How to progress for better gains in the gym

If you want to get stronger or build muscle mass, improving is the most important thing. This is due to the principle of progressive overload. Over time the absolute amount of training we do needs to increase. We need to do more reps, lift more weight, do more sets or make things harder. But when should you progress, and how do you do it for the best results?

The main goal of this article will be to suggest a better way to load, rep, and set progression. The method I suggest is inspired by Dr. Mike Israetel. It has the advantage of autoregulation

and personalization. Instead of a traditional static bro program, it also has the advantage of emerging around the lifter's current ability to perform and recover.

Progression for hypertrophy training

I think that progression for hypertrophy training is way more open-ended than if the goal is strength. The goal when training for hypertrophy is to produce mechanical tension and metabolic stress, and how we do this is pretty loose.

Progression can be done in many different ways. But as long as we mainly train with weights we will usually have to add reps, weight, and sets.

dynamic double progression

A popular way to progress in training is what some would call dynamic double progression. It is a strategy I mainly deem useful for novices, but effective nonetheless.

In this type of progression, you pick a rep range for the lifts, let's say 8-12 reps. You then choose a starting weight that falls in that range. Every time you can complete a set at the end of the range, in this case, 12+ reps, you increase the weight next week.

This type of programming can be great for novices. But for stronger and more advanced lifters it may introduce some problems.

1. Not Increasing sets and leaving gains on the table
2. No autoregulation may cause excessive fatigue
3. No periodization or fatigue management may slow or halt progress
   

Let's talk about how I think we can remedy these problems.

Adding autoregulation for better gains

We know from research that training 0-3 reps away from failure might not give worse results than training to failure. For this reason, introducing a way to measure how hard we train is useful. I suggest using autoregulate either in the form of RPE or RIR.

Training at lower intensity may allow us to do more training. Which, may lead to better results. Since there is a correlation between total volume and muscle gain.

However, hypertrophy science is limited at best, and we might not have the full picture. For this reason, we will also sometimes train closer to RPE 9-10. We will talk more about this when we get to the periodization.

How to do more sets for better results

We know gains are correlated with total training volume. That is the number of hard sets between 5-30 reps. On top of this our ability to recover from volume also increases pretty fast.

This means that in week one we might be able to tolerate and adapt to 3 sets of an exercise. While in week 2 we can handle 4 sets. By week 3 the 3 sets might even be too little to elicit a great stimulus.

To solve this problem we should add sets from week to week as we get better at tolerating volume. We keep doing this until we are no longer able to recover and improve from the amount of training we are doing. We should then deload and start again with a lower volume.

A good starting place is to find a number of sets where the muscle we are training gets a pump and feels some amount of disruption.

We can then add a set next week if the muscle is recovered the next time it is trained. If the muscle isn't recovered and is still sore, don't add a set or even remove one if the DOMS are bad.

Periodize your hypertrophy training

We are now ready to bring it all together in a periodized fashion. That is, we are going to plan our progression through a mesocycle. At the start of a mesocycle, we are fresh out of a deload. Our systemic fatigue is low, and at the same time, we are very sensitive to training stimuli.

This means that we hardly need to do any training to progress. We can utilize this to start training as easily as possible. That means relatively low volume and intensity. We start with enough sets at RPE 6-7 to feel a pump or light disruption. That is enough training to get a response.

Each week we increase either weight or reps of each exercise enough to increase the RPE by one. If we feel fresh next time we train a muscle, we add a set to the last workout, next week. If we feel a little sore we keep the sets where they are. If we feel very sore we remove sets next week.

We keep doing this until we cannot increase performance from one week to the next. That is when we hit failure, RPE 10, or even for some compound lifts RPE 9. By doing this we get all our training in an intensity range we know is stimulating for muscle growth. In the last week, we also touch on those super high efforts, just in case the current research is missing something and training to failure carries benefits we don’t know yet.

We then deload and start all over with a new mesocycle.

Wrapping it up

Instead of using progression styles such as dynamic double progression, reverse pyramid training, or whatever buzzword is currently used for a set and rep scheme, you can get more out of your training by adjusting more parameters. In this case relative effort (reps and weight) and sets. On top of this, the periodization and fatigue management in form of deloads allow us to train at a much higher average intensity compared to if we train in a way that does not accumulate fatigue.

Bringing all this together the accumulated training over months and years will end up combining into much more stimulus and over time also much more muscle mass and gains.