How I train myself and my clients. Make every rep count.

It starts with how you are today

Every session starts with a check-in. How are you today? How did you sleep? How’s your energy? I ask because the answers shape everything that follows. They decide how hard we go, and if they call for it, I’ll change the plan on the spot. A bad night’s sleep or a stressful week doesn’t mean we skip the session, it just means the session looks a little different.

I love my clients. I’m fully invested in them, I always want what’s best for them, and I give them my all. Their safety and wellbeing come first, every time. We also have a lot of fun, and for many of them I double up as an unofficial therapist, or so I’ve been told. So the goal is always the same. Everyone should end the session feeling better than they did when they arrived, even if that’s only by 1%. Some days it’s a lot more than that, and some days 1% is a win.

The environment has a say in it too. Spain in summer is soooo chilled, and sometimes you need to give in to it, so when Barcelona’s roasting I’ll usually ease people out of chasing progress for a few weeks and into maintaining what they’ve built. My own training works the other way round. Because I give my clients my all for most of the year, summer, when they’re generally training less, is when I train hardest. There’s more energy left over for me then.

A lighter set, and then we get to work

My warm-up is a lighter set of whatever we’re starting with, then straight into it. I’m not one for faffing around. I also encourage clients to use a full range of motion, always within their means, and as they warm up, that range tends to lengthen.

When there’s something new to learn, I’ll explain what it’s for, which muscles should be doing the work and what a good rep should feel like before you pick anything up. How much I say after that depends on who I’m training. Sometimes I need to see a few reps before I give any more input, and with a client who knows their body and adapts quickly, I don’t necessarily need to say anything at all.

With newer clients, I won’t overload them with information. Nobody can think about seven things at once with a weight in their hands, me included, so I’ll reinforce what they’re doing well and keep it to two or three cues at most. Weight in the heels, knee out to the side, elbows in, chest up. It’s often the tiniest tweak that makes the biggest difference.

For most exercises, I’m after seven to twelve good reps a set, with a weight that makes you feel it early. If you don’t feel anything until the eighth rep, I’d say the weight’s too light. Why do 30 when you can do 8? A 2017 review of 21 studies compared lighter weights, roughly the kind you can lift 15 times or more, with anything heavier. As long as people took their sets close to failure, muscle growth was much the same with both.¹ The heavier weights made them stronger, though, and they got there in far fewer reps. So yes, 30 reps can build muscle, but 8 good ones will make you stronger in a fraction of the time.

Quality movement and the mind-muscle connection

I’ve never counted my own tempo, and I don’t count yours either. I’m already counting your reps, so I judge it by how each rep looks. What I’m after is a rep that’s methodical and in control the whole way. Lowering the weight and lifting it are equally important.

Moving with control lets you feel the muscle working, and that’s what the mind-muscle connection means to me. It’s about squeezing as much as you possibly can out of every single rep. The more you focus, the harder the rep gets, which tends to surprise people the first time. Same weight, same number of reps, and suddenly it feels like a completely different exercise. It’s also why I’d rather we didn’t chat during a set. Between sets, I’m all ears, but while you’re working, I’d like all of your focus on the muscle doing the work.

There’s some lovely research behind this. In a 2018 study, 30 young men who were new to lifting followed the same program for eight weeks. Half were told to concentrate on the muscle they were working, and the other half on lifting the weight. The muscles at the front of the first group’s upper arms, mainly the biceps, grew by 12.4%, compared with 6.9% for the second group.² Their quads, the group of four muscles on the front of the thigh, grew by a similar amount either way, so focus isn’t a cure-all, but for a few seconds of concentration it’s a very good return.

Control also keeps the ego honest. If you can’t control a weight on the way down, it’s probably too heavy, and lifting it faster doesn’t solve that. It just hands part of the job over to momentum.

The exception is when performance and power are the priority. With athletes, or anyone who needs to stay quick, the lift itself can be faster and more explosive, because that’s what their sport or their goal asks of them. Goals matter.

Progress, but rarely in a straight line

I use progressive overload, which simply means asking a little more of your body over time, whether that’s more weight, more reps or more control. I keep track of all of it, so my clients don’t have to. It works, but it’s rarely linear, as nice as that would be. This is real training, for real people with real lives, and some weeks will feel stronger than others.

Something I’ve learnt over the years is that you often can’t force a period of progress. The intention might be there, but more often than not the body knows best. With my own training, I’ll listen to my body most of the time, but sometimes all I need is a great workout to get me back on track. It’s a fine balance, much like the rest of life. Push too hard, too often, and you won’t be able to keep the intensity up. My goal is to ride that fine line. Get it just right and you can keep progressing for years.

When someone hits a plateau, I don’t have one go-to fix. Sometimes it’s drop sets or pause reps, sometimes a spell of heavier lifting, and sometimes I’ll take the exercise out of the program for a while and bring it back later. What works depends on the person in front of me.

Every now and then, the plateau is in someone’s head. When a client tells me there’s nothing left, I’ll occasionally test that theory, and a few more reps usually appear from somewhere.

The biggest driver of progress I see is form. Every one of my clients starts getting better results once their form is high quality, and it builds like compound interest. For a while, you put in far more than you seem to get back. Then the fund grows big enough and everything starts to move. Those seven pull-ups felt like exactly that.

We work around it, we don’t stop

One of my long-term clients tweaked her back a while ago and it was very sore. She took a week or two off to rest, then came back, and we trained around it. It’s not rocket science. For every exercise that doesn’t feel right, we’ll find the one that does, and that applies to training in general, not only to injuries.

I live by that myself. I have osteoarthritis in my neck and a lower back that niggles from time to time, so deadlifts and front squats are off my list. There’s still an awful lot I can do, and I do it. It’s a bit damned if you do and damned if you don’t. I have some discomfort now and again, but I’m fairly sure I’d have far more of it if I sat around all day.

It isn’t always about swapping an exercise out, though. Sometimes all a client needs to master an exercise is a set-up that works for them. Every body is different, and not every exercise is going to look the same on every person. It can be as simple as a slightly wider stance, a slightly bigger bend in the elbow or a slant board under the heels.

I use a slant board in almost every leg session, because it gets people into a squat position they couldn’t reach without it. It’s wildly better for me too. It takes so much pressure off my lower back during a back squat.

Sometimes just getting into the position is challenge enough for a new client. A bent-over row is a good example. Holding that position puts pressure on your wrists and the whole back of your body before you’ve rowed anything at all. I often tell clients it’s supposed to feel challenging, because they’ve never done it before. Your body adapts to that, and not only your muscles. Even your skin toughens up to meet the demands of training, and your bones, tendons and ligaments do the same over time.

The line I draw is between discomfort and pain. Discomfort is part of learning a movement and getting stronger. Pain means we stop and find something else.

Same approach, whoever you are

It doesn’t matter whether you’re a complete beginner, an athlete or coming back after years away. Every session is built around what you can do now, not what you used to be able to do, and never around what anyone else can do. Where there’s a will, there’s a way, and my job is to find it with you.

When I’m training someone new, the goal is all about creating a positive experience, and I take that responsibility very seriously. Push someone too hard, too soon, and you might put them off exercise entirely. The mistake most inexperienced trainers make is doing exactly that, because they think more is better value in a session. It isn’t. The real value comes from the experience. Once a client is more experienced, you can expose them to greater challenges without the risk of putting them off.

If you’re new, two sessions a week is usually a great place to start, though if you want to do three, that’s absolutely your call.

How I train myself

I get my three sessions in every week without fail. I used to train five or six times a week, and to be honest, I felt rubbish. Currently I rotate through four workouts, two upper body and two lower body, so some weeks that’s two upper days and one lower, and some weeks the reverse. At the moment most of it happens on my terrace, which is a fully equipped gym in its own right and where I never have to wait for a bench. The rest happens at the gym.

The weights I lift have come down a little as I’ve got older. My form, control and body awareness, on the other hand, continue to improve, and I’m still using progressive overload and still making gains. Every workout is optimised for quality. I just care a lot less about the number on the plate than about how the movement feels.

I don’t train for how I look any more. Aesthetics are a lovely bonus, but these days I train for my health, my energy and my longevity, and because strong is sexy.

So, how do I train?

I train for quality movement, methodically and with full focus, three times a week, and every rep has a purpose. My clients train the same way, adapted to whoever walks through the door that day, and I’d like every one of them to leave a wee bit better off than they came in.

If you’d like to train like this with me, in Barcelona or wherever you happen to be, you’ll find me at martinebner.com.