You’ve Got to Progress to Well.....Progress

To lose body fat, to get stronger, to gain muscle mass or to transform yourself from a chubby-chain smoking-cricketer to Hollywood-wannabe requires the use of progressive overload. 

This means that over time the body needs to be exposed to more training volume, intensity, stress, and in Warney's case botox and teeth whitener, to keep making progress towards your given goal.

For strength initially it’s simply a matter of always increasing the load that you put on the bar in a progressive matter. 

For example if you did 3 sets of squats with 10kgs for 8 reps this week, then next week move up to the next dumbbell (12.5kgs) and go for 8 reps again. 

Once you reach a certain relative load then progress will be slower but with correct programming you can still see consistent strength gains after the burst of 'newbie' gains.

For example you'll sooner or later reach a load for the squats where you can't reach 8 reps. It might take 4 weeks of 14 weeks but you'll find it. 

At this point you have a few ways you can go but the simplest way to go from there is to set a rep range for each set.

As our goal rep weight is 8 then we'll choose a rep or 2 either side of that such as 6 - 10 and then your new goal is to do 3 sets of at least 6 reps but stopping at 10 reps.

Once you get 3 sets of 10 then you increase the weight and go again.

To gain muscle mass you need to increase actual tension and stress on the muscle plus an increase in your calorie intake. 

As muscle mass increases then so will calorie requirements because the more muscle you possess the more calories are required to fuel everyday activities. 

Placing tension and stress on a muscle can be achieved more ways than it matters to count but again it needs to be progressive in its programming, you can’t just go straight to the highest stress method because how do you progress after that?

To progress tension/stress you might use a particular weight and increase the reps you do with it like you used for strength above but with a higher amount of reps per sets, say 8 - 15. 

You might just make a set longer by using a slower eccentric phase (lowering the weight in a squat for example) or extend the sets with the use of partial reps or isometric holds after you've reached your prescribed rep target.

For calorie intake you'll need to know all the what, when and how's of calories which I'll post about next week.

For fat loss your progressive overload will come in a few different forms depending on where you are currently.

For training, beginners will be best served by improving their work capacity for the ability to train at a higher volume. 

So you might do your 3 sets of 10 @ 12.5kgs for squats this week which brings your rep total 30 (3 x 10) or your work total to 375kgs (30 x 12.5).

So next week you can either increase the rep total and do more then 30 reps with the 12.5kgs weight or you can look at doing more total work by less overall reps but with a higher weight (15kgs).

Once you have attained the work capacity to train with relatively high volume, then you can move towards a density approach.

The density approach can be done 2 ways. 

• FIRST - more work in the same time
• SECOND - same work in less time

For the first method you might bodyweight squats and push ups back to back to back for 5 minutes counting the total reps you manage to do in that 5 minutes. Next week you keep the time the same and aim to get more reps then last week.

For the second method you might set out to do 10 x 10 for push ups and bodyweight squats alternating exercises again non stop and seeing how long it takes you to do it. Next week you keep the 10 sets of 10 reps and try and beat your time.

Either way there is progressive overload in each and every session.

So if you're exercising away doing the same thing week in and week out and nothing is really happening, then just remember the definition of insanity – doing the same thing and expecting a different result.