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Wellness Wednesday for November 8, 2023

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 may be bro-science, but I've been taught that lower weight + higher reps is what to go for if you want to prioritize muscle mass versus strength. The reasoning having to do with the total amount of time your muscles are being activated. Again, probably bro-science, but at the least, that indicates that there's nothing about using lower weight + higher reps that significantly reduce one's muscle gain from weight lifting, since if that were the case, people would have noticed and not developed this bit of old wives' tale.

More generally, my own personal experience and general "common sense" among people who lift weights has been that, for 99% of people, whatever weight lifting regimen that is safe, challenging, and regularly stuck to is the best one for achieving their fitness goals, whatever those goals are. The differences that come from different types of strategies only matter for that 1% of people who take this very seriously and/or compete against other people who are hyper-optimizing their body recomposition. If you're not in that category, I'd say the main concern should be, can I do this "toning" strategy just as safely and just as regularly while challenging myself about as much as my other strategy? If so, then it'd be good to add it into your exercise toolbox, if only for variety's sake.