In a recent newspaper article by Judi Light Hopson, she challenges readers to drink a whopping amount of water - half their body weight in ounces every day for a week - to prove that it is indeed “liquid energy” and that drinking even more than the standard eight glasses each day “makes you feel better.”

I believe it would. I also believe 99.5 percent of her readers will never even attempt it.

It’s just too impractical.

The average adult American male now weighs just shy of 200 pounds. So in addition to any coffee, tea, milk, soda, or beer he might choose to drink during the day, the average guy would have to drink six, 16-ounce bottles of water every day for seven days to complete the challenge.

That’s why I say, “No how, no way” - something I pray you don’t say after reading the suggestions given here throughout the years about lifting weights. In fact, this article is going to assume you’ve followed those suggestions and have been pumping iron for so long that you feel your motivation waning and fear you might burn out when the harsh weather outside makes lifting weights inside your main form of exercise.

Fear not.

My “so long” is 42 years and one month, and I’ve never experienced burn out. When I sense it coming on, I self-prescribe a fail-safe antidote.

A two-week dose of variety.

The pseudo-penicillin to consider today might seem minor, but it’s not minor at all. Administered properly, it dramatically changes the feel of your workouts and - even more importantly - the way you feel about them.

The minor change is an extension to your repetitions. Do an extra half, sometimes the top half, sometimes the bottom - whichever half you perceive as harder - before starting another. Do what bodybuilders call 1 1/2 reps.

It may be overkill to define it here, but one weightlifting repetition is the full-range movement employed in a given exercise to stimulate a specific muscle or muscles. When you do one and follow it with either the bottom or top half of the same motion, you’ve performed a 1 1/2 rep.

Bodybuilders do so to add intensity, increase muscle mass, and improve technique. They can do the same for you - as well as provide that aforementioned mental break from the same old same old that can turn your trips to the gym into trips to the couch.

Jake Boly at BarBends.com calls 1 1/2 reps an “underutilized training tool” that “increases your time under tension.” Any variation that increases the targeted muscle’s time under tension, in essence its workload, forces the muscle to adapt and grow.

That’s one of the reasons why Boly says using 1 1/2 reps give you a “ton of bang for your buck.”

Think about the motion used to do the best muscle-building exercise for the upper legs and the glutes, the squat. While many lifters avoid any version of them because they are perceived as being so hard, there are “easy” parts to all the types, times when the muscles are not under maximum tension: the top halves as you ascend and descend.

But if you do 1 1/2 reps when you squat, you eliminate the “easy” ascent of what is really the second rep. But when you count reps, the two “hard” bottom halves with the first descent only count as one.

So for each counted rep, you’re doubling the time the muscles are under tension and forcing them to adapt to the added effort. But that’s not the only benefit to employing 1 1/2 reps.

When I take lifters through their very first set of 1 1/2 reps, their pace slows. The reps are just different enough to make them focus on how the body is moving, strengthening the mind-to-muscle link, which is a very good thing.

You’ve read here time and time again how the amount of weight used in a lift is to some degree inconsequential because you have the ability to make your muscles work harder or easier during the lift by the degree of tension you consciously place on them The slower pace and the increased awareness of the motion allow you to take advantage of this.

A slower lifting pace also allows you time to “think through” the movement and your technique improves.

Better technique reduces your risk of injury - and so does the fact that you need to use less weight when you do a set of 1 1/2 reps. In fact, you’ll probably have to cut the weight you use in half to perform the same number of traditional reps.

But do those 1 1/2 reps the right way, and those fewer reps should lead to more muscle.

Combine that with the mental break from the change of pace, and any thoughts of burning out quickly fade away.