Hard work is very conditioned, very much perception.
Between sets I pace around, shake out my arms and legs.
During the last rep or two I make a little noise, dropping the lever a few reps into the burn.
Yeah, I’d repped the stack even with some isometric holds, and slower negatives, but I stopped only a few reps into the burn.
It’s not like I used every intensity multiplier.
All in all it wasn’t truly all that hard of a set, after all, if it was would I really even have been able to do 5 sets in a roughly 10-15 minute time span?
Long rest periods for me yeah, but it definitely wasn’t a Metzer HIT set.
The girl using the leg extension after me throwing her head back in strain likely wasn’t going any harder either.
Imagine a person having a fully stocked bodybuilding gym…but with no prior knowledge, nor ever hearing any gym talk.
A twilight zone of an empty gym, with infinite weight, and every machine, but no lifting literature, YouTube, or talk.
Just the illustrations of the exercise.
With no preconceived notion of effort and using only common sense, this person would get far stronger, far quicker, and not act like they’re working hard until they’re far past where we act like we are straining.
Seeing a million grimaces of Tom Platz has conditioned us to act like that. We don’t need to.
-J