Time Under Tension

Discussions

• Is sprinting the single best exercise for most people?

  If I had one hour a week for exercise and the goal was to preserve the most valuable physical capacities as I age, I would probably spend it sprinting.Not leg training, not running, not HIT. Pure sprinting, on hills and uneven terrain. Sprinting here means short, near-maximal efforts over 10 to 15 seconds with full recovery between reps. Not necessarily as an exercise, but as goal.

• Are Bulgarian split squats far superior to back squats?

  If you are not a powerlifter, stop training legs like one. Actually, stop training everything like one. That is the argument. It took me years to realize that I didn't need to keep on lifting more and more on squats, since my legs didn't change after anyway. lbs would go up, muscles would stay pretty much the same. And the rest of my body paid the bill, less volume on arms, core, chest... Due to the focus on maintaining strong squat numbers. The problem is that seriousness, exhaustion, and...

• Do private coaches hold you back more often than they help?

  Something I see in the gym every day are private coaches (usually from the gym itself) being paid to walk around and give some basic exercises to the trainee. Most people walk into coaching with a simple assumption: I have a goal, and the coach is paid to get me there. But that is not true. The coach is also running a business, and businesses respond to incentives whether the owner is transparent about them or not.

• Should you actually work out less?

  Let’s be honest about what most people are actually doing in the gym. It’s not overtraining in any meaningful sense, even though people love to say that when they feel a bit run down. Real overtraining requires real output. Heavy work, high intent, repeated exposure to something close to your limit. Most lifters are nowhere near that. What they are doing instead is just wasteful, training just hard enough to feel it, just sore enough to notice it the next day, just tired enough to believe it…

• Are most 'advanced' lifting techniques just ways to make light weights feel heavy?

  After about a decade of lifting, something stops looking clever and starts looking familiar. All the “advanced techniques” begin to rhyme with each other. Drop sets. Giant sets. Blood flow restriction. Mechanical drop sequences. Myoreps. Rest-pause. You can rotate the names, but it ends up just being entertainment. You take a weight that is not particularly challenging, then you stack constraints or fatigue tricks on top of it until it finally feels like something is happening.