Single progression is the gradual addition of weights over time.  Yep – that’s about as sexy as it gets.  In a single progression model, you select a fixed number of reps (or time) – say, 5 reps (or 60 seconds).  Select a weight.  Lift it.  If you can successfully lift that weight for the target number of reps or the target time, then add a little bit of weight to the bar.  You can use percentages (1% per workout, for example) or fixed weight increments (2.5 pounds), but what’s important is the gradual increase of weight over time.

What happens when you can’t increase the weight?  You get stuck at 175 lbs for 4 reps, and you can’t seem to get that fifth one? First, determine if you’re really stuck.  If you’re not making progress weight-wise after three consecutive workouts, then on the fourth, it’s time to decrease the weights slightly.  In an exercise involving multiple muscle groups (e.g., squat, pulldown, deadlift), take the weight down by 20%*.  Then work your way back up.  What should happen is that you’ll squeak a little bit past your previous plateau point, then reach a higher plateau.  At that point, you’d repeat the process (known as “cycling” the weights).

Single progression is the simplest method of improving strength and muscle.  Combining single progression and cycling will probably net you as much strength and muscle gain as you can get, provided you use a sensible program.

Single progression is largely poo-pooed by the strength sub-culture as being too simplistic:  “Only beginners use it”, “It doesn’t work”,”You plateau too quickly”, and the like.  Try it.  Worry about the plateaus when they come.

P.S. – Quitting because the weights feel too heavy to lift isn’t plateauing.

*It doesn’t have to be 20%.  I will typically lower clients’ weights by 10% first and see if that does the trick.

If you’re like most people, when it comes to exercise, you use the terms “program” and “workout” interchangeably.  But they are completely different things.

Individual workouts are important, as they’re the building blocks upon which real results are made.  But what ultimately gets you the results you want is not a single monumental workout, but a series of consistently done workouts, arranged intelligently, will. And that intelligent arrangement of workouts?  That’s a program.

Here’s a missive to you:  Stop thinking of your fitness journey in terms of individual workouts.  No, I’m not asking you to stop giving it your all during each and every exercise bout.  What I’m asking you to do is abandon the search for the miracle workout that will transform you from a milquetoast to brick house.  Get on a solid program.  Embrace single progression (the steady but gradual addition of weights over a period of time) and settle in for the long haul.  Commit to improving your lifts a pound at a time, consistently, over the course of , say, a year.  Then get back to me.

“Spend most of your time on squats; spend pretty much your balance of time on bench presses. Every now and then see what you can do on the deadlift.”  – Bradley J. Steiner.

Sounds about right to me.  How about you?  What are your thoughts?  Post to comments.

One prominent  and controversial question in strength training circles: Is training strength and demonstrating strength the same thing or different things?  In other words, what’s the best way to build strength – by “demonstrating” it through heavy maximal lifts, explosive movements, and plain-ol’ ‘lifting stuff‘, or by ‘training it’ through more measured and precise means?

This is a huge waste of mental energy (better directed towards actually exercising).

To clarify what I mean, take a look at my foster kids’ handstand form:

For my convenience’s sake (l.-r.): Max, Shirley, Santa

Who would you say is the strongest?  Why?

Note the following observations:

• Santa has near perfect form (it’s only imperfect because she’d been holding the handstand for a minute waiting for her siblings to get into their handstands).  It’s safe to say she’s not only well-practiced at handstands, she’s strong for her size.
• Upper body wise, Shirley is the weakest in the upper body – you can see her arms beginning to give way to the weight of her torso and legs (alas, her leg falling forward makes this obvious).
• Max fell over a split second after this picture was taken.  And yet, he’d be the first one of the three I’d enlist to help me carry a Murphy bed up three flights of stairs.

Of course, it’s a trick question.  You can probably see what I’m getting at here.  Strength can be demonstrated.  But in order to be demonstrated:

1) You have to be able to demonstrate it (skill).

2) You need to have strength to demonstrate.

Pick a different skill (say, carrying a Murphy bed up three flights of stairs with a partner) and the evaluation changes.  Now, it’s clear who’s “strongest” – the only one capable of performing the task at all.

All this is mental piffle.  For actual exercise purposes, here’s what it boils down to:

The muscular/joint system has one global job: To move your body through space.  There is a near-infinite number of potential movements in which your body can be propelled (an infinite number of “skills”).  To effect the greatest change, choose those movements that are most global in scope (that effectively work the most muscle) and most applicable to your goals (after all,  a ballet dancer and your bocce ball-playing grandfather probably have markedly differing fitness goals) and apply measured, precise doses of exercise to improve the capacity of that muscle.

So it doesn’t matter if you lift a sandbag or a chrome-plated machine handle.  Work hard at increasing your ability; make it so that you can do more today than you could yesterday or yesteryear.  You’ll never master every skill known to man.  But you can make yourself a better version of yourself by mastering a few skills.  You even get to choose which skills they are.

One good thing about the rise in popularity of bodybuilding in the 60s and 70s was that it got people interested in lifting weights.

One bad thing (”One bad thing?”, the peanut gallery asks) about bodybuilding going mainstream was that it made “bodypart mentality” a part of the training consciousness – bodypart mentality being the idea that you build your muscles by working specific muscle groups with specific exercises, i.e., Curls for biceps, flyes for chest, leg curl for hamstrings, etc.

Of course, this is utter horse sh-t.

In my formative years as an exercise physiologist, I fell hook, line, and sinker into bodypart thinking as well.  Then, while I was doing a set of ball squats one of my co-workers noted , “Hey, you’ve got a nice teardrop in your quad! You do leg extensions a lot?”

At that time, I hadn’t touched a leg extension machine in about 7 years or so.  Yet somehow I’d managed to grow that specific muscle (which is primarily grown via leg extensions as per conventional wisdom) using other means.  It was the first chink in the armor of a theory that really has no basis in reality.

Bill DeSimone said: “Take someone who’s been training his whole body for 10 years.  Do you think you’ll be able to tell whether or not he did preacher curls vs. hammer curls by the shape of his biceps?  Or if his triceps will look any different if he did rope pushdowns vs. french presses?”

The point:  Bodypart mentality is poisonous because it tricks you into thinking you have to work every single muscle with a different exercise.  Or, rather, that it makes you forget that on the main multi-joint movements, multiple muscle groups work – and develop.  In other words, it distracts you from the real work.

I’m not trying to imply Tommy Kono or Eugen Sandow never did a lateral raise or a hammer curl (although they probably didn’t).  But Kono didn’t sculpt his chest with endless sets of cable crossovers, nor did Sandow “cut up” his midsection by doing a 25-minute death circuit of abs.  They earned their muscle by getting darned strong on the basic, multi-joint (read: most productive) exercises.

The moral of the story is: Don’t waste time on detail exercises when you’ve not built enough “material” to detail.  Build muscle using the most productive exercises, and eat to lose enough bodyfat to show the results of your hard work.  A corollary example: You don’t need to do 20 sets of biceps curls for your arms to grow.  Cultivate the ability to do a weighted chinup and your biceps will be big enough (and you’ll have built a nice set of lats and abs, to boot).

This whole fitness and nutrition thing can be tough.  The newsstand at your local Barnes and Noble carries no less than 10 different magazines, all purporting to offer The Program for vibrant health and physical beauty; and did I mention that each magazine contains 8 or 9 different routines (all different, of course, depending on whether you want peaked biceps or a taut backside).

Assume that you cut through the bogus stuff and stick to the proven basics.  Of course, there can be endless variations on the basic themes as well: Do I do a 5 x 5, a 10 x 3, a 3 x 6, or one set to failure?  Do I work out once a week; twice a week; three times in two weeks; once every 5 days; or every day?  Lift fast, or lift slowly?  Or just let my mood dictate my rep speed?

Let me quiet down the chatter competing for the top spot in your brain and simplify things as much as I can.  But first, an analogy:

If you work a relatively normal schedule, your weekends are free.  What do you do on any given Saturday?  After all, it’s not like you have to go to work or anything, right?  Well, your schedule during your “free time” is determined by an algorithm (or system) you run on a subconscious level.  That algorithm ranks things in order of importance to you (read: priority) and you tend to do those things that are more important to you before those things that are less so.  For example, you might opt to feed your 4-month old before you shave your pet ferret, because having a live baby is more a priority to you than having a well-shaven ferret.

It’s all too easy to succumb to paralysis by analysis and end up doing nothing when it comes to exercise.  But file these guidelines (and the order they’re presented in – hierarchy, people) in your subconscious mind and remember them when you read about the next great fitness breakthrough and are tempted to completely rejigger your diet and nutrition, yet again.

Aside:  You’ll probably note that many of these priorities are intertwined – e.g., insufficient recovery prevents progression – so you could argue that every single one of these training priorities is “most important.”  Keep in mind – there’s a difference between “most important” and “required for success.”  In Texas Hold’Em, betting is required for success, but not running out of chips is “most important” (since if you run out of chips you lose):

1) Strength – In short, train for strength.  In no particular order, here are the reasons:  Form follows function, you don’t have the time to follow Arnold’s routine (warning – slightly NSFW), and (most importantly), when you’re old, you’ll be glad you’ve got that strength anyways.

2) Progression – In short, strive to do better.  Lift more weight this week than you did last week.  Do more repetitions this time than you did last time.  Be a little better on your diet today than you were yesterday.  Read differently: Don’t do the same thing every single time (not to be confused with “Don’t do the same exercises every time.”).

3) Recovery – In short, don’t overdo it.  Stress your body via exercise, then let it rest.  Performing too much exercise is detrimental to your progress; at best, you’ll impede progress, at worst, you’ll set the stage for injury.

Next: Part 2 – Nutrition.

Ah, the muscle pump – in the annals of bodybuilding, is anything more sacred?  For the uninitiated, the pump is that sensation of muscle fullness after performing a lot of work for a given muscle group (whether directly or indirectly).

Ah, who am I kidding.  Everyone knows Arnold explained it best, way back in ‘77:

Of course, if you mention “Arnold” and “muscle pumps” in the same sentence, it’s usually this clip from Pumping Iron that springs to mind:

So we know bodybuilders like muscle pumps. But there’s an implied significance attached to achieving a pump that even casual exercisers know. It just instinctively feels ‘right to do.’

But does the pump deserve its vaunted status? Just what’s going on physiologically that causes a pump? And is it even necessary to achieve a pump to make good gains?

The pump is a traffic jam. (Warning: Boring science ahead)  What’s the mechanism that causes a pump?  Would you believe it’s nothing more exciting than osmosis?  Most trainers in the know dismiss the pump as mere fluid buildup, and on a macro scale, they’re right. Here’s what’s happening, in science-speak:

You’re embroiled in a difficult set, your muscle tissue is screaming for more energy (read: glycogen), and hydrogen ions are building up inside muscle cells (using that familiar burning sensation).  Blood rushes into the capillaries surrounding muscle cells and fluid and nutrients (oxygen, etc.) diffuse from the capillaries into the muscle cell.  On the other end, fluid (minus nutrients) exits the muscle cell by diffusing back into capillaries (osmosis).  When the hydrostatic pressure pushing fluid into the cell is greater than the osmotic pressure pushing fluid out of the cell, fluid builds up and a pump occurs.

Here’s the rub: The mechanism pushing fluid in is much more effective than the mechanism pushing fluid out.  In freeway terms, it’s a 6-lane highway entering the muscle cell, but a 1-lane street exiting the cell.  The end result?  The muscle pump – the body’s version of a traffic jam.  And just like all traffic jams, they eventually clear; pumps only last about an hour or two, and as fluid concentrations in the cell return to normal, cell volume too retreats back to normal.

What possible effect could this have on improved muscle growth? Only one, really: The “traffic jam” briefly results in a higher concentration of lactic acid, which has been shown in studies to correlate to growth hormone release (more lactic acid = more growth hormone).  Since growth hormone is a key hormone in muscle recovery (and consequently, hypertrophy), this premise shows some merit.

What does the science have to say about muscle pumps and hypertrophy (muscle growth)? Surprisingly little.  While some studies have shown a relationship between flow restriction and hypertrophy, it’s worth noting that they induced this flow restriction by literally occluding blood vessels (i.e., they wrapped an inflatable sleeve around the subject’s arm and cut off blood supply a la taking your blood pressure).   Even the researchers don’t agree on what exactly causes the muscle-building effects seen in the studies – one theory is that the occlusion of blood vessels results in greater mechanical load on muscle fibers (and we know that increased load results in greater muscle growth).  Whether or not all this translates into “pumps stimulate growth” depends on how liberally you read into the literature (and if you believe that a pump is occluding blood vessels to the same degree as a inflated sleeve cuff).

It’s also instructive to note there’s an alternative method to increase load on muscle cells – lift something heavier.

What about all the anecdotal evidence? Bodybuilders, who are the biggest (muscular) beings on the planet, prize the pump above all else, workout wise. Surely they’re onto something. Until you look at other populations of muscular athletes: Olympic weightlifters, powerlifters, gymnasts, sprinters; one black swan is usually enough to derail a theory.

But back to bodybuilding. One thing you may have failed to consider: The pump didn’t magically appear because you thought about it. Nor (generally) did it result from one workbout. It takes a lot of work to achieve a pump. So perhaps it’s not that the pump triggers anything special; it’s the work required to achieve the pump that’s the magic formula.

Certainly gymnasts work hard, fairly often.  Oly lifters too. Powerlifters can frighten small children with their training ferocity.

Hard work, the magic formula. Imagine that.

There’s no need to hit your arms with dumbbells, exotic bars, and cables from all different angles until you dislocate your aorta trying to achieve an incredible biceps pump.  It’s safe to say you can stimulate muscle growth without it.

Teri asks:

I have larger hip muscles than Joanne.  So why is it that she can lift more than I can in lower body exercises?

It may surprise you to discover that there are lots of factors that determine strength (or, more accurately, expression of strength).  Here’s a quick and dirty list compiled off the top of my head, and you can almost bet that it isn’t exhaustive:

• Cross-sectional diameter
• Neurological efficiency
• Tendon length
• Tendon attachment point
• Limb (bone) length
• Technique*

*I hasten to add that “technique” is more a factor that influences expression of strength, as opposed to “strength” proper.  So why is it listed?  Because you can’t really quantify strength without expressing it (i.e., you can’t test strength without lifting something).

It might be due to one or more of the listed factors (and perhaps, all of them) that a person with smaller muscles can outlift a person with larger muscles (in Joanne and Teri’s case, it’s probably 2, 3, and 5).

You’ll note that of the factors listed, only two are factors you can change: Cross-sectional diameter (aka muscle size) and technique.  So it’s not worth worrying about the others, nor is it worth fretting over how much you can lift vs. how much someone else can lift (unless, of course, you’re facing them in a powerlifting meet).  Instead, place a high emphasis on progression:

• How much can you lift today?
• How does it compare to what you lifted last week?  Last year?
• How much (more, I hope) will you be lifting next month?

It’s fun to see how you stack up against others – the entire human race would wither away if we didn’t have that primal urge to be king or queen of the pack – but ultimately, physical fitness (and everything that term means to you) is a solitary affair.  The only person you’re racing with is yourself.

Edit (12/17/08): Samantha adds two more changable factors that influence strength: Fat levels (more fat = more leverage) and recruitment (note: This is different from neural efficiency.  I’ll explain in the next post).

If your weights aren’t getting heavier, then you’re not getting any stronger, your bones aren’t getting any denser, and your muscles aren’t growing.

Every missed workout is a missed opportunity to stimulate exercise benefits.

You accrue the benefits of exercise during the rest periods between workouts, not during the workouts.

And if you’re not eating in a manner in line with your fitness goals, you’re almost (almost) wasting your time.

A reader from the UK recently commented on an admittedly tongue-in-cheek post I made on the usefulness (or not) of stability balls:

I have to disagree with your point about strength gains on the ball. Whilst the instability initially means you are limited in the force you can create, the recruitment of more muscles and the ‘cooperative effect’ these muscles achieve, means that you can become more stable and make greater strength gains than by isolating the chest, arms and shoulders in a bench press. Regular training means that your body will adapt and improve thanks to the instability rather than be continuously hindered by it.

(For reference, the original post is located here.)

Let me clarify some points for the benefit of those who might have misunderstood my post:

1. A primary goal of strength training is the acquisition of strength.

I grant that 99.5% of you initially take up strength training as a way to improve the way your body looks.  However, as famously said, “form follows function.”  A better-looking body possesses visible musculature, made possible by a combination of leanness and muscles of a suitable size (to each his own).  And the development of muscle size is closely related to muscle strength.

In other words, in the same individual, a larger muscle is a stronger muscle.

2. You will never be able to lift as much on an unstable surface as you can on a stable surface.

If muscle strength, then, is a primary goal of strength training, then anything that interferes with that goal is at best a distraction.  Unlike what my UK reader suggests, you will not “will adapt and improve thanks to the instability”, but rather, “be continuously hindered by it” relative to lifting on a more stable surface.

Let’s say I lost my mind and train you while standing on a BOSU board, and your current max squat is 215 lbs but due to the instability of the wobble board, you can only manage 55 lbs.  Through tenacity and practice, you work up to being able to squat with 135 lbs while on the BOSU.

Your leg muscles are arguably stronger.  You could even make the case that you’d be capable of a greater max squat, arguably due to the increased strength of your leg muscles.

But here’s the rub – you will always be able to lift more in a squat on stable ground than in a BOSU squat.  In the same individual, more stable = more weight lifted – always.  And more weight lifted = more strength gains.

3. Therefore, performing Circus Magic exercises interferes with the primary training goal of acquiring strength.

Why waste time mastering a skill you don’t need which indirectly produces the gains you want?  You’re right; it doesn’t make any sense to me either.

If you’re into Circus Magic exercises for a different purpose, such as teaching trunk muscle activation, then more power to you.  But don’t confuse your goals – do ball acrobatics for skill acquisition, lift heavy for strength.