u/Czlowiek_maupa

It's a made-up term that describes, at most, a small percentage of humanity, not some global phenomenon. It's better to change it to "middle-upper class rich western world optimism" and then it will make some sense.

It's like assuming all boomers were hippies when that only applied to the Western world, and even there, most boomers weren't hippies.

I'd like to take this opportunity to say that this sub is filled with naive, inaccurate, or completely made-up generalizations about generations, which often don't even apply to Europe and seem to apply only to Trumpistan.

When I started working out, I did what probably most people do: I sacrificed technique and rep timing in order to reach an arbitrary number of reps.

Over time, I changed my approach (honestly, somewhat influenced by the fitness trends, when every science nerd was talking about the importance of proper tempo. Interestingly, that trend ended and no one talks about it anymore, now are days of strech emphasis).

I started fanatically counting rep tempo  with a stopwatch. I added pauses at the most difficult part of the movements. I completely eliminated momentum. I tried to maintain perfect technique. Even when I hardly reached the planned number of reps, I didn't add reps/weight until the tempo and technique were on point.

This approach turned out to be really good for me for a while. Of course, this slowed my progress and set me back with the weights, but after about a year, I returned to my previous weights, with better technique and control than before. I was squeezing out more gains with the same weight and reps than when I was doing it more care-free. However, it was good for a while.

With the approach described above, the already slow progress becomes astronomically slow. Using double progression its around one rep more per two or three weeks and 5kg more per half a year on main lifts, and it's getting slower and slower. I've been essentially stagnant for a year now, stuck in a forever intermediate stage, and I feel that this is partly due to my training style and the self-imposed perfectionism I've become completely accustomed to.

I feel like I could move forward if I relaxed my approach to time and technique. I think that at this point, returning to the monkey days of swinging, cheated reps, lifting too much weight with poor control, and hitting reps at all costs with no-time bullshit would be much better than what I'm doing.

So which approach is better? Which one do you use? Vibe brolifting or science nerd counting? Propably a middle ground in between, but what exactly your middle ground looks like, in a measurable way? Or maybe its good to circle between "just lift heavy things bro" and "negative part of rep should take 2s and end with 1s pause on bottom" to avoid stagnation.