What's up guys, Jeff Cavaliere, Athleanx.com.
So today I'm getting up close and personal.
I want to have a conversation with you and you directly.
Because we're going to talk today about something that we both have in common, and that is a
struggle to build muscle.
Maybe you're not building muscle right now or you're not building it fast enough.
And guys, I can relate.
There's been many times in my life I've talked about a lot on this channel where I was never
the biggest guy in the gym.
I will never be the biggest guy in the gym.
I always will try to continue to put on muscle even as I get older, though it becomes a little
bit more difficult.
The fact is, we all who strive for more muscle mass are going to kind of run up against a
wall from time to time.
I think I have the answers as to why you're not right now.
And they actually ironically could all be dealt with and captured in one series of clips.
You ready?
Let's watch them together.
Here is just a Bench Press, I'm going to perform it htree different times.
Here's the first one here, just doing a Bench Press.
Okay, racking it, putting it back, done.
The next set here, I'm doing a Bench Press.
I get to the end here, I rack it and I'm done.
And the third clip here, I think I'm doing a Bench Press, it kind of looks like a Bench
Press, I do get to the end of the rep here, I rack it and I'm done.
Okay, now no judgement yet, let's move on to one more exercise, a Bicep Curl.
One of my favorites, I admit.
We're doing a Bicep Curl here, a couple of nice reps, finish it out and I'm done.
Next effort here, I lift it up, a little tougher, I put it back down and I'm done.
And then the last set again, something that resembles kind of like a curl, sort of.
Look, I've done this too, I know I have, I'm done.
So, now guys the thing that's in common about all of these is effort.
I mentioned the word, it's effort.
Right?
Even though one becomes a complete bastardization of what the exercise was intended to be, it's
all about effort.
Everything that you do, in terms of getting gains in the gym because there are things
we can do outside the gym, but in the gym.
We're talking about hypertrophy muscle gains here.
We're not talking about strength, we're talking about just muscle hypertrophy gains in your
training right now, can be boiled down to effort.
And that's what brings me to this video, and this is why I kind of want to have this personal
talk.
Because a lot of people have been talking about this ad nauseum right now about what
your effort is supposed to look like.
There's a magic effort level, supposedly, that's going to deliver gains and anything
less than or above that is not going to.
To the point where you might even be confused because you've heard it defined some way,
different ways that you don't even know what it means anymore.
I can tell you this, there are specific ways we can make this feel so much more easy to
understand, okay.
The first mistake, though, is hiding behind science.
And you guys know that I'm a big advocate for science.
I believe in science.
I like to apply it to everything that we do.
However, things like RPE, which is a method of communicating effort in training, can become
something that's going to hold you back from your own games because you're hiding behind
the terminology--Rate of Perceived Exertion, or, as I like to say, Really Poor Excuse.
Because when it's beginners that like to apply RPE to their training, they're hiding behind
the fact that they don't want to go towards their max exertion levels.
So, they push in an RPE six or an RPE seven, which means they're leaving three in the tank
or four in the tank.
Likely you are not.
Likely you can double that number, right.
You're not leaving three in the tank, you're probably leaving five in the tank.
If you're a beginner and you're utilizing RPE, you don't have enough experience to understand
what it's supposed to feel like.
You don't know what true max exertion is supposed to feel like.
Now, I can appreciate the intent of RPE.
I love it as a mechanism for advanced trainees to employ in their training because it provides
that subjective variation that we bring to the gym with us on a day in and day out basis.
Maybe we can't hit 90% of our one minute max every single time we go in or whenever it's
programmed to do so.
But on a given day we can give our best effort.
We can equalize those efforts by having a language that does it for us.
An RPE 8 is an RPE 8.
That being said, most of us aren't there in our training yet.
We're not at that point where we can benefit from that.
So, don't hide behind the science as a way for you to hold back in your effort, because
that first clip here that you're seeing is really what we would call one of those RPE
7s.
And by the way, before I even turn the page on that, there's a lot of variation in how
people define RPE.
Some people will say that RPE 10 is just your maximum effort, grinding through a repetition.
Others will say that your RPE 10 is your maximum effort to get the repetition done, but can
be done however you do it to get it to the top.
In other words, you can bastardize that wreck like I showed you before.
If this here is a 10, then this is a nine, because this is a good repetition, though
it's a grinder.
It's done in good form, but it's a grinder.
Well, that's a nine.
Well, then an eight would be just a little bit less than that.
All of them are hard.
There's no instance here where the effort isn't hard.
If you want to make changes, you have to challenge yourself.
And that means that everything you do must be hard to some extent.
Not that it gets to the point where your form breaks down, not to the point where you start
to look like you're not even doing the exercise anymore, but you still have to be putting
in effort.
If it looks like you're whistling Zip-a-dee-do-dah.
[Video Clip: "You'll be whistling Zip-a-dee-do-dah out of your assholes."]
you're not training hard enough.
Which brings me to these other points, the things that are all encompassed in those clips
that are going to help you to make sure you get this right every single time.
Like you go into the gym and every time you train, you're doing all your favorites.
I talked about this before, you shouldn't be doing all of your favorites.
This is not a greatest hits album that you're putting together here, guys.
You should be looking for exercises that challenge you, right?
It's not always about doing-- the favorites mean that you're good at them.
Let's start doing some of the things that you're not so comfortable with and get better
at those things.
Which leads me to the third thing, and that is the absence of nerves.
At some point you should have nerves before you go train.
See, as an athlete, when I used to compete, I was scared before I would step on the field,
I was nervous.
I wasn't nervous about getting ready to actually go play.
I wanted to play.
I couldn't wait until the whistle so I could start playing.
But I was nervous.
I was nervous about screwing up.
I was nervous about missing the tackle, about costing our team the game.
I was nervous about the outcome, what have we lost?
I'm going to have to deal with that.
Well, it happens here in the gym, too.
When you're serious about your training, you should be nervous about the lift you're about
to perform.
Not all the time, but in some instances, because what that means is that you care about it,
number one, care about it enough to give your best effort and actually have nerves.
But secondly, you care about missing the lift.
Not for the next day or two or a week, like it's going to ruin you, but it should mentally
put you back a little bit where you're disappointed that you didn't get to lift, that you were
prepared, or you thought you were physically prepared to do.
So, there should be nerves because it means that you care and if they're not there, then
you're not training hard enough.
Which brings you to another point, that ugly face.
No, no, no, not this one, no, no, that's just that's always there actually Jesse.
I'm talking about like this when you're training, like, do you ever get that ugly face?
If you don't, I don't care what you're doing, you're not training adequately enough with
enough stimulus to create any type of muscle growth.
Remember, we're talking about building muscle here, forcing new muscle growth.
It's not something anybody wants to do.
It needs to be pushed.
You've got to get comfortable being uncomfortable and along with being uncomfortable comes that
uncomfortable looking face.
Don't just make the face, make sure the effort is causing the face.
But if you make that face, because the efforts there, you know, you're on the right track,
it should never look like you're going for a walk in the park or like Jesse here, just
it out bench press rep after rep after rep, that's not how you should look.
Which brings me to two more points here, and that is the actual effort within a set and
then the effort within a workout, The effort within a set, you should never stop when you're
tired, you should stop when you're done.
You see, there's a big difference between that.
There's a lot of people who are not making gains that stop when they're tired.
When they start to get a little bit burned, when they start to feel like, oh, this is
getting tough.
If you stop, then I promise you you're not going to see any worthwhile results for the
time that you're spending in the gym.
Because I don't understand the effort you're putting forth, because you're not.
But the time that you're spending in the gym becomes wasteful.
You could be doing so many other things.
You can be spending time with your family, doing something, picking up a hobby and becoming
productive at something, maybe you find a cure for cancer.
But you'll be doing something much more productive than what you're doing in the gym.
Because if you're just stopping when you're tired, it's not an adequate stimulus.
Again, getting comfortable with being uncomfortable.
That's key.
So, we want to make sure that we're pushing ourselves to the point where we're getting
the work done and then only at that point are we stopping, not when we're just starting
to feel fatigued.
Which brings me to the last point here.
And it's when you're wrapping up your workout, right, and it's all said and done, if you
leave feeling refreshed rather than accomplished, you've done it wrong.
I have never left the gym with the intent to try to build muscle in that workout feeling
refreshed.
Not a single time.
I leave there feeling that I've given my best effort and I feel like I've accomplished something,
but I feel drained.
Now, not so drained that the next time I come back I can't perform, then you would be doing
too much.
You still need to be able to come back to that next workout because you've got to realize
that this is a big picture.
No matter what you do in today's workout, it still relates to tomorrow's workout and
yesterday's workout, and how that big plan fits together and the pieces fit together
in succession, it all matters.
So, if what I did today compromises my ability to come back tomorrow and do anything worth
a damn, then I did too much.
But that's not what I often find, I find people leave feeling refreshed.
This is that's exercise, exercise makes us feel refreshed, training does it.
Training makes us feel like we've worn our ass out and it should.
So, what I'm saying here, guys, you can boil it down to one thing, and here's the last
point I'm going to leave you with.
I always say this, when you have taken from your body what it wasn't willing to give you
in a workout and you've likely trained hard enough.
It's as simple as that.
If you go in and you just take out of that workout, whatever your body was willing to
give you for that day, ah, I don't feel like doing much, that's it, I'm done, then you've
likely not done enough.
You need to take what your body was unwilling to give you that day and when you've done
that, you've made an impact, a positive impact on change in your ability to start growing
muscle.
And only when you do that and get comfortable with those steps here, guys, will you start
to see growth.
And if you do, I promise you, you will see growth.
I promise you.
So, guys, I hope you found this video helpful again, if nothing else, truthful.
But that's what you can expect here.
guys, I will tell you exactly what you need to do, you just need to work on it.
If you're looking for programs guys, we break it all down step by step.
And I try to build in these incentives so that you push yourself.
We have challenges built into all of our workout programs because I want you to be able to
push yourself objectively and compare yourself to your peers and yourself objectively against
yourself.
Not just objectively trying to pull some random number out of the air, but objectively against
yourself.
That's where changes are made.
They're all built into our programs.
They're all available over at Athleanx.com.
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