If you’re like me, you want to lift heavier weights. You get a rush from squatting a new record, from adding 10lbs to your previous max and pushing out five reps that you couldn’t have done the week before. Same goes for any exercise: we humans are programmed to always want to do more, to exceed, to do better. Whether it’s doing more pull ups, running further and faster, benching or curling or whatever your exercise of choice may be, we all want to improve. We all have goals, but what is the best way to achieve them? Is there danger in pushing ourselves too fast, too hard? What is the right pace at which to improve and add weight to our workouts?
Unless you have a professional coach at your side, you will undoubtedly, especially if you are a male, make the most common mistake that ends up tripping everybody. You will start at a low, conservative weight, and begin to add on 10lbs each time you go back to the gym. You will enjoy a burst of strength as your body adapts to the new weights, and for about a month you’ll go on adding 10lbs each time, thinking yourself invincible, your gains impressive, your path set. Only to find, at about the third or fourth week mark, that you are starting to have difficulty with the reps. You’re going to start struggling to complete the third set, but will insist on maintaining your increases out of pride or ego. Soon your form will be falling apart, and you’ll be straining and heaving to finish at all. Finally, you’ll quit, burnt out, frustrated and probably having hurt yourself.
Don’t be that guy! Realize that your body will adapt quickly to initial gains, but that initial bump in strength isn’t linear. It’s like sprinting and running a marathon. People approach weight training as if they were going in for a 50 meter sprint, and try to go as fast as they can. But weight training is a marathon, and slow and steady wins the race. So rather than going as fast and hard as you can, try to build a solid base. Go for the slow, incremental increases that will at first seem too easy, but allow you to get past the point where you would have burnt out if you had gone faster.
What does this translate into in practical terms? For squats, you can improve about 10lbs/workout, for the first few weeks, and then when you begin to slow down, start using 5lb jumps. In the bench press, you have to proceed slower, and so 5lb jumps should at first be the way to go. When that gets rough, drop to 2.5 lbs. Don’t scoff—if you increase at 2.5lbs a week for a year, that’s a net total gain of 104lbs. The shoulder press is similar to the bench, and increases at the same rate. The deadlift will increase the fastest of them all, and most men can add 15 20lbs/workout. Remember, the smaller the muscle group used, the slower the gains.
Most importantly: be patient. Just because you can lift more weight does not mean you should increase your load. Yes, you can go faster in the short run. But when you hit that wall in three weeks time, you’ll wish you were still lifting slowly and steadily, and maxing out much, much further down the line.
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