When working out in a gym, most of us measure our progress by how much we increase the weight we can lift. The problem with this is that the longer you train, the more the rate at which you can increase the load slows down. The first step is to stop measuring your progress by comparing how much weight you lifted this week with what you lifted the week before.
There are many ways of assessing your progress. You know you’re getting stronger if you perform an exercise one week and then, using the same weight, find it easier three weeks later. And if you can perform more reps using the same weight, that’s also a sign that you’re getting stronger.
Here are a few ways in which you can develop your exercises.
1- Increase reps: This is an easy one. Week on week, add a rep or two on any given exercise. Do this over a three/four week period.
2- Increase the volume: This is the total amount of rounds you do in a session. If, for example, you do three sets of each exercise in a workout, add a fourth round the next time (or even the time after) to increase the total volume of the workout.
3- Increase time under tension: This is how long you perform each individual rep of an exercise. The longer you take to perform a round of 10 reps, the more difficult that round will be. For example: you perform 10 reps on a bench press taking one second to bring the weight down and one second to bring the weight up, which makes a total of twenty seconds under tension. The next week, you do the same exercise with the same weight and the same number of reps, but you take three seconds to lower the weight and one second to raise: this gives your muscles forty seconds under tension, effectively doubling the time you’re working the muscle, thereby progressing the workout once again.
4- Decrease the time you rest between sets: Basically, the less time you rest, the more challenging it is to maintain the reps designed in the workout. This method is good for increasing muscular endurance.
5- Increase intensity: Increase the weight of an exercise if you are weight-training, or the speed at which you do something: for example, if you run regularly, introduce some sprint intervals to your usual routine.
6- Frequency: This is simply how many sessions you do in a week.
Generally, this is the order in which I would make changes to a client’s programme. It’s important to remember that there are many ways not only to increase the difficulty of an exercise, but also how to measure your progress.
Although this gives you ways of progressing a workout in a gym, these principles can be used when doing different types of exercise elsewhere—a topic I’ll be covering next month.
Thanks for reading and see you next month.
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