The Anatomy of Your Resistance Training Workout – Part 3

Welcome to article three of a six part series breaking apart the details of a resistance training workout (Kerksick 2011; Spiering et al. 2008). My first articles focused upon two instrumental variables, choice of exercise and order of exercise, that operate effectively to ensure you are using ideal exercises to meet your goals and then how that you are performing them in a manner that will help lead to optimal adaptations. The current article, however, is going to discuss the impact of the grand-daddy of all the variables and that is load or intensity. I will say it early and likely several times again throughout this article that achieving and sustaining optimal levels of exercise intensity are the most important consideration of any workout whether it’s a weight workout or an endurance workout. This is certainly more important if an individual is particularly interested in increasing performance of some task whether it’s to improve a 5K time, jump higher or bench press more weight than their workout buddy.