 In this episode of Mind Pump, we cover the most important key that gets you consistent muscle building and strength progress and also helps you burn body fat. Now what we're talking about is progressive overload, but there's many, many ways to do this to your body. Now you know to add more weight when you get stronger, that's only one way to do it. There's eight other ways to progressively overload your body to get your body to consistently improve time and time again for long lasting success and results. Now this episode is brought to you by MAPS Fitness Products. Now they are the makers and leaders in the fitness industry of the best at home workout programs like MAPS Anywhere. They also have phenomenal mobility programs, MAPS Prime and MAPS Prime Pro and many, many other programs. By the way, two of their most popular programs, MAPS Prime and MAPS Prime Pro are both 50% off and there's only one day left for this promotion. Now these programs are flying off the shelves, we're only giving them away while supplies last, so you might want to act very quickly. But let me tell you a little bit about MAPS Prime and MAPS Prime Pro. MAPS Prime is a program that teaches you how to prime your workouts. Now priming is different than a warm up. Priming gets your body ready to move better, have better ranges of motion and to recruit more muscle fibers. In other words, if you do a proper individualize for your body, priming session 10 minutes before your workout, your squats, bench presses, overhead presses, your rows, your lunges, all your exercises will become much more effective. Now MAPS Prime Pro is all about correctional exercise. This program goes through the major joints of your body, helps you improve your mobility so that you have greater ranges of motion that you have more control over. Reduce injury and of course, because of better mobility, develop more muscle, faster and get better results. Again, both of those programs, 50% off, this is the final day, you only have one day left for this massive promotion. Here's how you get that discount. Go to MAPSFitnessProducts.com and use the code PRIME50, that's P-R-I-M-E-5-0, no space for the discount. I have a deeper conversation that I want to have with you gentlemen. This is a come to Jesus for Justin. Oh good. We have to talk about that cheese thing again. You have a little conversation. I thought we already had this conversation. No, no, no, on the real. We get a lot of questions and we had one just recently in a quad, I think that's what sparked the idea to do a complete topic centered around this. And really it's the number one key to see consistent results, no matter what your goal is, whether it be building muscle or burning body fat or just overall health. The number one thing that you factor that you can manipulate to see consistent results is progressive overload. Yeah, the whole reason why your body gets leaner or stronger or builds muscle in the first place is really as a side effect of the adaptation process. That's 100% correct. It's the number one key for consistent results is to get your body to be able to improve in how it performs and how it moves and you want your body to adapt in order to continue the adaptation process along, progressively overloading it or progressively changing and adding more stresses to it or getting it to want to adapt to more and more stresses as it gets it to continue to improve. Yeah, which is interesting because a lot of people throw that term around and I've heard it quite a bit but they're usually just referring to adding weight and so more load to the exercises that you're doing and there's a lot of other factors to progressively overloading that I think not a lot of people realize. That's right, that's exactly how this started. Now I remember that the person was referring to that we've done all these different episodes and then he's like, you know, I heard episode whatever and you guys say this is the key and then I heard this one and then I heard this is the key and he listed off all these different variables that we've talked about how important they are and they actually all fit in the category of progressive overload. Right, he thought they were like competing against each other. Right, and I think that's the topic. The topic in itself is understanding all the different types of ways that you can progressively overload the body. It isn't just specifically adding more weight to the bar. Right, so again we have to remember the process by which you get in better shape is an adaptation process of the body and all exercise is doing is it sending a signal to get that in motion, to get that adaptation process in motion. That's all it's doing. Now once your body has adapted to the point where whatever you did to get it to adapt in the first place now is tolerable. It's now no longer a stimulus that promotes adaptation. You need to change the stimulus and you need to advance the stimulus to get more change. So to use a very simple example, if 10 minutes of sunlight gets your skin to darken a little bit to adapt very quickly 10 minutes of sunlight will no longer cause that adaptation process. Once my skin is adapted to the point where only 10 minutes of sunlight now is tolerable then I need to do something else, something more, something different to continue that particular adaptation to keep happening. And so when you're training the body, you know this is what you're doing and there's a lot of factors that you can look at. Now the easiest one is weight. That's a very, and it's a great one by the way. It's not a bad one. It's a phenomenal one. But if you're a beginner to intermediate, this is where you should spend most of your time. Most of your time should be focused, especially if your goal is to build muscle. Most of your time should be focused on can I get myself stronger in an appropriate way with proper form and all that stuff. And I would say this is actually probably one of the most common reasons why somebody doesn't continue to see change. Very, very common with clients that I get. And I'd have to have this progressive overload conversation with them to get them to understand that would be doing their favorite at-home video cassette they follow. And it's the same one every single day. People have cassettes still? Yeah, no. I still have clients that follow video cassettes. No way. Yeah, yeah. Wow. No, no. These are long-term clients I've had for a really long time. VHS? Yes, yes. They have a favorite video. There's more people than you would be surprised to do this. They have found it. Be kind. Rewind. Yeah, they follow it. It works for them. Now, here's the thing though. They're using the same set of dumbbells they've been using in this workout for forever. And they like it. It makes them feel good. It makes them sweat. But they're not seeing consistent change in their body. And that's because their body has now become very adaptive. Very common too when I get a client who forget to at-home people, someone who just belong to the gym. They've been going to the gym for 10 years of their life and they've decided that they want to ramp it up or they want to hire a personal trainer to learn more. And when I assess their workouts, they would take me over. Well, Adam, first I do- I grab the 10s here. Yes, I grab the 10s and I do this exercise. I do 15 pounds on a leg extension. Yes. And they actually have a weight number that they do for every exercise. And they've been doing that for years. And that is part of the reason why they have plateaued so hard and they can't see their body progress. It's because their body has become very efficient with that. So weight is the most obvious one, but probably one of the most important ones. Well, yeah, it's one of the best metrics to actually see if your programming is effective, I think. I think it's a great way to see all these other factors we're going to mention. It all blends into seeing if you are actually progressing forward with the amount of weight that you can actually move. Yeah, your body will only ever be as strong or fit as it needs to be. It will never be stronger or more fit than it needs to be. It only ever meets the demand. And this is again a part of the adaptation process. It's a good one. Our bodies are supposed to be efficient. They evolve to be that way. So there's no reason for my body to carry lots of muscle and to be strong enough to deadlift 600 pounds unless it needed a reason to be. Unless I gave it a reason to be that strong or have that much muscle. So your body will only progress as far as your stimulus makes it progress. And one of the best ways to do that is to add weight. And this one is excellent and this one lasts a long time. But at some point adding weight isn't necessarily advantageous. At some point whether you plateau because your body is pretty smart in the sense that it figures things out and certain types of stimulus stop to work. So at some point you start to plateau or even if you do a kick-ass job you can't keep adding weight forever. I mean I've been working out for 25 years at this point I'd be bench pressing 6,000 pounds if that was the case. And that reminds me of the other end of the spectrum of client that I would get which is somebody who's been training for 10 years but it has added weight year over year over year and then they've been stuck. They've got to a point where they're like man Adam I've lifted this much on my bench press my squat all these things are there and just my body doesn't want to go anywhere between any further than that. And part of their problem is that's the only variable they've manipulated. They've only progressively overloaded through adding weight to the bar and eventually they kind of hit their peak of that and then they think that they can't continue to see progress because they can't add any more weight. They've gotten as good as they could get with the skill of actually the mechanical process of actually going through the exercise. So like there is a skill component there that you can get a lot better at but inevitably you're going to hit to that peak of it if you don't apply all these other concepts to build your overall strength up even further. Yeah in fact relying on any one of the factors that we're going to name today will result in a very hard plateau. It doesn't matter which one if you only rely on one and you don't know how to move through each of the ones we're about to name and manipulate them you're going to plateau. Now what does it look like when you plateau on adding weight? Injury, joint pain and stiffness that's what it ends up looking like because you're pushing weight and you're constantly adding weight and that's the only metric you know how to push. That's the only variable you know how to progressively overload. Eventually that results in either just a hard plateau or an injury or pain. And sometimes a regression. Sometimes you'll see you go nothing more frustrating than that right. You're adding weight, adding weight, adding weight and then all of a sudden you hit a week or two and you're weaker and that can be very frustrating. But I will say that it's definitely the most important one to focus on if you're a beginner to intermediate for sure. Get stronger. And if you're definitely trying to build muscle you know if you're somebody who's got a really fast metabolism and you want to pack on muscle focus on getting stronger but that's true for most people, for everybody I would say beginner-intermediate. Now the next one is almost as important. It's right up there and it's adding reps. This one I think people are, I see men adding weight and women tend to want to add reps if they ever progressively overload. Both of them though are very effective. So what does this look like? Well it's very simple. I did 10 push-ups this week and then next time I tried doing push-ups now I'm going to try to do 11. And the following week I'm going to try to do 12. Each time I do that extra rep my body needs to adapt to that new stimulus by getting stronger so that if I do the same reps it's easy but then again of course I add reps. It's not just simply adding reps though too. That's one of the ways with reps. It can be just manipulating reps. You alluded to something that I think is very common is a lot of my men that I trained they would like to lift really heavy and stay in that low rep range because they want to be strong, they want to build muscle and they've read all the magazines that say, oh lift heavy weight and low repetitions that builds the most muscle mass and like them I got stuck in the same mindset too and I would be only lifting six reps. So going to the 10 to 15 rep range was one of the best things that I'd ever did. The same thing is true on the opposite in the spectrum with my women client that would love to do the 15 to 20 rep range all the time never lifted five to six reps. So even though they're reducing the amount of reps it's a new stimulus because they haven't strength trained like that before. Well this is also addressing a lot of the myths out there that women are marketed to that they're going to get bulky if they go in the low rep range and this is something they don't want to get that boxy that sort of like football player look when in fact this change in stimulus, this change in rep range could really promote their body to change in a significant way. Same thing on the other end of it with your guy that's always doing like the one to five rep range and has never ventured into the 15 rep range in the higher rep range volume where that could be like the spark to change his physique completely. Yeah it's funny if the average woman when she first starts working out gained five pounds of muscle she would be extremely pleased so long as she didn't weigh herself on the scale because that'll freak people out but she would be very pleased she would feel herself feel more tight muscles would feel more quote unquote toned she'd notice that she could eat more food and she burns more calories her indirectly would start to burn more body fat she would just feel and look a lot better and so building muscle almost always unless you're talking about the extreme athlete almost always improve someone's appearance even from a general standpoint and so I'd say always aim for that when you're working with resistance. I also think it's important that we kind of talk a little bit about our philosophy when it comes to manipulating rep ranges because it's a little different than what maybe some people do and that's so they did a study and it was quite a long time ago when they compared the different rep ranges and if somebody followed a routine in a certain rep range for an extended period of time meaning beyond six weeks then they did somebody who changed it every like three weeks and then they did somebody who changed it every single day and which person saw the most results and the person who saw the least amount of results was someone who stayed in the same rep range for an extended period of time beyond six weeks the body would sort of slow down its progress so we know that's the least beneficial and then the other two were really close so somebody who changes the rep ranges up almost every single workout or somebody who changes it every two to three weeks they change it now because those were so close we like to advise people to stick to a phase for two to three weeks and that just comes from our experience knowing that it's easier for people to manage to be able to measure their results they're getting from doing that verses just constantly throwing in different rep ranges all the time and no rhyme or reason behind them even though that may show good benefits it's hard for a client to really understand like what was it that I'm seeing this change in these results? I would say if you're advanced if you've been training for three years or more consistently you can mix up rep ranges you know weekly and that's probably okay but most people different rep ranges require a different mental state they require a different type of lifting so if I'm doing a heavy set of squats for only three reps it's very different than if I'm doing a set of 20 it's different in my technique my form, my breathing in the mental state and so for the average person you're better off training in a rep range for two or three weeks so you can get into that zone of that rep range how it feels what it's like get good at that rep range before moving to another one but if you're advanced you know your body mixing it up I guess is okay because you're kind of taking out the element of getting better at a skill which we've talked about a little bit about a lot of people don't really recognize exercises as their own individual skill you think of a sport as doing certain movements as I want to get better at throwing a ball I want to get better at sprinting off the line I want to get better all these very like very specific things but exercise is no different if I want to do an exercise really well I have to be in the right mindset I have to have the right mechanics I have to you know be very focused I have to have all these factors play together and to do that I want to make sure I at least give myself enough time to reap the benefits of that well that's why I actually think it's different I don't think it's exercise what I say is there's exercise and then there's training if you're just exercising anything can be considered exercise going out for a ride on a bike or moving around doing jumping jacks having no rhyme or reason for what you're doing just moving can be considered exercise but training is more methodical there's a reason behind it I am training to lose 15 pounds of body fat I am training to build muscle yeah exactly so there's where the skill of it that I think is so important and there's where the advice of hey focus on a rep range for a block of time somewhere between two and four weeks is probably ideal and during that time you are practicing that skill that skill set and you're not so much exercising you are training right but at the end of the day very basic if you did 10 reps with 100 pounds this week and next week you did 11 reps with 100 pounds you have progressively overloaded your body you did an extra rep and so that's one more very important simple way you can use progressive overload to get your body to progress the next one is also very important I think it's a little it's a it's somewhere I go after I do the first two with typically with clients and that's simply to add more volume that's literally just means more work more sets more exercises so let's say you did squats for 10 reps this week with 100 pounds and next week you could either add more weight so now I could do 110 pounds or I can add a rep or I'll just do an extra set so I do the same weight same reps but now I did two sets of that exercise rather than one and now I've progressively overloaded my body just through volume now this is my favorite to teach in experienced lifter I agree with you that I think that weight and reps are like the first place that you teach very basic fundamental thing idea of like how you continue to progress progress the body but I love to teach volume to an experienced lifter and I think maybe that's because it took a long time for me to really piece the importance of this and actually get to the point where I was tracking this so first of all you have to understand how to calculate what volume is so it's set if you do sets reps and weight you multiply them so I multiply my sets by how many reps I do times the weight I do that equates to the volume and if you figure out and I love to take somebody so if you're listening right now and you're more of an intermediate to advanced lifter just for shits and giggles follow this formula track out your total volume in the workout and or for specific muscle groups and see where that adds up with the total amount of poundage is at the end of the week that will equate okay I did this many you know thousands of pounds for legs I did this many thousands of pounds for arms and figure that what that is and then just slightly increase that over the course of the next couple weeks and you can do it through the other two variables that we talked about either adding more repetitions or adding more sets or weight to the bar this will all equate to more volume but just doing a little bit you don't need to do a lot more in fact you don't want to do a lot more you just want to add a tiny bit of volume if you can do that this is how I progressed my body when competing I was very diligent about measuring where I was when I first was getting ready for my very first amateur show and then I made a point that from show to show to show if I was going to continue to present a physique that was progressed that was better than the last one one of the key factors for me to make sure I did that was it just slowly increased volume over time well this sort of reiterates the importance of having a plan and being able to even track that right like even knowing how many sets you did how many reps you did like this is the plan I'm bringing in so that way you can make these small adjustments and manipulate just enough for the end of the week so your sum total is going to go up just enough so that way your body keeps progressing for yeah tracking all these things is real important because here's what ends up happening you and this is like it's like this with diet so let's say we'll use diet for example let's say you're trying to be at a thousand calorie deficit every single day Monday through Friday you do great Saturday and Sunday come around and you screw up a little bit and you eat a little bit over what you were supposed to now that adds up to the average the total average and what you find when people do that is they end up breaking even so if you've increased your volume too much sometimes it'll end up happening is someone feels too sore or gets sick they don't work out an extra day they take a day off now the total volume for the week is about the same as it was before so you're not progressing so tracking your volume makes a big difference and you know Adam mentioned moving it up just a little bit here's the thing with resistance training there's a right dose for your body anything more than that and anything under than that means you get results slower means your body progresses less and the further away you move from that right dose the worse the results are in fact the further above that right dose you go the closer you get to injury and illness so anytime you're progressively overloading your body it's smart to progressively overload it just a little bit in fact I learned this lesson years ago when I was chasing a 600 pound deadlift which for me was a big big lifetime goal and the way I used to do it was I would lift and then if I felt like I could add 15 pounds that's how much weight I added I always added the most amount of weight that I thought I could add well later on what I figured was that this resulted in erratic strength gains I would gain strength and then I plateaued for a while so what I used to do then is if I got stronger and let's say I knew I could add 15 pounds I only added 5 I only added 5 I went less than what I knew I could do but I still went over what I did before it gave me much more consistent progress because the dose was more appropriate so this is how you want your total volume is if you do figure out your total volume don't add as much as you think you can do don't think to yourself like man last week I went through that work out this week I bet I could do twice as much don't do that just add a little bit and watch what happens and you're much more likely to have consistent results now the next one less popular but very important this one's a good one and this is very simple increase your range of motion this one can make tremendous progress you wouldn't think that initially right I think a lot of people would even consider this as a factor right so to give you an example it's like if I did a squat down to parallel with 100 pounds then next week I'd do a squat an inch lower than parallel with the same amount of weight now what I'm doing is I'm just working on getting a greater range of motion with the same resistance the greater range of motion is progress has added more overload to my body because it's more difficult now I love talking about this especially during this time right now because it's really tough if you're a hardcore powerlifter bodybuilder been training for a really long time I know this is a rough time for a lot of the guys and girls out there that are going through this because they're like oh my god I don't have access to my gym and this is part of what motivated us to do the webinar is to help teach people to work on this it's a great time to focus on something like this like hey you talking about mobility yes and work on getting increased range of motion and you know this there's some people that put out some videos that were pretty good to try and talk to people about hey when we're we don't have access to all these barbells and dumbbells and the ability to put a bunch of weight on the likelihood you're going to see lots of progression is just not realistic and so instead of being hung up on it you know let it go for right now and then when you get back in you can do that and there's some truth to that right it's really if you've been lifting for a long time and you're used to lifting really heavy weight and then to take all that heavy weight away from somebody and expect that they're also going to progress and see major gains during this time is less likely but it doesn't mean that they can improve on something like this and Sal alluded to this when we were talking about mobility the other day that maybe you don't you know see major muscle that you put on by working on all this but what ends up happening when you get back to the gym and you start training all those exercises and those heavy lifts with a new found range of motion you'll see a huge difference in gains start to pile on then those unfamiliar positions that your body is in like those ranges of motion where it's a little bit deeper than you would have liked the bar to go but now you have to dig your way out well that's important that's a whole another category that you have to focus on adding strength to and mobility helps you kind of provides provides the answer to that it helps you stay in that particular position and to really emphasize how can I recruit you know more effectively the amount of muscles that I need to be able to produce the force to to get me strong in this and so it's not necessarily I'm trying to stretch to a range of motion that's you know gets me way further like way more flexible and way more able it's more of like how strong can I get even further within this range a very clear example is I had a client not that long ago that I helped out with like their squat depth like we put up they just they had a really tough time getting anywhere beyond 90 just really really type tight hips lacked a lot of ankle mobility very close to home for me it was my issue and so I spent a lot of time helping him out with that and one of the things that he realized was you know now that he got this new range of motion he was able to get deeper he wasn't quite as strong as what he was when he was stopping at 90 degrees but the thing that blew him away was like and he couldn't figure out he's like I don't understand Adam I'm squatting 100 pounds less than what I was squatting before but my legs are as developed or more developed an example of how you can see those type of benefits because you are now using a greater range of motion which is now recruiting more muscle fibers so you can potentially your strength could just expand it exactly and so you could potentially develop more muscle even with less weight yeah and studies are pretty clear on this whenever you're unless you're talking about sport specific strength adaptations full ranges of motion are superior in terms of total strength gain and in terms of muscle development when compared to exact exercise with a reduced range of motion a full bench press done properly will build more muscle and more overall strength and a half bench press this is true for every single exercise I remember when I was a kid and I learned this first hand I remember working out in the gym and wanting to curl certain amount of weight on a preacher curl and I did I always went real heavy so I stopped just short of fully extending my arms and I had an older gentleman tell me hey try doing that full range of motion with light weight very very short per time because as Adam was saying you do recruit recruit more muscle fibers and you get better results and so one way to progressively overload your body is when you're doing an exercise with a certain amount of weight and you're doing a certain amount of reps and now you feel stronger in it and you feel easier and you think okay I can add weight or I can add reps or I can do more sets one thing you can do is say you know I'm not going to do any of those all I'm going to do is a deeper full range of motion now feels more challenging to you so you've overloaded your body without doing anything other than extending upon your range of motion now I think it's also important to note that you know we're not recommending somebody who is never squatted past 90 and has got really tight hips to go way past that right is to go way past that it has to be appropriate and proper right and probably the best way to do that is not necessarily with any weight on the bar it's to work on the mobility issues right if a lot of people that can't break 90 degrees it's normally some sort of a limiting factor in their hips or ankles that's the most common so if that's where the issue is you don't need any weight to start working on ankle and hip mobility to improve that and then you can go back to squatting deeper and deeper versus oh the guys on my pump said this is a great way to progressively overload I'm going to start working on a deeper range of motion in my squat and you haven't done the prerequisites to be able to do that first you must gain stability and you have to be comfortable in that lower position if you're not even comfortable in that yet you got a lot of work to do and once you gain that comfort you gain that stability then we can start like gradually loading that so it is like in itself an entirely new exercise and that's how you kind of have to approach it well like any of these it's a very small incremental process so if your squat is to 90 and you once you go lower it gets much harder even if you go down you know 4 centimeters lower than 90 you've added which is going to progressively overload your body the next one is also extremely important in fact this one's one of my favorites this one has the one I'm about to mention right now has the best longevity and it's something that you can practice forever as you get better at it it reduces the risk of injury and it sets you up to do any other way of progressive overloading even better and that's just perfecting your skill and your technique perfecting it what I mean by that is we talked about exercises as you know skills and they are skills you're squatting you're pressing you're pulling you're doing a pull up that is a skill there is a way to do it that's better than other ways of doing it and so sometimes when you do 5 reps on a pull up and you think wow I could do 7 reps now instead of doing 7 reps do 5 reps but do them better than the way you did them before do them more perfect with better control it's all about getting better and better and better technique as you get stronger you know you definitely refer to bodybuilders a lot when talking about this stuff I think they're some of the best at doing this right they they pick an exercise and they focus so much on form and technique and to me that that highlights and as we're going through these I can't help but think of like an avatar made like you can't help but kind of look at it and go like oh the power lifters do a really good job of doing volume and I would have to say that the power lifters and Olympic lifters too they're probably the best with technique because power lifters and Olympic lifters are they don't care about necessarily developed I would say Olympic lifters over power lifters for technique but both of them they're so they're practicing it's so to a few that they're just trying to master yeah so that's I mean that's a factor and I know what you're trying to say in terms of like being able to feel their way through exercises bodybuilders do a great job of being able to really feel and highlight certain muscles that they need to highlight in that exercise yeah yeah well the technique part you're right with Olympic lift and what's neat too if you sometimes you get we get so focused on the first one that we talked about is just adding weight to the bar but there's a great way to overload the body by just perfecting the technique if you watch like a great boxer or martial artist they will practice a jab or a straight or a kick over and over and over they'll practice it without an opponent they'll practice it in the air over and over and over again then they'll hit a bag because they're perfecting their technique this is what you can do with your exercise literally if you don't want to add weight or reps or volume or range of motion all you got to do is make the exercise look better have perfect technique each time and trust me there's a lot of room here I've been working out for decades and I can make my deadlift which is my strongest exercise I can sit there and make the technique better and better and more and more intense because of the technique improvements something I've always kind of thought to and there's been an argument on which is better certain machines versus like these compound lifts and why I tend to lean more on the high skill type exercises because of that fact there's so many moving parts and to be able to master a certain skill of being able to back load squat for instance it requires so many moving parts and so many things to work harmoniously and it really is a challenge it's more of a challenge that your body is then going to reap the benefits from well this reminds me too of some of the DMs that I've been getting right now with everyone being trapped at home and you know we've got some of these advanced lifters that are following like our maps anywhere program and they're telling me you know Adam I'm really advanced and do you think this program is too easy for me I said man I just did a workout on the other day and roasted my ass I can take a single leg toe touch which is a very basic movement that I had with my 65 year old clients that I would do and I can make that shit roast me if you focus if you get barefoot and focus the way your feet are gripping on the bar the way your knee is tracking when you do it the way you hinge back with your hips the way you keep your spine the position you keep your neck and your head and when you do it I mean there is so many little nuances to a simple movement like that that yeah you can just breeze through really fast and do 10 reps or you can take and say you know what I'm going to make this so beautiful and move so perfectly through the whole thing and then focus on every aspect from my toes all the way up to my head and the way I position everything you can take an exercise like that and make it extremely difficult and the best way to work on this one is to work with the weight that is not your maximal weight it is to work at an intensity that's not your maximal intensity if you want to work on perfecting technique it needs to be practiced over and over again so don't pick a weight that's the hardest don't do reps that are bringing you close to failure don't do so much volume just practice the exercise and continue to practice it better perfect practice makes perfect right and then you'll get better at this perfecting technique and each time you do better with your form you are overloading the body and the body is learning to adapt through that process now the next one is the one that I think the bodybuilders are the best at which is the mind-to-muscle connection I have yet to meet a strength athlete that can feel a specific muscle with almost any exercise like a bodybuilder like I could watch a bodybuilder change a bench press to be peck focused to be tricep focused or to be delt focused all within the same exercise the only other one I could even possibly think of would be like a gymnast and that's mainly just because they have to they're so body aware in their movements but in terms of like being able to squeeze and flex a muscle on command like bodybuilders or masters well you remember this was a good debate that we had with Ben Pakolsky back and forth I mean he would argue this over even progressive overloading weight he comes from the camp that you know if you do a really really good job of focusing on a movement you can recruit more muscle fibers through that than anything else so there's definitely a case to be made that this could go and I like this one a lot for safety reasons yes right so you know it's great for longevity that's the knock that I have on progressively overloading weight and going there it's the easiest one it's the simplest for bodybuilding it's the simplest for people to measure and explain to somebody like hey last week you were lifting 10 pounds now this week let's lift 15 pounds but the truth is if you are a relatively new lifter just adding weight a lot of times as soon as you start to lift a little bit heavier weight than what you're used to form goes out out the window or it starts to suffer at one point where maybe focusing on progressively overloading the focus the mind muscle connection and technique type of direction maybe a lot more beneficial and a lot of times maybe where I focus with my advanced age type clients yeah I like mind muscle because it does give you better awareness also like I can I can make an exercise far more difficult for my target muscle simply by concentrating and isolating and working that muscle through my mind I mean I could do a chin up a supinated grip that's a palms back chin up and I can make it just work my lats I can make it work my lats really really well I can also make it work my biceps really really well I can even make that exercise hit my rhomboids and my mid back really really well by changing where I'm focusing the effort and the squeeze and each one of those variations is a slight change in technique and the average person watching me do each one of those reps wouldn't notice a huge difference they'd be like oh each one he's doing is a pull up now someone who's advanced would be able to watch and be like oh wow he's making his biceps do more of the work over there too when you come back to just you know movement and performance training being able to be that aware of how you know the feel of how everything is going in the movement you can adjust on the fly so much more effectively because you can feel your body react and feel which muscles are working more and you know you're able to adjust a lot more which then helps you to then you know carries over into the overall movement yeah one thing that I love most about training so much is it a lot more than any other form of exercise it gives you the ability to be able to shape and sculpt your body in very specific ways almost like a sculptor I know of no other form of exercise where you could literally look at your body and say I want more muscle here I want more shape here I want more curve there typically with other exercise modalities you do the work out and your body takes the form and shape of whatever it is that gets you good at that particular skill but with resistance and bodybuilder with what we're talking about right now which is the mind and muscle connection I can specifically shape and sculpt my body this is why bodybuilders again are so good at this the sport of bodybuilding is literally what it's all about is having the most symmetrical well-developed balanced physique and if you're like if you're you know bodybuilders are humans and all humans have muscles that develop faster than others or some that look more dominant so when you're looking for muscle allows you to use resistance training in this way to where you can really shape and sculpt your body to the point where no joke if you know how to do this well you can make a bench press develop your lower pecs more or your upper pecs more same exercise simply by concentrating and squeezing on the exercise you can also make an exercise far more challenging just through the mind and muscle connection so if you're stuck at home and you're doing pushups and you're like I tell you what slow them down squeeze and focus on the muscles you're trying to target and you'll do half you know I can't help but think of clients how many times do you guys have a client that was doing like a tricep push down and they fill it in their biceps too so even for somebody who's not like really really advanced or trying to be a bodybuilder the importance of this is just getting the most that have every even basic exercise you know learning to be able to push down for the tricep push down and know that you're trying to utilize the tricep and not allow the shoulders and other muscles I love training a client that really grasps this concept and does have very good control of all their muscles because then you can give coaching cues like you know less shoulders more tricep here oh retract this squeeze here resist with your back when you let out you can start giving them cool cues because they understand how to control all these different muscles and then you can get the most out of every movement it's funny because you're pretty much fighting your body's natural instinct to make things more efficient exactly that's just going to be a constant battle your whole life like if you want to just sit and lean forward your body's going to make that the thing and nothing else it's going to like take all these other factors out and just focus on making you effective of that so you're fighting that innate ability your body has to make things really effective for you but like you're training your body to do things a certain way to produce what you want out of it yeah at the end of the day by the way all of these are things that make things harder for your muscles that's really all what it really breaks down to so when we're talking about mind and muscle what you're doing is you're trying to make the exercise feel harder by working the target muscle more than you would if you were trying to make the exercise easier now the next one is my favorite to point out when I go into any gym and I've said this on the podcast before it's been a while since I've brought this up but the next time you're in the gym because we've done enough studies and research to be able to say what you know oh training in the hypertrophy range is the best place for building muscle well part of the hypertrophy quadrant or range also includes the tempo and that tempo is a 4-2-2 meaning I go four seconds on the negative I pause for two seconds in the isolation part of the exercise or isometric portion of the exercise and then I go two seconds on the way up so if we're like but the next time you're in the gym pay attention if you see anybody do a negative for four seconds no longer you never see this so it is such an easy way to progressively overload the body for somebody that's been lifting for a really long time and say hey you know what today I'm not going to change your routine at all you're going to do everything you normally do but all I'm going to do is I'm going to count your negative and I want you to slow it down to four seconds watch what that workout looks like it's something to consider isometrics or you know just the concentric portion so if I want to just do something explosively and not slow the momentum on the way down you know that's a completely different stimulus that your muscle is going to react to but also isometrically like I want to hold hold hold that position as long as I can is training the muscle to react in a completely different way yes so slowing reps down makes exercises a lot harder so does speeding reps up now a lot of times people think you're missing the point the point is not to do fast reps and then do as many as you can the point is to do fast reps and then stop when you can't move the bar that fast anymore that's how you utilize fast reps so if I'm doing an explosive squat I'm going to go down on the rep come up as fast and hard as I can and I'm going to do that until I can't move that fast anymore now I'm done with the set and believe me the effort that you put into a lift is a way of overloading your muscles you can literally get stronger in an exercise not add weight not add reps not add volume not add anything just change the rep speed and watch your body start to progress again and if you're listening right now the best thing that you can do personally is the opposite of which one you tend to lean more towards so if you heard me say that about slow reps and you're like no Adam I go pretty slow I'm always very slow everything is explosively 1-1-1 it's power it's fast you're doing a lift like that it will shock the body because you're so used to the opposite and if you're somebody who you know relates more to power lifting and you love or my athletes tend to do this right Justin's notorious for this this is how he likes lifts so if you watch you got him and I in the gym and we both did bench press he would look more like what would benefit most is doing the opposite because I gravitate more towards the slower controlled tempo me going in and saying you know what today I'm going to lift for power I'm going to stack some more weight on there I'm going to do it explosively a couple times that's it and then the same is true for Justin opposite that would benefit him the most is going in I'm going to train more like a bodybuilder slow my tempo down now years ago I learned about this next one and I remember like it was yesterday I remember muscle magazines in those days they all said that you need to rest two to three minutes in between sets because that's how you got the strongest that's how you built the most muscle and so that's what I did in between sets I literally would not do another set unless two minutes passed and I would always do this then I read this article by a bodybuilder can't remember his name but he talked about doing lots of supersets and cutting his rest periods short and he said that just by cutting his rest periods short interesting I've never done that before let me give it a shot so I had a stopwatch and I allowed myself to rest 30 to 45 seconds that was it now I had to dramatically reduce the weight couldn't lift as much as I did before but holy cow did I get a ridiculous pump when I did it that way and then by staying that way for the next few weeks my body built muscle again I actually got my body to progress again simply by cutting rest periods a little bit shorter now the reverse is also true if you're somebody that rests 20 to 30 seconds in between sets rest one to one and a half minutes in between sets and you'll see the same thing happen this is another one that I think is really easy to point out or easy to recognize in yourself because I do feel like there's a real clear divide of like what camp you kind of are close to you're either like the powerlifter where you have like you lift the forever rest yeah you rest for three to five minutes you talk to each other you wrap your knees up you chalk up if you lift like that cadence boy you take that person and you shut them down to one minute or shorter rest periods or lots of supersets they're going to see a huge response in their body the same thing is true for the person who loves to do supersets like so I love to take the bodybuilders and the people that love to do supersets compound lifts trisets you know short 30 second to one minute rest all of a sudden hey today we're going to go real slow we're going to rest we're going to load it we're going to go for strength and power in this lift so whichever one you know you gravitate to the most switch it up by doing the opposite yeah and I think too it sort of feeds into like for instance so if I'm if I'm lifting really heavy now we're really want to focus on the mechanics and the skill and all this stuff like usually resting a bit longer really like helps aid into that that process versus like you know cutting it short and doing supersets it's really hard to focus and really you know get my mechanics and the perfection of the form of it but on the other end of that like really feeling the muscle and like working your way through those sets with less rest I mean man you really feel those muscles get pumped up with blood yeah now there is a range right there is a range you want to probably unless you're doing a superset you want to rest at least 25 to 30 seconds that would be in the short range as long as 5 minutes if you're doing really really heavy sets but that's a wide range to play with now the reason why I said that is because when we say manipulate the rest period I know there might be some people like cool I'm not having any rest periods and I'm just doing 15 exercises in a row in which case you're not really doing resistance training anymore you're doing more like cardio with weights now the last one this one is one that I think people are very familiar with but it's also one that can sometimes be abused the most abused but when it's used properly can be really good which is intensity just add more intensity push your body harder now you can push your body harder with a lot of the stuff that we just talked about every single one that we just talked about is one way to do this but there are other intensity techniques these are advanced but you could do something like partial reps so partial reps are if I did bench press and I'm doing 6 full reps and I know I can't perform a 7th rep then I'm going to perform 3 half reps and then when I'm done with those 3 half reps I'm going to do another 2 quarter reps and then I'm done it's like squeezing out more work within that given set and training to failure falls under this category too now we advocate for people training with 2 reps in the tank that's what we normally say but it doesn't mean that none of us ever trained to failure it's just that very few people need to hear that because I think it's abused I think it's overly used in our space because it just seems to be oh just I'll take it to failure each time and I get sore the next workout and that's where this gets abused where we're constantly chasing the soreness as a way to measure how well the how the well the workout was this is just one more variable it's just one more way that I can progressively overload the body to keep keep adding weight or keep getting stronger or keep losing body fat is by increasing your intensity but again there's a ceiling to this like every time you can't come to every single workout and increase intensity so you can get real quick you can run into a wall by always chasing that type of and it's addictive too I mean you see this in the one rep max chase the PR you know chasers out there that are that they see this this crazy boost and strength and now you know this has becomes a repeated workout where they're trying to keep chasing that the best PR trying to best what they maxed out on completely and you know there's a very much of a cap to that and you have to be careful you know what that leads to I also love having this discussion about these so we've listed nine of these that are ways to progressively overload right to consistently see results in the body no matter what your goal is and honestly eight of these nine every single person can manipulate without adding weight so eight of the nine without if you don't have more barbell weight if you don't have more dumbbell weight at your house physically add more weight to the bar that is the only variable of all the variables that we just and this is why you still can make great progress at home if you understand these if you understand all the different ways to overload the body and you're stuck with just the same pair of dumbbells or one barbell or very minimal amount of weight at your house because we're all stuck at home right now it doesn't mean you can't manipulate these other eight variables to continue to see progress in fact when we created maps anywhere which we designed for people to you know work out without weights that's exactly what we did because you're not working out with weights it's hard to add resistance so what we did is we manipulated the other all these other you know factors that you hear which is why everyone from beginner to intermediate will follow a program like that and feel and see results because all those are within your control so at the end you can overdo all of these or you can focus only on one of these and watch your body plateau but if you mess with all of these and you do them in a systematic way where sometimes I add weight sometimes I do a little bit more reps this time I'm gonna add a little bit more volume oh let me increase my range of motion let me feel the muscle more let me perfect my technique let me speed up my reps let me slow down my reps let me look at my rest periods but you do it in a very methodical slight consistent long term results until you start to reach your genetic muscular potential and let me tell you every single person listening right now has not reached that potential so there's still a long way to go by using these types of factors and techniques and with that go to mindpumpfree.com and download all of our guides resources and books you can also find us on Instagram you can find Justin at Mind Pump Justin you can find me at Mind Pump Sal