Increase Your Strength And Muscle Faster With Work Capacity

Build your strength and muscle faster by improving your work capacity

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Build your strength and muscle faster by improving your work capacity
If you are at a point in your training where you are no longer progressing. You can’t seem to get any stronger or build any more muscle. You’ve been doing the same 3 sets of 10 for 6 months now and you're just stuck. The problem isn’t that you have hit your genetic limit. It’s that you’re limited by your work capacity.

Your body gets used to doing a certain amount of work and once you hit this level your progress stops. On top of this, work capacity just like everything else will diminish as we age, unless we train it. The best way to define work capacity as it applies to training is it is the amount of work we can do and recover from by our next workout. Work capacity can be improved by slowly increasing the volume we do in each training session and as your body starts to adapt to this higher training volume your work capacity improves. Once we return to a lower volume of training it will feel easier to do that level of work even with the increased weight. Allowing you to push past your old plateau, once again progressing and hitting new PR’s

You always want to be making measurable progress, by taking some time to effectively train your work capacity you have divided your training progress into two phases.

The first phase is your lower volume training with the main goal being to add weight or another rep each workout. So for example, if you can bench 175 for 2 sets of 10 and on the third set you do 8 reps then next workout on that third set you want to try for 9 reps and eventually 10. After that, you would increase the weight. Now once you have plateaued and can’t progress anymore even after trying a deload or two, then you move into the next phase. Where you now shift your focus to increasing your work capacity and overall volume. When your working with a rep range of 10 or more reps often times you can still use the same weight, but if you are training in a lower range like five reps you might want to lighten the weight and increase the number of reps. You don’t have to, but your overall workload will be higher if you do.

I will give you one example of how you can increase your work capacity and stay in that low rep range. What you would do is after finishing your typical amount of sets you would add in one more set of just one rep using the same weight as on your last set. Then on your next workout do 2 reps on this additional set. Continue each workout to add an additional rep until you can no longer add another rep. At this point, you repeat this number of sets and reps for a couple of weeks then add in one more set of just one rep. You’d advance this set just like you did the last one. Once you hit your maximum number of reps on this last set and it might just be 2 reps, you keep the workout the same for two more weeks then drop back down to your original number of sets.

Let me explain this in a bit more detail using the example of 3 sets of 10 at 175 pounds, over the course of those 3 sets you are going to move 5,250lbs. now when you add in a fourth set and let’s say you can do 7 reps on this set that is another 1225 pounds making the total 6,475 pounds. That is a substantial increase in work capacity and your body will need time to adapt to it. So I wouldn’t add in another set for at least 2 or three weeks. Over this time you may very well find you are able to add a rep or 2 to that final set as your capacity to recover from this increased volume improves.

The extra training volume will not only stimulate more hypertrophy, but it also gives our joints and tendons more time to get used to this weight before increasing the stress on them with a heavier load.

You can repeat this process and add in a 5th set. After a couple of weeks of doing five sets, it’s time to drop back down and you’ll be amazed how easy only doing 3 sets feels after doing 5.

If you find once you have moved up to 5 sets that your performance has started to suffer and the amount of weight you can move is going down from one workout to the next, then you have pushed your work capacity as far as it can go for now and you need to step back to 3 sets, deload