Progressing your Workouts
When you start training, you will see massive benefits to your strength, fitness and muscle shape. This is because when your body is exposed to stimulus that is harder than what it is used to, it has to change and adapt.
However after a while, your body can handle this level of stimulus, it becomes easy to complete and you will see less response from your body. This can apply to strength training and cardio training.
To continue seeing improvement from your workouts you must use a concept called progressive overload, which means to gradually increase the resistance your body must overcome over time.
You cannot just follow the same program with the same weights forever and expect incredible results.
Ways you can apply progressive overload to your workouts:
1. Increase the weight you lift over time
Your body adapts to the stimulus that you place upon it over time. What feels hard to begin with, will eventually feel easier. If you always use the same resistance, soon your body will no longer need to adapt and you will plateau. To keep getting stronger, building lean muscle and shape you must slowly increase your weight that you lift or resistance that you overcome over time.
For example, if you used a 5kg squat for your 3 sets of goblet squats last week, this week you may try 6kg for your first set, then back to 5kg and then 5kg. Next week you may do 6kg for the first two sets, then back to 5kg and so on.
Even a small increase makes a difference.
If you are doing exercises with bodyweight resistance, you must also find a way to increase the resistance. For example, a pushup on the knees on the floor may be getting easy, so you can try on your toes on a bench. Or planking on your knees maybe getting easy to do for 30 seconds, so you can try going onto your toes for a few seconds, then back to the knees.
Increasing your resistance will increase your strength and muscle and keep you improving.
If you are a beginner, you may notice strength improvements very fast but then as you become more advanced that your progress slows. This is normal. When you haven’t been doing any resistance training, the body has a lot of adaptation to do in the beginning and will gradually reduce. When you are an advanced lifter, your progressive overload gains will be small, like adding 2.5kg overall to your bench press or barbell squat or deadlift. This still keeps the improvements happening over time.
2. Increase the volume of your workout
Volume is sets x reps x resistance. Overall volume adds up to the load your body has lifted, and therefor making greater demands on your body. The best way to increase volume is by adding another set to your exercise or adding another exercise to your workout.
3. Up your reps
For muscle development we want to stay within 8-12 reps for our exercises. This means that if you can only complete 8 reps of an exercise, then slowly increasing your reps over time until you get to 12 reps is also progressive overload! However, when you get to 12 reps, we recommend that you increase the weight.
4. Increase training frequency
The number of times you train per week also adds to the overall load on your body. When you begin, you will probably need to have a lot of recovery because training is so new, your body will need rest to adapt. But as your body becomes better at recovery, you can increase the number of times you train. 3x is a great starting point to see improvement, but eventually you may want to increase your training to 4 or 5x. This is to a certain point, overtraining can happen if you train too much and do not allow your body to recover, or can reduce the overall quality of your workouts because you feel tired and sore.
Remember, progress isn’t always linear, sometimes you may feel a little tired or not as strong some weeks, that doesn’t mean that you have lost your progress. Do what you can in your session and then over time your progress will increase!