The intensity spectrum

In ordered to achieve your goals you need to understand how training at different intensities effects your desired outcome.

Above is a depiction of the different levels of intensity relative to your 1 rep max (1RM). Underneath that, you’ll see how this roughly corelates to the number of reps you can perform at that level of intensity, below that shows which system is most effected by that style of training; whether it is more muscular or neurological, and finally which training effect is achieved.

It is important to note that this is a spectrum. There is always some neurological and muscular adaptations happening within our training but how you train biases different ends of the spectrum.

First of all, let’s begin by defining what intensity is. When it is applied to resistance training ‘intensity’ is a percentage of your 1RM. 100% intensity would be the most amount of weight that you can lift for one repetition. Your 5 RM, for example, would be around 89% of your 1RM . So if you can squat 100kg for 1 rep. You can probably squat around 89 kilos for 5 reps.

These percentages are from strengthlevel.com which is a great website for calculating your strength relative to other lifters.

You’ll notice that as you get further away from your 1RM the difficulty between one rep and the next decreases significantly; the difference in difficulty between the 9th rep and the 10th rep of a set could be the difference between reaching muscular failure or not. Now imagine if you can do 50 reps of a given movement, chances are you could probably do 51 and 52 and 53 etc. It gets harder to reach muscular failure the further away you get from your 1RM.

Training close to your 1RM increases the demand on your neurological system. This is why bodybuilders tend to work within the 5 - 30 rep range because it’s easier to reach muscular failure and is more stimulates the muscular system more than the neurological system.

Power lifters and people who want to increase their max effort strength will work up to peaking phases where they lift very close to their 1RM, training mostly with sets of 1 - 3 reps. Training in this way strengthens the neural pathways from the brain to your muscles allowing you to contract more muscle fibres quicker and produce more force.

It’s important to understand what level of intensity you need to train at to illicit the training effect you desire. If you want to gain as muscle as possible training exercises at repetitions higher than 30 reps isn’t the most effective way to train and will result in less gains.

If, like most people, you don’t have any specific goals other than training to stay healthy and look better, it’s probably most beneficial for you train a bit of everything, either in specific training blocks or spread over different work outs throughout the week. Anyway that will allow you stay consistent for a long period of time.

If, however, you have more specific goals like planche or 50 pull ups , then identifying what level of intensity is most important for you to train at is important to maximise your gains and 80% of your training should be done at that specific intensity while the other 20% can be in other rep ranges.