Turn up the Volume

Progress in strength is not linear, like they teach aspiring strength coaches and personal trainers in Exercise Science classrooms. If it were, if we could count on increasing weight every week becoming strong and fit would be easy. Just do a little more each week. 

In the real world, initial gains peter out and people go on vacation, get sick, don’t sleep and have to work and take care of kids. These disruptions in the training plan make it even more difficult to make those linear jumps week to week. 

At Gain, we like to manipulate the volume, or how many total reps of something you’re doing as a way to get stronger without actually increasing load. There’s endless ways we can do this, but for the purpose of the blog imagine doing 8 reps with something you normally only do 5 reps with. 

For example, if you’re goblet squatting 5x5 with a blue kettlebell for week 1 and 2 on your program, week 3 might be 5x8. Our goal for you is to keep the same weight used for 5 reps on your 8. The following week, your program might drop back to 5x5. The idea here is that we know you can do the blue for 8 reps, so you’d better use a yellow for this 5. 

This is a slow, sustainable way to build strength that dramatically reduces the risk of injury. There’s nothing wrong with heavy loads and low reps, that’ll get you stronger too. This is just a way to simplify the progress and play the long game. 

Justin Miner 

@justinminergain