Dotty

I would appreciate it if you could stop by my weight loss blogand tell me what you think.
Warmest wishes,
-Joan

Since doing just weight lifting (not Arnold lifting – but enough to cause some struggle) I have lost a few dress sizes and have more energy, etc.

I also agree with the posts that stress diet as well. It’s a combination of exercise and good diet – which is still the same – lots of fruits & veggies, good carbs, beans, nuts, etc. No one is 300 lbs from green leafy vegetables and oatmeal. The fat is from processed, fat and sugar laden foods that has become a staple of our food diets.

Been reading about a month, and marvel at your work – you amass an amazing amount of information. Please know how much this work is appreciated.

Yoga, anyone? The classic Richard Hittleman book “The 28 Day Yoga Plan,” is a great, beginner friendly way to proceed. Not 100% spot on sure about title, but you’ll find it if you seek it!

Someone else mentioned Callanetics – also quite excellent for effective, easy toning results.

You said: “For most people in weight training, fifty reps of a five pound weight will do nothing. Even for a moderately fit person, most exercises you’d do with a five pound weight wouldn’t do much. For a beginner, it will be a serious challenge to even do a few and that *will* trigger the growth hormone response cited in that paper. Don’t laugh – there are a *lot* of people with no fitness in America. Do you think it’s healthy if that beginner in that kind of shape grabs a fifty pound weight?”

The standard advice, that has been repeated by myself and your critics here, is to use a heavy or challenging weight if you want to accomplish anything. What you didn’t appear to understand is that “heavy” doesn’t mean 50 pounds instead of 5 pounds – rather, heavy means whatever amount makes you feel pretty tired after 10 or so reps. It’s an individual definition, and is related to a person’s gender, age, and level of fitness.

So, for the beginner who finds it a serious challenge to do a few reps with a 5 pound weight, 5 pounds IS heavy, and doing 5 sets of 10 reps (or just 2 sets of 6 reps, even) is legitimate weight training, and will lead to an increase in strength if they keep it up.

However, if that same beginner picks up a 1/2 pound weight and does 50 reps in a row without feeling tired, he or she will accomplish nothing – that’s not cardio, and it’s not weight training. In your original posting, that’s what it sounded like you were suggesting. And that is why so many of us pointed out you were wrong, even if what you actually meant was right.

How did I insult you? By pointing out that even in the face of overwhelming evidence, you still stick to your falsehoods? You are simply wrong, and you’re not admitting it, and by doing so you’re losing credibility with your audience. This doesn’t seem wise to me.

You have failed to find one account of someone doing fifty reps effectively. You have failed to acknowledge that none of us is talking about “maxing out” weights.

I think you are ruining your credibility, and that can carry over to other articles.

Anyway, it’s good that you mention how our habits today have a huge effect on our life later on.

When I look at my parents I seriously become a bit spooked with the thought of being like them at the same age. They’re just under 50 but both are overweight and getting worse.

Paradoxically, the fear of becoming like them is forcing me to seriously think about making exercise a part of my life.

I started jogging in the summer of last year. Unfortunately I stopped after about a month. The reason? I had bad shoes and my feet would start to hurt tremendously. Initially I took breaks, but the problem just kept coming back and I gave up.

With winter fading, I’m going to start again tomorrow. I’ll probably have to buy some new shoes.

For those who hate running as I did in the past, I seriously suggest starting out slow by using a schedule such as Nike’s http://www.nikerunning.com

You can find some cool schedules on there, for beginners I suggest the Walk to Run schedule – it really is great and keep in mind that you’re hearing this from someone who absolutely detested running.

Often on this site, when a number of comments disagree with the post, it’s because the post wasn’t clearly communicating what your comments suggest you were saying, leading to these “I obviously meant” circular conversations. You should perhaps add “in my opinion, for beginners” to the paragraph starting “a lot of repetitions” to make your point, it reads as though you’re saying it’s always better, which is getting peoples’ backs up.

We were all beginners at some stage, and are speaking from experience. I’m not a powerlifting monster, I’m a 5′3″ woman, and when I started lifting, maxing out on a lot of exercises was with the five-pound weight you mention above! “Maxing out” (which I don’t think anyone above is advocating, they’re talking about doing low reps with a challenging weight) doesn’t necessarily equate to 300lb deadlifts, or even empty bars – it can mean squatting with bodyweight, or holding soup cans, or whatever is challenging to you. There are a number of elederly people at my gym, and they don’t do 50-rep exercises, they do 12-rep exercises, some certainly only with bodyweight. Anything is better than nothing, and I can see that there may be confidence-building and form-developing advantages to a very low weight which doesn’t challenge you, but god, it would take such enormous time from your day!

I agree with you, beginners should not max out, beginners should not lift heavy weights, beginners should focus on technique. Safety depends on exercise technique, and this is indeed best learned with light weights.

Mrs Clear does 3 sets of 15 reps, which totals for 45 reps. 3 sets of 15 reps is different than 1 set of 45 reps. I assume you meant 5 sets of 10 reps (50 total reps) rather than 1 set of 50 reps. The bad comments you received are because doing 1 set of 50 reps is potentially dangerous for beginners. Here’s why.

Technique deteriorates as fatigue sets in. When doing 50 reps in a row, you’re getting an endurance workout as you wrote. This fatigue gets in the way with learning technique. Your last 15 reps will be of mediocre quality compared to your first 15. Bad technique increases risks of injury.

Therefore low reps are recommended to learn proper technique during the first months. 5 sets of 5 reps with an empty barbell for example. Beginner has 5 reps to focus on technique for 5 sets. Not 50 reps in row.

Several of my readers are 270lbs, 30% body fat, can’t do 1 single pull-up, can’t touch their toes, etc. I call this out of shape. I all have them do weight lifting exercises, starting with an empty barbell, 5×5, add weight every workout. Tony is my best example: http://stronglifts.com/forum/discussion/108/1/tonys-training-log/ Read his progress for yourself. You’ll find more examples in the forum.

If you really want an endurance workout using weights, than you could do 10 sets of 5 reps (50 reps) with 30second rest inbetween, kind of a HIIT workout. However you need to know how to lift correctly before attempting this kind of stuff, thus again proper technique. Anything like 1 sets of 50 reps is best left for intermediate/advanced trainees who have a solid base of technique.

The weight lifting community would appreciate if you’d change the 50 reps to what I think you meant: 5 sets of 10 reps. This way beginners don’t get injured.

Let me know if you have further questions.

It is extremely common to do sets of 50 reps of flies with a weight that’s 10% or 15% of your max weight. This is a *great* exercise for endurance, even for people in tremendous shape.

I don’t insult you. Please don’t insult me.

How about instead of hurling insults, you offer some advice for the extreme beginner – the person I’m obviously writing to? What should a person who has not actively exercised in a long time do to begin with? I think it’s reasonable to suggest a very small weight to this person. Do you disagree? Why? Do you think that weight training is a better choice than, say, walking? Why?

“Lifting weights is NOT a cardiovascular endurance exercise,”

That’s a fairly obvious statement.

If you have a complete beginner, you’re far better off telling that person to pick up the lightest weight possible and seeing what they can do with it than to have them pick up a giant weight.

For most people in weight training, fifty reps of a five pound weight will do nothing. Even for a moderately fit person, most exercises you’d do with a five pound weight wouldn’t do much. For a beginner, it will be a serious challenge to even do a few and that *will* trigger the growth hormone response cited in that paper. Don’t laugh – there are a *lot* of people with no fitness in America. Do you think it’s healthy if that beginner in that kind of shape grabs a fifty pound weight?

As for the benefits, scroll up and read Ms. Clear’s comment. Are you telling her she’s a fool as well? She’s doing 45 reps with 6 to 10 pound weights and it’s improving her health, which is virtually the same as what I’m suggesting. For a lot of people, such seemingly simple exercise, which would do “nothing” for you, can be really beneficial.

We’re talking about two different groups of people here. I’m assuming no fitness (which I think is pretty clear from the article) – you’re assuming the person is already fairly fit. You guys are quoting sites like stronglifts.com – the advice there is totally inappropriate for people who are complete beginners. You’re also perceiving that everyone has a pretty decent basic level of fitness – that’s totally not true.

When I’m writing about setting goals of 500 more steps in a day than you normally take, I’m not talking to athletes. I’m talking to people who really need to start doing *something* for exercise – and these small victories are invaluable first steps.

Comments where athletes are suggesting that these complete beginners start doing serious weight training – even just picking up a benchpress bar – are misguided and dangerous. If you’ve never lifted a weight, you should *not* be trying to max out or even coming close to it – you’re just begging for injury. The only reason I’m leaving these comments up at all is because the discussion is really important for people to read, whether they’re afraid to leave the couch or they’re ready for anything.

The stronglifts.com 5×5 beginners workout starts with an EMPTY bar. In this program you add only 2.5 kilos at a time.

Mark Rippetoe, author of “Starting Strength”, stresses all the way through his book to start with an EMPTY bar.

Lifting weights is NOT a cardiovascular endurance exercise, and trying to make it into one is not only ineffective, but can lead to repetitive stress injury. If you’re lifting weights for general fitness, then you’re lifting weights to get stronger. As Mitch explains above, strength is one important component of general, functional fitness. I would argue that it’s the single most useful component.

Any strength or conditioning coach will tell you that light weights many times is NOT the way to get stronger. Moderate to heavy weight (for you) at a moderate to low rep range is how you get stronger. Of course, if you’re a beginner, this means taking a very light weight, doing a moderate number of reps, and then incrementally increasing the weight you use from workout to workout.

After reading the abstract posted by rhymeswithlibrarian, I’d say that it proves your point to be absolutely wrong. The study concludes that:

“In the young subjects, GH responses were nonsignificant at 60% and increased progressively at 70% and 85% of 1RM. No significant effect of exercise intensity was observed in the older subjects.”

In other words, as the weight used for the exercise increases, the amount of growth hormone released increases in the young subjects, with no change in the older subjects. This is diametrically opposed to your claim that light weight and high reps increases growth hormone release.

Sorry for harping on this Trent, but as you can tell by the comments here, it’s frustrating for many of us to see misleading fitness information disseminated, especially considering that your blog is usually so spot-on and has a very large, very trusting audience.

As I said above, I follow the Crossfit method, as well as all their cautions. If you look at their scalings, they will pretty much always tell the “puppy” level athletes to just practice the exercise on max weight days, not to do anything resembling a heavy load. For more technical bar exercises, they won’t even suggest using an actual bar, just use a pvc pipe and have someone watch your form. Maxing while inexperienced can be dangerous, and proficiency must be learned before testing the limits of one’s ability is attempted.

That said, it is by no means a poor method if increasing health and fitness, merely one that should not be jumped into unprepared.