Making General Progressions Make Sense
Equipping you with guidelines to make sure you're always moving forward.
Keeping on the usual theme, I want to give a good guideline about how to achieve your goals and make the journey sustainable for you. You might have heard of the popular advice to get 1% better each day, but what does that mean? And how can you apply it to your fitness journey? I want to share some tips on how to use the 1% rule to improve your fitness level, and how to take it to the next level by modifying the factors that guide our workouts, the FITT guidelines. By changing the variables of your training, such as frequency, intensity, time, and type, you can challenge your body in new ways and stimulate further adaptation. Lastly, I want to help break down internal barriers that we tend to set up following intensity where we may think we are training harder than we are. This is typically a way we keep operating within our comfort zone, which can be fine in certain situations but we will dive deeper into that in a bit!
First, getting right into it the 1% better every day doesn’t need to be something that is actionable, though with exercise it can be something that we do end up measuring! It is more of the mindset, where we set out to try and make sure that we are pushing to be a little bit better each day. If you hit that 1% mark each day then at the end of the year you’ll be 37x better! It is about the mindset shift to making small day-to-day changes that stack up and build
up some momentum, using that momentum to perpetuate the change into the future. Now this rule has a very direct translation into exercise and nutrition, taking it day by day and embracing those wins. Making sure that you are making a good breakfast, making sure we are hitting the protein goals, and working toward any of these will make it clear to you that you’re meeting that 1% better every day. Then once we hit that consistency part we start working on another phase. It brings it back to setting those realistic goals with an actionable plan to do it. This mindset is truly the plan that helps you break down those goals into pieces that work in a step-by-step order to get to the place that you want to be. Trying to get this mindset shift in place will prove to be one of the biggest changes in working on progression toward our goals!
The next thing I want to chat about is the idea of variables that we can modify within our training to propel our progress forward, these variables being frequency, intensity, time, and type. We can use each of these variables to modify our training to make our training more difficult, more energy demanding, provide a new stimulus, or any of these to try and increase the amount of work that we are doing to again get just a bit better each day. I know that it is one thing to keep saying modify these variables but that can be overwhelming to know what place to modify so I want to give you a good way of knowing which variable to modify to help your certain situation. First looking at frequency, if you are starting by just making sure you are hitting one day a week the easiest way to progress is to just add another day, that will make sure we are marching along in the right direction, increasing our total volume by a bunch, and keep the ball rolling. We can keep doing this when you feel like you’ve stagnated a bit until you’ve gotten to the maximum number of days that you believe you can commit to. For some that is 3, for some, that is 7, but for many, it is typically somewhere in the middle. Now, frequency doesn’t always need to be the number of days working out, it can be the number of days hitting each muscle group. If you have already increased to say your desired 4 days a week, change your workouts so that instead of doing 1 body part each day, we increase it so we are hitting your entire upper body 2 days a week and your entire lower body 2 days a week. This is also another great way of progressing our frequency. We would aim to do this frequency increase when we feel as if our body has enough time to fully recover from the previous sessions and we are waiting too long to hit that muscle group again. Just keeps your body recovering and adapting getting more changes faster!
The next variables I want to speak on are intensity and type as they go hand in hand quite well. This is because a way that we can increase our intensity is by changing the type of exercise that we are doing. Instead of using a barbell, try using dumbbells and focusing on the stress, try doing some bodyweight movements at a higher degree, or try something different as it is an interesting way to find the movements that give you the most stimulus for your body. If we can increase the amount of stimulus via a movement that doesn’t beat you up but still lets you push it hard then that is the best ideal movement that we can do for you. So experiment a bit with the types that you are doing! There is never any shame in testing out a new movement as long as you are taking it far enough and staying intense with it. That is the next piece is making sure that our intensity does line up with our goals. Intensity is making sure that we are training close enough to failure and pushing that bar just a bit further as our body adapts. Playing with this variable will be pushing heavier weights than you did last time, doing more sets than you did last time, and doing more reps than you did last time. Any of these will increase the intensity at which you are doing the workout. This is a great method of progression if you have already gotten to the desired amount of days that you want to exercise and then get the time that you want to spend in the gym. Then it is all about pushing the weight up and up and making sure that we are breaking past any mental barriers that may be blocking you from getting over the new weights. Your body adapts, so don’t be scared of increasing the weight, decreasing the rest times, increasing the sets, or any of these to help keep that progression train rolling.
The last one to discuss is going to be time, time is typically for our more cardiovascular-based goals but can also apply to strength and other aspects of our health and wellness. Time is exactly what it sounds like, just increasing the sheer amount of time that we are participating in the exercise. With cardio, you can keep the progression rolling just by adding a few minutes each week for a good while, cardio builds quickly so don’t be scared of it! The other way that time can affect our workouts is with lifting, increasing the sheer amount of time under tension you are going to be under or time that you are doing the movement which correlates directly with the amount of volume that you will be doing! Choosing this method of progression will be very important for cardio-based goals that you want to achieve. There are specifics that I will get into deeper down the road for advanced cardio progression but as of now, if you just increase the time on your feed and increase it a bit longer each week you are going to be in a great spot. Cardio training shouldn’t be skimped out on either as it translates very well into every other aspect, it helps prepare your body for large amounts of low-intensity movement making you more resilient to completing more tasks in a day, if helps easy tasks continue to feel easy, and likely the most important, regular cardio can help with your recovery times so you aren’t going to be as sore following training sessions and you can recover quickly between sets and between workouts themselves. That would be one of the biggest reasons why we would focus on time progression.
Now that we have covered all the variables that we can modify with progression and good times that we would want to use them. Let’s talk about common barriers people set up when it comes to progression. Most of the time, these variables come from people being scared of trying new weights, doubting their abilities to handle the new weights, or just general discomfort in pushing up toward failure as that is very hard to consistently do and it takes a lot of mental and physical effort to achieve. This is why we focus on different progression tactics to make sure we can keep that intensity level high, and overcome those barriers by pushing ourselves in different areas thus making the overall experience easier. If you struggle with pushing yourself to the next available weight, try gradually increasing the sets you do by one or two for the next few weeks then cut back on the sets and increase the overall weight that you are using. It is all about finding ways we can break that barrier down in a different path to force our body to grow. However, with that being said as an example, never be scared of trying a new weight and failing it. It is better to test it and see where you are, as you may find you were sandbagging yourself for a little bit, or you may find that you need a bit more time with that same weight to keep pushing yourself. We ideally want to be pushing ourselves to a point where we have a noticeable drop off in the speed at which we can move the weight, this is going to be that sweet spot of us forcing our body to adapt while not making too much fatigue for our body to handle!
To recap, maintaining good progression is key to achieving our goals, breaking them down and trying to get “1% better each day” makes it so we have the right mindset in trying to break down our goals into something more manageable, those plans are then made following the FITT principle. Managing each variable within FITT to match the progression we are currently at will ensure that we keep marching forward and getting closer to our goals. Lastly, we want to make sure you aren’t setting up any unnecessary barriers that don’t need to be there, don’t be scared of trying new weights, and don’t limit your abilities just because you “think” you won’t be able to handle it. In my time coaching, people limit their abilities far below what they are capable of, whether it is from the fear of embarrassment or true doubt in their abilities. Always aim to surprise yourself!
If you found this useful and provided some insight please share it around to somebody who might need to hear it. If you have any questions, need clarity, or a topic that you want me to discuss send it my way. You can contact me by email at sidneyabartlett@gmail.com
Until next time,
Sidney Bartlett, CSCS