Intensity: You Control It

You will not always be able to control some training variables.

Frequency. Every once in a while you’ll get sick. Every once in a while you’ll have to stay at work late. Things like these could prevent you from getting to the gym as frequently as you would like.

Duration. Some days you get caught in traffic on your way to the gym. Some days you have to pick your child up from school. These are things that could cause your workout to be cut shorter than you had planned.

Load. Maybe it snowed a lot today and your gym is closed due to the weather. Maybe you are traveling and your hotel gym only has a treadmill and a set of 5lb and 10lb dumbbells. These are times when you may not have access to the equipment and the amount of weight you are accustomed to training with.

But one thing you can always control is intensity.

(Training) Intensity refers to how hard your body is working during an activity.

If you were unable to work out some days this week, make sure to push the intensity on the days you are able to.

If your workout has to be shortened tomorrow, make sure to be as efficient as possible for the time you will be working out to keep the intensity higher.

If you aren’t at your regular gym and have to make do with lighter weights, use pauses or tempo, or extend sets for more reps to increase the intensity.

It shouldn’t matter how often you’re able to work out, how much time you have to work out, or what equipment you have at your disposal - you should always be able to find a way to push yourself to a proper intensity level.

You Won't Get Big On Accident

In my experience as a personal trainer, it has always been difficult to convince some people to train with weights.

Many people have come to me over the years believing that lifting weights is dangerous and that it is sure to make them look like The Incredible Hulk within 2-weeks time.

Actually, it’s far more dangerous to go through life not lifting weights than it is to lift weights.

And it is extraordinarily difficult to look anything like The Incredible Hulk.

The fact is that most people that ARE TRYING to get big, can’t even get big.

It’s very audacious of anyone to think that they might start to look “too bulky” by accident.

***It takes years and years of frequent, consistent, and sufficiently intense weight training to build muscle***

The majority of people who are concerned with getting too bulky will never train for enough years, will never train frequently or consistently enough, and because of their misinformed belief that they’ll probably get too big from this stuff, will never train at high enough intensities to risk getting anywhere near the dysmorphic size they fear they’ll become. So there’s one more reason not to worry.

I don’t encourage weight training to firmly impose my training style and goals onto others. It really doesn’t matter what your goal is. I already know you should train with weights.

Properly utilizing the weights will support any training goal.

If you want to slim down, you should lift weights.

The weights won’t make you bigger, it’s other things you’re doing that may.

By the way, not all exercise that includes weights is “weight training”. If you’re using a weight for a set of 8 that you could really do 15 times, you aren’t lifting weights, you are quite literally wasting your time (go back and find the ***).