Paleo and pop tarts. Acupuncture and antibiotics. Hypertrophy and hip openers.

What do these seemingly totally incompatible things all have in common?

They all represent false dilemmas that are presented as binary options that are completely exclusive of one or the other. A false dilemma, or false dichotomy, is a logical fallacy in which only two possible options are offered, often between two extremes, without considering that there may be a third or even many more alternatives.

Positioning and thinking about things in this way is easy and effortless to the point of being outright indolent. It saves the presenter the effort of deeply understanding a topic and adequately conveying nuance and the full spectrum that exists in reality, and it saves the reader or listener from having to expend even a modicum of energy thinking critically about what they’re hearing. This fuels a vicious cycle in which those who use the most absolute language engender bigger audiences and more credibility because of it.

As a matter of fact, humans are so hard-wired to prefer concrete and absolute language that we actually deem a source as to be untrustworthy or lying when they use abstract language.

Which means I’m screwed and you all think I’m a giant liar.

Because the world is far less black and white than many people want you to believe.

Lately, there seems to have been an uptick in the amount of arguing and fighting that happens on social media that boils down to presenting false dichotomies where no such binary choice actually exists.

And we’re all so much worse off for it.

In reality, there is far more common ground between these polar opposites than there is difference in the extremes.

Paleo is juxtaposed against If It Fits Your Macros (IIFYM) and presented as a binary choice between eating pasture raised pork with spinach and donuts, protein shakes, and peanut butter. The reality is that there is far more common ground between Paleo and IIFYM than any trite Facebook nutrition meme poster would ever prefer to admit. Presented with any fit, healthy, reasonable Paleo or IIFYM afficionado what you’ll find is that the vast majority of their diet ends up looking exactly the same. They will eat large amounts of vegetables, protein from whole food sources such as fish and meat, and carbohydrates from plant sources. From my experience attending everything from Paleo f(x) to the Arnold, I can tell you that people from both ends of that spectrum eat donuts, ice cream, and candy and people from both ends of the spectrum eat grass-fed farmer’s market beef.

Alternative medicine has been a favorite target of the evidence-based science-über-alles crowd in recent years, but they’ve failed to acknowledge that in between the false choice of alternative and Western medicine there is a vast gulf of agreement about what constitutes good medicine and what promotes good health. Are there alternative medicine practices and practitioners that are utter scams? Absolutely. Are there Western medicine doctors who are downright criminal in their actions? Yes. But in between you have a wide variety of practices of dubious scientific efficacy when studied in isolation that just happen to work in a clinical setting to deliver the intended results for patients and clients. At the end of the day, virtually every clinician no matter what end of the spectrum they’d place themselves on would agree that the majority of maintaining health involves eating well, sleeping adequately, and exercising just enough.

When it comes to training, there are only two modes, right? Either you’re doing corrective exercises for hours on end, or you’re hardcore smashing weights and crushing personal records, right? That’s certainly how it would seem when you spend any amount of time reading training articles online. You’re either doing everything right in spending all your time trying to “fix” movement problems with corrective exercises, or you’re completely wrong to waste any time on it because you should just be putting more weight on the bar and getting out of your own way. Let’s not even get into the spectrum of exercises that are deemed to range from worthless to Holy Grail. And YET, we often fail to acknowledge that the vast majority of both corrective and performance oriented training lies in the wide band between exclusively corrective and probably-closer-to-destructive-than-corrective. In fact, I’d argue that all exercise is actually BOTH corrective and performance-enhancing – provided it tests well (via biofeedback.)

This Nonsense Is Killing Us

If we can agree that as a collective all the people who care about their health, wellness, fitness, strongness, etc. make up a community (there’s that setting aside the differences of extremes idea again) then we owe it to the rest of the community to recognize that very little of anything is actually more than a couple standard deviations away from the exact same thing everyone else is doing, and there’s no point in arguing about which is the correct answer.

In doing so we add confusion and doubt over the parts that really matter, and add nothing of value by focusing on the one percent of one percent that is different and acting like it’s a matter of kind, not degrees. When people are confused about things that are already intimidating and scary you know what they do? Nothing. We don’t need more people doing nothing, what we need, as a community, is more people doing the stuff that matters — the stuff that we ALL actually agree on when it really comes down to it.

A question that comes up fairly often with people who are new to using biofeedback in their training is about whether or not they are simply warming up as they do movements and things test better and better.

Here’s the short answer: no, you’re not just warming up.

But let’s get into the longer answer, just for fun.

First thing’s first, I am going to assume that the testing results someone is getting are accurate, and not hampered by pushing to end range of motion, or ignoring the first signs of tension. See here for some common fixes. 

But what if everything really does test better and better?

The first thing to understand is that warming-up is not happening in the mechanistic sense that we often attribute to it by the words we use. There is no actual change in temperature of joint synovial fluids and any muscular temperature increase is debatable. The effects and benefits of warm-ups are hotly contested, and some studies have shown that injury risks actually increased with the use of a warm-up.

So what IS going on with a warm-up, and why do we do it? Why does it seem like we can move more freely when we do a warm-up? And an important question, why doesn’t it always work?

Warm-ups tend to have an effect that allows you to move more freely most of the time because movement that tests well allows for more movement! That is the entire basis of biofeedback testing. You quantify a movement (the toe touch), you do another movement, and then you quantify the movement again to see if it has increased. Theoretically you could do the same thing with your deadlift 1-rep max as the test, but the error introduced by the testing itself would be prohibitive. Using a brief max effort squeeze of a grip dynanometer is similar, at a lower error and cost of testing.

Range of motion is mediated by the brain, as an output that is generated after all of the various inputs from sesory receptors such as Golgi tendon organ and nociceptors as well as the brain’s own map of the body in space.

So when you do movement that tests well, you very likely ARE getting more range of motion. But if you think that all movement is going to “test well” and allow for more and more, think again. This is best illustrated with one of my favorite stories, as it’s so applicable.

A new client I was working with mentioned that whenever he went out for a run his first interval would be abysmal, but after taking a short walking break, all subsequent intervals felt great up until the end of the workout.

I asked what he was doing for a warm-up, and he told me that he was using a dynamic warm-up for runners that he got out of a running magazine.

So I suggested an experiment. Next time he went out for a run, instead of his usual warm-up, he was to do 3 sets of 10 bodyweight reps of the three exercises that regularly tested best for him in the gym.

Can you predict the outcome of this little experiment?

Sure enough, his first interval felt just as good as the rest of them. As it turns out, his regular warm-up did not test well for him at all, so subsequent movement suffered. The running itself seems to have tested well, so it was only after he took a short break that things reset and he was able to benefit from that movement. Switching to a warm-up of things that tested well allowed what followed to be performed at higher function.

It’s Only a Matter of Time

If you use biofeedback long enough, you are guaranteed to have the seminal moment in which you test an exercise and your range of motion is suddenly and significantly reduced. This may take a few sessions, a few months, or more than a year depending on what you do and how you move. But it WILL happen when you find something that significantly conflicts with what is best for your body.

Until then – keep testing.

 

You’ve almost certainly seem them, maybe you’ve even committed it to memory. Rep range charts are to lifting weights as cooking temperature charts are to grilling. If you’ve never seen one, allow me to be your first:

Maybe yours has slightly different reps, or is represented by a spectrum with some overlap, but the general idea remains as similar as it is misleading. Low reps for strength, high reps for muscle, conditioning, or no results depending on who you ask.

This chart, as a heuristic, is not without value. If this is the first time you’re seeing it, you’re probably learning something useful today. Low reps with heavy weight tends to increase adaptation to maximal strength, and higher reps with necessarily lighter weight results in more hypertrophy as a result of stimulating the mechanisms for muscular hypertrophy.

Looked at from the logical conclusion, doing 20-rep sets of squats or deadlifts is never going to allow you to realize your potential 1-rep maximum.

Likewise, only lifting heavy singles is never going to allow you to realize your maximum muscular potential.

But memorizing this chart that is intended to be a heuristic can be incredibly misleading!

It can lead someone whose primary goal is strength development to never wander past the 5th rep.

And it can lead someone who wants to get swolerjacked to never approach their maximal weight limits.

So the question is what you should do instead?

Do ALL of the rep ranges, some of the time.

The reason for varying your rep ranges is an example of the whole being greater than the sum of it’s parts, or one plus one equals three.

• Maximum strength potential can’t be achieved without maximizing the physical size of the levers acting on the muscle. All else being equal a bigger muscle is stronger than a smaller one. This can not be achieved by training only low repetitions for “strength”.
• Maximum hypertrophy potential can’t be achieved without eventually moving bigger weights to increase mechanical tension. Only lifting for “hypertrophy” by keeping reps high and weights low will eventually put a ceiling on your strength.
• Bone is probably best encouraged to remodel and increase in density through heavy loading.
• Softer tissues like tendons and ligaments are probably best remodeled by higher-rep training.
• While even just a few high-load singles or doubles of a large compound movement like squat, deadlift, or bench press may fatigue you enough that further productive training of those movements is impossible, high-rep training of pieces of the whole is almost always still possible.
• High-rep training in exclusivity fails to prepare you in myriad ways (due to SAID principle) to handle loads at or near your maximum potential. In other words, you specifically adapt to what you do, so if you never work near your limit, you can’t work near your limit.
• Finally, in terms of scope and breadth function – which I am always trying to optimize – training at both ends of the spectrum gives you the widest range of function.

Each of these ends of the spectrum, taken alone, may be beneficial. But together they form Voltron.

Anecdotally, I can tell you that the single fastest way to jump start someone’s flatlined progress, if they have always been training in a particular rep range, is to change it up. A perennial 5-3-1 lifter can start making almost astonishing gains when they start including 8, 12, and 20 rep sets.

Which will inevitably bring up the idea in some people’s minds that you can’t do high rep, or 20-rep sets of deadlifts.

This is nonsense.

One of the things that helped me build an indomitable deadlift (and back) was doing outrageous feats of volume in the deadlift. Workouts of 100 reps, or sets of 20 were not at all uncommon (although I’ll note that over all my training my deadlift average reps per set is 5.9). In 2014 at Juggernaut’s BUS3 Brandon Lily told me that one of the things that helped him build his deadlift is the “stupid shit” they would do with it. Sets on the minute, high rep sets, etc. In other words, lots of volume, lots of density, and lots of variability.

People get so stuck on rep ranges, and ideas about how many reps they should be doing for their goals. Here is the answer from my buddy @maxshank. Check out my blog at dellanave.com for an extended article on the topic. Link in bio.

A video posted by David Dellanave (@ddn3d) on Aug 24, 2015 at 9:17am PDT

All of this to say, sometimes do a lot of reps, sometimes do one rep.