Ensuring REAL Strength Progress (Part 1): Progressive Overload Checklist
Not improving? Review this checklist of common underdiscussed faults that may be the cause of your stalled progress.
Contents:
How to use this post
Troubleshooting Checklist
Calories
Protein
Rep Quality
Exercise Selection
Rep Schemes
Sleep
Stimulus-to-Fatigue Ratio
Misconceptions on “Progressive Overload” and creating “False Progress.”
Expectations & Metrics
Psychological Stress
Closing
Introduction
This post is the first in a series of articles aimed at addressing the most common issues with individuals' training programs, habits, beliefs, and decision-making in the gym. These issues can hinder or eliminate progress that would otherwise be made with good programs or from capable athletes, such as yourself.
In short, this series will delve into the things that many people - including yourself - are doing that genuinely interfere with their progress in strength training.
If this series receives adequate support, we will expand the scope to include skill acquisition for fighters and other athletes, covering a variety of factors that hinder success in sports or hobbies. So stay tuned to the substack and engage by liking and subscribing to the substack from this post, along with leaving any comments.
How to Use this Post
Below is a list of essential elements that must be accounted for in training to ensure progress is being made. If you are struggling with improvement in strength qualities or other training factors, you can use this list as a series of "checkboxes" to troubleshoot what is limiting your success.
While some people may have success at times without adhering well to these elements, if you are struggling, these factors are the first things to take note of.
The elements will be ranked loosely in order of importance, although each of them is crucial. Before turning to alternative theories or drastically swapping training programs, determine if these elements are properly in play if you encounter trouble with any exercise or program.
Although some of these factors have been covered in previous posts, we will dedicate individual detailed posts to each deserving factor as this series and manual continue to grow (requests will drive priorities, so don't hesitate to speak up).
If you are not familiar with the basics of strength training, progressive overload, strength vs muscle mass, nutrition, etc., read these posts and programs first.
Muscle Gain Nutrition Cheat sheet
Troubleshooting Progress Checklist
Calories
Let's get this one out of the way first: caloric consumption is generally priority number one for all gains, especially those of a hypertrophy-based nature (both muscle and connective tissue). Although gains can be made in a variety of areas without a major calorie surplus, overall calories still need to be adequate to drive adaptations. Even when losing weight in a caloric deficit, a shallow deficit of calories is much more likely to allow for performance improvement than a steep one.
The most surefire way to allow for strength improvement to persist or to diminish/halt is to not consume enough food.
A tremendous amount of trainees decide subjectively whether they are eating “a lot” or “a little”. However, this means nothing, and the actual numbers are what count. Regardless of whether calories are tracked and managed carefully or not, the math is what matters. Physics does not care how full you feel you are or if other factors are getting in the way. You are either eating enough total food for the body to use surplus resources for physical change, or you are not. In most cases, slowly gaining weight for temporary periods is desirable. Expect this to be the first mistake and source of failure in most men who struggle to gain weight. (In 99% of cases, the real issue is appetite struggles, not your metabolism.)
Protein
As a secondary component to calorie intake, the nature of the calories being consumed matters a lot as well. Adequate protein intake should generally be between 0.8 and 1g per lb of bodyweight or per lb of lean body mass. Protein is typically given the 1g/lb bodyweight metric as it is simple to remember and is in the ballpark of maximum effectiveness. However, it is often technically an overshoot when it comes to most training gains.
It is important that one doesn't use this as an excuse to under eat protein, however, and it is extremely common for individuals to think they are eating a lot of protein by simply “guessing” that a pasta dish with a couple small pieces of chicken is adequate for a meal. Track your intake, supplement if absolutely necessary, and get a strong idea of how much protein you truly are consuming and get it in the adequate range. Again, this is actually about 0.82g per lb of lean body mass at minimum, and thus shooting above that is a good rule of thumb.
Honorable mentions in this section also go out to eating adequate fats and carbs for performance and health. See the muscle gain cheat-sheet post for details.
Rep Quality
Repetition quality is the most abused element of progress within the walls of the gym. This often refers to the intent and focused execution of the exercises performed in question, but the factors are still myriad.
The most common issues individuals present is:
General poor technical form on an exercise
Undisciplined execution of tempos
Undisciplined maintenance of range of motion on an exercise
Maintenance of the technical execution of a set as fatigue sets in
Besides conscious focus during training, several of these issues can also be improved by improving other factors that will be listed further below. But it should go without saying that an exercise is meant to achieve an objective, and if executed inadequately toward its goal, it simply won't achieve it
Rep schemes
While selecting an appropriate exercise is important, so is the prescription for its use. Frequently individuals will program or challenge themselves with repetition schemes that do not service the desired goals or at least get in the way of training as well as they could.
Common mistakes are:
Taking heavy compound lifts to high reps very often. This usually taxes the body tremendously overall while limiting your ability to use them for what they are usually most beneficial for…heavy loading of the body. Often sets are finished due to systemic fatigue and not because a target muscle is being stimulated directly, and the effects of strength they provide are reduced by using lower weights for higher reps.
As a rule of thumb, most heavy compounds work best in the 1-10 rep range (most often the 3-8 range) depending on your specific needs/goals.
Taking isolation or secondary exercises (exercises that are still “compound” lifts but generally are biased very heavily into one muscle group or aren't loaded quite that heavy) to very low reps. This happens often when one is concerned with “strength” and begins to resent rep numbers that go above 5 reps.
Do not take any isolation exercise below 6 reps in most cases (8-15 being the best range for most) unless there is reason for a particular movement to be an exception (uncommon).
Performing explosive movements for higher reps. This generally diminishes the quality of dynamic work and most movements designed for speed and power should not go above 5 reps for the lower body and 6-8 reps for the upper body without some rest time in most cases. These numbers are also more about when your power begins to drop off and not necessarily about the number itself.
CrossFit gyms often utilize Olympic lifts and plyometric type exercises for metabolic conditioning work - this greatly reduces the explosive benefits as well as greatly enhances the impact stress on the body (Not always a bad thing…but often not the most efficient choice for most goals).
Your programming should generally have a mix of rep ranges between 1-15+ reps depending on what the needs/goals of the selected exercises are.
General guidelines: Reps should be 1-10 for force emphasized training, 6-15 for hypertrophy and tissue based adaptations, 15+ for endurance or capacity building for very sensitive tissue.
Sleep
Obviously sleep is important and this is nothing groundbreaking. We have all heard/read plenty about why its necessary and what is required. Nothing special is needed here. Video games and phone addictions often get in the way of most young peoples sleep.
If you are getting less than 7 hours per night, do what is needed to change that.
Bedtimes between 10pm and 12am with 1-2 hours of low stress time works best for most.
Caffeine abuse and screens inhibit sleep.
Most of this we know you are well aware of but its important that you make efforts on your sleep like you do training and diet.9+ hours of sleep has been measured repeatedly to show higher strength levels, faster sprint times, and much much lower injury rates in training.
Do what must be done if this is your problem.
Stimulus-to-Fatigue Ratio
This is highly correlated to the exercise selection as well as rep scheme factors, but is given its own spot simply to demonstrate the concept and its importance.
You can understand more about the stimulus to fatigue ratio in audio format here
Essentially however, it is important that you understand balancing training hard vs training effectively. This means that training that is very stressful still might not be yielding improvements. The quality of that stress is what matters as well as your ability to recover from it. If your body feels constantly run down, but you do not feel any sensations like CNS activation, muscle disruption/soreness, or see any metric for improvement - its likely your training is heavily fatiguing without providing quality stimulus.
Your exercise selection, rep schemes, rep quality, and overall program design should be assessed again in this case.
Proximity to Failure/Intensity Tracking Overload & “False Progress”
Exercises should generally have a metric for intensity of the sets performed. In my programming it will generally be an RPE or RIR rating.
This intensity is extremely key for achieving a proper stimulus. If an exercise is not taken to the prescribed or necessary proximity to concentric failure it will not provide the outcomes desired.
Its common that individuals do not reach muscular failure or adequate intensities because of poor exercise setups (see above) or rep scheme approaches. However, it is also very common that trainees get a basic understanding of progressive overload and seek to add specific increments of weight or reps each week.
This obviously isn't always bad but very frequently results in a major issue where the athlete is severely under-dosing themselves for weeks/months before the intensity of an exercise is adequate…and finally once they reach a zone of appropriate stimulus they seek to add weight/reps so linearly based on what would result in a “personal record” that day that they begin to compromise rep quality in order to achieve this.
The result is that they were only in the pocket of strong progress for a short period of time.
5 reps and 10lbs added to an exercise is not “progress” if it was only added over 3 months because you were training extremely softly at first. You did not get stronger as much as you literally “just added weight” as it was not testing or building your limits for most of that time.
This is why it is more important to assess STRESS during an exercise rather than the numbers and what you need to do to “progressively overload”. Overload should be observed over time as you actually make progress…but not all training logs that demonstrate “progress” are accurate in that way.
Your goal in training effectively is to hit the prescribed intensities that produce adequate and appropriate stress and then recover from that stress. Observation over the course of months to years from your training logs should reflect increased progression of load, length, and speed etc, but obsessing over “adding just 1 rep per week” will end up with wasting years of effort if that additional rep is either encouraging poor rep quality OR undershooting intensity.
Make sure every set you perform revolves around the intent and execution of the set being high quality and not worrying about the “numbers” until after.
Poor Overall Programming
Often it is not a smaller factor that is getting in the way but rather that a series of conflating issues are afoot with an entire approach to training that just makes for a complete training program to be ineffective or un-practical.
In these cases, you may have to revaluate what your program is like, what your goals are and perhaps seek another approach entirely.
It’s common that these situations arise when programs do not balance the split of training stressors, recovery days, total volume of work, individual factors including life constraints, and often sequencing training in such a way that time is used poorly as well as damaging the quality of work that can be done between exercises.
Some mistakes I've seen:
Super-setting major muscle groups together, often defeating the purpose of antagonist supersets overall in most cases; ie dips + chest flyes
Sprint or plyometric sessions immediately after strength training the lower body
Adding extra exercises/sets to the point of diminished returns or thinking they are missing out on the benefits of another exercise and adding it in where it is not needed (No understanding of specific adaptations vs fatigue).
Utilizing training programs that work for one goal and not understanding where they conflict with another…(i.e. running a hypertrophy split for bodybuilding while seeking to train boxing 5 days per week; boxing being the ultimate goal)
It is important to have some idea of what decent program design should look like for your goals so you do not veer too far off track making overly impulsive decisions.
Expectations & Metrics
It is also important to actually utilize some type of metric for success and managing expectations. Firstly because it is important to be able to acknowledge if you are actually making progress. It is short lived during our training history to make extremely rapid changes in every area - some individuals get used to this and expect it forever in some way despite being educated on “beginner gains”. This leads to many thinking they are “stagnant” when really they are in a typical rate of progress but hoping for something more that may not be realistic.
The body needs to take legitimate time to make advanced adaptations and this process must be done well repeatedly to show real reward. Understanding that if you are looking to make real changes you should be in this for years (not weeks/months).
Tracking metrics such as bodyweight, waist measurements, accurate lifting numbers, performance metrics for speed/conditioning etc. and all factors that matter enough for you to be concerned with should give you the most accurate story of what's going on and it may be the case that you are actually doing quite well.
In that case, good work and keep going.
Stress
Finally, we should touch on mental health and psychological stress. It is a real thing that periods of deep stress, anxiety, depression etc. do not improve almost any health metric. By default, recovery and adaptations can be lessened.
There is a catch-22 here where worrying about stress levels will create higher stress levels. So it is a balancing act and I suggest to not sensationalize any factor like this. Enjoy training and enjoy life is the easiest way to improve this in the most general sense when it comes to fitness.
External stressors that are serious need to be managed and tackled the best you can.
Ultimately this is a personal issue that reflects things that go beyond strength training and how you see fit to manage your psychological well being is unique.
I can say however that when it comes to recovery from training - having fun and enjoying the gym can do a lot. Making training sessions more engaging and enjoyable - however that needs to be done for you - can have a major impact on your recovery from them as you leave in a good mood and looking forward to the next rather than dreading training and leaving defeated.
Good mental support in all other ways goes beyond the scope of this post.
Conclusion
Training factors touched on here will likely be expanded on further in this series, but this should give you a general overview of what most faults prevent individuals from reaching their potential. The scope of this could go even further as well when we touch upon some other related factors that did not need to be bunched into this post but will all be written about soon.
Please comment what you would need clarification on or what you need covered next in more detail, and it will be prioritized.
As always, train sensibly.
Not medical advice. Discuss with your physician before engaging with any information on this blog.