I’ve been a gym member for 10 years and I’ve been training seriously (with goals and some base knowledge about lifting) for about 3 years now, and it’s only today that I understood what “weight” was. Not literally, but in a weight training context. I used to train with weights that made me unconfortable, weights that made me do about 8 to 12 reps (the normal bodybuilders’ rep range for hypertrophy), without really trying to lift more the next week. Just lifting the same weights week after week until I felt that I could put a little more on the bar or take a bigger dumbbell. I have not seen much progression in strength, even though I lost a great amount of fat and gained muscle mass. I was getting fitter, but not stronger.
A few weeks ago, I made a new workout program with the objectives of getting stronger, which meant putting more weight and doing less reps. As a beginner in “strength”, I figured that I better get myself used to a 3-6 reps range for this program, strength programs don’t normally allow more than 5 reps per set, and generally around 1 to 3 reps per set. I also decided to write everything I do in a notebook, what exercices, for how many sets and reps, and also the amount of weight used. So at each training, I know exactly what I did last time, so if I was able to do more reps than the program allowed, I add some weight to make the rep count drop.
I’ve been doing this program for about two months now, and I know pretty much the exact “max” weight I can take to stay in the rep range I defined. In fact, after just a month it was already clear. And I must say that this method has already shown me that I’m much stronger than I thought I was. And this is exactly where the title of this article takes its meaning. I understood what “weight” was, especially “heavy weight”. I can’t count how many times I read “lift heavy” in bodybuilding/fitness articles, I thought I knew what it meant, but I didn’t. I especially experienced its true meaning while doing deadlifts and shoulder presses at about a month into my program. So like I said earlier, now that I write everything in my notebook, I can make progress towards lifting the more weight I can while still being in a safe range for my body (because it prevents me from randomly choosing too much weight).
Ok, first, if you know a little about strength, you probably know that the main exercises used to compare lifters to each others are the bench press, the squat and the deadlift. It seems to be the bare minimum to squat and deadlift at least your own bodyweight (not bodyweight squatting and deadlift but doing squats and deadlifts with a bar that weights as much as yourself), and doing twice your bodyweight on these exercises before you can even consider yourself being a strong person. Bench press seems to be at 1.75x your bodyweight. As a beginner, my goal is to get to squat and deadlift my bodyweight, which is about 180 pounds.
So, that day I was at the 155 pounds mark on my deadlift, and I understood two things, what a real deadlift is, and what “heavy weight” is (I haven’t got the same feeling with squats yet, but I’m sure it’s coming soon too). From what I’ve said just before, 155 pounds is not much weight for a deadlift, but for my current level, it is. Until that day, I’ve been deadlifting around 135 pounds (one 45 pounds plate on each side and the barbell itself), which was enough to get me tired, and maybe working my lower back a little, but not much else. I just had to watch my form to do it correctly. But at a weight near my current limit, things got quite different. It wasn’t only about keeping good form anymore, it was about doing everything I could to keep my body from collapsing to the ground. I have to admit that I still didn’t feel much in my legs, but my core (lower back and abs) was ready to burst out of me as well as my forearms and traps. At this moment I realized how much every muscles have to work together to make it happen. And I can’t achieve this muscle concerto with light/moderate weights. So this is it, lifting heavy means that the weight is so heavy that you have no other choice than to solicit nearly every muscles in your body to manage to do each rep.
The same thing happened to me while doing heavy barbell shoulder presses (standing), it wasn’t as obvious as it was while doing deadlifts because I had to put a lot less weight on the bar to be able to lift it over my head. But the end result is really similar. With light to moderate weights, it’s a shoulder movement, with heavy weights, it becomes a lot more because all the rest of the body has to stay tight to avoid collapsing under the bar. The first few times, I thought that my back was about to bend backward under the pressure, to finally realize that contracting my glutes and core would make the movement workable without pain (and keeping me from collapsing under the bar).
So from a movement targeting few muscles with light weights, it soon becomes nearly a full body workout just by itself when you put enough plates on the bar. One last note before closing this article, when I say max weight for an exercise, I mean the max weight I can lift while still being able to keep good form and while having the weight under control from start to finish. All this to minimize the risk of injury. Because there’s no use to being strong if you can’t actually use it because of injuries.