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Dan's avatar

Thanks for this, Phillip. Really interesting information and ideas that make sense given what you’ve shared. I find myself continuously navigating and trying to balance proper form and approach and recovery with desired results while avoiding injury, especially at my age. My joints simply won’t let me push beyond a certain point without punishing me for it. There’s a lot of redefining of goals and what gains look and feel like and recalibrating routines accordingly.

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Philipp Maerzhaeuser's avatar

It’s nice to see you’ll get on this journey of experimenting with longer rest times between sets.

I’m curious, how old are you?

I can relate very much of trying to still make progress while avoiding injury.

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Dan's avatar
May 25Edited

I’m actually 66 although in pretty decent shape for my age. Still I’m definitely having to make adjustments to what I do and also just think about what realistic but still challenging goals look like.

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Ellen Anne Shapiro's avatar

Interesting. Our conditioning and biases are always about undervaluing rest and recovery...doing more, doing harder isn't necessarily the best. As always when I read fitness research done on men, my question....does this apply any differently to women?

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Philipp Maerzhaeuser's avatar

Hey Ellen,

I agree, it’s a huge problem that most research is being done on men.

So to be honest, I have no idea at this point if it holds true for women, but my gut feeling is that yes, definitely

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Chris Fehr's avatar

I do 4 different exersises using different but probably a little overlapping muscles and then rest 3 minutes and do it all over again. My theory is some muscles are getting extra rest while I do an exersise without them.

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Philipp Maerzhaeuser's avatar

Yes,

supersets work, both for agonist-antagonist muscles and doing multiple exercises for a singular muscle if it is adapted to higher stress.

Both lowering the weight slower (3 seconds) and pausing in between sets for up to 3 minutes might be enough of a challenge, so you may have the same effect with less exercises.

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