Progression?

Almost everything I write is anecdotal. I have a lot of interest in science, but I honestly do not let it impact my training a whole lot. The consensus in the scientific community keeps swaying and the ways of the world always makes people be conform and create a vacuum of consensus. Almost every year, new studies  come out showing that the anecdotes from some former pro bodybuilder wasn’t that crazy after all. Sometimes it is HIIT, sometimes it is Volumekings. The pendulum swings back and forth.

Friends, no matter what method you use - whether if it’s #Science or not - someone has had success with it. It doesn’t take many minutes to trawl through the internet and find confirmation, no matter how obscure the training method is.

That doesn’t mean people need to sit at home, completely confused and indecisive. It doesn’t mean you have to go on Reddit and interrogate so-called experts about which program is optimal. It all works. Don’t get discouraged. One thing both research and anecdotes consistently show is that gradually lifting heavier things up and putting it down, gradually builds bigger muscles, given that you eat enough and do it for long enough.

Progression, friends.

That’s one of the reasons Doggcrapp (DC) training is so effective. It’s about always lifting a bit more than you did last time. But it doesn’t have to be one-dimensional or two-dimensional like DC. Progression can work across all parameters: mechanical tension, metabolic stress, total volume, frequency, and so on. You can even be bold enough to run progression for individual muscle groups and movements independently of each other, much more like Hatfields floating schedule in ABC.

In the past, my training has been structured like this for long stretches of time:

Full body: 4x per week, around 12 weeks or until progression slows down.2-split: 4x per week, around 12 weeks or until progression slows down.3-split: around 6x per week and until progression… well, you get the point.

Then reset with heavier loads and maybe different exercises, but almost always the same movements. More no that topic in another article.

The key here is to have progression on as many of the exercises as possible. Preferably double progression – keep hitting the same weight until you hit a target set of reps and then increase the amount of weight just enough to decrease the number of reps and then progress by trying to repeat the previous number of reps. When you have milked all the progression out of the program, you decrease the frequency just the slightest and do it again. And again. Until the frequency becomes too low and then you repeat the cycle.

But before picking exercises for your movements, remember that some exercises have a rehabilitative or preventative purpose and don’t work well with hard progression. If that’s the case, they should support progression in the main lifts. Think about it and don’t focus too much on progressing exercises that are limited by coordination and balance—unless that’s the goal, of course.

All of this mainly applies to hypertrophy – but the strength world is not that different.

Back in 2016, I wrote this quote in an article for Trainingday:

“Chinese weightlifters have started doing bodybuilding, powerlifters have started training with higher frequency, and more bodybuilders have started applying progression in their training. I think we have an exciting era ahead of us. So next time you sit down and plan your training for the coming weeks, take a proper look and see if there’s a new method you could apply or a different focus you could include in your endless pursuit of bigger muscles. Success lies in progression AND, to some extent, variation—so shake things up and, as always…”

I don’t have numbers to back this up, but I believe we’ve seen one of the most aggressive developments in strength sports in modern times. Just look at strongman and powerliftingrecords, they are being broken year after year. Something is working. One reason is that the population is growing, so we’re finding more outliers in different sports. But i think it is because we are seeing people learning and experiementing more. At least i hope so.

To excel in strength sports, a certain level of specificity is required to lift as efficiently as possible. You don’t get that from lying around doing burnout sets of skullcrushers, but you do walk out the door with a bigger set of pipes.

Enough rambling. Back to training.