Are You A Man?
I was talking to a guy at the gym who has made amazing gains lately over the last 3 months, using heavier weights, bigger, same muscularity. I asked him what he was doing and he told me something I had never heard about before. He calls it affirmation rep training. Basically, the idea is that as we are doing our reps we all count them out in our heads. But he somehow came up with the idea that this was limiting him, especially in lower rep ranges like 6 or below once the weights started getting heavier. Like he knew he was going to do 6 reps, he'd mentally tell himself this at the beginning and then counting up to 6 or down from 6, he would anticipate that he should be getting tired or the end of the set and often couldn't make the final rep.
He said it was all subconscious to some extent. But he said he decided to try something else, not counting the reps, but instead saying a word based sentence with the same number of words. So for 6 reps you would say "My chest is bigger and stronger." After experimenting a bit with it he also makes the sentences positive affirmations and ones that can always end in something like "yes!" Or "bigger" "stronger" something like that. This ending turns out to be crucial because subconsciously you want to get to that Yes word.
He told me the various sentences but the only ones I could remember are this one above and the 4 rep sentence "Are you a man?"
I tried it today and damn if it doesn't change things up a bit.
