Introduction

There are many approaches to training intensity in the fitness community. It can be hard to know what advice to follow that will give you the best results. This article should help clarify some of the confusion around training intensity and give you a good starting point to help you out.

The terms

I want to go over a few terms that will help us define training intensity so that we can be accurate and precise with recommendations.

Reps: Short for repetition, this is made up by the lengthening and shortening phases of a muscle in an exercise.

Sets: This is how we group a number of reps. After a set is performed, rest may be needed before another set or the next exercise.

Warm-up/Feel Set: This is a set performed with the intention of not stimulating muscle growth but warming up joints and muscles for tougher sets.

Working Set: This is a set performed with the intention of stimulating muscle growth.

Training to failure: Training to failure is a term heard thrown around quite a bit when discussing training intensity. For our purposes, lets define training to failure as performing a set until you cannot complete a rep with proper form.

RPE/RIR: These terms can be used to rate intensity of a set. RPE is an acronym for rating of perceived exertion. This is a scale from 1-10 with 10 being the highest difficulty. RIR is an acronym for reps in reserve. This is a number that represents the estimated number of reps you could have performed if you continued the set. For our purposes, we will match an RPE of 10 to and RIR of 0. This reflects the maximum effort of a set in both terms for intensity.

Tips for beginners

If you are relatively new to the gym, I have good news for you regarding training intensity. You really don’t need to worry about it so much. Your top priorities right now should be consistency and rep quality. Because you are new to training, your body is highly susceptible to adaptation, and it doesn’t take much for you to grow at this point.

Try your best to have a consistent workout schedule that allows you to hit a realistic number of training sessions each week reliably. Focus on trying new exercises often but giving yourself time on each exercise to work on improving form quality.

Tips for intermediate lifters

Now that you have a consistent workout schedule and are able to perform reps with decent quality, we are going to want to take a look at introducing training intensity as something for you to pay attention to. The major problem with intermediate lifters is that they just don’t know exactly how to judge training to failure in terms of RIR or RPE.

For intermediate lifters, you should try approaching failure with most of your working sets. This will allow you to get a greater appreciation for what true failure means. We don’t want all of our working sets to be done to failure in this stage to avoid building too much training fatigue.

Tips for advanced lifters

By now, you have excellent form and have a good judgment on how to rate your intensity using RIR and RPE. In this stage, we are going to start introducing periodization of your training. We will work in phases of accumulation and deloading also known as a mesocycle.

The scope of designing a complete mesocycle is greater than this article but we can still run through the basics. Each mesocycle begins at a lower intensity and gradually increases intensity from week to week until it reaches the maximum. After the maximum intensity is reached, a deload will become necessary to allow the body to recover from the systemic fatigue endured in the past weeks. A mesocycle can last anywhere between 3 and 6 weeks typically. Using mesocycles can be an excellent way to get as much close to failure training as possible while managing fatigue in a safe way that promotes longevity.

Conclusion

Training intensity is a crucial factor that goes into building quality muscle tissue. If you follow these tips depending on your training skill level, you will be able to build muscle efficiently without raising the risk of injury.

Train smart and intentionally and you will go far.