Last year I bought a strength training program from a Canadian bodybuilder named Jeff, and it kind of made me better at everything.

The program was designed for people who don’t have much time to train – busy people cramming 35-minute workouts into lunch breaks. Because you only have time for one or two working sets per exercise, you have to make each set really good. The usual effort won’t do for these precious few sets – each one has to be high quality and high intensity.

High intensity, in a strength training context, means you do enough repetitions that you’re flirting with muscle failure — the point where your muscles physically cannot move the weight another inch.

The author insists that people almost always overestimate how close their normal effort gets them to this max-out point. You might feel like you would fail on the next rep, but if you test that assumption by continuing anyway, you find you can actually do two, three, even four more before you really hit the wall.

I started focusing on these extra reps as the whole point of the workout, and immediately started getting better results than I had in all my years of gym-going.