The e-book will be downloadable to all who pre-ordered on Monday, Feb 27. The print books will ship within two or three days after that. Prices on both the e-book and print book will be going up within a few days of release.

Yes, it contains workouts, but only a few. The focus of the book is on optimizing exercise performance, not workouts.

No, it is not just about machine training. It addresses free weight and body weight exercises as well.

Yes, rest-pause, negative-emphasized, negative-only, hyper, etc. are still covered, but they are not being recommended in the book. The training techniques described in the book are safer, more efficient, and more effective and make those and many other classical high intensity training protocols and techniques redundant and unnecessary.

While working around injuries is discussed, it does not deal with specific injuries as this would be way beyond the scope of the book. If you have questions about working with or around specific injuries I recommend scheduling a phone consultation.

No, there is no discussion of motorized machines. These sections have been removed due to the realization there is no practical way to reconcile some of the safety considerations with problems inherent in motorized equipment design, especially those machines which use a motor in conjunction with a weight stack.

The previous five-chapter preview is no longer being sent out because all that material has been completely rewritten. The pre-order videos are also being re-recorded and will be sent to those who pre-order within the weeks following the release of the book.

The book is not about high intensity training in general, but exercise performance specifically. The next book is a more general book about HIT but will not be announced or available until completion due to the scheduling delays and work problems involved with this one.

If you have any other questions please post below. I try to respond to all comments and questions within 48 hours.

My response, to a question about mechanical work and repetition speed:

“The most important thing to keep in mind is the key appears to be relative effort, and not load. A wide range of loads and repetition ranges have been shown to be equally effective for strength and size increases in the long run, provided they are used with a high level of effort. With this in mind, the ideal approach would be to use the lowest load required to get the job done. Rather than focus on how much weight you can lift, you should focus on how intensely you are able to get your muscles to contract with a given weight, how efficiently you can use that weight to fatigue the muscles, and only increase it when you are unable to achieve failure within a reasonable time frame.

Rather than trying to lift the heaviest weight you are capable of, you should be lifting the least weight required to effectively load the muscles and thoroughly inroad them within a reasonable time. While it may seem counterintuitive, the better you are at an exercise the sooner you will fail with a given weight.

Don’t mistake being better at exercise for being better at lifting weights or being stronger. Beingbetter at exercise means being more skilled at using the weight to challenge the muscles, to make the movement harder. Being better at lifting weights means being more skilled at creating favorable leverages and using momentum to make it easier for your muscles to move the weight. Being stronger means being able to produce more force, not being able to lift more weight, because the manner in which you lift it makes a huge difference in how much force is required.

If you want to impress ignorant people in the gym, learn to lift weights in the easiest manner possible so you can load lots of plates on the bar and make all sorts of noise.

If you want to become as strong as possible, learn to use the weight to make the exercise as hard as possible to create a stronger stimulus for growth.”

Responses to email questions:

Weight vs. lever

A few people asked how this is possible with the same weight. It is because weight is only one of several factors affecting the resistance the muscles encounter during exercise, the force they must overcome to lift, hold, or lower the weight under control. Leverage, which is affected by body positioning and alignment and range of motion, is a major factor. Acceleration and velocity are major factors. The ability to focus on intensely contracting the target muscles is a major factor. Depending on the exercise and equipment used there are many more. Depending on how you use it, a given weight can be harder or easier to lift, as well as safer or more dangerous.

For example, consider the effect of leverage during a leg press or squat. Despite the weight pinned on the stack or loaded on the barbell being the same over the entire range of motion, the lower half of the range of motion of a leg press or squat is harder than the top half due to the differences in leverage. If you don’t believe me, try a few reps in only the bottom half of the range of motion, then try a few in the top half, keeping everything else (speed, turnarounds, etc.) as equal as possible. The bottom half is more difficult because the longer levers (moment arms) result in more resistance. Weight x lever = resistance (torque, actually).

The goal of proper form is to use the weight to create a a level and variation in resistance that is both maximally challenging to the muscles being targeted and minimally harmful.

How much weight

Enough that you are able to recruit all the motor units in the targeted muscles and achieve momentary muscular failure within about six to eight strict, slow reps (around three minutes), but not so much that you are unable to perform at least three or four (at least one minute).

If the weight is too light you’ll keep recycling the more fatigue resistant fibers and not recruit and effectively stimulate the larger, high-threshold motor units. If the weight is too heavy form tends to fall apart and injury becomes more likely, especially when approaching momentary muscular failure.

Speed and weight

Moving more slowly in and of itself does not reduce the weight you can use. Your muscles are actually capable of contracting with more force at slower velocities (do not confuse the velocity/force curve with the acceleration formula – they are two different things). Moving more slowly makes exercise harder because it allows you to better control body position and movement and levers and keep the tension on the targeted muscles, as well as improves your ability to focus on intensely contracting them.

Criticisms of rest-pause, negative-only, and “advanced” training techniques

This resulted in more email than anything else. There are numerous problems with each of these, all of which are discussed in Elements of Form,  and I’m not going to repeat all of it here, but the main issues are the misguided focus on mechanical work (total weight or reps) rather than intensity of effort and various safety problems inherent in repeated loading and unloading and intra or interpersonal resistance transfer compounded by progressive fatigue.

Proper exercise is a requirement for living the longest, happiest life possible. It is a requirement for self-actualization – realizing your full human potential and necessary for achieving the ideal of a sound mind in a sound body.

While many people have at least some awareness of the potential benefits of exercise relatively few fully realize its importance. I believe at least two of the main reasons for this are failure to associate a lack of exercise with the resulting physical consequences, and underestimation of human physical potential.

It is easier to make cause and effect associations when the cause is one of commission rather than omission and when the time between cause and effect is shorter. The consequences of a lack or omission of exercise are not immediately apparent and in some cases take years. Nautilus inventor Arthur Jones once explained during a seminar:

“If I were to grab you by the throat, and choke off your air supply, it would immediately become apparent to you that oxygen is absolutely essential for life. If I were to lock you in a room with no water, after several hours, the degree of thirst you would experience would indicate to you that water is a requirement for life. If I were to lock you in that room with water, but no food, it would take a little longer, a matter of a couple of days, before you would be ravenously hungry, and there would be no question in your mind that food was absolutely essential for life. However, it often takes years before ones body begins to show the harm done by a lack of proper exercise.”

In the long run, if nothing is done to prevent it, we gradually lose muscle as we age, becoming weaker and more frail and suffering other problems as a result such as decreased basal metabolic rate, decreased insulin sensitivity, increased body fat, decreased cardiovascular and metabolic capacity, increased blood pressure, osteoporosis, increased risk of falling due to reduction in speed and steadiness of movement, etc.

In the meanwhile, if you do not exercise you live with a level of functional ability and a physical appearance far below your potential. Compared to what you can and should be, you are weak, slow, and fragile. If you do exercise, properly, the improvements in strength, speed, durability, and overall health will allow you to do more, do it better, do it longer, and look good while you’re at it. I believe the average, untrained person grossly underestimates their potential, would be surprised at what they are capable of becoming with proper exercise.

Exercise is one of the most important things you can do to improve your life. It deserves the same serious consideration, attention to detail, and effort – both physical and mental – as any other major life goal or achievement of high value. It is not enough to just do exercise, you should strive  to master it.

You should perform every exercise and every workout in the safest, most effective, most efficient manner possible.

Safety

It ought to go without saying that exercise should performed in the safest manner possible, but considering the sloppy and haphazard form commonly displayed in gyms and the outright dangerous antics of Crossfit, plyometrics, “core stability training” and similar activities touted as exercise it is apparent most either aren’t aware of or underestimate the potential for injury and long term damage of improper training.

While all physical activity poses some risk of injury exercise can and should be performed in a manner and with a level of control which makes it safer than almost any other activity. It would be counterproductive and downright stupid to perform an activity for the purpose of physical improvement which simultaneously poses a significant risk of causing physical injury or undermining your long term functional ability and health.

This does not mean exercise should be easy. On the contrary, to be effective exercise must involve a high level of effort. There is no conflict between safety and intensity of effort during exercise, however; the manner of performance required to minimize risk of injury is the exact same required to maximize the quality of muscular loading and effectiveness.

Effectiveness 

More than any other factor, exercise effectiveness is related to effort, and effort is maximized with proper form. Contrary to claims of some ignorant trainers that how you perform an exercise is less important than the effort you put into it, proper form and maximum effort are not mutually exclusive but directly related. The better your form the higher the intensity.

The histrionics and bodily contortions often associated with a high level of effort during training are not an indication of greater intensity; many trainees commit these discrepancies even when they are not actually working hard. They are attempts to reduce the difficulty of the exercise or distractions from the discomfort of hard work.

The person who grunts, grimaces, and makes a show of heaving or jerking to gain momentum and leaning this way and that to find a lever advantage during exercise is not the one training the hardest, but rather the person who remains stoic as the pain of effort increases, impassive and expressionless, focusing on intensely contracting the targeted muscles while maintaining strict control of the position and movement of their body.

Correct form during exercise involves positioning and or alignment of the body and a path, range and manner of movement designed to effectively load the muscles. Breaking or “loosening” form makes an exercise easier, not harder. Some trainers claim “loosening” form is advantageous because it allows more repetitions to be performed displaying their ignorance of the real objective of exercise.

Efficiency

Exercise is not an end in itself, but a means to improving your health and functional ability to better enjoy other activities and aspects of life. You should spend no more time exercising than necessary for best results. Doing so will not give you better results, but will take away from the finite amount of time you have to pursue other goals or  interests and enjoy the company of friends and family. Fortunately very little exercise is required if performed properly and with a high level of effort.

The only exercise you need – in fact the only activity that truly qualifies as exercise – is progressive resistance training. When performed properly it is the safest and most effective method of stimulating improvements in all trainable factors of fitness; muscular strength, size and endurance, cardiovascular and metabolic efficiency, flexibility, bone density and connective tissue strength, and body composition.

The Standard

There are other considerations, but these three – safety, effectiveness, and efficiency – are the highest priorities and the standard against which different methods should be compared if the ultimate purpose of exercise is to contribute to greater enjoyment of life.

There are a lot of training methods, programs, and modalities which can eventually maximize your strength and overall fitness and functional ability.

Any strength training method performed with a relatively high level of effort, consistently, and progressively, and any program that addresses all the major muscle groups without exceeding a volume and frequency of work your body can recover from and adapt to can eventually get you about as strong and as muscular as your genetics will allow.

Any physical activity or combination of activities performed with a relatively high level of effort, over a full range of joint motions, involving loads meaningful to the skeletal system, can eventually result in significant improvements in cardiovascular and metabolic conditioning, flexibility and bone density.

Any modality that provides the ability to meaningfully and progressively load the muscles – free weights, machines, body weight, manual resistance, isometric stations, etc. – can be effective for this purpose if used correctly.

These things are often pointed out to avoid criticizing or making comparisons between methods, however in any objective comparison of different methods of achieving the same goal one will be best.

Your life, your health, and your time, are far too important to settle for just any training method, program, modality. Accept nothing less than the best.

The Mission

My mission is to promote this philosophy, of training in the safest, most effective, most efficient manner possible to maximize life-long health and functional ability with enjoyment of life as the standard, and to teach the best methods of achieving this.

This will be the purpose of this web site.

This refinement of philosophy and mission are why Elements of Form has been almost completely rewritten and rather than teach will expose the flaws of protocols like rest pause, negative-only, and the misuse of various unnecessary and counterproductive “advanced” techniques like forced reps, forced negatives, drop sets, etc. and why they have no place in a proper exercise program.

This is the reason I sought employment with Overload Fitness and membership in Renaissance Exercise, as they are the best in the field of exercise and represent true advancement in the art and science of exercise performance and instruction.

The idea one should eat less and move more to lose fat is based on a few assumptions:

1. that fat gain and loss are mostly a matter of energy balance
2. that body fat will be burned for energy when the balance is negative
3. that exercise burns enough calories to have a significant effect on energy balance

Not quite.

1. While energy balance is a significant factor, fat gain and loss is also strongly affected by your hormonal state which is the result of the type of foods you eat. Regular, excessive carbohydrate consumption results in chronically elevated insulin levels which can promote fat storage and limits your body’s ability to access its fat stores for energy. Other hormones influencing metabolism and appetite like leptin, ghrelin and thyroid can be negatively influenced by regular consumption of grains and legumes, and those foods also contain substances which interfere with mineral absorption and irritate the gut, contributing to the development of auto-immune disorders.

2. Even if you restrict energy intake, if your hormonal state prevents you from efficiently using fat stores when there is a negative energy balance it can break down lean body mass instead and reduce metabolic rate to adapt to the lower energy intake. Foods that negatively effect leptin and ghrelin can directly contribute to a reduction in metabolic rate.

3. No activity burns enough calories to make it worth doing for that reason alone, and demanding physical activity increases appetite often causing people to consume more energy than the little extra they burned. The proper role of exercise in a fat loss program is not to burn calories, but to maintain muscle while fat is lost.

Forget the old mantra to “eat less, move more”. Instead, eat better and exercise harder.

If you eat better food – nutrient dense grass fed meat, wild caught fish, eggs and a variety of vegetables along with some fruits and nuts – and restrict or eliminate intake of grains, legumes and sugar, you will create a hormonal state conducive to fat loss and get your appetite under control, as well as improve many other aspects of health. While meat, fish, and eggs are energy dense, eating them tends to blunt appetite and keep you feeling full longer, and non-starchy vegetables are extremely high in physical volume relative to calories when compared to grains and legumes, and will also fill you up. If you ever do need a quick source of glucose, starchy vegetables like yams, sweet potatoes and beets are a  much healthier option than grains.

Instead of wasting your time doing things for the sake of burning calories, spend a few minutes a few times a week doing hard strength training. While strength training won’t burn a lot of calories either, it will maintain lean body mass while fat is lost, improve glucose metabolism and insulin sensitivity, deplete muscle glycogen stores making more room in the muscles for incoming carbohydrate (meaning less of it is likely to be converted to triglyceride and stored as fat) and will raise metabolic rate slightly. When done correctly, even very brief strength training workouts significantly improve cardiovascular and metabolic conditioning and flexibility, making additional “cardio” redundant and unnecessary.

You can use all the time a more efficient exercise program frees up to do things you actually enjoy, instead of wasting it on a treadmill or elliptical machine or in group classes that burn up a lot of your time but not much of your fat.

Today I had the opportunity to speak with Ken Hutchins about Renaissance Exercise (RenEx) and began reading The Renaissance of Exercise: A Vitruvian Adventure (TRoE hereafter for brevity). While our paths could be considered convergent I was astounded by their advances and refinement of both the protocol and the equipment. After seeing and trying some of the new machines I don’t think words can adequately explain the degree of improvement over everything else out there. “Amazing” is far too small a word, and my first reaction, “holy shit!”, doesn’t quite do it either.

I won’t say any more about the equipment for now, and I will not give any details on the equipment since they have their own timeline for presenting them.

As much as I feel I have made huge leaps forward just over the last half a year I am as blown away by TRoE as I was the first time I read SuperSlow: The Ultimate Exercise Protocol over seventeen years ago. Although I am only a few hours into reading it, I feel it is even further beyond Hutchins’ SS technical manual than that manual was beyond Arthur Jones’ Nautilus Bulletins in terms of the refinement of the philosophy, protocol and instruction of it.

In 1996 I was so excited about Hutchins’ SuperSlow philosophy and protocol I left my job, college, and everyone I knew to move across the country with nothing but my car, some books, and some clothes to work with and learn from him. Today I felt that excitement again. As much as the past six months have felt like a period of enlightenment for me, it would appear RenEx are truly bringing about a Renaissance in exercise.

Everyone needs to exercise if they value their fitness and health. However, if someone has been led to believe “exercise” means any type of physical activity they may erroneously conclude their daily walk or bike ride, weekend sports participation, or yard work qualifies and that they do not require anything else. Or, they may perform some other activity popularly promoted as exercise, but which does not meet the criteria and may be relatively ineffective or inefficient or even counterproductive to their goals.

What defines and distinguishes exercise from these other activities is it is a process specifically designed to achieve these goals – improvements in general fitness – rather than another type of movement such as a locomotor or sport skill performed for the purpose.

The definition that best describes this is Ken Hutchins’, the development and basis for which is explained in his article The First Definition of Exercise. It states,

Exercise is a process whereby the body performs work of a demanding nature, in accordance with muscle and joint function, in a clinically-controlled environment, within the constraints of safety, meaningfully loading the muscular structures to inroad their strength levels to stimulate a growth mechanism within minimum time.

Some of the qualifiers may seem extraneous unless you understand and consider all aspects of performance, in which case the distinction is more clear. While these may not be necessary for an activity to stimulate some improvements in fitness and health, they are required for optimal exercise.

For example, I have worked out and trained clients in a variety of environments, from ideal, clinically-controlled environments to crowded, noisy gyms and training studios surrounded by trainers and subjects performing all manner of distracting nonsense. The environment has a tremendous impact on a subject’s ability to concentrate and internalize – a major factor in exercise effectiveness and safety – and is just as important as protocol and equipment to long term results.

TO BE CONTINUED…

Although I have not responded I am reading all of the feedback on the previous post and everything is being taken into consideration in the overhaul of the site. The priorities are relevance, utility and simplicity and your questions and comments influence the information I prioritize in creating new content. There are going to be some significant changes. Get ready to change the way you think about training and nutrition.

Working on the book Elements of Form has involved a lot of thinking about how to optimize various aspects of exercise performance and how to best teach them, as well as why people really exercise and how to help them better achieve those goals. As a result I’ve been refining my own training and that of my clients, and experimenting with approaches that I believe will make significant differences in people’s results as well as the safety and efficiency of their workouts.

I want the web site to reflect this, and have been thinking about how to better use the site both to teach and learn. I can only personally train a certain number of people weekly, but by organizing structured programs and collecting data through the site (which attracts over a quarter million visitors yearly) a lot more is possible. I will be cutting my personal training hours way back and making the site and these programs my priority, as it is of greater interest to me personally and allows me to reach and help a much larger number of people.

We are still in the planning stages, but nearly everything will be changing over the next couple of months. In the meanwhile, there may be technical problems with the site, some content may not be available for periods of time while things are being restructured, and on occasion I may request feedback from visitors on things like topics and features we are planning so I can better tailor the material to your information needs and interests.

I would appreciate it if you could take a few minutes and post your answers in the comments below to the following questions:

1. What are your short and long term training goals?
2. How can we better help you to achieve them through this web site?
3. Would you be interested in participating in large, structured group programs if it required sharing data which would be used to improve future programs?

Site redesign

After Elements of Form ships this web site is being completely redone to make it simpler to navigate and use and a separate subscribers area is being planned for training videos and live interviews, teleseminars and question and answer sessions with members.

Nautilus Bulletins web site

The Nautilus Bulletins web site currently redirects to this one, but will also be set up as a separate web site with unique content and features including regular commentary on chapters from the Bulletins and other writings of Nautilus inventor Arthur Jones.

Lost comments

During the transition a few comments that were still awaiting moderation including questions I hadn’t had time to answer were lost. If you posted a question in the comments and do not see it within the next two to three days I apologize. Please repost your questions and I will answer them as soon as I am able to.

HIT workshops

Several people have inquired about HIT workshops recently and I promised to post a page with detailed information on these. This will be part of the new design.

The 21 Convention in Melbourne in 2012

To all the Australian HIT people, The 21 Convention will be in Melbourne in 2012. I am not currently scheduled to speak, but they may invite me if there is enough interest. You can view my 2009 and 2010 presentations in the exercise videos section, and contact them to request me at the 2012 convention in Melbourne in the contact section of their web site.

Renaissance Exercise equipment

Several people have called or e-mailed for my opinion on the new RenEx machines. I worked for Ken Hutchins as a personal trainer and doing welding and basic machine work when he was developing the SuperSlow Systems machines some of the RenEx equipment is based on and have trained and trained clients on and am familiar with those, but I have not had the opportunity to try the new RenEx machines yet. I can only speculate based on the photos and my experience with Ken’s previous equipment.

They appear to incorporate many features that should reduce friction significantly, allow for more consistent tension and more efficient inroad, better adjust to individual body differences including strength curves, and help minimize certain form discrepancies (along with proper instruction). There isn’t much I can say other than what I think or suspect until I actually have a chance to try them.

ARX Fitness equipment

Several people have also asked about what is going on with ARX Fitness (formerly CZT). I have not talked with them for a while and do not know. I was not able to speak at The 21 Convention in Orlando this summer due to an out of state funeral and have not had the opportunity to use their Omni-Fit machine and can also only speculate, but I believe it also has potential.

MaxOut/ExMed and Regeneration Strength

Other than the new MedX Leg Press retrofit and the UXS-15 I can’t comment on anything MaxOut/ExMed or Regeneration Strength are doing, except that they’ve also got some interesting projects under way.

All in all, it looks like the next couple of years will be very interesting for those who understand and appreciate high end, high tech exercise equipment. (And high end, low tech equipment, if you count the UXS).

Just a few of the topics covered include;

• The real objective of exercise
• Proper mindset during exercise
• Positioning and alignment
• Path of motion
• Range of motion
• Speed of motion
• Proper technique for different types of upper and lower turnarounds
• Compound versus simple movements
• Proper grip during pulling, pushing and other types of movements
• Forced reps, forced negatives, drop sets and other training techniques
• Negative only, negative accentuated and negative emphasized training
• Hyper training
• SuperSlow, The Ultimate Rep and other low velocity methods
• The different types of Rest-Pause training
• Static Hold, Timed Static Contractions and other isometric methods
• Eplanations of Infimetric, Duo-Symmetric Poly-Contractile, Akinetic, and other traditional Nautilus protocols

Ebook: $20 (pre-order download link will be sent Wed, September 21)

Print Book: $25 + $5 S&H (ships Friday, September 23) For orders outside the US or for different shipping options email drew@baye.com before ordering.

Chapter excerpt:

Objectives

“How you perform each repetition of an exercise is far more important than how many repetitions you perform.”

I’ve probably said it thousands of times over the past two decades. Whenever a client seems more focused on how many repetitions they perform than how well they perform them I remind them of the real objective of exercise – not to make the barbell, weight stack or their body go up and down, but to effectively stimulate the body to produce improvements in fitness without causing injury or undermining long term health in the process.

This is one of the most important concepts in exercise; if you want the best possible results it isn’t enough to just lift and lower the weight, you have to do so in a manner that provides effective stimulation for the muscles being targeted without exposing the body to potentially harmful forces. Both of these goals require understanding and correctly performing various elements of form like body position, path, range and speed of motion, breathing, and even proper mental focus and mindset.

For example, there is far more to a barbell squat than putting a bar on your shoulders, squatting down, and standing back up;

• The bar must be set to the correct height in the squat rack or power rack – at approximately the middle of your sternum – for you to be able to get into correct position under it and safely load it onto your shoulders and unrack it.  Too high and you may have to come up on your toes to get it out of the hooks, too low and energy is wasted unracking the bar.
• The bar should rest on the trapezius above the spines of the scapulae, not on the back of the neck over the lower cervical vertebrae.
• The hands should be positioned wide enough to be able to assist with balance but not so wide you don’t have plenty of clearance between the hands and the uprights of the rack, with an open grip for wrist comfort.
• The elbows and scapulae should be pulled back, creating more of a “shelf” for the bar on the upper back.
• The neck and back must held be in the proper position, head forward, chest high, and lower back flat.
• After unracking the bar the feet must be positioned roughly shoulder width or slightly wider with the feet angled out in line with the thighs, so you are able to squat down between the thighs, rather than on top of them.
• The starting negative should be performed in a slow and controlled manner, with a gradual reduction in speed towards the bottom of the range of motion.
• Movement should gradually slow to a stop without any bouncing at the lowest position possible without the back rounding, the hamstrings resting on the calves or the heels coming off the floor.
• Upwards movement should start immediately but slowly, and a constant, controlled speed maintained throughout the lift, before gradually slowing to a stop again just a few degrees shy of lockout.
• Throughout the exercise your breathing should be relaxed and continuous (no breath-holding or val salva), your shoulders and trunk should remain tight, and you should focus on continuous, intense contraction of the hip and thigh muscles.

Almost every person I’ve seen squatting in gyms gets most or all of these wrong. They set the bar high up on the base of their neck instead of their scapulae. They slump their chest and round their back. They barely lower the weight half way, then bounce back up and lock their knees, rather than working over the full range of motion in a smooth and controlled manner. They make the weight go up and down, but they don’t accomplish the real goal of exercise.

Sadly, this is not limited to the barbell squat. Most people perform every exercise in a similarly inefficient manner, robbing themselves of much of the potential benefits of exercise while unnecessarily increasing their chances of injury. Part of the reason for this is they focus more on lifting the weight or completing the repetition than on using the weight to effectively work the target muscles.

The problem with this is when a person is more focused on lifting the weight they tend to move in a way that makes it easier to do, which is exactly the opposite of what you should be doing during an exercise. Instead, you should be using the weight in a way that makes the movement harderfor the target muscles to provide an effective stimulus for improvement.

The goal of this book is to teach you how to do exactly that – to get the greatest possible benefit from every repetition of every exercise you perform.