Weight Lifting Essentials: 2023 Version

As we want to lift more, it’s good to know the essentials. And here are three to get us started.

Weight Lifting Essential #1: Training Heavy

Lifting light or medium- weights doesn’t give that many benefits. After we get a foundation of fitness (perhaps after two months for absolute beginners), we want to lift heavy. Heavy will mean different levels to every person, yet we could define it as lifting enough to come close to our one-repetition maximum most weeks.

Lifting heavy means lowering the number of repetitions (reps) per set. That means not every set you do should have you grinding out 10–15 reps. While high-rep sets have some value, for multi-joint moves like squats/bench presses/deadlifts, sets of 3–5 reps are golden. You’ll use more weight, building more pure strength. And as you progress, that new strength will enable you to lift heavier weights.

If you deadlift 200 pounds just one time, your body adapts in a better, different way than if you deadlifted 125 pounds eight times.

By forcing your body to adapt to a very heavy workload, your bones, nervous system, joints and muscles all need to adapt and become more anti fragile in order to pick up that much weight. By forcing our bodies to adapt to the maximum level of chaos with weights, we get much more stronger and gain more benefit than just doing light reps.

Fitness expert Alex Feinberg articles the virtue of heavy lifting in this podcast. He eschews the…