Progression Takes More Than Just Adding Weight to the Bar

I just finished an amazing leg workout with Teresa Bragado, someone I not only am enjoying getting to know, someone that pushes me to the nth degree but she is also someone that cares about posture, proper form, stretching and teaching you the techniques to help you become a better lifter, to progress through your workouts – from workout to workout and from week to week.

If you follow many fitness blogs, magazines or talk to the guy standing in the corner lifting a bunch of weight, you have undoubtedly heard that to progress, all you need to do is add weight to the bar.

While this is true – it follows what the professionals call ‘the overload principle’ – it dictates and says – Hey Mr. Muscle! When we overload your with a bunch of weight,  we tweak the heck out of you and you have to get a little stronger and bigger so that we can load you up again the next time.

To continue to change to continue to progress, I am learning that it means way more than just lets load up the weight. Adding weight is the simplest, most measurable way to apply the progressive overload but its not the only way, and Teresa is very much the first to point that out to me.

As you push harder through your workouts and as you workout each and every week, trying to attain more change, you are going to hit what the professionals call strength plateaus.

Working in a condensed time frame, Teresa is preparing for her competition. She can’t afford to hit those strength plateaus and since I”m alongside her, I train exactly like her.  She has to see change in a very short period of time. She can’t be plateauing for days, weeks when getting ready to compete.

Instead of continuing to grind away, trying to find some way to add weight to our lifts, Teresa focuses on other forms of progressive overload!

In short, I am learning how to maximize muscular tension and master technique.

So … In addition to adding additional weight, she has me focus on doing a much better workout by

• Placing tension on the target muscle (sqquuuuueeeze those glutes!)  through the entire range of motion
• Working on adding more range to my motion (getting lower to the ground when squatting)

 

Creating muscle holds, muscle pops, muscle pumps at various spots within a range of motion (thereby adding additional tension to your muscle group)

• Stop worrying all the time about maximum weight. Focus instead on creating maximum tension to your muscle
• Stop counting reps
• Control the weight through the entire range of motion (I like a lot of people will throw the weight when I’m getting tired or when I’m not mentally prepared to push or pull a certain stack or weight load)
• Aim to perfect the movement – if i don’t have the form correct, we lower the weight until I get used to the movement. Once I master the movement, I can then create tension on the working muscle or muscle group

There are other great things I’m learning about her phenomenal approach to weight lifting. She varies other aspects of our workout as well such as volume, duration and even training density (how much work we actually do in a given  time frame)