You know I’ve been doing my workout first thing in the morning with a really good friend of mine who has recently rejoined the gym. I must admit he’s kicking my ass at the running and I seem to, be shall we say, be encouraging him with his weight training :-)

(YES THAT DOES SAY 7.15am ON THE CLOCK)
Now load of people say to me training? Why are you training when you do all those classes? Well you see, your body is an amazing, adaptive piece of machinery. When you throw a certain demand at it, it adapts in amazing ways to be more equipped to handle that demand in the future.

So the classes I teach has little or no effect on my body especially as I don’t put in 100% as I have to instruct, spot and correct. When you work out you need to be progressive and make each workout harder than the last to get great results.

Progressive? Yeah, you know, how you’re increasing the work you do from one cardio session to the next in order to ensure that you continue to improve your fitness and lose body fat.
So, when it comes to exercise, if we do the same 30 minutes of steady state cardio from one workout to the next, within 2-3 workouts we’ll be well adapted to those exact cardio demands. So well adapted, in fact, that those 30 minutes will be barely better than sitting on the couch.
And the same is true for high intensity work. If we don’t progress the workout from one session to the next, the demands will be so small on our bodies that we’ll see none of the benefit we saw when we started the program.

So there is a “secret” to an ever-increasing health profile, an ever-improving body composition, and non-stop performance increases. And it’s called progression.

Weight Training Progressions

Now, most people oversimplify the idea of progression. They assume that to “make it harder” from one week to the next, they need to spend more time exercising. However, that’s not always the case. Sure, this type of volume progression is one method to progress your program. Yet it’s not the only way.
In our weight training arsenals there are several ways to design programs to ensure progress toward a variety of goals, including increased strength, increased power, increased muscle mass, etc.

Here are a few examples of ways to design a proper progression in the weight room.

#1 Simple Load Progression
Classic progressive resistance training (or simple load progression as I call it) relies on the necessity of increasing our load lifted over time, assuming the same repetition range.
Like Milo, the Greek wrestler who purportedly jogged around the perimeter of the Coliseum with a calf on his back, getting stronger and stronger as the calf slowly grew into a bull, we try to increase the weight lifted from one week to the next in order to continue to progress.

#2 Complex Load Progression
Periodization models have introduced the idea of systematically increasing our load lifted while decreasing our repetitions. This model uses gradually increasing loads (or intensities, defined as a percentage of 1 rep max) while using gradually decreasing volume (measured by the total number of repetitions performed during a workout). These types of sessions are called intensification sessions.

Of course, even within an overall periodized program that’s focusing on intensification (heavier loads and fewer reps during a workout), the idea of simple load progression still stands. Obviously, if you’re using a similar repetition range from week to week during an intensification phase, you should be increasing your load used, even if you’re only using the same rep range during two consecutive training sessions for that movement.

#3 Simple Volume Progression
Compared to the simple load progression above, simple volume progression is pretty much the opposite. Instead of increasing the load from week to week, you keep the load the same while increasing the volume (measured by the total number of repetitions performed during a workout, whether that’s adding a few reps to each set or adding a few total sets).

So, instead of doing 6 reps at 80kg, as you did during week one, you’d be doing 7 reps at 80kg during week two. Alternatively, instead of doing 3 sets of 6 reps at 80kg, you might do 4 sets of 6 reps at 80kg. Either way, volume progresses, load stays the same.

Other examples, of varying utility, based on your goals, include:
Decreasing rest time from week to week in order to improve between-set recovery.
Increase rest time from week to week in order to handle heavier loads on subsequent sets.
Another example of using time as a variable is Charles Staley’s EDT. This style of training demands that, from one week to the next, you increase the number of reps you perform while keeping the total exercise time constant.

I’ll give you some examples of Cardio progressions next time :-)

Have a great day and I’ll see you in the gym
MM

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