Your Evidence Based Guide to Building Muscle (Part 6)
Progressive overload
One of the biggest mistakes I see everyone make in the gym is doing the same exact routine every time. No matter what your goal is, you will never make progress if you are not increasing the weight you lift or number of reps you do gradually over time. Tracking your performance is essential, especially in the context of training to build muscle. You should have some kind of logbook where you write down what you did for weights and reps last week so you can seek to best that performance the following session. Progress is never linear, and you will most likely not be able to increase your performance every single workout. But you should try to. If you’re trying as hard as you can to best what you did the week before you can ensure that you are getting the most out of that workout. And if your performance is going up month after month, especially as an intermediate or advanced lifter, you can be pretty certain that you are gaining muscle. If your performance on an exercise does not improve for a month or two, that’s a pretty good indication that something with your program needs to be changed. This is one of the few circumstances in which I would look at changing an exercise that otherwise still meets the criteria we discussed in the section on exercise selection.
How much should you try to improve each week? There are so many strategies you can use, none of which are necessarily any better or worse than any other. But I do have one favorite: the double progression method. In this method you pick a rep range that feels appropriate for the exercise, say 6-10 on an rdl for example, and start with 6 reps, adding a rep each week until you get to 10 before increasing weight and going back down to 6 reps. Each set you do in an exercise after the first set you do as many reps as you can, acknowledging you will most likely get fewer reps than the set prior. You can follow a plan like this rigidly, or use a strategy like RPE that allows you to go up or down in reps depending on how you feel on the day. And while the goal may be to increase reps each week, some weeks you may be able to add 3 reps, and some weeks you may have to settle for the same as what you did last week or less. As long as month after month you are getting stronger there is no need to overthink it. You could in theory run this scheme for months on end without having to change a single thing and see tremendous results.
