MiniWorkoutDad Workout: How Much Weight Do You Need?

Even though you are not a bodybuilder, you need to do this for health and longevity.

Starting as young as our thirties, you begin losing muscle to Sarcopenia. If this is news to you and you’re interested to know more, you can read all about it in “Age Healthier and Slower: The Scientific Proof for Resistance Workouts“.

Just in case you’re a woman and already thinking, “But, I don’t want to become bulky“; unless you take anabolic steriods at the same time, you won’t. You don’t have sufficient testosterone to look like a man.

In order to increase muscle size (so you can at least put back what you’re losing), you need to achieve a state called hypertrophy. There’s more on what’s sufficient to achieve that later on.

The word “cardio” is enough to raise a groan from many an older reader. Perhaps because in the 70s and 80s it became synonymous with burning calories.

The (daft) idea was you could eat more of what you want, if you were prepared to pound the pavements of your neighbourhood in your Nikes, burning it off. We now know better: you can’t exercise off a bad diet!

In recent times, the benefit of doing short but intense bursts of cardio has become more widely understood. So, instead of plodding, you need to be closer to sprinting (ideally uphill!). This has the benefit of:

1. Raising your basal metabolic rate for an extended period (burning more calories)
2. Pushing your cardio endurance to ever higher levels (making you fitter!)

Short intense cardio is what you’re trying to achieve doing my workout, so you need to be getting seriously out of breath and heading towards your heart rate max.

You aim for intensity, so you don’t need to go jogging for hours every week!

You can read more about this workout’s potential role in weight loss here.

You’re ticking the “sustained contraction” box at 15 secs per hold and, by rough approximation, the total contraction duration gets done in 6 cycles. So, if you work at 70% of your maximum strength/ Maximum Voluntary Contraction (MVC), you’ll be guaranteed results!

My bag currently weighs 60lb / 27.2kg and that feels pretty heavy in Phase 2 especially. If that is 70% of my MVC, that suggests the most I could hold momentarily is 86lbs/ 38.9kg, which seems plausible. I know that, after a couple of cycles, maintaining Phase 2 for 15 seconds becomes challenging – as does Phase 3 off the back of it.

Observations of effort

In the scientific studies, the percentages and timings are merely observations recording total effort. The difference in the second study was that the extra repetitions were done, not to a specified weight+time, but to absolute maximum effort (failure!). The muscles (biceps Brachii, Brachialis and Brachioradialis) were pushed to the limit of their capability.

This is what I mean, when I talk about working out with intensity. You must be struggling to maintain holds and make lifts as your workout progresses. Then you can be sure that you are pushing your limits and entering the zone where progress lies.

Intensity of effort is critical to progress — that’s why I always use the workout video…

It drives you on, keeps your technique tight, and prevents cheating on counts. More info here

The objective is to find the weight at which you can sustain Phase 2 (the Upper Front Isometric) for 30 seconds before failure. This should be your all out, arms shaking, effort.

Men should probably start testing weights from 15kg up; women from around 10kg.

Be sure to take 2 minute breaks between each attempt. If you don’t, you’re going to gradually exhaust the muscles and get a low test result.

When doing the workout, you’ll notice that making the lifts becomes progressively challenging. This is because of a “chain of exhaustion” that’s occuring, where muscles are repeatedly hit isometrically at different muscles lengths and also in motion; eccentrically in the lifts and concentrically in the transitions.

The isometrics are the bulk of the work in the workout. They have the much larger role in exhausting the muscles. But, in doing so, they make lifting and lowering the weight far more challenging. This enables the lifts and transitions to have a bigger impact on our muscles at a lighter weight, as we push our limits. They are like the hard last rep, not the easy first one!

I’ve spent hours – days in total – pouring over scientific research reports looking for the magic numbers, only to discover what’s obvious, when you think about it. The only two things we really need to understand when choosing our workout weight are these:

1. Your body only changes to adapt to greater demands and they can only be found at the edge of your current capabilities. If you’re not struggling, you’re not growing.
2. 95% or more of what you do in your workout is laying the foundations, but you haven’t built anything until you do that toughest last 5% of effort.

Steve — MiniWorkoutDad