Three fifteen isn’t a magic number.

Wait, let me back up.

When I was younger, I really enjoyed weightlifting. I was reasonably good at it and it was a great way to get exercise, but after high school I could never get back into it. Oh I tried. I would spend hours in the gym performing the standard three sets of eight to twelve reps. And I would get nowhere. Months of going to the gym and no progress. Every couple years I would try this. Same routine and the same results.

But, everyone has heard the quote:

  The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. 
Often misattributed to Einstein or Benjamin Franklin.

In November I decided to try something different. I’d read about another routine. It was progressive and used less reps. Deep down I remembered the dogma– ostensibly science– I had retained from somewhere: that the eight to twelve reps to failure over five sets is the ideal weight lifting routine.

One of my objectives was to raise my deadlift workout weight to three fifteen. (See, I brought it back.) That means to raise three fifteen from the floor to waist height and to do that five times in rapid succession.

The picture above is last Thursday’s workout. (45+4x45+2x35+2x10=315)

The quote above is a bit dumb and who knows its provenance, but too often we keep doing the same thing over and over again and we’re surprised that we get the same results. Habits form and we repeat patterns from our past. For me, this time, it was stupid workout dogma I learned at seventeen. It kept me from making progress for years. What pattern are you locked into? What result keeps turning up differently than you want?