I got another interview for you from Las Vegas with Travis Stoetzel.

Travis does really hard core intense training and I got chatting with him about going to max because a lot of times what people do is every time they go to the gym or every time they workout they think they need to go to max and lift their heaviest weight.

I wanted him to chat about what people need to remember and think about when it relates to going to max.

CLICK HERE to watch the YouTube video.

Travis Stoetzel:

#1 – Does it correlate with your overall goals?

One of the things in regards to lifting heavy is does it correlate with your overall goals. Are you a competitive athlete? Are you an actual powerlifter? That’s what you are going to have to do in regards to competition. Is it going to require you to lift as much weight as you need to? Is it going to transfer over to your overall performance? These are some of the main things that you want to focus in on first in regards to lifting extremely heavy.

#2 – Look at your fitness level.

As you start out, are you going to want to grab a barbell and lift as much weight as you can? Well, it’s something that we all want to do. It’s our natural instinct. If you think about it, that’s probably what a lot of people have done the first time they go into a weight room and that’s kind of the mantra so to speak , “I am more bad ass than you. I can lift more weight than you”. It’s kind of just the overall thought process with people. They don’t know any better.

It’s not really about how much weight you can lift, it’s how much weight you can lift efficiently & effectively in order to get you to your goal that you got in mind.

Again, that is all relative to what you are trying to get accomplished. If it’s relevant to your sport, if you are power lifting, obviously you know as a powerlifter you got to build yourself up to that.

Going to max, how often should you do it? If you are going to be doing it, if you are a competitive athlete, if you are a powerlifter, obviously you are going to be doing a lot more than somebody who is just after general fitness and just looking at getting strong. You don’t have to do it once.

In my gym with a lot of my clients which I call athletes whether they are competitive athletes or not, we typically stay around 3’s. You will go pretty heavy with three reps but you are not necessarily taking that ultimate risk of just putting as much weight on the bar and just cranking out a single rep because that’s pretty taxing to the body and again it’s all about your general fitness level and what your overall goal is.

Do you need to be taxing your body out that much? Because singles, if you are not ready for those, they can mess your body up. As we were talking about earlier, back pain with squatting and deadlifting, if you are not yet ready to do that, that’s when those injuries occur.

Just the basic stuff with the maxing out and do whatever we are doing at the gym, and yes we do it but again it’s all relevant to who is training, what their goal is, and if they have earned the ability to do that. Obviously if they are not efficient with the lift that we are doing, for example deadlifts, overhead press, squats, whatever it may be, they have got to earn the right to max out so to speak.

Rick Kaselj: Where can people get more information about you Travis?

Travis Stoetzel: People can find more information at TrainAggressive.com or you can check out Unbreakable Badass which are the workouts that I do with my clients, that you can do at home.

You can get more details on Travis’ Unbreakable Badass Blueprint 2.0, here: 

Rick Kaselj, MS