Stop flip flopping your exercises and programs.
- To be good at something you need to PRACTISE it.
- For strength this is obvious - to improve on any lift you have to practise the movement again and again with sub-maximal loads (but high intent of acceleration) in order to basically wire your muscles and nervous to be efficient at it
- This holds true for muscle gain as well but for slightly different reasons
- Progressive overload is the name of the game - when, under the same conditions you add weight and/or reps to an exercise you have evidence that you have induced a positive hypertrophy response from the body.
- When you begin a new exercise, there will often be a period where you quickly gain strength. A lot of this is due to your body becoming more efficient at cordinianting itself to make the lift and NOT nessacarily becuase you have gained muscle
- So to make sure that 1- we get good at a lift so we can nail down the technique to induce the most stimulation and 2 - ensure that the progressive overload is from muscle gain and not just your body 'learning' or 'remembering' the lift, we have to stick with an exercise for a good while
- This goes against the common advice of 'shocking' the muscles. The thing is - if you constantly change your exercises, you will have the illusion of strength gain as you will get better at each lift technically but not necessarily you muscular adaptions.
- Sticking with lifts for weeks and even months at a time gives you clear cut objective feedback about your progression over time
- Should you ever change an exercise ? yes, if you have stalled on a lift for a long time and have taken care to make sure your overall program, diet and recovery are on point, then you may have reached a wall with that lift (which will happen eventually) now it is time to switch it up
- What about variation ? well, hypertrophy training is pretty dam simple, but for the sake of variation to keep us sane, we can vary many other things in our program apart from the exercises, such as - exercise order, tempo, bands/chains, grip, intensity methods etc
For max gains, pick 2-3 movements per muscle and stick with them for at least 3 months.
Client of the week
My guy Sam had hit a serious road block in his training, with no results for a good few years.
We immediately scaled back his training volume and selected a range of exercises that suited his circumstances (which included a lot of mobility issues)
We set to work on building up his cardio base with long duration weighted carries before adding in harder HIT work.
I think the main cause of his success has been his improved mindset towards training. Once we got him some small wins under his built he really began to buy in to the training and fully committed to training hard and being consistent.
It all paid off.
If you want to improve your physique to elevate your health, career and mindset - click here.
“The path to greatness is paved with persistence, not perfection.”
- Aloo Denish Obiero
Step by step we can all reach our personal mountain peaks.
Have a great week,
Arthur
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