4 Ways to Make Progress in the Gym (Without Adding More Weight)
Lift weights. Add muscle. Get stronger. Repeat forever. Seems like a pretty reasonable prospect when you first start strength training, but unfortunately strength increases don’t come in a predictable fashion, and eventually, everybody will eventually hit a ceiling on how strong they can get. After all, I’m (at the time of this writing) 36 years old, and I got my first gym membership when I was 14, when I could only bench press 45 pounds once (and just barely). But even if my strength only increased by 5 pounds per month (which is hardly an astronomical level of improvement), that would add up to:
5lbs x 12 months per year x 22 years = 1,320lbs of strength increase
But don’t forget that 45lbs I could barely lift once (hey, I want all the credit I can get here) – I should be able to bench press 1,365 pounds once based on a pretty low rate of strength improvement.
SPOILER ALERT: I can’t.
And don’t get me wrong – getting stronger is a great thing. It just isn’t the only way to measure success in the weight room, and when you’ve been training for a long time, sometimes you find yourself being happy with adding 5 pounds every year to some of your lifts.
But don’t panic – there are still plenty of other ways to show that you’re making progress in the gym besides simply adding more weight to the barbell.
Increasing Reps
Sure, this is a pretty obvious one, but still, you’d be surprised at how many people become fixated on “maxing out” most every time they walk into a gym. But the biggest drawback to measuring progress with your one rep max (besides the fact that it can be a slow process) is the amount of wear and tear on your joints, tendons and ligaments, especially as you get older. Besides, very low reps (1-5) doesn’t create the same stimulus for muscle growth as a more moderate rep range (6-15 in most cases), so gradually increasing the number of reps you can do with a weight gives you a much longer time-frame to show progress. For example, if I can squat 200lbs for 5 reps, my progress might look something like this:
Week 1: 200lbs for 6 reps
Week 2: 200lbs for 7 reps
Week 3: 200lbs for 7 reps (hey, nothing is ever perfectly linear)
Week 4: 200lbs for 8 reps
Week 5: 200lbs for 9 reps
Week 6: 205lbs for 5 reps (adding weight and reducing the reps again)
Increasing Density
Workout density is simply how much time it takes to complete a given amount of work. Let’s say, for example, that I do 4 sets of 10 on a deadlift with 250lbs, resting 3 minutes between each set. Counting the amount of time it takes to complete each set, it might take about 12-15 minutes to do those 4 sets.
But what if we could get the same amount of work done in less time? Increasing your workout density can be a phenomenal tool for building aerobic capacity as well as work capacity in a given muscle (or group of muscles for bigger exercises like a deadlift), and is a great tool for increasing your ability to recover more quickly. It might look something like this:
Week 1: 3 minutes rest
Week 2: 2 minutes 45 seconds rest
Week 3: 2 minutes 30 seconds rest
Weeks 4-5: 2 minutes 15 seconds rest (again, not everything happens linearly and that’s perfectly okay)
Week 6: 2 minutes rest
Density-driven programs can be some of the best ways to train for fat loss without sacrificing strength, and without doing incredibly high reps – staying in a 6-12 rep range works incredibly well with this method.
Improving Your Lifting Quality
This one doesn’t get nearly enough credit, but too often we tend to get lost in the “just get the weight up” mindset and lose focus on the quality of the work we’re doing. But without focus on improving our skill and the quality of the reps we’re doing, too often the stress ends up going to the wrong places – joints, tendons and ligaments – or into the wrong muscle group – feeling a row in your biceps instead of your lats or upper back – compromising your ability to build muscle in the right places and making you more vulnerable to injury.
One of the common mental battles with taking time to focus on skill development is that often, it requires taking a step backwards – doing fewer repetitions or reducing the load on the bar – in order to make additional progress. Keep the concept of “short term loss, long term gain” at the forefront of your mind when using this concept and remember that it’s completely unrealistic to focus exclusively on how quickly you can add weight to the bar.
Manipulating Exercise Order
Ask 100 men what exercise they do first on chest day (which, if you weren’t aware, is internationally recognized by commercial gyms everywhere to be Monday), and 90 of them will tell answer “flat bench.” Why? “Because I can lift more when I do it first.”
The standard order for exercise placement in a workout typically works its way from the top down, using exercises that allow for more weight and more muscle overall to be stimulated in the beginning, and moving toward isolation movements that use fewer muscle groups and allow for less overall weight to be lifted. Bench presses, squats and barbell rows before dumbbell flyes, leg extensions and cable pulldowns, for example.
However, by moving the bigger movements to later in the workout, it tends to have a twofold effect: 1) it pre-exhausts the target muscles, allowing them to be recruited more intently than when performed fresh, and 2) it has a joint-sparing effect by initially reducing the amount of weight you can use.
I really like this technique and I picked a lot of it up from John Meadows – one of his favorite techniques is to place barbell presses, deadlifts and squats at least second in a workout, if not later. And given that I have two herniated discs in my lower back, by deadlifting as the second, third or sometimes even fourth exercise, the rest of my back is fatigued enough that my lower back is never compromised, even though over the course of several years (yes, years) I can still deadlift more when I do them fourth in order than when I used to do them as the first exercise.
Again, don’t get me wrong – you should challenge yourself to get stronger, but pure strength alone is not the only way to get better and show progress when you walk into the gym week in, week out.
Unless you’re already able to bench press a small car – you’ve obviously done something right.
