Progressive overload is pivotal for increasing performance. Whether it's increasing the weights, the sets, or the reps, you need to increase the stress to progress over time.
Developing a stronger work capacity in the gym lays the foundation for hypertrophy, strength and power to follow. The underlying principle is to allow yourself to tolerate and recover from more work, session to session and week to week.
Volume, or amount of training, is thought to determine the magnitude of physical adaptation. The more work you do, the bigger the results you get. It applies to more than just lifting weights. Progressing volume and conditioning your body to higher workloads will result in larger responses to training in whatever direction you're going.
There are a number of ways to progress from week to week in the gym. Generally, any linear progressive program increases the load each week, and possibly decreases the reps. Week 1, 4×10 @ 100 kg. Week 2, 4×8 @ 110 kg. That's an incredibly normal approach to strength training.
While intensity goes up, the total workload decreases, so total volume and work capacity may go down. Instead of that typical approach, what I'm suggesting is maintaining or very gradually increasing intensity, while challenging yourself through volume and your ability to tolerate it. While also challenging recovery ability through setting a time limit. Setting a time limit on the work matters because simply increasing sets week to week will not guarantee you are improving. It will guarantee you are staying in the gym longer.
A practical example
Set a timer for a fixed amount of time, say 30 minutes. Select two exercises that are agonist and antagonist, like a push and a pull. For the lower body, a single exercise like front squats may be enough. Go as hard as you can, and get as many sets as possible in the time frame, hitting your target reps each time. Record your results.
| 30 minutes | Weight | Reps | Total sets |
|---|---|---|---|
| A1: Incline DB press | 40 kg | 10 | 5 |
| A2: Chin-ups | BW + 5 kg | 6 | 5 |
Say the target was five sets. The athlete in the example above hit five total sets of both exercises in 30 minutes. He hasn't surpassed it (six or more sets), so he keeps the same weight for next session and tries again. Once he can achieve six or more sets in the time frame, the load can be increased, usually by around 2.5%, or whatever gym maths makes sense.
If he can only manage four or fewer sets, reduce the load by around 2.5% and try again next session.
These are guidelines, not strict rules. You may want to increase the time frame to 45 minutes and use 10 sets of 4 as a target. You may decrease to 10 minutes and try for 4 sets of 12 on accessory work.
After completing a work-capacity block of four to eight weeks, you should be able to tolerate a higher workload in a shorter period of time. From there, moving to a more traditional intensity-increasing program reaps the rewards of the previous block.