Design Your Own Progressive Muscle Building Training Program

Design your own progressive muscle building training program

Today we are going to talk about six things you can apply to any training program to keep you progressively building muscle.

We’ll start by looking at a couple of things the stronglifts 5x5 program does very well. I would like to make clear here, that there is so much more to progressive overload than just adding weight to the bar, but this is one thing that stronglifts does very well.

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They do this by having you start with a weight that is about 50% of your 5 rep max and add the smallest amount of weight each workout until you have surpassed your old 5 rep max. Then they have you continue to add weight until you can no longer complete 5 reps.

Each time you add weight to the bar you are increasing your training volume. As a matter of fact, there are only 2 elements of progressive overload that don’t directly increase training volume using the definition of volume as equaling sets x reps x weight or (intensity) and the second-way stronglifts keeps you progressing is one of those things.

They do this by adjusting your rest times. The recommended rest time between sets on the stronglifts program is 90 seconds now if you're struggling to get your last five reps on your set, then they recommend you rest 3 minutes before starting the next set to give you more recovery time.

Now if you fail to get all five reps the suggestion is to wait at least 5 minutes be for attempting the next set. This additional rest time will allow you once again to potentially increase your training volume. Once you have increased your rest time to complete the set over the next few workouts you need to start slowly shortening your rest times until you are back down to your original time.

Adding weight to the bar along with adjusting rest times are things we might change on a workout to workout bases along with adding another rep to our set. Typically we will have a rep range set up of say 10 to 12 reps for 3 sets and we pick a weight that we hit failure within that range on our last set. Once we can do over 12 on each set, then it is time to increase the weight.

We can also use a similar deload strategy to stronglifts with our reps once we find ourselves at a plateau in our training and we just can't get another rep. Reducing our repetitions by 4 or 5 then slowly add them back in one rep at a time over the next few workouts. Stronglifts reduces the weight by 10% then slowing adds the weight back in.

We can add progression to our workouts is to add in another set. In this video, I’m going to talk more about adding in an extra set to your working sets. This isn’t something we would do from workout to workout, rather we would do this over a block of time anywhere between two to six weeks. This increases your training volume quite a bit as well as the length of your workouts. If you were to keep adding in sets, eventually your workouts would get too long and you would end up not recovering from one workout to the next. Adding sets in is something I do quite regularly in my training where I add in a set every few weeks until I get to a point where I’m overreaching then I back off the number of sets I’m doing, change the rep range and weight, then do it all over again.

Next is increasing training frequency. This is when you add in another training day, like when you go from training your full body twice a week to three times a week. Increasing your training frequency can apply to just one body part too. You might find that you have a muscle or muscle group that is lagging and would benefit from an extra day.

Changing the pace of our reps like the negative portion can allow us to progress overtime. How this works is the first week you perform your repetitions at your normal pace then the second week you slow the pace down particularly the negatives. Going half the speed you would normally do. Then on the third week, you would add in 3 pauses on the way down. In a perfect world you would continue to do the same number of reps per set, but don't be surprised if you end up doing a rep or two less. Once you get to the fourth week you keep the 3 pauses on the negative and add-in another 3 pauses on the concentric part of the movement.