The Perfect Rep
In 1998, I was heavily influenced by Steve Wetzel, the head strength and conditioning coach for the Minnesota Vikings. I spent my senior year of high school in a mentorship program with coach Wetzel as my mentor. Many of Wetzel’s lessons have shaped how I’ve approached exercise over 25 years later. Weekly, Wetzel would do a 1-on-1 classroom session in which he introduced and discussed a topic around training, conditioning, recovery, and the like.
Our first lesson? The perfect rep.
In the field of strength training, trainees, trainers, and coaches have always focused on exercise selection, sets and reps, rest between sets, frequency (days per week), free weights versus machines, and proximity to muscle failure. But what Wetzel started with was, what he called, the building block of a strength training program: The Repetition. If the cell represents the foundational building block of the human organism, the rep represents the building block of the strength training program.
We must first master the performance of the perfect rep.
Perfect Rep Guidelines:
Raise the weight in a controlled manner so that momentum is eliminated.
Pause in the contracted position (for example, when the legs are fully extended on a leg extension). Eliminate any bounce or hiccup.
Lower the weight approximately twice as slow as you lifted it in order to expose the muscle to “eccentric” contractions.
Move through the greatest range of motion that safety and joint comfort allow.
Avoid creating leverage by alternating body position.
Transition slowly, attempting to eliminate momentum and repeat for the next rep
As you approach muscle failure, the point where you can’t possibly do another rep, focus on failing with perfect form. Rep 8 or 9 should look identical to rep 1-2 (with perhaps, a slower lifting speed as fatigue sets in).
Take action: In your next workout, rather than trying to lift more weight or perform one more rep than last workout, obsess over performing the perfect rep.
Boring side note: The original name for Discover Strength (which I eventually abandoned) was going to be “The Perfect Rep.”
