One question a lot of people ask as they are going through their workout program is how do you measure how intense it is? A personal trainer may want to increase the intensity and you may feel like the intensity is already too high? How do you know if the intensity is not high enough?
What the heck is intensity?
The intensity of the workout is how hard it makes you work. The intensity is too high if you are barely able to perform more than one or two repetitions of the same exercise. For example, let’s say you were handed a pair of 25 lb weights. You are told to perform bicep curls with the 25 lb weights. Now, it’s likely that you can do it – at least once or twice. But after two or three, your arms tremble violently and the fourth curl you are ready to drop the weights entirely and you can’t even begin to consider making a fifth.
Your workout is at too high a level of intensity.
The point is to work to muscle fatigue, not failure. There are many exercises and routines where you may want to achieve failure on your last repetition, but not in the early part of it.
Maintenance and strength training should work at moderate intensity, helping you to build muscle tone, muscle strength and muscle endurance. All of these will help you burn calories more efficiently, recover more efficiently and build your strength at regular intervals without risking severe injury or worse.
A great way to measure whether weight intensity is good for you is to use the following value system to judge the weights you are using:
Based on the above example, using 10lb weights for bicep curls. You will perform 3 sets of 10 repetitions each.
During the first set, you should be able to perform the curls comfortably, perhaps feeling some tightness at the end of the 10th repetition.
During the second set, you will feel some tiredness and some mild burning by the end of the second 10th repetition.
During the third set, you will be exerting effort to perform each curl, the last 4 or 5 repetitions should be hard, sweating effort. By the time you reach the 10th repetition of the third set, you should honestly feel like you cannot curl anymore.
If you can push past that tenth, then go for the eleventh and twelfth. But you should feel that failure.
If you experience that, then you are working at the correct intensity. If it is too easy, perhaps increase your weights to 12 lbs. If it is too hard, decrease to 8 lbs. Discover the right intensity level in order to make the most of your workout.