Addressing Weaknesses and the Repetition Effort Method

Imagine you were running a relay race and you’re the fastest and most competent member of your team because you’ve run these types of races all your life (heck, maybe you come from a lineage of crazy masochistic family members who like to run for fun). However, you’re expected to handoff the baton to a newcomer to the sport who is slow, clumsy, and also incompetent. They fumble with the baton and don’t know what to do. Then, when they finally get going, it’s at a leisurely slow pace. They struggle to even stay in the team’s designated lane. Inevitably, despite your best efforts, your team loses due to the poor performance of your worst teammate. What does this have to do with your strength and fitness goals? Well, this might be how your overdeveloped quads feel about your weak glutes or hamstrings--the reason why you don’t squat or deadlift as much as you should. Or, this is how your strong biceps feel about your weak lats--the reason you struggle to do more than a few pull-ups or chin-ups. Someone or something isn’t doing its fair share of the work. This is also an analogy for how something in your kinetic chain may be broken.

You might have the quads of an 800 pound deadlifter but the glutes of a 300 pound deadlifter. In this case, you’re limited to a 300 pound deadlift because you’re only as strong as your weakest link.

You might have the triceps of a 400 pound bench presser but the chest of a 200 pound bench presser. In this case, you’re limited to a 200 pound bench press. Your triceps, in this example, are your all-star runners who carry your team. However, your chest, in this example, is like that terrible runner on your team: it isn’t strong or fast enough yet, it isn’t skilled enough yet, and it doesn’t know what the hell to do to keep up with the rest of the team or the competition. It only knows that it’s under stress and it doesn’t want to get hurt.

You really are only as strong as your weakest link. Just because the phrase is cliche doesn’t make it invalid. With this in mind, let’s observe our most fundamental lift again: the deadlift. If you have weak lats, you are more likely to be pulled and rounded forward during the lift, forcing you into a position where it is more difficult to exert force at the top of the lift. If you have weak glutes and/or hamstrings, you will struggle above the knees to lock out any respectable weight because you cannot flex your hips strong enough to finish the movement. If you have weak quads, you may struggle to initiate the movement with adequate leg drive to break the weight off the floor. Heck, if you have weak hands, a broken finger, a torn bicep, or a strained forearm then your grip on the bar is going to be dramatically affected. Even grip strength is a potential weakness that needs to be addressed.
IF YOU HAVE A WEAKNESS, ATTACK IT!

​Arnold famously said that while he worked out, he would look in the mirror, pose, identify weaknesses in his physique and “attack” those weaknesses. An NFL coach will often know the weaknesses on his team going into the offseason so as to draft or trade for players to fill those specific weaknesses (or risk opposing teams exposing and exploiting those weaknesses during the season). For example, an otherwise stacked team of extremely talented offensive and defensive players might lack a reliable field-goal kicker. This is a big deal considering that kickers, who are usually not highly regarded as “athletes” and usually don’t get much of the glory or attention, are actually responsible for the most points in NFL history. It’s not even close (https://www.pro-football-reference.com/l…/scoring_career.htm). The last time I checked, you win games by scoring more points than the opponent. Kickers just happen to do it rather quietly. Perhaps your butt is also doing its job (or underperforming at its job) quietly. Perhaps it could be doing more. Perhaps one head of your deltoids or your calves or your traps or some other muscle group is lagging when it could be thriving.

I refer to these as “sleeper” muscles. These are muscles that we don’t normally think of as contributing to anything important or ones that we haven’t yet built a strong mind-muscle connection with. Here’s the test of whether or not you have a sleeping muscle: can you make that particular muscle contract voluntarily? In other words, can you flex it? Your pecs? Your glutes? How difficult is it to do so? If you have to put a lot effort into it then you probably have an underdevelopment--a weakness--there.
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A second test is to ask yourself: what hurts? Is it the labrum in your shoulder? Is it the inside of your knee? Your left hip? Your lower back? As Louie Simmons often says, WEAK THINGS GET BROKEN. Weak things usually hurt. If a joint (or your spine) is lacking the skeletal muscle support it requires to remain stable and safe, that area will send pain signals to your brain to tell you to stop asking it to do that activity. The only way to overcome this is to become STRONGER, WAKE UP those sleeping muscles, and bring up those weaknesses. Doing so will lead to extraordinary increases in strength and size (i.e. aesthetics).

We can fix these problems with targeted repetition work. This is where “repetition effort method” comes in. The repetition effort method uses rep-ranges between 6-20 repetitions and relatively lighter weight (than the max effort method) to target specific muscular and also soft-tissue weaknesses. Remember, the tissue around your joints also has the ability to strengthen itself, it simply takes a bit longer than muscles do. A lot of heavy bench pressers (people who press in excess of 600 lbs.) often do very heavy cable pulls. Their goal is not necessarily to build bodybuilder-type lats but to strengthen the connective tissue in the elbow joint to prevent injury. They may use repetitions of dumbbell chest flies to strengthen the connective tissue in the chest or do Arnold presses to strengthen a weak rotator cuff. This is something that can’t be safely done with heavier weights and low repetitions, at least not at first.

Many of these repetition method exercises are bodybuilding-type single-joint isolation exercises as opposed to the multi-joint compound movements that powerlifters, weightlifters, and crossfitters often advocate. We sometimes call these “accessory” movements because they assist with things that the bigger movements like the squat and bench press miss. For example, someone with abnormally strong triceps may struggle to develop strong shoulders because their triceps do almost all of the work during a bench press. For this reason, they should do repetitions of overhead shoulder presses. Similarly, someone with abnormally strong quads may have greatly lagging hamstrings because their quads do almost all the work in the squat. This is where things like Romanian deadlifts, stiff-legged deadlifts, and even hamstring curls may help a lot.

​Targeting these weaknesses with repetition work not only makes you stronger and more muscular but it also helps you to prevent imbalances and injuries. By strengthening all your muscles along your kinetic chain from your feet to your head, you will become a better overall competitor.

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