Value in the Gym, Part 1

Approaching Lifting Through the Lens of Value

Mark Brown

September 15, 2022

The concept of value is essential to understanding why and how stuff gets done. This goes foes the gym, work, home, everywhere. For some areas of life, such as business, the discussion of value is inherently in everyone’s face overtly. Others it gets buried like the lead in a magazine essay. So this idea of value at the gym really is about understanding what one’s long term fitness and strength training goals are. From there, a lifter is able to plot the path to success with far greater accuracy. All of the concepts I outlined in The Road to Disciple help get to the point where what is actually valuable to the overall stated goal and what isn’t. Some chapters of it are more pertinent to it than others. I have learned quite a few lessons regarding value in the gym over the last 8 months that have become very clear lately. Today’s essay is about the idea of value, the lessons of 2022 and how they became clearer.

I have written many times about my movement to a session structure that is more in line with powerlifting than bodybuilding for the vast majority of my strength training so I won’t repeat all of it here. What I will do is to put into the specific context of what this essay is about. Different strength sports prioritize certain areas of strength gain over others. That’s just another way of saying that different sports have different stated goals. A lot of times lifts, rep ranges, sets, etc will overlap in term of presence but differ in importance. Understanding what the long term goal actually is becomes the the most important step in many ways. I have heard Dave Tate and many guests on his podcast Table Talk speak about strength and fitness goals that are 2 or more years in the future. It’s particularly interesting to hear accomplished powerlifters talk about goals in this way because good discipline can promote a very narrow snapshot of the moment if not carefully guarded against. Official competitions help tether longer term goals to daily improvement with the allure of an external reward for success. Depending on the person, that may or may not help someone’s motivation. Success in these events definitely helps mindset stay positive. It reinforces the thought that improvement, whatever the specifics of it become, is possible and well within reach if discipline is maintained. A positive mindset is a must if improvement is to be made and goals are to be met.

Value is best seen through the actions people take. Sometimes what people talk about valuing lines up with actions they take, but it’s hardly a given. The world presents us with an ever changing set of circumstances that challenge everybody’s individual core values. I like the way Colin Cowherd puts it best. Loyal readers know this phrase by now. “People tell you who they are all the time, you just have to listen.” He’s not referring to the words that come out of people’s mouths, but to the actions they take. Often times, life circumstances cause situations that put a gap in between what we say we value and what we actually value. Finances, relationships, and business all put us in positions that outright require lying to either someone’s face or behind their back to just get to the next situation in our lives. Our actions become the best and easiest way to identify what we and others value as a result of that. People are best off accepting the truth of the value they get from the actions they take rather than do mental gymnastics it takes to deny it. This is where truth can become harsh, unwanted and harder to accept as a result. That leads to progress never being made on the stated goals and self-evaluation never gets to where it needs to be for it to become useful to anyone.

Strength training and the various strength sports adhere to the principle that values are best seen through actions thoroughly. What makes the former challenging is that the latter is all over the place with what lifts competitors are judged on during official competitions. This is an exceedingly important thing that lifters need to understand when approaching work in the gym. Competitions act as goals to be met. As such, everything that is done must be completed with them in mind. Powerlifters must complete single reps of bench press, squat and deadlift at competitions. Weightlifters are judged on the snatch and clean and jerk. Strongman and CrossFit athletes need to be prepared for just about anything, especially the former. Bodybuilders are literally judged on their physical appearance. What differentiates strength sports from sports that employ strength training as general physical preparedness, shortened down to gpp in a lot of texts and chats, is the overlap of exercises that occurs in every day training. Any discussion of value in training must start with the understanding of the goal(s) in mind because the overlap I just mentioned can lead to a lot of mistakes and time lost very easily. Competitions create artificial time limits that give a sense of urgency to lifters to get everything right the first time.

Once the specific long term goals have been understood, the planning phase can begin to make them happen. One of the biggest obstacles any lifter will have to deal with when developing a lifting plan is how to deal with energy and time. These 2 factors limit what lifters are capable of accomplishing in any given training session. This means that individual sessions have to be focused and efficient if the long term goals will be accomplished when they are planned to be. Daily gym work can feel like it doesn’t matter because it is repetitive. Understanding the value of the daily gym work for succeeding in long term goals is essential. It really is easy to forget just how important consistency is when goals seem so far away. There are ways to make training sessions feel fresher than they really are. I’ve gone over a few recently but I will re-iterate that working in 3 week long waves helps the body bring up weaker lifts and forces lifters to keep thinking about future strategy. Quickening the pace by altering rest periods is another. That typically means less focus will be on the weights lifted and more put on the effort level given. Muscular development isn’t ideal for some lifts that are done with regularity, like bench press, but it will have other physical and mental benefits. There are lots of other tricks lifters can do to freshen up lifting sessions without doing any harm.

“Value” doesn’t always mean “best.” It can only be gauged in terms of “better comparative to what is available.” The “best” option doesn’t mean any one alternative is objectively better than another in every situational. So understanding that “value” is situational at best needs to be learned very quickly if consistent progress is to be made. Improvement is made in the margins, especially for seasoned lifters. The bench press is a great example of a lift that requires high levels of both strength and technique to really max out its potential. While someone can add significant weight to the bar relatively quickly by pressing with more precise technique, they will inevitably hit a wall if they don’t continuously strengthen their triceps, lats and deltoids. Doing bench press every week will help improve the technique if they doing it correctly but doesn’t develop the muscles that are doing the pressing effectively. That makes the bench press a lift that is better at telling the lifter where they need to get stronger and bad at developing that strength. The improvement of the bench press for any lifter whose goal is a better 1RM, 3RM or just more raw strength overall must be made by increasing the strength of the muscle groups that do the movement. That’s where the margins are for any main movement lift. If a lifter doesn’t choose supplemental/accessory lifts well or does them in a rep and set scheme that doesn’t take full advantage of what the lift does, then plateau purgatory is likely in their future.

What makes the process of improvement in the margins particularly hard for any lifter is the timer I mentioned above. They also get so many cracks at it during the session to get it right. If they stay at it long enough, learning through failure will happen until it finally sinks in. This process helps the lifter understand alternatives to whatever lift they are doing, which are nigh infinite given access to enough equipment. Then it comes down to choosing the best one of the situation the lifter is in on the given day. Working in 3 week waves complicates this a bit because “best” in this case doesn’t always mean the same lift. It could be the lift one is strongest or weakest in. Remember, the rising tide effects all boats. The last few weeks have been instructive in teaching situational choices. I have found that certain accessory lifts I do regularly deliver better results after using specific specialized bars than other bars. I’ve always known it to be a possibility, but to actually feel the difference was illuminating. Accessory lifts almost always focus on muscular development and don’t deal require the same amount of total body energy that main or supplemental lifts do. The latter is really where a lifter needs to get the most value of the lift they choose to do.

Supplemental lifts are done to help improve 1 more aspects of the main lift and are usually done in the 3-6 rep range in my experience. That means a lifter puts enough weight on the bar or dumbbell in their hand for no less than 3 reps and no more than 6. Given enough weight, that’s plenty of volume depending on the number of sets a lifter does. A lot of time and energy are going to be expended in this phase of a session. Getting this right consistently will keep paying dividends for weeks and months to come. Specialized equipment can become extremely useful for a lifter in this situation. It can bring alternatives into play that wouldn’t exist otherwise to their benefit. Certain lifts are physically demanding in ways that isn’t helpful under any circumstance but are well worth doing once those demands can be passed. I will use a specific example of a lift that I stopped doing about 6 weeks ago because I wasn’t finding much value in to illustrate this point.

For the first 6 months of 2022, I continued to do seated overhead dumbbell press in the 8-12 rep range as my main shoulder lift on Wednesdays following my sets of chest pressing as I have in the past. I start about 55 pounds and work my way to 70 or 75. That rep range puts it more in line with an accessory but it’s still a significant lift. What prompted me to stop was the progress I was seeing from doing one heavy supplemental lift on Sunday after pressing. I know from experience that getting the dumbbells up into position gets progressively harder each dumbbell up the ladder. When I get to the 75 pound dumbbells I can barely get them into the front rack position even with that odd cheater curl-half jerk thing I do to get it there. I have failed to get them there more times than I would like to admit. I just decided it wasn’t worth the effort of fighting the dumbbell into position when I have the equipment to do somewhat the same lift but be able to put the bar a position that was ready to be lifted or could be cleaned into position. For those wondering, those lifts are the seated overhead press with the American Cambered Bar or a clean and press variation I do with a log or viking press. What made the seated overhead dumbbell press even less valuable was that by the time I get to the 70-75 pound dumbbells I can really do 6-8 reps with them. The fight wasn’t worth the reps I was getting out of it. This is not to say overhead dumbbell pressing is gone forever from my planning, because it’s very much my primary for when I go to the gym. There’s not a lot of alternatives at the gym I am a member of. In my current situation, it’s not worth my time or energy.

That’s just one example of times I have thought of value in the gym. I have a second part of this essay planned talking about specific points of value to illustrate what I am trying to say here. The last 6 months have been pretty eye opening on this subject for me. Having spent almost all of my lifting sessions in the garage this summer has made me very cognizant of the concept of value. The improvement I have made in strength, muscular and technical development has really shown me a clearer picture of how to stay on this path. I’m hoping to pass that along in this essay and the ones that follow.