Dr. Andrew Huberman

I'm making more progress in the last two or three years than I did in the previous eight, despite having been at the resistance training thing for a long time and not really changed much else.

So the idea is always trying to do repetitions in really good form, always trying to isolate the muscles that I'm trying to target for compound movements.

I'm not trying to isolate one muscle, obviously, but to execute the movements properly in the case of compound movements.

And then as the set gets harder and I can say, OK, you know, failure is approaching somewhere to stop counting repetitions and just focus extremely hard on the form and execution and the targeting of the muscles.

So that a lot of times I don't even really know how many repetitions I did.

Of course, I know how much weight I'm moving, but.

I just keep telling myself, make it harder, not easier.

Make it harder, not easier in the final two to three repetitions of the set.

Sometimes I'll go to failure where I can't move the weight anymore.

Sometimes I get close to it and just stop.

And I've noticed that for me, this is translated to better strength and hypertrophy increases, but also just better ability to execute the movements and far fewer little nagging aches and pains and things like that.

So it's been an inversion of the mindset of complete

complete X number of repetitions at a given weight, then increase it every couple of weeks or every workout ideally.

My mindset is, nope, I'm going into the gym to use the weights as a tool to generate adaptation, strengthen hypertrophy increases.

And I'm going to make each work set as hard as possible by making the final two or three reps harder and resist the temptation to move the weight just to complete more repetitions.

I just like your reflections on that because I'm actually interested in getting better at what I'm doing.

And I imagine that is useful, but you're probably going to tell me that there are times when I should just actually try and max out the number of repetitions I can do.

Yeah, I definitely pursue progressive overload still.

I should have been clear about this.

I'll tell you who I think will look better, men and women, I think the people that focus on quality.