I read a Nerd Fitness article  and there is good stuff.

In training, the key of success is to have constantly better results and improve challenges level.

If you repeat the same training everydays, every months, your body will adapt et it will learn to burn less calories and make less progress.

To continue to make progress our body to become stronger, we must constantly add little challenges everydays.

Always do the same thing again and again doesn’t work

Normaly, if you want to lose weight, you need to increase your energy expenditure. You need to move more, right ?

In summary to lose weight, you must move more and eat less. But move more is a little bit more complex than that.

Exercices don’t always lead to an expenditure of energy. There is a little explanation the New York Times .

Professor Pontzer for Hunter College followed a hunter-gatherers tribe and he learned they burn the same amount of calories than an average american. Mainly, their bodies adapted to the stress and learned to burn less calories in other ways to increase efficiency :

« Energy expenditure is consistent across a broad range of lifestyles and cultures. Of course, if we push our bodies hard enough, we can increase our energy expenditure, at least in the short term. But our bodies are complex, dynamic machines, shaped over millions of years of evolution in environments where resources were usually limited; our bodies adapt to our daily routines and find ways to keep overall energy expenditure in check ».

If you do 3 sets of 10 push-ups everydays, your body will be really good to do 3 sets of 10 push-ups, it will be more efficient but not necessarily stronger each time.

Look :

• To increase your level in a video game, you need to fight against enemies stronger than you.

• To increase your level training, you need to do harder challenges in your training.

Progressive overload

We know we can’t do the same thing forever to have huge progress. We need to do challenges.

« Progressive overload », this is our chanllenge’s name. We overload ours current capacities, slowly but surely.

NSCA’s Performance Training Journal  explains :

« Without overload there is no adaptation by the body. Neuromuscular adaption occurs first, followed by increases in muscle and connective tissue, and bone mass. Proper conditioning methods will lead to physiological advancement as well. Depending on the training goals, improvements in lactic acid tolerance, lactate threshold, maximum aerobic power, and a variety of cardiovascular functions could be the appropriate responses ».

Our body will improve in all sorts of ways form stronger muscles to a better performance of the central nervous system. All of this is possible with a stimulus or simply « a challenge ».

We apply a stimulus to our body and our body responds, this improve all these areas mentioned above.

The solution is simple, right ? Just increase the challenge to each exercice, everydays and forever. Just to reach the level 99.

A record everydays

I wrote an article to break a plateau  and the better thing to break a plateau is to avoid it. A plateau can drain mentally, depress and can demotivate the most rebel.

When a linear progression is no longer possible, it’s the time to make little progress each week. This allows to progress without injuries.

Here are the benefits of this approach :

• You don’t overload too much your body but you learn to lift more weight each week then your body begin to adapt to become stronger and repairing properly.

• You don’t have these days where you feel blocked. You proves to yourself constantly than you’re better than yesterday.

The goal is to increase the total weight you lift in each training somehow. There are several ways :

• Lift more weight per reps than the last time

• Do more reps with the same weight than the last time

• Lift more tota weight than the last training

• Do the same number of reps, same number of sets and the same weight, but with less rest time between sets.

• Lift in a better form with more range of motion or a harder variation.

As long as one of these metrics is higher than your previous training, you’re improve your level et you are stronger.

Example :

• Training 1 : 5/5/5 x 43kg (95lbs)

• Training 2 : 6/5/5 x 43kg (95lbs)

• Training 3 : 6/6/5 x 43kg (95lbs)

• Training 4 : 6/6/6 x 43kg (95lbs)

Each weak ONE rep was added in the training. Then for the Training 5 and 6, the processus restart with a heavier weight.

• Training 5 : 5/5/5 x 45kg (100lbs)

• Training 6 : 6/5/5 x 45kg (100lbs)

The total weight lifted in Training 4 is 3x6x43kg = 774kg (1706lbs) and the total weight lifted in Training 5 is 3x5x45kg = 675kg (1488lbs). There is more weight per reps, there is progress, it’s cool.

Slow, stable, constant progress. Little by little, we become less little !

You ? How you progress ?

-Steph