Cathy Meehan: Are you doing the wrong number of reps and actually sabotaging your health? Should you go heavy weight and low reps or should you go light weight and high reps? I mean, really, what is the answer? Well, on today’s episode of the Meehan Mission podcast, we’re going to talk with Eric Barber from Barberic Training. He’s going to help break down the strategy behind the reps.
So really, how do they impact strength and muscle and endurance? So if you’re ready to find out the right approach for you, let’s welcome Eric to the show and let’s get started.
Cathy Meehan: Well, hello everyone. Welcome to another edition of the Meehan Mission podcast. And it is our favorite online trainer, Eric Barber with Barberic Training. Eric, so great to see you today. How you been doing?
Eric Barber: Mm-hmm.
I’m good, I’m good. How are you, Cathy?
Cathy Meehan: I’m doing great. Actually, I do have to admit my hamstrings are a little bit sore, but I wanted to get you on today because there is a lot of confusion and discussion on reps. And I know me personally, I have the question. I mean, am I supposed to do heavy weights and low reps? Am I supposed to do, you know, light weights and high reps?
Eric Barber: Yeah.
Cathy Meehan: Am I trying to bulk up? Am I trying to lose weight? There are so many questions and I know you are the guy to answer them all. So let’s just start off with that. What does a person need to know about reps? Especially if you know I’m working out and I want to see certain results. Where do I start? What’s the strategy?
Eric Barber: Yeah.
I love this topic. I know I say that every time, but I do. I geek out on this stuff. What we’re talking about is not just reps. We’re talking about sets and reps, okay? Different training modalities. To break it down, you know, there’s a lot of noise out there now. A lot of know-it-alls, a lot of people saying, you gotta do this, you gotta do that. I’ve been doing this for 30, 40 years now.
Cathy Meehan: Okay.
Okay.
Mm-hmm.
Eric Barber: What I like to do is always go back to the basics. There are people that paved the way for us a long, long time ago and did all of this work. And we learned from them and we’ve been adding to it, adding to it, and then we just get more scientific about it. But then sometimes it just gets to a point where it’s just so much.
Cathy Meehan: Okay.
Eric Barber: data and so much science and everybody’s a know-it-all and it’s getting hard to know the difference between what’s real and what’s not anymore. So I like to take people back to the basics, okay? And so the basics are if you keep your repetitions between one to five reps, you are training for extreme strength or you are training for power. So when you look at people like
Cathy Meehan: I agree.
Thanks.
Eric Barber: Olympic weightlifters, what you see in the Olympics, versus power lifters, right? Huge difference between the actual look of each of those kinds of athletes as well as what they’re trying to do. Okay, but they’re still using the same rep range. So, in that, like just starting there alone, like how in the world do you even break into this? So a power lifter…
Cathy Meehan: Thank you.
Eric Barber: Is basically, they’re training on three events, right? The deadlift, the back squat and the bench press and those are known as the slow lifts. Okay, so power lifters are going for extreme strength in that one rep range a one rep max, right? That’s what they train for in three events and to me, it’s awesome, but I can’t train like that all the time for year after year after year. That would drive me crazy
Cathy Meehan: Okay.
Eric Barber: Right? I’m more of a multi athlete adventure style. You know, everything I train for is to be able to do cool things out there. Right? So, the power lifters, they really, they really are trying to prove how strong they are on those three lifts, but they call it the slow lifts because the barbell moves very, very slow. Okay. Now an Olympic weight lifter, what you see in the, in the Olympics way more
Cathy Meehan: Yeah.
Eric Barber: Complex. It doesn’t mean that it’s harder it’s just more complex of a movement because now you’re adding speed Okay, but their three movements are the snatch and the clean and the jerk the snatch is one movement where you take a barbell from the ground to overhead in one fast explosive movement right, and the clean and jerk is where you break it up into two movements you clean it up to your chest You take a deep breath and then you punch it overhead for a jerk. Okay, so the back squat, deadlift, and the bench press are the three slow lifts of powerlifting and the snatch, the clean, and the jerk are the Olympic lifts, the power of the explosive Olympic weightlifting. So those guys train for one rep as well, but two totally different athletes. When you look at a bodybuilder, I mean, I’m sorry, a powerlifter,
They, they’re usually big and husky and they’re going for that maximum weight. When you look at an Olympic weightlifter, they’re all lean and muscular and ripped. And it’s like, what? Well, when you add that speed in there, you have to train a totally different way. So when they train, they usually train in the one to five rep ranges. Okay. So that’s, that’s the first, that’s the, that’s where we start. Right? Those guys are extreme athletes in strength and extreme power.
Cathy Meehan: Extreme, yes.
Eric Barber: Okay. The Olympic weightlifters are more power because power is strength plus speed equals power. Okay. Power lifters, it’s kind of a, they shouldn’t really call it powerlifting because power indicates that they’re using speed. Power lifters. Yeah. They, the bar moves very, very slow when they’re lifting those extreme lifts. So anyway, so that, that, that’s the ability to literally like run through a wall.
Cathy Meehan: Yeah, you would think, okay.
Eric Barber: You know what I mean? That’s very short energy and it’s just boom. I mean it is power or it is strength. When you get into reps number six through 12, that’s more of the hypertrophy stage. Hypertrophy meaning muscle growth. Okay? You can change your physique. You can change the look of your body. Like a sculptor with clay, if you want bigger shoulders,
You can literally train in a way within that six to 12 rep range where you can trigger muscle hypertrophy or muscle growth within certain body parts. This is where bodybuilders live. Bodybuilders wanna build and sculpt their body. Their reps are in the six to 12 rep range. We’ll come back to this. I’ll tell you how to train in these ranges, right? But right now I’m just laying that framework.
Cathy Meehan: Okay.
Okay.
Okay.
Eric Barber: laying that framework.
Cathy Meehan: Yeah, no, that’s good because you know, I’m very selfishly doing this interview with you because I’m thinking to myself, where do I need to be? And I’m sure that members of our community, if they’re either, you know, they’re working out, they’ve been working out or they’re starting to work out or whatever they need to know, you know, what they need to know about reps themselves. So when they’re conditioning and training their own body. So so I’m listening and thinking in my head. So keep going. Keep going.
Eric Barber: Yeah.
Yep, yep. Okay, so we’ve established the one to five rep range. This is where those type of athletes live, okay? The bodybuilder or people just looking to change their appearance, they’ll use bodybuilding techniques to change their appearance. So whether they’re a bodybuilder or not, that six to 12 rep range is the magic rep range, okay? When you get into 15 reps and more, it could be 15 reps all the way and up to 100 reps, okay? Let’s say, or more.
Cathy Meehan: Okay.
Okay.
Eric Barber: or more. Now you’re getting into muscle endurance. You’re not going to be very strong when you pick a weight that you do 30 times. You’re going to be using a pretty light weight. But what you’re training your body to do is muscle endurance, muscle endurance, muscle endurance. So when you look at endurance athletes like cyclists and people like that, they tend to lean more towards the higher rep ranges. You’re not going to see
a lot of top tier cyclists doing one to five rep ranges. Just like you’re not going to see a power lifter hop on a bike and ride for three hours, right? Like the different rep ranges do different things to your body. Do different things to your body. So that 15 rep range and up can go up and up and up and up. So CrossFit is very, very interesting. CrossFit, you know, it’s changed a lot since I, I, I,
Cathy Meehan: Okay, and that makes sense. That makes sense. Yeah.
Yeah.
Eric Barber: was in on the ground floor with all of that. I got started in 2006. I think I was the first official CrossFit gym in Tulsa, Oklahoma. I was the 150th affiliate worldwide. Okay, so now there’s over 15,000. So I was back in the very early days, back before we had all the cool equipment and everything. We had to build a lot of our own equipment. It was crazy. I had to build my own pull-up rig.
Cathy Meehan: Wow.
Eric Barber: It was crazy, but CrossFitters, at least back in the early days, very, very interesting because our rep ranges were anywhere between one rep, like a powerlifter or an Olympic weightlifter, all the way on up to hundreds of reps for one exercise. So what I loved about CrossFit was I got to be good at all things. Now over the years, CrossFit has changed and now it’s become
Cathy Meehan: gosh.
my.
Eric Barber: Well, I don’t know. It’s just very heavily focused on competing. Whereas in the beginning it used to be a lot about, it was all fresh and new and we were trying different things and we were guinea pigging ourselves on everything. And it was just a wonderful golden era learning stage of CrossFit. Now it’s very, very different. It’s much, much more professional and much sleeker and quite frankly, very competition based. You know, even within
local gyms. Yeah, now I’m not saying anything bad about CrossFit. I just got out right before COVID. I sold my CrossFit gym. And so that was my last time coaching CrossFit. Although funny thing, I just recently started at a CrossFit here in Charlotte, North Carolina as just a substitute coach. Yeah. And I did that because now that I’m an online trainer, I literally sit in my room.
Cathy Meehan: fun!
Eric Barber: in my office all the time working. And I go from being an in-person coach, yelling, screaming, cheering, hugging, scolding, being very, very people-oriented to now I’m just by myself. And so I was just praying about it and I was like, I need to get back in front of people. I need to have that balance again. yeah.
Cathy Meehan: Wow
Yeah, that’s very healthy. That’s very healthy and people need to realize that themselves too. You know, you can only be so isolated. Good.
Eric Barber: So I went to a really, I went to a, yeah, I went to a really cool local CrossFit gym here. It’s huge. And I told them who I was and how long I’d been doing it and all of my experience and all my credentials and all my certifications. And they were like, come on, it was awesome. So I love those guys. Yeah, more on that in the future. I just started this week. It was great. I’m just coaching one night a week and it’s a blast. I love it.
Cathy Meehan: Yeah.
Great.
Eric Barber: So anyways, so those CrossFitters are very interesting because we do all rep ranges and it confuses the body a lot, which is really cool. The body has amazing ability to adapt. The human body has an amazing ability to adapt. And so when you’re training with all rep ranges, your body is just like, man, we got to get in shape because who knows what this guy’s going to do to us again. You know what I mean?
Cathy Meehan: Mm-hmm.
Yes.
Eric Barber: So yeah, so those are the basics of the rep ranges. You’ve got your one to five, you’ve got your six to 12, and then you’ve got anything past 15.
Cathy Meehan: Yes.
Okay. Okay. Well, that’s interesting. And just, I just want to kind of hit back on the high reps because just something that I’ve heard is that if people are looking for fat loss, and I’m sure you’ve heard this before that you have to do high reps. So what is, what is your take on that? Is that a myth or is that true? It is. Okay.
Eric Barber: It’s old school. Yep, it’s an old school way of thinking. To say, I’m gonna lift light weights, because I wanna lose fat. It’s kind of like saying, I don’t wanna get all big and muscular overnight. Like, I don’t wanna be like these muscle dudes. So I’m just gonna go light weight and do a thousand reps on something and I’m just gonna lose fat. That’s kind of not the way it works. I think we talked about it before, but you know.
Cathy Meehan: Mm-hmm.
Hahaha.
Yeah.
Eric Barber: When you want to lose body fat, you need to look number one at your nutrition. Nutrition is king.
Cathy Meehan: Yes, absolutely. I just had that, I had that discussion less than an hour ago with someone talking about, you know, my weight loss came from, yes, working out, but I mean, I think 80% of it was because of my tweaking my nutrition. And that was it.
Eric Barber: Yeah, yeah So nutrition is king. There’s no nutrition is king When you’re in your 20s, it doesn’t seem like that because you have unlimited energy and you’re bulletproof and your body You know can bounce back from anything the next day, right? But in your 20s your body is still progressing up it’s when we get in our 30s that it starts to kind of plateau and then starts
Cathy Meehan: Yes.
Eric Barber: the age of decline, right? So young people are all over Instagram and they look amazing and this and that and they’re giving all kinds of advice but they don’t really know because their body is still just on. Yeah, so I, yeah. So it’s better to always start with your nutrition first, that’s what I do with all my clients, right?
Cathy Meehan: They’re still living the life. Yeah, you just wait. You just wait. Yeah.
Mm.
Eric Barber: And the trick is with my clients to get them leaned out and eating well is to make it fun because people will not follow a meal plan that is an absolute drag or it’s too complex or it’s too hard. People just won’t do it. Not over time. They might be able to keep it up for a couple of weeks, but over time, no way, no way. You’ve got to make it fun. So I always start with nutrition. And then after that you get into cardio and you’ve got your zone one, zone two, zone three, zone four and zone five. Right.
Cathy Meehan: Yes, correct.
Eric Barber: And zone two is that perfect heart rate range to maximize losing body fat. If you go too high, your body will start to use muscle glycogen, muscle energy, right? We don’t want that when we want to lean out. We want to tap into our stored body fat. So you want your heart rate a little bit higher than just going out for a walk and you want it a little bit lower than being out of breath. That’s your zone two. If people want to check out, I did a cool video on that on,
on my Instagram and Facebook. If anybody wants to go to that, I’ve literally labeled it zone. So zone training. Yeah. So, so nutrition and then fat burning cardio. Okay. When you’re training with light weights and doing tons of reps, I wouldn’t say that it’s a true fat burning. You know what I mean? I think it’s more muscle endurance. You’re teaching, you’re teaching that body how to handle low grade
Cathy Meehan: Great, that’ll be a good resource.
Mm-hmm.
Eric Barber: muscular pain giving you muscle endurance, okay? Yep
Cathy Meehan: Okay, so there’s more to that. There’s more than that. So, yeah, so let’s talk about people’s goals. You mentioned fat loss. So the person that wants to build muscles, let’s say we’ve started working out and then now we just want to continue to build muscles. My guess is that for me personally, I need to move into the moderate reps, right? And maybe a little bit heavier weights.
Eric Barber: Yeah.
Yeah.
Right.
Cathy Meehan: And okay, that’s.
Eric Barber: So the data is coming out now, finally. Well, the data’s been out for a long time, and the bodybuilders and a lot of us have already known all this, but the general public is finally starting to listen now, because guys like Dr. Andrew Huberman and all these guys are coming out and they’re proving that as we age, strength training with heavy weights, with good form, not sloppy form, but with good form, training heavy weights is really gonna help
extend your lifespan, it’s going to give you a better quality of life and people are like, I need to start lifting heavy. And it’s like, that’s what we’ve been telling you for all these years, right? So literally when you think of elderly people, they lose the ability to function, you know, to get up out of a chair. It’s the loss of strength really, you know, so, and then your bones get more brittle and that kind of thing. So yes, that six to 12 rep range, I guess you could say six to 14, cause I said 15 plus, right?
Cathy Meehan: Yeah. Yes.
Eric Barber: But if you think about it, when you and I started working out together, I put you on a 15, 12, 10, eight workout. 15 was a good warmup weight. It’s your first set on an exercise, right? And it’s just meant to just kind of wake your muscles up, wake up those movement patterns, right? And just get your body kind of clicked on to, okay, we’re doing a leg extension now, or we’re doing a bench press now, or something like it. It just kind of…
Cathy Meehan: Yes.
Mm-hmm.
Eric Barber: wakes your body up and it’s like saying, this is what we’re doing now. And it’s with a light enough weight that you flood the body with circulation and you’re starting to lubricate the joints better, you know, that kind of thing. then I had you go a little bit heavier for a set of 12, then a little bit heavier for a set of 10, and then a little bit heavier for a set of eight. Now in your third month of training with me, the last month of my 12 week challenge,
Cathy Meehan: Yeah, just get used to the movement. Yeah, absolutely.
Yes.
Eric Barber: We bumped it up to a 15, 12, 10, 8, and then a burnout set of 15. Do you remember that? I had to go back to a lighter weight and just shoot for that burn, right? With my guys that want to put on a lot of muscle, I’ll have them do a 15, 12, 10, 8, 6. That way they can hit that heavy set of 8 and 6. Okay? Yep. So that, to me, is muscle strengthening.
Cathy Meehan: Yes, I remember those. Yes.
Sounds good.
Eric Barber: You know, but you’ve got higher reps in there and you’ve got lower reps in there. So it’s like a, to me, it’s like the perfect range for building strength, building power, hypertrophy, building muscle endurance and, changing the way that you look. Like I said, I love this stuff. I geek out on it. I think beginners should start with three sets of everything. And I think as you get in better shape, as the months go by, you bump it up to four sets on everything. You bump it up to five sets on everything.
Cathy Meehan: Okay.
Endurance is in there. Yeah. Yes.
Yeah, it’s all in
Mm-hmm.
Eric Barber: When you start getting into, you know, ’cause we talked about reps. So if we can just take a second and talk about sets, how many of these sets do I do? Yeah. Beginners three sets. Yeah. Beginners three sets. You’re just, you just need a good solid month of not training hard, but training consistent. In the beginning, consistency will always be better than intensity. Always. Getting those workouts in in the first month is way more important than somebody who’s like, dang it.
Cathy Meehan: Yes, yeah, explain that sets and reps. What’s the definition of that?
I agree, yes.
Eric Barber: I’m gonna lose weight and I’m gonna get back in shape and they go in and they hit it too hard and they either burn out from fatigue or adrenal fatigue or muscle fatigue, whatever, or joint, they start having joint issues right off the bat. They just haven’t given enough time to be consistent with three sets of everything and making it a habit, okay? Second month you can bump it up to four sets. Third month you can bump it up to five sets. When you start getting into more sets per exercise, above five sets, that’s where it’s getting kind of extreme. You’re either training for something in particular, okay? Like training for a certain sport or training for a certain lift or something. Like I just think it’s a little bit unnecessary, okay? Now I’ve done workouts where I’ll get to the fifth set and I’m like, man, I feel like I misjudged my numbers. I’m feeling a lot, like I wanna keep going.
So every once in a while I’ll be instinctive and I’ll do like a sixth or seventh set on something. Every once in a while, I’m kind of crazy. Every once in a while I’ll do 10 sets of 10 on something, but it is not a fun way to train.
Cathy Meehan: So what about if rather than increasing the number of sets, increasing the weight? You see what I’m saying? And so like rather than doing four sets of something, I do three sets, but increase the weight that I was doing before. Does that make sense? Okay. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Eric Barber: Yeah, so that’s what I meant. So like when we did three, when I had you on your first month, three sets, we did a 15, 12, 10, and progressively increasing the weight a little bit. Okay. When you, when you see some people’s programming, I see some trainers programming and it’ll be something like three sets of 10 or three sets of 12. I think that we should progressively get heavier each set. That’s how we get stronger.
Cathy Meehan: Mm hmm. OK, yes.
Okay, do the variable like you’re doing.
Eric Barber: You kind of learn your way around the gym, you kind of learn your way around each exercise and learning what different plates feel like and that kind of thing. For me going into the gym, if I had, let’s say my workout had five exercises and each of those five exercises was five sets of those five exercises, right? And it was like five sets of 10. So like five sets of five sets of 10, five sets of 10 all the way down. That would, to me, that would be very boring.
Cathy Meehan: Yeah. It’s easier to keep track of in your head though, but yeah.
Eric Barber: I like progressive.
Yep, it is. Yep, it is for sure. But I like the progressively heavier plus that helps us reach our goals of getting stronger. Okay. Now the best part of training like that. Well, assuming I’m assuming that they’re taking notes somehow, whether it’s on an app or whether like I’m old school. I write on my workout some paper, right? Keep them in. Nope. I’m still old school. I have a stack of them chest high in my storage unit. I love it.
Cathy Meehan: Mm.
A little notebook. I have a little notebook. Yeah.
Eric Barber: I like the apps too because the apps will give you graphs and stuff. It’s really cool. You know, you can find things instantly, but I’ve also had apps crash on me before and I don’t like that. I don’t like it when all my hard work disappears. So anyways, so whatever works for you, right? But when you, when you train like that for a month and by the end of the month, you’re like, holy crap, sorry. Holy moly. Um, my set of 15, 12 and 10,
Cathy Meehan: Hmm
Eric Barber: was so weak compared to what I’m doing now. Like you can see the progress over that one month. I love that. I love seeing progress. I’m always trying to make myself better. Always trying to look for progress. And then when life hits you below the belt and you have to drop a knee and all of a sudden you can’t work out for two months and you gotta kinda start back over from zero, you’ve got all your numbers. You’ve got what you started at before and you get back, you know what I mean? And it just builds and builds and builds.
And then you just become really good at going to the gym and knowing how to work out and what weights to use and stuff. Is this helping at all?
Cathy Meehan: Yeah, yeah, it does. It does it. And you know, I really love the point. The very beginning is consistency because once you establish that consistency, you change your entire lifestyle and you make priorities for it. And and you know, people ask me about, you know, how do I stay? what is the word motivated and how do I stay, you know, just consistent? And it’s like because I started
with consistency. I just tell people, you know, you have number one, you’ve got it. It’s the mindset you have to dedicate. I dedicated 90 days. I was like 90 days. I can do anything for 90 days. You started me out on consistency. So I started with consistency, you know, just developed a whole new lifestyle and my pattern and maintained that. And, you know, you, get all those benefits of, you know,
cognitively, physically, I mean, there’s just the energy, all of those things that I don’t, it was worth the risk of changing my life to the reward that I got. And I just, you know, I can’t emphasize that enough to people that if you’ve been thinking about working out or it’s, you know, it’s like, I don’t have time. I don’t have money. I don’t, you know, stop because you can do it. I mean,
And we’ve talked about the financial aspects of it and one of the other ones, you can start in a home gym. I mean, there’s just so many things or there’s $10 gyms that they’re all over the place. So finances should not be a barrier for anyone.
Eric Barber: We should do a podcast on that sometime because the cost of not training, right? The cost of not hiring, the cost of not hiring a personal trainer or an online coach or the cost of building your own home gym or whatever, Anything put into your fitness, if you’re consistent with it, it’s gonna pay you back in spades.
Cathy Meehan: Yeah, that’s good. That’s a good one. Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, and also the point of hiring a coach, whether it’s a, you know, in person or online, because you even talked about it on form. You know, if you’re not doing the correct form, then that’s going to cause injury. And that’s, you know, you definitely don’t want to cause injury. And especially if it’s been a while since you’ve worked out or you’re just new to the whole idea of working out. It really, really would be
Eric Barber: Right.
Cathy Meehan: like so beneficial to make sure you’ve got a coach and someone, you know, directing you along the way so that you can, you know, do it the right way. Because the last thing you want to do is injure yourself or get burned out on that.
Eric Barber: Right.
Especially as we get older, yeah, that’s… but we should We should do a we should do a podcast on the the cost You know of not working out versus the cost of working out that would be really cool
Cathy Meehan: I’m not getting older. What are you talking about?
Okay, we’ll do that on our next month since we are doing these monthly. So we’ll do that. We’ll work on that.
Eric Barber: I, you know, sometimes I, I get people that are like, I could never afford you just their knee-jerk reaction is, I could never afford a trainer. Right. And I challenge that I challenge that because going out to eat at restaurants all the time or ordering food in all the time. I mean, if you think about the drive to a restaurant, having to sit there, having to wait, get everybody situated, you’ve got to wait for your waiter. And then they get there, you order your food.
Cathy Meehan: Mm-hmm.
Eric Barber: There’s the temptation to always eat appetizers and eat desserts and then have drinks with that. you know, God forbid, I mean not God forbid, but I mean if you’re having to pay for not just yourself and your partner, know, let’s say you’ve got kids thrown in, when that’s your lifestyle, you know, that’s an easy thousand or two thousand dollars a month. You know what I mean? So I try to help my clients fall back in love with the kitchen again.
or if they’ve never done that before, fall in love with it for the first time. Cooking in your own kitchen is fun. Like you can make it fun. Your own spices, it’s what… Yeah, meal prepping is fun. You get to make the foods taste the way that you want them to. You get to choose the ingredients, right? You don’t have to worry about somebody who might be sick in the back, but needs the money and they don’t want to risk giving up that shift because maybe they need money so they come into work kind of sick. So you’ve got people…
Cathy Meehan: Absolutely, absolutely. I love meal prepping.
gosh, I never even thought of that until now, but thank you.
Eric Barber: You’ve got two, three, four different hands handling your food in the back of a restaurant. And right now, know, restaurant eating and foodies and all that, it’s sexy now, you know, like the foodie thing and just restaurant. I just, I’m like, man, you’re wasting so much money and then you have to tip on top of that. Right. And so what should cost you, you know, you know, maybe 25% or less to cook at home.
You’re spending three quarters more money on to eat out at a restaurant plus all the drive time. Plus every once in a while you get bad food, you know, I just, to me it’s just I don’t know I’ve been living like this for a long long time and I think I love my kitchen, you know, and I love feeding people when they come over. I love it. I love, I love the looks on their faces when they’re like, this is really healthy and it tastes good and I’m like, yeah
Cathy Meehan: Mm-hmm. That’s good.
Simple ingredients and simple ingredients. Well, you know, I also I make note to people that say that they can’t afford to eat organic or healthy foods.
When you actually look at what people are purchasing, so stop purchasing the soda pop and the prepackaged food items and whether it’s Twinkies or whatever, whatever. And instead get Whole Foods, shop the outside of the grocery store and prepare your own meals. It’s not gonna cost.
Eric Barber: Right.
Cathy Meehan: If it costs more, not that much more. It’s just, you just have to be wise and prior planning really is what it is. so, okay, let’s get back on reps. So question, I just have a couple of quick ones. I think we kind of talked about it, but what is more important weight or the number of reps for people?
It’s a trick question.
Eric Barber: Well, when you’re training, you want to choose weights. And this is hard in the beginning. You know, if you remember, when I give you your workout program, your first week going into the gym, I was like, now, everything doesn’t have to be perfect, right? Because you’re sitting there and you’re like, okay, Eric’s got me going to a seated leg curl. And what’s this for? This is for hamstrings. You watch the video on the correct form. You’re like, okay, I got it. There’s the machine. You set it all up and everything and you start.
Cathy Meehan: Mm-hmm.
Eric Barber: You know, okay, I need to start with a light weight 15 reps. lot of times you’re just guessing in the beginning and you put it in and right off the bat, it’s too heavy or right off the bat. It’s way too light. You get to 15 and you’re like, I could keep going for another 15, right? So that in the beginning, there’s a lot of trial and error, a lot of hit or miss, right? But if you’re taking notes and you’re writing it down, then you can build upon that from week to week to week. Right? So I would say, I would say that.
Cathy Meehan: Yes, guessing.
Eric Barber: It’s not necessarily the amount of weight that you can lift because some days I go to the gym and I feel like crap and I can’t lift heavy. Other days I go to the gym and I’m like, what is, why do I feel like a horse right now? Like I feel like I can handle anything. You know what I mean? Like, so it’s not necessarily about the weight. I don’t think. And it’s not necessarily about the number of reps. I just use that as a guide. What I care about, what I think about.
all the time. I’ve been training for 35 years and every time I go to the gym I am thinking about quality of reps.
Cathy Meehan: Good point, good point.
Eric Barber: I don’t know, there’s a lot of my buddies still to this day that they only care about the amount of weight that they lift every single workout and I’m like man my body changes from day to day like I didn’t get good sleep the night before maybe I drank too much coffee. I don’t know whatever but I’m just not feeling super strong that day It’s better to just get that workout in with lighter weights right instead of having to fuel my ego and have to use what I’m used to lifting so
Cathy Meehan: Such a good point.
Eric Barber: I love training. I keep it very fluid. go with what my body’s telling me, you know, someday my body’s telling me I can go heavier. Other days it tells me, no, let’s go back a bit. So I wouldn’t say it’s the weight and I wouldn’t say that it’s necessarily 15, 12, 10, eight. It’s not necessarily the reps to me. I use those as guides, the strength and, or the amount of weight and the rep scheme, right?
Cathy Meehan: That’s very important.
Eric Barber: And we worry about the quality of the reps, the actual workout itself. You want to stimulate the muscle, not annihilate it. Okay. So if there was one of the things that I struggle with sometimes with CrossFit is, you know, the workout will be up there on the board and it will say something like, and I used to program this stuff cause I was crazy back then, but it would be like, here’s the workout. 100 pull-ups, 200 push-ups, 300 squats.
Cathy Meehan: Dang.
Eric Barber: Okay, that’s all right, that’s pretty salty. And so when you get towards rep number 78 and 79 on pull-ups, at that point you’re like, I just wanna be done with these. My back was thrashed by rep number 50. And then you start getting into sloppy reps, okay? Now there’s a whole argument about do we have to train perfect all the time or is it okay to have…
Cathy Meehan: Thank you.
Eric Barber: a little bit of slop in your training because your body will adapt to real life whenever you get, you know, when, cause life is not perfect movement patterns, right? So there is truth to that, that it doesn’t have to be perfect all the time. So the body is so complex. Like everybody tries to sound like an expert and say, you got to do this, you got to do that. But there’s a little bit of truth in everything, you know? And so I try to, I try to shoot for quality reps all the time.
Cathy Meehan: Well.
Eric Barber: But when I’m training high rep training with tough workouts and tough weights, I allow a little bit of, not slop, I don’t get sloppy, just a little bit of cheating or something like that to help keep the weight moving or keep my body moving. But that’s pretty rare. That’s pretty rare. For the most part, I’m thinking about really stimulating the muscle, not annihilating it. And the more you, so on those workouts, like what I just mentioned,
Cathy Meehan: Thank you.
Eric Barber: you’re annihilating the muscle. 100 pull-ups, you’re smoking your lats and your back muscles. 200 push-ups, so you’re annihilating it. Now you need more rest after that. You’re gonna need two, three, four days more rest. Whereas if you just go into the gym and you stimulate the muscle, you’ll be able to get more workouts in without so much afterwards pain.
Cathy Meehan: Hmm.
Yeah, that makes sense. Well, and what you said is just, you know, really, you just need to read your body because, you know, so many things. I mean, if you’re tired, I went yesterday and I hardly had sleep the night before because I had a lot of work to do and I didn’t feel like going to the gym. So I just basically went through the motions. You know, I went in, went through the motions and got out of there. And then but some days I’m.
Eric Barber: Yeah.
Cathy Meehan: my body’s feeling great and I don’t ever wanna leave the gym and I just keep working out. So that’s the way that goes. Well, Eric, have we covered a lot of things between low, moderate, high reps and weights and everything that, anything you need to add to that?
Eric Barber: Right. I know, I know. Yeah.
I think so. Probably a little overkill for the average listener, for the average person listening to this, but it’s kind of fun to geek out on it. And I don’t know, just, sometimes I think a lot of people out there are making it so confusing and they try to sound super technical or super scientific or super smart. I like to always take it back to the basics and just learn.
Cathy Meehan: Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Eric Barber: learn from the basics and then apply to our own lives what we learn from the people that have gone before us. You know what I mean? And I think what I said about three to five sets per exercise, you know, building up to that over time, starting with three, building up to five is a pretty good safe way to train. I think training in that six rep to 14 rep range is pretty much what
Cathy Meehan: Yeah.
I love that.
Eric Barber: 80% 90% of the people out there need to be doing you know, you’ve got your 10% your 20% your outliers that are training for a certain something or a certain event or a certain lifestyle, you know, but I found at 56 now, I think I’m 56. I train low reps all the way up to high reps so that I’m able to go out and spend the day, you know, surfing with my kids or rock climbing out at the Whitewater Center or
or whitewater rafting or you know what I mean? Like I like training with all rep schemes. So I can go out and live a pretty adventurous life even in my fifties. Yeah.
Cathy Meehan: I think that’s great. So Eric, if somebody wants to reach out to you, what’s the best way to find you?
Eric Barber: So barberictraining.com, but I post two, three posts a week on my Instagram is barberic underscore training. And my Facebook is simply Eric Barber. Yeah.
Cathy Meehan: Okay.
Great, great. It is always fun to have you on. I look forward to next month’s podcast with you. And until then, everybody out there, just please share.
Like, get working out if you haven’t started yet. And I would love to hear anybody else’s success story because I know I personally, Eric changed my life. I live to work out and it has made such a difference. And so everybody, I want you to have the same blessing that I got. So everyone take care, have a very blessed day and Eric, we’ll catch you next month. Thanks so much. Bye bye.
Eric Barber: You changed.
Thank you.
All right, thanks for having me. Bye bye.
