 If you're the type of person who trains really well, has great sessions for two weeks, and then has very remedial, pretty much painful sessions for two weeks, then you need to hear what I have to say. Hey everybody, I'm Lance Coyke, and today we're going to talk about an article that I wrote for TonyGentleCore.com. Tony was a dude that I watched, you know, read some of his stuff when I was coming up into fitness, and he taught me a lot. I learned a lot from reading his stuff. And now, you know, it's 12, 15 years later, and I wrote an article for his site. How cool is that? This article, why attempting to set PRs every week is stupid. This was a wonderful topic to talk about on Tony's site, because this is kind of a pet peeve of both of ours. The idea is people try too hard, and that holds you back. Now this becomes more and more important as you get more and more advanced in your training. The trainer doesn't really know how to push their body to the brink of its limits, its physical abilities. So you can kind of set PRs every week for your first maybe six months of training, and you don't have to push yourself terribly hard. The issue is when you have adapted, when you're stronger, higher levels of training wear your body down. You have the same body more or less. Your tissues have changed a bit. You probably have a lot more muscle, and maybe even some less fat. But your joints can only handle so much, and that's kind of the principle behind this. So when you try too hard, you limit your body's ability to recover. Instead, what I'm going to try to pitch to you is you should prioritize technique and push yourself maybe one out of every four weeks. It's called periodization of training. Purposefully try hard one week, and then purposefully try easy one week, and then try somewhere in the middle the other two. Now I hear a lot that personal records aren't supposed to look pretty. And that's just kind of false. If you're really an experienced, that's generally true because the poop hits the fan, and you don't really know how to adapt to it, and so you lose all of the technique that you've built up because you haven't been building it for very long. But if you've been training for 10 years, and you're used to setting personal records, whether that be a 1RM or whether that be a 6RM or a 10RM, it's the best you've ever done for a given weight and rep range. If you're really experienced, you can hang on to your form, even through the hard reps. The problem here is that we spend too much time testing our strength instead of building our strength. If my goal is to squat as much weight as possible, I get fixated on this one rep maximum squat weight that I use because that's the measure that I'm using to tell me if I'm getting better or not. The issue is strength happens in various ways. We're kind of chasing force production, but we're measuring how much weight we can lift. And sorry, I hit my chord. And how much weight you can lift is only a representation of what your body has figured out how to do in any given day. So the example might be if I'm doing a deadlift and I pick that weight up and then I let my back start to round, that's not something I really want to practice. I don't want my back to round when under load. But if this is a once in a lifetime opportunity, I'm deadlifting in front of some very famous people and I'm trying to impress them, then I'll let you back around and that's fine as long as you get the lift. It's important to not conflate the weight that you're lifting with your actual strength. That's all I want to say here. Now I think it's important to be a little sick in the head when you go for a personal record. Like you have to say, you have to be confident that you're going to get it, right? And you have to kind of, you know, it's not going to be easy, but you need to stick with it. The problem arises when you say that all the time because you start to train this poor technique instead of reinforcing good technique and your body just doesn't know where you're trying to teach it to be during these heavy lifts. Now mindset is definitely an important piece of setting a personal record, but biomechanics is probably even more complex. There's a bunch of muscles. There's a bunch of joints. There's all these nerves that control all of this. And even something as simple as like a lateral raise hardly occurs in isolation, even though we're tending to isolate a singular muscle group when we do that, i.e. the deltoid. If we don't know what to expect from the brain once a lift starts to get tough, then we tend to hyper-react to it. It's not even conscious, right? It's subconscious. On a subconscious level, our brain says, this is really tough. And our body says, okay, I guess I'm going to bridge my hips up off the bench to finish my bench press instead because my upper back is getting too tired, my shoulders are getting too tired, and I need some more lower sternal peck recruitment. So yes, these technique changes generally allow you to lift a little bit more weight on that day in an acute short-term sense. But it does compromise joint position for longevity and even for long-term muscle gain. Instead of having inconsistent technique, I would I would suggest striving for consistent technique. Check out my graphs over here. So we've got this top one is showing us this is this is how we don't want to respond to a set getting tougher. We don't want our technique to be really good at like 40 or 50% of our one RM. You'll notice it's really low there at the beginning because we don't have any weight. We don't have any feedback. We're super stiff. We don't practice really good technique even in our warm-up sets. That's what that left part of the graph is saying. Then we get these easier weights and then we get to some harder weights and our technique starts to fall down. And then at some point, we just can't even do the lift. What we would like is 10 out of 10 technique through all 10 out of 10 sets and then eventually you just can't complete the rep. And I think that with enough time and enough discipline, you too can get there. Back maybe about seven years ago now, I was lifting really regularly and I was pushing really hard, but I frequently had setbacks and it wasn't until I really started to periodize my training, like purposefully take some days easier that I was able to get on top of anything. What I would do is I would just push too hard even if I didn't feel well and even if I already pushed hard last week and I would just break. I would break for two weeks and I would have two weeks of good training, two weeks of bad training, just this seesaw back and forth. So you make gains for two weeks and then you regress two weeks worth of gains and then you make gains for two weeks. It's just this perpetual vicious cycle that hopefully you will now avoid now that you know all of these things. So I wanted to talk about a couple examples of this first one that I think about when I think of technique changing during a heavy lift is a deadlift. Now it's definitely hard to nitpick anything when it's almost a thousand pounds. Watch this. So he stops and he leans back and he puts the weight on his leg. He's doing this so that he can get better leverage through. He can utilize his quads to straighten up a little bit more. He's bringing his hips closer to the bar, narrowing, not narrowing, but shortening the moment arm for that and giving his glutes better leverage to then help him lean back and stand up and he gets it, which is super cool. That's I mean, that's really heavy. Very impressive. I'm not nitpicking him. I think this was a testing day and this is good for him to do, but this is what it looks like. So I'm doing this every week. I'm probably not really training my lockout to the extent that I could be. Next one I want to talk about is really common in Olympic weightlifting and that is a forward weight shift when you're squatting. Now this is going to happen really quickly in this video, but watch her heels at the bottom. Bam. They come up. Okay. You can replay that if you need to. The idea here is I'm trying to stretch the knee and the ankle more because maybe I don't want to sit back so much and load the glutes and hamstrings. You see this a lot with newbies too, but you know, generally with a lot less weight and other parts of the technique are going wrong. Something like this is can be indicative of one, maybe I'm just getting used to this. Maybe there's a pattern that I've trained, which is really common in Olympic weightlifting, especially in the United States and in China too. Yes. They do that too because they have the ankle mobility, right? So they need to let the knees bend forward more so that they can get the stretch so that they can shorten back up. This can also be indicative of a posterior chain of muscle weakness. So glutes, hamstrings, lack of muscle strength can be the reason that I shift forward because then I can overuse the anterior chain of muscles. Something like this makes quad stiffness really common. So definitely check out my video on quad stretches and some better alternatives if you want some help with something like that. And if you have a weakness in a posterior chain of muscles like in the hamstring area, which is really super common, you might try exercises like Romanian deadlifts or even a good morning where you're trying to bow at the waist but not bend the back at all. All right. And then last one I want to talk about is the bench press torso twist. Now this one is a lot more complicated and it's going to be harder to see. So I have a couple videos for us to look at here. But I think this is, you know, the stuff we've watched up until now has been very symmetrically focused, which is easier to see when we start talking about this. But the real world is asymmetrical humans are asymmetrical. So we got to kind of consider that. So this first one, not to put this guy on blast. This one is a little bit weaker of a weight. They're doing 135 pounds as many reps as they can and you'll watch, you can see it there. It starts twisting, but watch his left pec in relation to his right pec. Look at that. And so it's coming up away from the bench and the right shoulder is falling down toward the bench. That is just, that is a torso twist. And if I'm, now this is a testing day. So again, I'm not putting them on blast. You go for it. Get what you got to get. But if I'm doing this as a training, you know, I'm doing this every week when I'm training my bench press, then I'm practicing bad technique. Next one is another one. So you see this a lot in like, I see this some in really heavy weights, but generally if, if somebody is pretty advanced in heavier weights, then they don't, they don't get stuck so easily. They don't get falling back. They don't get stuck falling back into these bad techniques. But when you do something like 135 bench press challenge where you're doing it as many reps as you can, generally that last one, your body is just shut off. And you can, you can do some sort of like contortion to shift the load, maybe only to your triceps and alleviate the load on the pecs. And then you can get another rep. And so you're going to do that. So that was pretty good. He's starting to flare his elbow out though. You see that? Yeah. Come help. So that's not too bad. But the thing that I want to demonstrate there is that the elbows will fly out on something like that. All right. Let's do another one. This guy does a few more reps, but you can also see a little bit of the elbow flare and the chest turn kind of starts right there. Yeah. Yeah. And it just progressively turns and turns and turns. So he's holding that together pretty well, honestly, but you still have even this. Well, obviously, I mean, that is your PRs don't look pretty rep, but you'll see the sternum turn slightly even on the last like five reps or so. And even something as subtle as that is not exactly what we want to train, right? Now I mentioned before, like PRs don't look pretty. They could look pretty pretty. But for something like a 20 rep max, they're probably not going to look very pretty. And then one last video here. How hard to nitpick a 675 pound bench press? Just take a look at it. Like, watch, see how real that is. This guy is very, very advanced, has a lot of experience training. And when he gets a PR or a really heavy rep, it still looks pretty good, right? Now the torso twist during the bench press is pretty tough to fix. You might want to consider some dedicated shoulder mobility exercises and link up here for a follow along circuit that you can do. Or, you know, even some unilateral type exercise in the lower body still provides this asymmetry in the upper body as well. So something like a split squat link up here for my way too much information on the split squat, if you want to learn more about that. Just remember, you need to be disciplined about your technique when you're exhausted. Now to wrap us up here, I want to reiterate that it is OK to try hard on your sets. Like, you can't just do nothing and expect progress. But you need to be as mentally disciplined about your technique as you are physically disciplined about your effort that you're putting into your lifts. To finish this off, I'm just going to read some of these guidelines for building strength that I find useful. Test strength at most one out of every four weeks. Quote, testing strength does not mean a single rep maximum, but a max effort for the preplanned training program set and rep scheme. That means I'm not going off plan, I'm doing what is planned. Train like a bodybuilder, aim to feel the right muscles working. Using less weight doesn't mean you're de-training. Strength can fluctuate up to 18% in either direction on any given day. Don't forget to de-load your training one out of every four weeks. Don't forget to train endurance, even if your goals are strength oriented. And use cardio to speed up your recovery from strength workouts. Check out a cardio workout. If I still have links left, I'll link to a cardio workout up here. And remember, spend more time building strength rather than testing strength. That's going to be it for me. Thanks so much for watching slash reading slash listening. If you learned something, hit the like button and subscribe to be notified when I release new videos. If you need something else to watch while I link to a bunch of stuff during this video or I mentioned it all, so I'll just leave some of it here.