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This is an excerpt from an Elite Body interview with Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle author Tom Venuto.

Jim: What are some rules people should follow for an effective workout?

Tom:    One of course would be form.  You have to learn the proper technique for the exercise.  That’s important because bad form can cause an injury.  If you’re injured, you can’t work out.  Second would be that poor form robs you of results.  For example, if you’re heaving a weight up and using momentum to lift the weight, the muscle’s not working.  Momentum is working.  If you’re dropping the weight, it is gravity working; not your muscle resisting.  Form is number one.

Number two, proper resistance – for weight training that means choosing the right amount of weight to give you the exact stimulus you need to get the response you want – strength and muscle growth.  If you don’t use enough weight, you don’t get the stimulus you wanted.  Outside of some calories you burn, your workout was ineffective.

What I’ve noticed is the advanced trainee gets a real instinct for this.  If you watch a pro in a gym, they might put the pin in the machine, do a couple of reps.  Immediately they stop and they pull the pin out and they adjust it.  They know instantly or they’ve been keeping a training journal and they’re tracking the exact poundages they used for the previous workout.  They’ve walked into the gym knowing exactly how much weight to use.

If you are a beginner, you need to work on this.  You need to develop a sense of the right load to use as early as possible in your training career.  One what that I like to help people do that is by instead of giving a fixed number of sets and reps, I use two things – a rep range and a rep max.  Now I’m sure you’ve heard a training program with a prescription “I want you to do three sets of ten; four sets of eight; five sets of five” and there’s nothing wrong with that provided you have load selection down to a “T”.  If you do that, you need to know how to pick the right weight.

I would prefer to figure out what your goal is, choose the right repetition range for that goal – for example muscle growth is typically a range of 8-12 reps – and instead of saying three sets of ten, I’m going to say “I want you to do three sets of 8-12.”  I’m going to give you a repetition max number of 12.  Your cue is that if you can do 12 reps in good form, that’s your signal to increase the weight.

If you’re training with the right weight, the last rep or two is very difficult.  You are working to get the last rep or two.  You may even hit failure on that last rep on some of your sets.  It happens between 8-12 – no brainer way to figure out how much weight to use and it’s really important because I see a lot of people using light weights and they’re doing three sets of 12, but it was a 25 rep max.  They’ve selected absolutely the wrong weights.  You’ve got to nail down the poundages.

Number three would be progressive overload or some kind of overload or some kind of progression.  That’s the fundamental principle of making progress.  Here’s a rule to remember – do what you’ve always done; get what you’ve always got.  I have that on a little poster.  I’m looking at it right now up on my bulletin board.  That’s one that you should always remember.  To get something that you never got before like more muscle or a leaner body than you’ve ever had before or more strength than you’ve ever had before, you are going to have to do some work that’s above and beyond what you’ve ever done before.  Makes sense, right?

You have to work out of your comfort zone.  Safely but steadily you push a little bit past your previous workout.  A little more weight, another rep or two, the same workout completed in less time which is called density; a new exercise you have never done before; a new combination of exercises; a new workout program – something – anything you’ve never done before.

I could go on and on, but one more I think is really important is recovery because the growth takes place outside of the gym, not while you’re in the gym.  This one is so important.  It influences all the others.  Your volume, your frequency, your resistance, everything – if you’re not recovering between workouts you may have to change your frequency.  If you were training four or five days a week, you may have to come back to three days a week or you may need to put more rest days in between.  If you were doing 12 sets per body part and you’re feeling overtrained and you’re not recovering, you may have to cut back to 8 or 6 or 3.

The idea is that you have to overload your body and make it do work that it hasn’t done before, but you have to be able to recover from that.  The idea here is that training is a stress.  People have this idea that stress is bad.  Stress is not bad.  Stress is your stimulus for growth.  No stress, no growth.  You rot away and die.  What you need is stress, recovery, stress, recovery, stress, recovery and that would be a good thing to remember in terms of life stress as well with people’s work and with people’s career.
I mention this because your lifestyle is going to influence the results that you get out of the gym too.  If you have a high stress psychological level and you’re not sleeping well and your boss is driving you crazy and you’re overworked, it’s going to affect physical recovery.  You have to take the time to balance all kinds of work with stress and that’s what’s going to keep the progress coming.

Posted by Jim Katsoulis on Wednesday, August 20th, 2008 at 3:33 pm.