- Heavyweight wrestler Gable Steveson won gold at the Tokyo Olympics.
- He attributes part of his success to the absence of any maxing out in his workout routine.
- Maxing out is when a lifter will lift the highest possible weight they can for just one or two reps.
Heavyweight wrestler Gable Steveson credits his workout routine for his gold medal victory at the Tokyo Olympics, but he credits a workout he didn't do just as much.
The 21-year-old wrestler said he doesn't believe in maxing out in the weight room, which involves lifting the highest amount of weight possible for just one or two reps.
"There's really no point besides telling your friends that you lifted a certain amount," Stevenson told Insider. "Stuff like that is pointless and it could injure you."
Steveson, who wrestles as a student athlete at the University of Minnesota, said he used to max out, but quit the practice with his teammates two years ago.
Maxing out increase risk of injury without increasing gains
The last time Steveson maxed out, he said he hit one rep of 375 pounds on the bench press. But he says maxing out with lower-body lifting is a much more dangerous practice.
"If your form is messed up then your back can get blown out," Steveson said. "We didn't want to risk, if I messed up my form or something, if I did mess up all the way, I could get a herniated disc. There's so much more that goes into it. We go heavy, but we try to stay away from excessive amounts of weight."
These days, Steveson said he and his teammates do their heavy weight lifting in sets of four reps, and not just two or three.
Celebrity sports trainer Mike Boyle agrees with this philosophy, and doesn't instruct any of his own clients to max out either.
"My philosophy is that as the number of reps goes down the injury risk goes up," Boyle told Insider. "We rarely do less than three reps and probably spend 80% of our time between 5 and 10 reps."
Even former World's Strongest Man Hafthor Björnsson disagrees with a philosophy similar to maxing out.
Björnsson previously told Insider's Rachel Hosie that no on should train to failure when they workout, which is when you keep going until you physically cannot complete a rep.
"I never ever almost failed a lift in training sessions, you should always leave something in the tank in the gym," he said.