No, you did NOT lift a million pounds!

So just like runners claiming "i ran 100 miles this week"

Well it didnt really count since u didnt run all 100 miles at the same time.

OP has 0 happiness. J leave em alone dumbdy.

If they lifted 100lbs x 10 times, they certainly did lift 1000lbs.

What school did you go to?

Tonnage is a legitimate way of tracking gym progress. However, just like mileage, it's not the end all be all. Examples:

40 total squats @ 100lbs vs 20 total squats @ 200lbs. Both the the same tonnage, but different stimuli. The 20 total repper is much likely getting more benefit than the 40 total repper, all other things being equal.

Same goes for mileage. I could beat a guy who runs nothing but 9:00 miles for 120 miles per week over almost any distance, even though I only do 50–60. But plenty of people out there run less than me and could handily beat me.

Those are different. If you ran 10 miles today and then run 10 miles tomorrow, that means you ran a total of 20 miles. If you lifted 10 pounds today and then lift 10 pounds tomorrow, that doesn’t mean you lifted 20 pounds. It just means you lifted 10 pounds twice.

.... What?

Then you ran 10 miles twice, also.

I never thought of it this way. Can't wait to discuss this with my hot girl bartender.

Jfc u are really dense lmao

You're that insecure where you have to post this?

I’m plenty secure. That’s why I don’t pretend I lifted a million pounds. Insecurity is bragging on social media about false accomplishments and trying to make people think you’re a jock when you’re not.

So, what if they do? Insecure people complain about people just trying to better themselves then they come on here and downvote me and upvote yourself for calling you out on it.

Your next move is to go on other devices and upvote yourself and downvote me several times. It is predictable.

Nobody successful would act this way. It's a loser's game.

If I ran 5x1k @3min/k then I ran a total of 5k @ 3min/k

Which one of these people posting on social media is banging your girlfriend?

It’s either that or you have a small penis, something is up with you OP.

The reason that lifters don't track 'tonnage', is that it isn't meaningful to them. For a lifter with a max of say 410 lbs, to lift 400 lbs once is much much more difficult than the tonnage equivalent of lifting 100 lbs 4 times. To maximize tonnage, one would lift a very light weight hundreds or thousands of times, which is not how they train.

A better running analogy would be to compare speed/intensity. It's like walking 4 x 16 minute miles, compared with one 4 minute mile.

In any case, it shouldn't bother a real lifter if some clown wants to evaluate tonnage for fun, just as a 4 minute miler isn't threatened by a recreational walker.

This isn't the equivalent at all. You've already put the qualifier "this week" in there, so people know that you have done it across the whole week.

The equivalent would be as a another poster has mentioned:

"I ran 5 x 1k @ 3:00/km, therefore, I ran 5k in 15 minutes."

No one says this, and no one believes it to be true. We would list the workout as it was done, therefore, people should list their workouts as they are done: "I lifted 10 x 100lbs", not "I lifted 1000lbs".

Some really good lifters do track tonnage though. Especially when they consider periodization and hypertrophy phases. It's fallen a bit to the wayside for the reasons you mentioned. It was a big part of those crazy eastern bloc programs. But, like I said, no one good has ever used it as the most important metric. It's pretty similar to tracking running mileage.

Wrong. My next move after my last post was to go to bed. You’re just as bad at predicting the future as you are at debating.

Nope, I’m good. Isn’t it more plausible that the people who are exaggerating their weightlifting prowess online are the ones who are trying to compensate for their deficiencies? I just realized that’s what’s going on. Thanks for helping me to see it this way. Now I’ll just laugh at them.

But the two are not equivalent, unless you are being sarcastic, coz the latter delivers less information than the former and risks being misunderstood unless you emphasize “total”.

Running mileage as well as tonnage implicitly have units of miles or pounds per unit time whereas a single run’s distance or lift weight has no time in its units.

The analogy to running is throwing the discussion off-track, because you can only run one distance at a time. Or to put it another way, running has two dimensions (time and distance) while lifting has just one (weight). When someone runs ten miles twice and then says they've run a total of 20 miles, we implicitly understand that it took them twice as long as running ten miles once, not that they doubled their speed.

That said, the relevant question is whether tracking cumulative weight lifted is misleading, or has any implicit meaning. I'd argue its meaning is clear. Consider Tennessee Ernie Ford's 1955 chart-topper, Sixteen Tons: "You load 16 tons, what do you get? Another day older and deeper in debt." He doesn't mean that he lifted sixteen tons of coal all at once; that's the cumulative amount he loaded during one full day. It's a meaningful metric to him, because loading 16 tons is harder than loading 15 tons, and easier than loading 17 tons. Similarly, his total loading numbers over the course of a week or a month or a year tell us something about how hard he worked, and perhaps how much he earned. So the idea of adding up a bunch of small lifts to get a single number analogous to a big lift has a long and established history that dates back to well before social media.

In summary, chill out and worry about your own problems, dude.