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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   925 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for March 18, 2026

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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This is gold.

I find it useful as a yardstick, not an absolute. Generally agree with the article.

For starters, I think there’s a pretty large kernel of truth to the general idea of “effective reps.” I think the “hard” version of the idea (“the last 5 reps before failure are all the matters”) has major problems, but a “soft” version of the idea is almost self-evidently true. To maximize hypertrophy on a per-set basis, you do almost certainly have to get somewhat close to failure, in basically any context I can think of. If you can do 12 reps with a certain weight, doing 3 sets of 10 is almost guaranteed to get you more growth than doing 3 sets of 3.

unsurprisingly, stopping each set REALLY far from failure did compromise hypertrophy.

Altogether, these studies support the idea that in order to maximize growth on a per-set basis, you do need to be reasonably close to failure, but actually reaching failure probably isn’t necessary, especially for trained lifters.

Yeah, that's good advice.

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