Coaches often discuss the optimal rest intervals between sets for various training objectives. One common “rule of thumb” is that for maximal strength you want “complete” rests, and for hypertrophy you need “incomplete” rests between sets.

Acute, catastrophic injuries resulting from weight training are thankfully, rare. For those of us with chronic, painful, “non-descript” injuries however, that fact is less than comforting. There’s nothing more frustrating than that all-too-familiar “it doesn’t hurt until I lift” pain.

Sometimes, these injuries take the form of chronic inflammatory problems such as medialepichondialitis (tennis elbow), a shoulder that clicks, low back spasm, heel pain, the list goes on and on. Often, these injuries are unnoticed during normal day to day activities, but as soon as you try to run or lift, or anything else, there it is again. This leads to the observation that weight training doesn’t cause injuries, it reveals them.

In this post I’m going to outline a training method that, more times than not, will allow you to re-establish your training without flaring up those injuries. I call it the “boil the frog” method. But first, let’s look at a few things you really should consider if the opening paragraphs of this post sound like you…

It’s recently dawned on me that if you follow my training recommendations, you’ll be essentially training like an Olympic weightlifter, although you may not actually be doing the O-lifts themselves. The salient points of such an approach include:

If you’re a competitive lifter, your “core” lifts are your actual competitive lifts (clean & jerk and snatch for O-lifters and squat, bench, and deadlift for powerlifters).

Historically, most lifters have tended to go intense & heavy on the core lifts, and then a bit lighter on the assistance lifts. In recent years, powerlifting maverick Louie Simmons turned the traditional paradigm upside down: his Westside charges go moderate and fast on the core lifts, and then get down to business, going super-heavy on the assistance lifts.

Here’s why this approach CAN work very well, especially for experienced lifters:

It’s GOOD to have a philosophy, right? Here’s Mine:

1) We’re all athletes. Maybe we’re not all great athletes, or even good ones, but we’re all athletes. Or, well, at least we all wanna be athletes. Which is the same thing really. The point is, we’re goal-seeking creatures, trying to improve our physical ability to interact with the World, and with life, whether that means being more successful in a tennis match, or having more energy at work, fighting cancer, or just trying to look, feel, and perform better. We all need bodies that can get us through the day, at a high level of success. And a big part of our mission is to help people do just that.

In order to experience further progress, do you need to know more, or do you need to make better use of what you already know? Don’t answer yet, just absorb that question…just let that question penetrate your brain for a moment…

Incidentally, I grew up in the martial arts tradition of Bushido, and we were always taught that knowledge doesn’t exist without action – in other words, knowledge that isn’t acted upon isn’t really knowledge at all.

Pop Quiz: What’s the main difference between you and an Olympic athlete?

Genetics? Drugs? Coaching? Facilities? Motivation?

Certainly all of these and more factor into the equation, but I’m convinced that the most significant point of difference is consistency.

Maximal strength (MxS) is defined as the maximum amount of force one can produce irrespective of time or bodyweight.

The qualifiers “time” and “bodyweight” distinguish MxS from power and relative strength, respectively.

MxS is perhaps the core quality that all individuals should be concerned with, because it’s acquisition is the fastest route to all other motor qualities, including relative-strength, speed-strength, strength-endurance, speed, and speed-endurance.

During my recent talks in Bellaria Italy, a theme developed which reflects what I consider to be a problem in the way that most people think about resistance training. In particular, during one roundtable discussion on EDT training, I fielded numerous questions about the so-called “correct” number of sets, reps, rest duration, etc., etc., for EDT workouts.

Finally, I saw the underlying problem behind the various questions I was fielding: the attendees were focusing too much on the means of optimal weight training and not enough on the ends. As I thought about it, virtually ALL resistance training systems and philosophies focus on means, often to the total exclusion of the ends…

If I had to summarize the 3 most common resistance training mistakes (or to put it more kindly, inefficiencies) that people are guilty of during their workouts, my “terrible triad” could be summed up in a single sentence: “Slow, isolation lifts performed on machines.” Let’s take a look at each of these 3 components one at a time: