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Nov. 17, 2025

How Much Should You Lift and How Often? The Real Rules for Strength, Men After 40 - 18

In this episode of Driven For Health, Coach Brian Parana continues the Strength Pyramid series with Level 2: volume, intensity, and frequency.

Coach Brian explains why men over 40 can lift heavy, lift often, and train with volume, but they cannot max out all three at once. The key is learning how to balance training stress, recovery, effort, and consistency so workouts build strength instead of causing burnout, joint pain, or stalled progress.

This episode covers how heavy to lift, when to train close to failure, why moderate reps can build muscle, how many reps and sets to use, how often to train each muscle group, and why recovery matters more as men get older.

Coach Brian also explains practical training concepts like one-rep max, rep max loads, rate of perceived exertion, reps in reserve, training volume, hypertrophy, strength work, fatigue, deload weeks, and how to organize lifting across the week.

This is a strong episode for men over 40 who want to build muscle, get stronger, improve body composition, train smarter, and understand the real rules of strength training.

Show Notes
Transcript

In this episode, Coach Brian breaks down the 3 key training variables that determine how fast you build muscle, strength, and consistency — Volume, Intensity, and Frequency.

These aren’t just numbers on a spreadsheet. They’re the gears that control your progress, recovery, and longevity in the gym.

You’ll learn:
• How to find the right balance between lifting heavy and lifting often
• Why fatigue, not effort, is what usually stalls progress
• How to structure your training week for strength and muscle without burning out
• Practical rep, set, and frequency targets that work for busy men over 40

Whether you’re just getting back into the gym or trying to break through a plateau, this episode gives you the roadmap to train smarter and finally see consistent results.

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It’s my 30 Tips in 30 Days series, a free email plan that gives you one simple, actionable tip every day to help you improve your nutrition, fitness, and overall lifestyle.

You’ll learn how to eat smarter, move better, and build small daily routines that actually last.

Just clear steps you can put to work right away.

Join for free at go.brianparana.com/30days

and start building a healthier, more confident version of yourself today.

Want help applying this to your own health, weight, energy, or lab numbers?

Coach Brian Parana offers Health Hot Seat coaching segments for men who want a clear next step with nutrition, fitness, weight loss, blood pressure, cholesterol, A1C, or daily consistency.

Learn more about The Call To Rise, a 100-day coaching program for driven men over 40 who want to lose weight, improve their health, and rebuild confidence:

www.thecalltorise.com

To connect with Coach Brian:
brian@brianparana.com

Disclaimer: This podcast is for education and coaching support only. It is not medical advice. Always work with your physician before changing medication, treatment, or medical care.

lift heavy. You can lift often. You can lift a lot, but you can't max out all three at once. The strongest lifters in the world know how to find that balance instead of fighting against it. The real art of training is learning how to push harder and when to pull back. Welcome back to Driven for Health, the podcast for men over 40 who are ready to take control of their health.
Understand nutrition amongst their crazy busy on the-go life. Build strength in the body. Build a body that they're excited about in their 50s and 60s to not only look but function and perform at their best in everyday life. I'm coach Brian Pra and in this part two of our strength pyramid series. We're going to cover volume, intensity, and frequency.
In our 17th episode, we talked about the foundation, which was adherence. You have to do the thing that you enjoy the most to be able to keep doing it. And once you're able to keep doing it, we can build on that motivation, willpower, none of that matters because you can keep the consistency up. Sure, there's going to be days that are not exciting to work out.
You're not ready for you have to squeeze a workout in or something, but in general, workout will be effortless in comparison. Today we're going up again, moving up one level to the training variables that make or break your results. Volume, intensity, frequency. These three are deeply connected. And if you learn how to balance them, you'll understand how to train efficiently [clears throat] for both size, mass, and strength without burning out, getting hurt, injured, or just not seeing results.
Part one, understanding the relationship. When we talk about volume, intensity, frequency, or BIF for short, we're talking about the gears that drive progress. Each one affects the other. Raise intensity, volume changes. At a training day, frequency and volume both rise. Push intensity to high and you limit recovery, which forces volume down.
That's why I don't stack these as separate pyramid levels. They're interlocked. They interact with each other. One affects another. Think of periodization. The plan that manages stress and recovery over time. Periodization is the frame around the entire pyramid in and of itself. It decides how much of each variable you emphasize in different phases of training.
And in general periodization schedule in any professional and amateur trainee, they're going to do three, four, five, six weeks of increasing volume intensity with a D lo week. That goes for strength training, any type of cardiovascular training, running, endurance sports, all the things. Let's break down the first variable, intensity.
Now, intensity is simply how heavy the work is and how close you train to your limit. It's not just about the load that's on the bar. It also considers other variables like your effort or rate of perceived exertion. For strength, specificity rules, a power lifter competes in a single rep max. To get the best idea of that, he has to train heavy, practice low rep sets, and refine his movement patterns until it's second nature.
He wants that bar path to be ingrained in his movement patterns so that it never shifts because a subtle even centimeter shift out of the best optimal movement pattern will then cause more stress and strain at hundreds of pounds lifted for that exercise. strength. Sure, it's about muscle size, but it is a skill on how to move the bar, the weight.
Your nervous system learns how to recruit fibers faster, coordinate movement under high, heavy load, and function at its absolute best. Specificity and hypertrophy. For muscle growth, the rules are broader. Hypertrophy simply needs mechanical tension. Hypertrophy is what most people are after. Get into the gym and build muscle. That's what hypertrophy means.
It needs mechanical tension and your muscle pushes closer to failure with enough total work, total volume, total overall capacity on that system that you're working. You don't have to live in the three rep range. Studies by Shonfeld and Campo show that if volume is equal, sets of 10 can build just as much muscle as sets of three or even sets of 15 and even sets of up to 25 or even 30.
Sciencebacked information these days. The difference the three rep group got stronger because of the heavier loads and the skill practice of again moving that barbell in the right patterns of movement. What this means so that heavy weights are required for strength. Moderate to heavy weights can drive size.
Right? We see that if you want to get stronger, you lift lower reps, usually five or less. you want to gain size or generally 8 to 12, possibly 15 reps. Why some load still matters for you when you're working. Now, if intensity didn't matter, walking around the earth would make everyone jacked, right? You just you could just live and you'd be strong.
But there's a threshold. Once load dropouts below roughly 20 rep max territory, muscle growth falls off fast unless you do two or three times as much work, which becomes inefficient. I like to think of this as if I am doing walking lunges. I can do what feels like a 100 walking lunges before I get that big fatigue. I honestly just feel like I'm taking long steps.
In converse, if I take 50 lb dumbbells and I start doing walking lunges. Shoot, I get 10 or 15 and my legs are burning. They say, "Okay, we're done. Let's put these things down and rest for a bit." You see the difference? In general, for any guy listening, we want to maximize our time and intensity and the time duration that we have for our workouts.
Why why does this happen? Because the only the few challenging reps of that set for say 20 25 30 those are the ones that are say effective reps. They're recruiting all available muscles. The first 5 10 15 you're just going through the motions in a sense moving. That's why you need to apply a certain amount of intensity and load to get stronger.
Moderate and heavier loads get you to those efficient reps faster. If you want to dive deeper, look up Furelli's Myors method. It's built on that concept. We'll certainly cover that in later episodes, but for what our purposes are here for just volume, intensity, frequency, that bit BIF model, it we're going to keep it light and simple.
Ways that you can measure intensity. Number one, percentage of one rep max. Okay, you'll see it as percent symbol 1 RM oftent times abbreviated useful for main lifts but limited for smaller movements or high rep work. Everyone's rep to percentage curve is different. Meaning that one person might hit eight reps at 80% while another only five reps to hit 80%.
It just depends on your ability, strength, your exercise history, your muscles ability to produce force. There are certainly guys at my height of 6 foot and 190 lbs that can recruit a significant more muscle fiber and concentrated strength to lift heavier one rep maxes than I do. I would love to be able to bench do 25 and I certainly could go through strength protocols to do so, but right now in terms of what I'm trying to do is staying fit healthy and lead my guys in the call to rise program, I just focus on functionality and getting the workouts in and of
course doing challenging amounts of volume so that I'm sore. I also want to build muscle or maintain the muscle in my body. I'm checking all those boxes. The second way to measure intensity are rep max loads. Instead of testing a single max, which potentially could be higher risk for the reward, you could find a five or 10 rep max.
And when we say max, we literally want the fifth rep to be so exhausted or 10th one to be so exhausted that you literally can't do it another rep after that. This allows you to perform the program and sets slightly lower [sighs] to those to stay a little bit shy of failure, but also a little bit shy of increased risk. Now, in the last episode, I talked about my experience with the 5x5 programming, starting strength.
Tons of fun until the barbell got so stinking heavy I mentally couldn't move it before I got to the barbell itself. And the weight that I did that I remember 290 for biceps of five dive squats felt as if it was going to squash me. I then shifted to Wendler 531 programming for a number of months and that was what this is doing say 80% of your one rep max which allowed me to do a lot more effort with a lot less risk of injury.
Now to the third way to measure intensity is our PE, rate of perceived exertion or some people call it reps in reserve. And this is definitely a personal judgment on how many reps you can do before you actually fail. RPA of 10 is failure. You can't do another rep. Nine is just one rep left. Eight, two reps.
This is definitely personal experience and changes daytoday based on your energy, effort, experience, fatigue for the week, what movements you did, all those things. A big question I get so many times in my DMs is, should I train to failure? Failure can of course increase activation of muscle, activation of strength and and getting you the best opportunities to gain that strength, but it also limits how much work total work total volume you can do in an individual training session.
If you max out your first set of bench press at five reps, it's likely your next two sets might drop two or three reps for each of those. Or you might have to lower the weight down to complete the number of reps you wanted in each set. If you stop one rep shy, you could likely hold four reps for each set for your say doing five.
But the total volume means that you're going to if you you end up doing that, you'll have less total volume, which means less opportunity for muscle growth and be stimulated to produce more muscle. it might be likely to start a little bit less. And of course, of course, of course, of course, you should be documenting this journey as you go in your notes, whether it's on your phone or good old pen and paper, pencil paper, writing down your exercise and your sets work amazing.
I remember going way back to 2011. I had been working with a client of mine, Betsy Finland. She was never trained before her age of 50 and I met her at 55. She started coming to my boot camp classes, spinning ab class that I taught at this gym. And then from there, I progressed and and opened up a CrossFit gym. She came with me.
Now, we literally tracked I just tracked and would write down what she did for her workouts. And I was able to get this woman to deadlift 250 lbs, lift 100 pounds over her head, rope climb, do pull-ups, all sorts of crazy stuff because we just focused on doing two and a half to five more pounds.
Can I get her to lift more than she did the last time? It was insane how strong she got and capable. She ultimately ended up becoming CrossFit world champion at the age of 60 in 2011. You can Google it, Brian Brana, Betsy Finley CrossFit, and you'll find a video of my younger self talking under the what used to be the Home Depot Center out in LA.
Such a cool experience. But that goes to the fact of if you know what you're doing, [snorts] you're practicing volume, intensity, and frequency, you can get pretty darn strong at any age. Most six-year-olds, even men, have a hard time deadlifting 250 lbs, and she weighed about 140 at best.
Now going back to should I train to failure. We use failure strategically. Save it for isolation work like bicep curls, tricep extensions or lateral raises, things like that. Take the final set of an exercise to failure occasionally for extra stimulus. Avoid failure on big compounds due to D loads or high stress weeks. Remember, [snorts] if you're building up heavier heavier each set week and all, then you are capable of just adding D losses and keeping the work volume high and D loads to rest and recover yourself.
That's fine. Another one that my buddy Chris and I when we work out, we love doing long partials or as we call them havsies, which would be meaning to go to the the the end of the range of motion, say a bench press from your chest halfway up or a pulling a barbell row pulling from the bottom to halfway up.
We call those havsies. And we would just stay in that rep range, not not little reps, but actual the movement pattern range of from chest to halfway up. And you just go back and forth, not bouncing the weight up and down or anything, but nice slow controlled up and down after we did a normal set of full range of motion. And you see these become pretty popular on the the YouTubes and fit influencers for long partial reps.
And I love doing them occasionally to mix in for extra stimulus on that last set. Practical takeaways here for hypertrophy is spend about 3/4 of your work in that 6 to 12 rep range. I even say for guys 8 to 12. Eight meaning that it's heavy. 12 meaning you should probably go up in weight. And you can go through that span of those four rep range there to justify where you're at and when to add it in.
Now, we can occasionally sprinkle in some other three to five reps or even lighter 15 to 20 occasionally just to mix it up for your body to cause more challenge for the hypertrophy. That's fine. And again, scientific studies have been showing that even 20 or 25 reps still build muscle just as much as the other ones.
I'm still going to hang out in that 8 to 12 rep range. Just going back to that walking lunge example. For strength purposes, keep roughly 3/4 of your work in that one to six rep range with a quarter in the higher reps for muscle and joint health. meaning that say threequarters of the workout you're going to do heavy and then in the last part you'll just do some higher volume sets to get more volume in a little bit more work intensity and that will be good does have its place but it needs a purpose okay you can't just throw it in there randomly you'll never get the true
strength of volume that you're looking for and and muscle mass that you want part Three is volume here. And volume is the total work that you perform. It's reps times sets times the load gives you your volume. Example, 10 sets of 10 reps equals times 10 pounds. That would be a,000 sets or 1,000 pounds of weight moved.
Or let's go simple. Three sets of 10 reps with 10 pounds. That would be 100 pounds move. And this is the total volume in the workout that you want to slowly keep creeping up over time. Say 5 to 10% more every single workload that you do. Now this both drives muscle growth and the practice of consistently doing this builds the strength skill itself that you can work the skill set of moving weight in movement patterns to develop the strongest response in your body that you are going for here which is important. And you want to make sure
that you are focusing on that increased muscle mass here, that increased strength here that we do. When your volume goes up, strength and hypertrophy will rise until they they don't they'll stop. At some point, there's a decrease in returns. And at that certain point, the return per set drops and the fatigue climbs faster than your actual say fitness or muscle response will.
This was a foundation back in the fitness fatigue model of 1982 proposed by Banister. Training builds both fitness and fatigue. So let's define this dual responses of this model of fitness and fatigue. Every training session produces both a positive effect say improved fitness and it has a negative effect on fatigue. Okay.
fitness will improve and fatigue will start to build. Now the opposite effects of this is fitness enhances performance while fatigue will reduce it. If we get too fatigued, your fitness performance will decrease. Right? Think of training too many times in a row and then you have to take a mandatory rest day because your body just isn't functioning or firing as it should.
Now, part of the performance equation here is the resulting performance is essentially the net balance between these two components. Performance equals your total fitness minus fatigue. Meaning that you'll have increased performance if you have more fitness and less fatigue. Which means that you need to sprinkle in specific rest days or different training cycles to allow for fatigue to keep lowering down.
Muscle fatigue, joint fatigue, tendon, ligament fatigue, and also something that people don't think about is your your nervous system fatigue. That's a real thing. your nervous system will grow tired and fatigued on. If fatigue rises too high, it hides the gains you will make. Okay, that's obviously a big problem here. Different decay rates.
Okay, what this means is a critical aspect of this model of fitness and fatigue, these decay at different rates. meaning fatigue dissipates relatively quickly within a couple days, right? A a good rest day will get you freshened up for another strong work effort the following day. Well, fitness built over time decays more slowly.
What this says, guys, is that if you took a week off of gym time, there is muscle memory. You can build it right back within a very short time because your fatigue will dissipate. You'll be going back to the gym with renewed energy, focus, effort, and be able to build some muscle along the way there.
Let's do some research on volume. I came across a number of studies that multiple sets of work outperform single sets for both strength and size. Okay? Doing more sets perform better than a single set. But doing more sets doesn't always necessarily mean better results. Okay? You have to be careful about the volume that you're doing. Sean Feld and KGER and many others have shown that growth increases with additional sets up to a limit.
Then it plateaus or even declines. We go back to the fitness and fatigue model. Your fitness will build until it doesn't. The worbomb 2007 metaanalysis found that around 40 reps per muscle group per session is where the curve flattens for most lifters. Okay, 40 reps. Think of it in four sets of 10, five sets of eight, six sets of say six to seven reps.
Okay, you get the gist. Those are going to per each muscle group. Doesn't feel like a lot, right? Used to wanting to go into the gym and doing a lot more. Now, certainly some people can manage a little bit better than others, but this is the real deal. I'm talking about more real world evidence that in 2006 there's a study done by Belu which stated three groups of national level lifters trained with different amounts of weight at 90% or greater their workload.
Low, moderate, and high. Those were the three groups. Okay, the moderate group, not the heaviest, made the biggest strength gainings in squat, snatch, clean, and jerk. Not the highest and not the lowest. So, not so think of if we were just put general rep ranges on this. one to five reps for the heavy or high workload, eight to 10 to 12 for the moderate, and the low effort would be 20 plus reps.
Just as a context for this. So, the moderate group, not the heaviest, made the biggest gains because less joint pain, less burnout, less accumulated fatigue over time, higher quality workouts, which was great. And this is just what most lifters see in the gym. Those who chase max weights every day burn out. They get tired, they get fatigued, they might get hurt, and they might need longer breaks in between.
And those who train hard but manage fatigue can build their progress steady over time. And of course this goes with just hypertrophy basic strength training but also if you think of a crossfit style workout where there are different energy systems meaning low say 5 minute or less workouts to moderate 10 to 20 minutes or 30 minutes or longer workouts metcons as they call them in that process there.
You should do all of them. Just vary them up with intensity because it'll cycle through your fitness and your fatigue progression. Some days you do lighter, heavier, and other days you do heavier, shorter, and we can cycle through variety. Long efforts, short efforts, moderate efforts with different reps, cycles, ranges, weights.
How do you adjust volume? Here's two questions for you to think about when adjusting volume. Am I progressing right? Am I making progress when I write it down on the paper or track it in my phone? Secondly is am I recovering? Can I keep having the intensity, the effort, the excitement going to the gym when I go? That's a good simple thing to think about when it comes to are you recovering and you have energy and effort to make it.
If your progress stalls and you're well recovered, add a small amount of volume to the mix. Okay, that means that we can just say add an extra set for each exercise that you're doing that day. Recapping that, if your progress stalls and you seem to be plateau, let's put a little bit more work in.
Let's add more volume at the end. If progress stalls and you're beat up, this is where we need to reduce your total volume temporarily. Maybe you're doing less sets, less volume, and maybe taking two or three rest days this week instead of normal three, four, five workouts in the week. After a dload load, think again progress periodization.
We do week one, two, three, four, five building in intensity. And then we have a de lo week somewhere around week four, five or six depending on your training, your effort. Then this is going to allow you to be able to rebound. And then that first week back, you'll be able to ideally lift heavier, harder, stronger. Then this will delay your next stall process.
And that that'll be fine. This will actually allow you to recover and work harder in this process over the long term as you continue to get stronger as you continue to change your volume and your workouts and try different exercise routines and short, medium, long duration efforts inside your strength training, the average volume trends to go upward.
Okay, you're stronger, so every set gets heavier, but you don't always need to chase consistent increases. Okay, you don't need to just do I'm going to do 5 lbs more today and keep every single time doing five pounds more. What we do want to do over the long term is focus on the minimum volume that moves you forward.
Just do a little bit more to add more strength, more volume, more intensity, and only add more when you truly need it. This will keep your fatigue in check. This will keep your mental and emotional state around your workouts, your motivation as well. Think of it like this. Do enough to improve, not as much as possible in that workout session.
Even if you were to feel amazing for that strength training session, you might just need to throttle it and save some for the next workout session. Now, we're on to frequency. Talking about how you organize all of this work across the week or a month is your frequency or a periodization schedule. Frequency is simply how often you train a movement, a muscle group, an exercise each week.
Imagine taking all your weekly sets for bench press and trying to squeeze them into one monster day. Total volume, same load, but fatigue will scrot. Your performance tanks and technique just starts to fall apart. You just literally can't produce like you did. that that is a significant problem. So, we don't want to just do that.
We're going to spread it out by splitting it up into two or three sessions across the next say week or two. We can focus on a variety of different other parts of this such as say the speed of the bar, the movement patterns of the exercise itself, moving at different angles of say bench press and more lower on the chest to up higher on the chest toward the neck.
Those are going to work different angles and parts of the muscle. Now, strength is a skill. Okay, strength is something that when you practice it, you learn just like everything you have to learn. Now, we don't want to just burn out again. If you train a lift once per week, you might not get enough quality in the reps, the practice of it, the movements, understanding the exercise and correlation to your body and energy and fatigue.
If you train it every day, say bench press every day, your quality will drop because the fatigue will build. Somewhere between say two or three times per week, per lift hits that balance. Most people, if you really want to if you if you want to be consistent doing a muscle group one time a week, cool. You're going to stay fit, healthy, strong, doing it twice a week, you will definitely put a huge emphasis on growing it.
Maybe some weeks you might have higher frequency on certain muscle movements exercises such as say bench press. I really want to get my bench stronger. All right. Then for the next 8week cycle we're going to focus on two chest days. But then on the next cycle you would be say focus on pull-ups. All right.
I'm going to do two pull-up days and only one chest day in a week to build that muscle group up. And you can go rotate through and just keep pulling up your weakest muscle or aesthetically muscle that you need to build up to get more of an aesthetic balance in your body so you look and feel like you work out. Recovery is obviously important.
You're stressing muscles and joints, right? We're not just playing a piano here or something. We're picking something heavy up and putting it down. By spreading the same total work, not doing all the bench in one day, but across multiple days, seven to 10 days, this is going to lower your cost of recovery per session.
And if you're eating properly that we done in episode 5 through 11 for the nutrition pyramid portion, if you go back to those, episode five is on calories. How many calories should you eat for different phases? Number six is for macronutrients. How to target specific amounts of protein, carbs, and fats to fuel your exercise activity.
Then we've got episode seven is on micronutrient supplements and then ultimately lifestyle behaviors in episode 11. So you can go back to those to refresh. If you haven't listened to them, then definitely go back and be ready to take some notes. I literally lay out some solid efforts there. All right.
Evidence for frequency across multiple studies. Always want to bring in studies into these things. So we have sciencebacked information. Michael Zordo's his work on daily undulating periodization which is a higher frequency when matched to total volume. Well, it will improve performance. And we're not going to dive into the what we could say DUP if you were to Google search that.
We're not diveing into exactly what that is on this podcast, but we certainly can and will in the future because it is a really good strategy for alternating hypertrophy, strength, and power sequences. Say, think of, "All right, we're going to do certain sets and reps in a hypertrophy range of just saying, all right, we're going to do five sets of 10 reps to 15 reps to strength being somewhere around fiveish to power being one to three and you sequence those in hypertrophy, strength, and power throughout week, you will get strong pretty quick and you'll be able to
manage that fitness and fatigue association. with how you're feeling. Practical uses of everything that we just talked about here. So, here's some of the main takeaways. Most lifters are going to do best between three and six training a week for the busy guys I usually work if with. If we can do three or four, cool, thumbs up.
If you stay consistent with three days a week every week for the rest of your life, you're going to be way more consistent and active than the majority of human beings ever in the history of humans of exercise. Train each major lift or muscle say two to three times a week depending on what your workout routine is.
If it's more of a full body or pushpull leg type rotation, sure we can get more two or even three times in. If we're doing body splits, maybe it's one, possibly two of those days in, depending on which muscle group or movement pattern you are prioritizing. If a session leaves you wrecked, split it into shorter bouts instead of just piling more work on into one day.
Okay? We can just do more reps another day. And consider the overlap effect of what particular movements bring to the table. A bench and overhead press hits delt and triceps in the chest or shoulder activity. This has to be considered especially when you're thinking about the total volume of reps on a tricep extension or bicep curl in a sense or a delt that you're doing.
Squats and deadlifts bring in of course your legs but also your back and your core. So you want to make sure that you count these things overlap and add these sets not by doubling the volume on your biceps as an example by having biceps be additional in there with enough volume. Meaning don't do a full set of back and then do three different bicep exercises doing tons and tons of reps on them afterwards.
Let's translate all this into numbers. You can actually use volume. We want to have anywhere from 40 to 70 total reps per muscle group per session. Anywhere from one to three times per week depending on the approach that you're using. A body split versus a full body versus a pushpull leg rotation. That means you'll roughly do 10 to 20 working sets weekly for most people.
Beginners on the lower end, intermediates and the middle to high and advanced should be very dialed in to adjusting based on their recovery. They should know when a good day to push and when a good day to do a little bit more moderate effort intensity train with one to 15 rep maxes range max. Okay. For strength, that'll be keep three/4ers of work at six reps or fewer.
And then for hypertrophy, three quarters of the session between six and 12 reps. The rest is going to be higher for your strength routine because you need more rest, say up to three minutes per set. Whereas in the hypertrophy, we can do a typical 45 seconds to 60 seconds. And for most of these, you're going to have that RP, that rate of perceived exertion.
Personally, you're going to think of it, oh, this is about a 78 or a nine effort. Whereas the strength is going to be, wow, this is feels like a 10. Super heavy. Someone brass for the frequency. You want to hit each main lift or muscle group two to three times a week. And if you're consistently dragging weight in a session, we need to split it up.
Progression tech checks of what we want to do is the simple question of am I progressing? If yes, keep going, keep working up until you need a recovery week. And if you can say no, but recovered, add a little bit of volume or another bit of reps or sets or another set in the week. But if you're beat up and you're not progressing, then you need to pull back for a week or two to recover and rebuild your muscles.
Overlapping, you have to overlap as we mentioned. Simple guidelines for most intermediate lifters. No, bench press is going to say two times a week. Squats two times a week, deadlift one to two times a week, rows, pulls, accessory work, two to four. A lot of people love benching or pressing a little bit too much, but most of the time if you do shoulders and chest separately, that means those are pushing exercises.
You're going to do more of those. And back is going to get less attention. You're going to want to do more back work in relation to the bench press and the shoulder pressing that you're doing. Meaning, you want to stay balanced in your workout routine. Closing down this portion. uh BIF volume, intensity, and frequency.
These are your main levers. Pull one and the other levers move. If you go hard on intensity, volume and frequency might have to go down. If you go more volume, then intensity might have to go down. If you go more frequency, then volume and intensity might have to go down. You want to use data to evaluate where you need to do.
And this is why tracking your lifts is important. In the next episode, we're going to go over progression and how to layer all of this activity into the weeks and phases so that you get stronger and more productive. Here, moving into our fast five. This is I get so many emails. They really enjoy this portion of it. The simple easy questions that I get on a regular basis are personal ways to get to know me a little bit better.
So, the fast five, what's one training mistake you see men over 40 making over and over again? And what's the simple fix? Guys, you want to make sure that you don't train the same way you did in your 20s. Now they lift heavy, ignore the recovery, they ignore aches and pains in the joints in the body and they just don't follow any sort of a structured plan of having say D lo weeks built in it just more is best.
Let's stop doing that. Question two, when a myth about building what's excuse you, what's one myth about building muscle after 40 that needs to basically die already? This one's simple. It's too late to make real progress. I've worked with so many people. I gave you the example of Betsy who became a CrossFit world champion at the age of 60. You can get stronger.
You might not be as strong as you could have been in your 20s, but better late than never. Better now to make progress than wait. Don't wait. Question number three. What's one nutritional rule you live by even when traveling or during holidays? Well, right now it's November 11th. holidays are coming.
And it's so important to have this two-step question of where's the protein, where's the fiber, and then secondly is can I drink if I'm going out to eat or something, can I drink a whole glass of water before I eat any food? This will help to start to slow down my hunger levels. Same thing with the protein and the fibrous foods, vegetables or fruit.
This will slow down your hunger, keep cravings at bay. You literally won't want to overeat. ultrarocessed tasty foods. Question number four, what's one lesson the gym has taught you that's carried over into business or life? Well, for me, there's a couple. One is it takes progress over time, patience over time. Some days you're going to feel great, other days you don't.
You have to balance out how to keep moving forward. You have to have a strong mindset to keep pushing and enduring the challenges of the situations that come up. And just know there is a paytoplay in all areas of life. If you don't have a very fulfilling adventurous life, you will have to pay in some way. Money, time, energy, effort, developing skills.
Even this podcast takes the I've spent 20 years plus accumulating knowledge, information, experience to be able to deliver these things. Be patient and stay consistent. Number five, what's your personal definition of being strong? For me, I think strong means being reliable. It's being the kind of man that you show up, staying tall, that people can count on you, and by working out or doing these things in in your your off time or with buddies and and the the discipline of exercising helps build a strong character for you to rely on when things
get hard. You will do the work. As we wrap up our episode, if you've been wanting to take better care of your health, but don't know where to start, so many people are overwhelmed by so much information, I've got something for you. It's my 30 tips in 30 days series. It's free email plan that gives you one simple, easy, actionable tip every day that helps you improve your nutrition, your fitness, your overall lifestyle.
You'll learn how to eat smarter, move better, build small daily habits that actually last. There's recipes, workouts, all sorts of different insights on nutrition, and it just keeps you moving in the right direction. You'll see the link in the show notes, but it is go.piran.com30 days. That's 30 days. This will help you start building a healthier, more confident version of yourself. So check that out.
I'll love that. You can even reply and I'll engage with you personally. Yes, no bots, no team members, just me engaging with you. I want to thank you for joining me on this episode of Driven for Health. I hope this strength series is something that you're learning a lot about and giving some key takeaways.
In the next one, I actually have a workout routine that you'll be able to leverage in there as well in the the show notes. If this episode helped you understand training structure or you enjoyed this whole podcast, share with a friend, someone that's close to you that's still guessing how to do the gym or how to do nutrition.
I I would love for you to share and spread the word. And as always, I'm Coach Brian Pana. Stay consistent, stay strong, and I'll see you on the next one.