Make Your Workouts Injury Free and Progressive

How to make your workouts progressive

To continue building muscle and getting stronger we need to keep our workouts progressing slowly adding weight over time. Simple enough, but anybody who has been training for any length of time knows eventually this becomes hard to do. Sometimes our ego and desire to progress get in the way of true progress and we end up injured and unable to train.

The first rule to make our workouts progressive is perfect form. This is where we start when we first learn a new exercise. We perfect our form then we add weight. And we always come back to this before we add any more weight or another rep.

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Here is an example; let’s say your goal is to do 12 reps of a certain exercise then you’ll to add weight. You’ve been struggling to get that 12 rep for a while and finally, you manage to grind it out a bit of a nasty rep and not exactly perfect form but you’re excited to finally get that rep and next workout you add weight to the bar.

This is a big mistake! And it is caused by thinking the only way to progress a set is to do another rep or add weight. The next step here should be to clean up that rep. Perfect the form and make sure we are doing a full range of motion. Before even considering adding another rep or more weight.

To take a sloppy rep and turn it into a perfect rep takes an increase in strength. This is why I include perfecting your form as a type of progressive overload.

Adding a repetition to your set or increasing the weight are the two most common ways to perform progressive overload. These methods along with keeping our reps perfect are what we use as a beginner the most.

But there are a lot more ways available to us. The next most common one would be to increase the training volume this can be done a few different ways. The first being to add an extra set to an exercise or another exercise for a specific body part.

The biggest flaw with doing this is that it makes your workouts longer so to balance this off reduce the number of sets for another body part. Do this for a month then switch body parts and add the extra sets to the one you had reduced.

By adding in sets like this it improves our work capacity which will improve our ability to lift more once we return back to our regular number of sets.

We can also progress our workouts by adding in another training day which only works if you have one available and you always have to make sure you leave enough time for recovery.

I briefly want to mention density training. I’m going to talk about it more next month as it works well to help you reach a new maximum number of reps on bodyweight exercises like push-ups or pull-ups.

I don’t use density training a lot with traditional weights with one exception. Sometimes to get that next rep in I will increase the rest time which allows me a bit more recovery so I can do that additional repetition. Now even though I got another rep, it isn’t progress because I took more time to do it.

Density training is when you do the same amount of work in less time and this is what I need to do with my rest time to progress. I need to reduce my rest time over the next few workouts back to the original time. Once I have done that I’ve made progress.

Another way we can progress our workout without adding weight or even another rep is to change the tempo of our reps most commonly this is done by slowing down the negative portion of the movement.

This has a lot of advantages one of the biggest ones is it allows us time for our joints and tendons to adjust to the weight.
It also provides the muscle with more time under tension and improves our mind-muscle connection. Enabling us to really own the weight having full control of it before increasing it.

Try slowing down the rep to about half your usual pace. This can also be done on the positive portion of the movement.

Another way we can change the tempo so we can progress is to add in a pause. My two favourite places to do this is at the halfway point of the rep just before we switch directions. This will eliminate any momentum we might have and the other place is at the midway point of either the positive or negative part of the movement. I find it particularly challenging to add a pause when moving the weight against gravity.