week resting, which starves them of the blood they need to heal up.
Totally backwards.
Frequent training heals. That discovery was the first major game-changer.
My joints immediately felt better as I began to train everything 3-5 times a week.
But frequency alone can’t be the whole answer. Bone-heads who train more often and change nothing else are going to hurt themselves.
Enter the RPE, or Rating of Perceived Exertion.
Imagine the hardest set you do where the last rep is a gut-punch. There’s no way you’d have managed one more rep.
Call that the @10
I think most halfway serious lifters assume the @10 is the goal and the gold standard.
Not so. Not always.
If I were training in a bodybuilding style, using 6-12 rep brackets, and not aiming for daily strength practice, I’d throw in 1-2 sets @10
Otherwise? Nah.
The @10 is top of the scale. As you move down, you get more reps in reserve.
The sweet spot is a few notches down with the @7.
That means you’re leaving 3-5 sets in reserve.
The weight is such that you could smoke it at speed if you wanted.
You probably shouldn’t, by the way.
Explosive reps are like box jumps: Unless you’ve prepared to do them, and you have no pre-existing injuries, don’t do it. I’ve known more than my share of folks who did a “harmless” box jump and blew an Achilles tendon. A quick drop and fast reversal creates massive strain on the joints involved. It is no different with barbell and dumbbell lifts. Not the best idea for aging folks and anyone that wants to stay in the game for decades.
You want the possibility of speed, not the actual quick motion.
With an @7 RPE, the weight will be heavy enough for productive training and light enough that it won’t annihilate your joints and nervous system.
Nearly all my non-bodybuilding training is done in the @7 bracket.
Snappy, smooth reps.
And that is why my joints don’t hurt anymore.
My bag of tricks is a mile wide and coming up on 30 years deep. If you’ve got a weight-training, nutrition, mind-set, skill training, or existential angst problem keeping you from getting the body you want, this link might interest you:
Matt Perryman