“Progress is a slow process”: Many of
us have probably heard this quote at some point and as it relates to the development
of physical attributes such as body composition adjustment (AKA weight loss,
nay, FAT loss), strength development, or attempting to create a symmetrically
developed, aesthetically pleasing physique, for either competitive or personal
reasons, it is incredibly accurate.
Most beginners will notice that gains in strength come relatively easily
at first, but this is primarily due to neurological adaptations. In a sense, lifting
weights is a skill, comparable to other skills like swimming, or riding a bike,
in that, once you learn to swim/ride, there’s not much room for improvement
after that, and if you want to continue to progress, you need to progressively
overload the body, and force it to undergo further adaptations.
Once the nervous system has ‘caught up to speed’, and the motor patterns for
the movements that you’ve chosen to perform have been developed, and reinforced
with repetitive action, the results begin to slow down, and in most cases, come
to a complete halt, AKA hitting a plateau.
When, or if, progress begins to pick up again, it seemingly comes at a
much slower pace than that at which you first experienced it. This in itself
can be very de-motivating, and agonizing, by contrast. It is for this reason
that one should attempt to look for as many ways to quantify progress as
possible.
While lifting more weight than you previously ever have is a very black
and white way of quantifying progress, it isn’t the only way. There are many
ways to quantify progress that don’t include lifting more weight each and every
training session. If progress was that simple, you wouldn’t be reading this, or
looking to educate yourself further on how to make progress!
In a perfect world, anybody would hypothetically be able to go online or
use an app on their trusty smart phone, search for a training program suited to
their goals, get into the gym and follow it to a ‘T’, and develop the body that
they ultimately want within a reasonable time frame (barring any major injury).
Unfortunately, we don’t live in a perfect world, and just because a program
calls for a specific number of sets to be performed with a given rep bracket,
doesn’t mean that it will just happen that way.
For example, a set and rep scheme may look like this: 5 X 4-6. At the
completion of the workout, if the individual was able to perform 5 sets of 4-6
reps with a given intensity, then next time, the logical progression would be
to increase the weight and try for it again. But what if the individual doesn’t
complete the minimum prescribed 4 reps on all 5 sets? Then what?
While some may think, why not just lower the weight to get the prescribed
amount of repetitions? To me, that’s like an explosive type of athlete such as
a sprinter, or short distance swimmer/cycler deliberately choosing to run/swim/bike
slower during what’s supposed to be an all out sprint, just to leave enough
energy ‘in the tank’ to complete the desired number of sprints that his program
calls for. Deliberately running/swimming/cycling slower will NOT make anyone
faster, I don’t care what anybody says. So that rules out the, ‘lower the
weight to complete the desired number of reps’ method.
On the flip side, what if the individual does happen to hit the maximum
prescribed 6 reps on all 5 sets? Is it expected that by increasing the weight
by an ‘appropriate’ amount, that he/she will be able to do it again? Like I
said earlier, if progress was that simple, you wouldn’t be reading this in an
attempt to learn alternative ways to quantify progress, as it would be a waste
of time that could be used to train and just get bigger and stronger.
While it is certainly possible to increase the weight and hit the bare
minimum of 4 reps for all 5 sets the next time you perform a given workout,
there is still the possibility that it may not happen, especially not every
single time.
Over the years I’ve realized that it’s important to look for other ways to
quantify progress aside from just increasing the weight as often as possible, not
just for your own workouts, but especially in working with the average,
everyday person, who’s simply looking to improve their overall health profile.
Being able to see quantifiable progress is perhaps the single most motivating
factor there is, after all, we as humans are results motivated, and that’s true
for all facets of life. No one wants to see zero return for their investment.
Ways to quantify
progress, besides lifting more weight!
-
Increase reps
-
Increase sets
-
Reduce duration
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Increase time under tension by increasing eccentric tempo
-
Decrease time under tension by reducing concentric tempo
Increase Reps
Like lifting more weight, performing more reps with a given intensity is
also very black and white as far as quantifying progress is concerned. If you
perform more reps of a certain exercise, with the same weight as you did last
workout, assuming the technique and tempo at which you perform the reps is
identical, than there is no question whether or not you’ve progressed.
The major limitation to this method is the same reason that you can’t just
add weight each and every single time. If you could, then hypothetically
speaking you could take your 1 rep max, and make it your ten rep max in ten
workouts. Not saying it’s not possible, I’ve just never seen or heard of such a
thing.
Also, given that the amount of reps performed will influence the training
effect, if you are able to simply perform more reps, the results you get will certainly
vary. Hypothetically adding one rep each and every week will lead to the
development of differing strength qualities, which may not be in line with what
you want to accomplish.
For example, if you were training for aesthetic purposes, and want to
build bigger muscles, you may want to perform roughly 8-10 reps per set. After
a few workouts, you may be capable of doing more than 8-10 reps with that same
intensity, but instead of making it harder by adding more weight to overload
your muscles, you decide to perform more reps with the same weight. Doing this
may not continue to build muscle upon which you’ve already built, because the
fact that you can perform more reps than you could before, would suggest that
the weight you are using is now ‘too light’ for what you want to accomplish.
I like to personally use this method when I feel that increasing the
weight, whether for myself or for a client, will not be successful, so instead
of trying to lift more weight, I’d rather seek an improvement in the total amount
of reps performed in a set.
For example, let’s say the prescribed rep bracket is 6-8, and you are
capable of performing 8 reps for all your prescribed sets. Instead of trying to
up the weight and failing to hit 6 for all your prescribed sets, I’d much
rather perform 9 or 10 reps, and then when I feel ready, up the weight so that
I can manage to fall between the 6-8 rep range on every set.
This method is especially suitable for exercises performed with dumbells,
as dumbells typically go up in 5 lb. increments. A 5 lb. jump per arm (10 lbs.
total) equates to at least a 10% increase in weight if you are using under 55
lb. dumbells, and at least a 5% increase unless you are using at least 100 lb.
dumbells.
A 5% increase is very reasonable and realistic for most, but for those who
are not yet able to use over 55 lb. dumbells for the exercises of their
choosing, a 10% increase, or more, may be too much, and that’s when increasing
the reps beyond the rep bracket goal is most appropriate.
Increase Sets
Performing more sets is another method in which you can use to gauge
progression, but like increasing the weight or reps, you are limited with how
many sets you can add before you overwork your body’s ability to recover, and
therefore overtrain, which I dare say is counterproductive to any
strength/physique related goal.
This method is best suited for those who are not at the point where
increasing the weight is the most effective decision, and where increasing the
reps will not lead to the most effective adaptation relative to your goal.
For example, if you are training to make relative strength gains, which
means you DO NOT want to put additional muscle mass on your body, as the
additional bodyweight regardless of whether it be fat or muscle, could
negatively affect your ability to make weight for a physique or athletic
competition, than adding more sets may be a solid substitute as far as methods
used to quantify progression is concerned.
Performing additional sets at a given intensity is one of the most
effective ways to promote the development of the desired strength quality by
further recruiting and fatiguing as many motor units as possible to perform a
given task, whether it be strength and/or size development, or improved
muscular endurance.
The major flaw to this method is its accuracy as it relates to quantifying
progress. For example, if in one workout you perform 4 sets of 6 reps, and the
next workout you choose to perform an extra set for the same exercise, because
you feel that upping the weight may be too much of a stretch, and increasing
the reps is not in line with your goal, who’s to say that you couldn’t have
performed that extra set the last time you trained? While lifting more weight,
or more reps, is a very black and white way of quantifying progress as in, you
either do it, or you don’t, performing more sets may leave you asking yourself
more questions, than having provided you with answers.
Nevertheless, more sets ultimately equates to more overall volume, and as
long as it is within your body’s capacity to recover, it should result in
progression.
Reduce Duration
When adding more weight is simply not feasible, adding more reps is not
possible or in line with your goal, and there’s simply no room to add more sets
to the workout without overtraining, you can always try performing a given
workout in less total time. The total time taken to perform a given training
session is referred to the workouts ‘density’.
If one week a given workout takes you roughly 45 minutes to complete, and
the next time you do that exact same workout, which means you hit all your sets
for the prescribed number of reps, and you complete it in roughly 40 minutes,
than you would have improved your workout density.
This method obviously has limitations very much the same as adding more
weight, reps, or sets, in that you can only reduce the amount of rest between
so much before you are not resting at all. It should go without saying that, if
limiting the amount of rest you give yourself starts to take away from your
performance, than adjustments should be made.
If you’ve been pounding away in the gym for several years, you’ve probably
had ‘one of those days’ where you felt that adding weight may be too dangerous
and lead to injury, increasing reps may lead to a breakdown in technique and
therefore result in injury, and adding more sets may be of too high a demand
for your body. When this happens, as it usually will at some point, as we can
only get so strong before the weights begin to take their toll on our body as
well as our psyche, than attempting to perform the same workout a few times in
a row may appeal to you the most, based on the assumption that, if you’ve
already successfully performed a given workout without injury, than surely you
should be able to do it again (as long as too much time hasn’t passed between
workouts).
While strict attention should be paid to all the loading parameters,
regardless of which method you choose to use to quantify progress, this one in
particular requires additional attention to be paid to rest intervals.
Depending on the total amount of exercises and sets you choose to perform,
shaving off just ten seconds of rest between sets can ultimately add up to a
few minutes in the end.
For example, if you perform 20 sets over the course of a workout, by
resting ten less seconds between sets than you did last time you performed the
same workout, you’ll perform a given work load 200 seconds (3 min, 20 sec)
faster than you did the last time you performed that workout. If you do that
again the following workout, you will have knocked off 400 seconds from your
original time!
I personally find this method to be most suitable for those in the
beginning stages who are having a difficult time lifting more weight properly,
don’t have the muscular endurance to add more reps and/or sets, or those who
are so strong that adding more weight, or going for that extra rep and/or set
is just not safe.
Increase Time
Under Tension
Increasing the length of the eccentric portion of a repetition is a great
way to boost strength levels, increase muscle mass, and leave you feeling like
you got run over by a truck (depending on what bodyparts/exercises you trained)
for a few days (anyone who’s done enhanced eccentric squats, deadlifts, presses,
and pull variations can relate).
For those who want to gain size/strength, but feel that attempting to lift
more weight is a bit premature, adding reps is not in line with their goal, and
performing more sets would lead to overtraining/injury, than increasing the
time under tension with each set may be the most effective way to go about
making progress.
The major limitation here is that, as you increase the eccentric tempo of
each rep, you’re ultimately increasing the overall duration of the set, as well
as workout, and you can only lower the weight for so long before it negatively
affects your ability to lift a given load, for a given number of reps.
For example, let’s say you are taking roughly 2 seconds to lower a weight,
irrespective of how long it takes to lift it, and you are performing 10 reps.
This means that 20 seconds of the set are dedicated to the eccentric
repetition. By upping the eccentric tempo to 3 seconds, you’ve now added at
least 10 total seconds onto the duration of the set, and that’s not taking into
consideration that the concentric is surely to take longer as fatigue sets in.
The additional time under tension may or may not affect the amount of
weight that is lifted, and this will primarily come down to metabolic fatigue.
If it doesn’t, than increasing the eccentric tempo can work to your advantage.
But if you have to dramatically lower the weight, just to hit the prescribed
amount of repetitions, than it would be in your best interest to look for other
ways to quantify progression.
With that being said, this method is particularly effective if you are
using relatively heavy weights, for low repetitions (1-5 is suggested). That
way, the accumulative effect of the increased time under tension won’t
negatively affect how much weight can be used. If you are performing 5 reps of
less, than upping the tempo by 1 second will only tack on a maximum of 5
seconds per set, and 10 seconds if you up it by 2 seconds. This leaves room for
small increments of progress to be made for a few weeks at a time, while
ensuring that you are still training as close to your target strength quality
zone as possible.
Decrease Time
Under Tension
Another way to measure progression would be to increase lifting speed.
After all force = mass x acceleration. Therefore, the same load, lifted with
more speed, means more muscle activation.
As with each of the above methods, there are limitations with this method
as well. After all, you can only lift so fast, and unless you are recording the
set with a digital camera, that can breakdown the lift frame by frame, it’s
virtually undetectable by the human eye whether or not one rep is faster than
the previous rep (the exception being sets performed for high repetitions, in
which the concentric is dramatically slower as fatigue sets in).
Also worth noting is, the heavier the weight lifted, the slower the
concentric repetition will be, therefore making this method inappropriate if
you are lifting relatively heavy weights.
The only time this method would really be effective for quantifying
progression, is if you are lifting a light enough weight that you can
deliberately lift it slower on purpose. For example, if you could deliberately
lift a weight for 3 total seconds, then next time, using the same weight, you
could opt to take only 2 seconds to lift it. That in a sense would be
progression, but I wouldn’t consider it to be all that effective, because who’s
to say you couldn’t have lifted it even faster than that the last time?
Personally, I would never use this method, as it is my opinion that every
rep should be lifted with the intent to move the weight as fast as possible
(within reason, meaning proper form is adhered to), but for arguments purposes,
as it relates to the scope of this article, I figured I’d throw it in there,
because some people may want as much variety as possible when it comes to
looking for ways to quantify progress.
Connecting The
Dots
Given that the body adapts to whatever stimulus it’s exposed to over an
extended period of time, it is crucial that changes be made in a positive way
to continue to overload the body, and prompt it to progress. Unfortunately, as
stated earlier, nothing will work forever, and thus, the need to find other
ways to make progression become necessary. Below is a sample blueprint of how
you can manipulate the methods above to your advantage throughout a few weeks
of training, to keep yourself progressing, followed by a summary. Note that the
method highlighted in bold, is the one that has been adjusted for that specific
week.
Week 1: 4 sets X 6 reps, 2 min. rest, 2 second eccentric
Week 2: 5 sets X 6 reps, 2 min.
rest, 2 second eccentric
Week 3: 5 sets X 4 reps, 2 min.
rest, 2 second eccentric
Week 4: 5 sets X 6 reps, 2 min.
rest, 2 second eccentric
Week 5: 5 sets X 6 reps, 2 min. rest, 3
second eccentric
Week 6: 5 sets X 6 reps, 1 ½ min.
rest, 3 second eccentric
Week 7: DELOAD! AKA reduce the
volume to allow for the body to go through a super compensative effect and reap
the benefits of all the hard training from the previous 6 weeks.
Summary
The purpose of the first week is to lay out some baseline numbers, to
which we can build upon over the coming weeks. Don’t get too caught up in the
exact number of sets, reps, rest and tempo that is displayed. The numbers used
are strictly for demonstrative purposes, however, they would be appropriate for
someone looking to improve their absolute strength levels, but in the end, your
goal should determine the specifics (including exercise selection, which I
deliberately left out so that focus could remain on the methods).
If all goes well in week 1, meaning you picked the appropriate amount of
weight to hit your set and rep goals, then the next week you could add another
set to increase the volume, as highlighted in week 2. Increasing the volume
with a weight you’ve proven you can handle for 4 sets, in my opinion, will have
a higher success rate, than bumping up the weight after just one workout.
Psychologically it’s easier to cope with the thought of performing more of what
you’ve proven you can already do, than stepping up to unknown territory and
attempting something for the first time (that being a heavier weight). The more
times you expose yourself to a given stimulus, the faster it becomes ‘the
norm’, and when this happens and the weight is no longer challenging enough for
you, you can focus on increasing the weight.
The reduction in reps highlighted in week 3 indicates an increase in
weight. The sets remain elevated in relation to where they were in week 1,
since capacity had been worked on the week before with the addition of an extra
set. It wouldn’t make sense to reduce the sets and allow yourself to lose what
you’d just finished working so hard for, especially since you are performing
less total reps per set.
The increase in reps highlighted in week 4 indicates that the weight
remains constant for this week, but the goal is to simply lift it more times.
By this point you will have increased the volume, increased the weight, and are
now attempting to perform the new weight for more reps, which is a very
realistic expectation.
By the 5th week you’ve increased the volume, weight, and reps
with a greater amount of weight than when you started, so now you could focus
on increasing the time under tension with every rep/set by slowing down the
eccentric, as highlighted in week 5. This method, along with that in week 4 can
be used interchangeably, meaning that if you couldn’t up the reps the previous
week, or felt it wasn’t the best way to go, you could focus on increasing the
time under tension, which would contribute to you being able to increase the
amount of reps you can do next time, by virtue of increasing your strength
levels.
Finally, after increasing the sets in week 2, weight in week 3, reps in
week 4, and duration of the eccentric repetition (and therefore the entire set)
in week 5, you can attempt to get all that work done in less time in the 6th
week by reducing the rest intervals.
The sample blueprint above is just that, a blueprint. You can, and in most
cases should, make adjustments to more than one method with each workout, I
just decided to keep it as simple as possible for educational purposes, as it
is a lot easier to remember one thing at a time, as opposed to many. One
example of how you could adjust more than one method at a time is, as the
weight is increased, it is often a good idea to minimally increase the
eccentric repetition tempo as well to make up for the loss of time the muscles
are under tension, since the reps will (likely) be lower.
Also, slowing down the eccentric is a safer way to go when handling
greater intensities to help prevent injuries. Very often, people will
unintentionally lower a heavier weight faster the first time they handle it, to
get the added benefit of the stretch reflex to help propel the weight back up
during the concentric portion of the rep. While this technique may help you
complete more reps, it will wreak havoc on your connective tissue over the long
haul, and could lead to irreversible injury.
Conclusion
The only reason anybody would do anything, especially as physically
demanding, and time consuming, as lifting heavy ass weights, day in, day out,
for weeks, months, and years on end, is to see progress. No one in their right
mind would willingly choose to devote the time necessary to accomplish goals
that hold some level of significance to them, unless they really wanted it.
The problem however, is that real results, that can be measured
(quantified), become harder and harder to come by, the stronger and more experienced
you become, which can be extremely demotivating, unless you are aware of
various other ways to quantify progress.
I started it off with a quote, and I’ll end it what a quote as well. I
recall reading Lee Priest saying something like, “the day that I’m satisfied
with my results, is the day that I will quit”, and my interpretation of that
is, he believed that there is ALWAYS room for improvement, regardless of what
level of experience you may have. After all, that’s the type of mindset that
propels the best in the world at their respective sport/career, to keep working
hard. If you are someone that takes strength training seriously, and has for
quite some time, then the methods illustrated throughout this article should be
enough for you, or anyone, to continually make progress, and keep making improvements.
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