Third Common Training Mistake
This is the last in a series of three articles on three common training mistakes. The first mistake is to believe that workout must become increasingly severe and difficult in order to keep on making progress. The second common mistake is that seventy two hours or more of rest is needed in order to recover between workouts. This is not true unless you make mistake number one. A third common mistake will be covered in this article which focuses on the belief that weight or reps must be added every time you workout or your training is non productive. This is pure nonsense, but I believed it for a long time .
Shock Training
In my early years of training, I would occasionally figure out how to shock my body into strength gains so that I could add on five or ten pounds by the next week. Every time this would happen, I thought I had finally found the magic method of training. I eventually figured out that a quick gain was usually followed by no gains, and I would eventually revert back to my previous strength level. Shock training seemed to be a strategy that could be used occasionally for instant gratification, but it proved to be a terrible strategy for long term results.
In the Beginning
Part of the reason that I was so focused on quick gains was that I had gained quickly as a beginner. Actually, when I first started training with weights, I didn’t gain very much at all because I had no idea how to train for about a year. Once I bought some weight training literature, I had a better idea of how to train and my strength really took off for about three months. I could practically count on adding five or ten pounds to my lifts every week. Within that three month period, my bench press went up by sixty pounds, and my squat and dead lift increased close to 100 pounds. My gains then slowed way down for a year and a half, followed by almost no gains for years (as in decades). The problem was that I kept looking back to the quick gains I made as a beginner. My mind was locked in on the idea that I should be able to add weight every week or my training wasn’t working.
Short Term Thinking
After years and years of training, I started to actually do some basic math. I realized that if I added five pounds to my lifts every week for a year, I would be over 250 pounds stronger than I was at the start of the year. It dawned on me that this was not be realistic, so instead of thinking about how much I could gain in a week, I thought about it in terms of how much strength I could gain in a year.
Long Term Thinking
What if I only gained ten pounds of strength per year? Of course that would be pitifully slow, but it would add up if it were done year after year. What about a twenty pound strength gain over the course of a year? A little better, but still not much unless you consider that in five years it will add up to 100 pounds. A strength gain of thirty pounds per year would make me 150 pounds stronger in five years, and a forty pound strength gain would add up to 200 pounds in five years. When I looked at strength gains of twenty, thirty, or forty pounds over the course of a year, and broke those gains down into how much I would need to gain every week, or every month, the gains looked insignificant.
A Month and a Week
A strength gain of twenty pounds per year breaks down to a little under two pounds per month, and a forty pound strength gain over the course a year breaks down into 3.5 pounds of strength per month. These same gains translate into gaining a little less than a half pound per week in order to get twenty pounds stronger in a year, and a little less than a pound per week in order to get forty pounds stronger in a year. This is almost negligible to a short term thinker, and it sounds like almost no gains at all, but to a long term thinker, it adds up to 100 to 200 pounds in five years.
If you looking for a predictable way to become stronger so that you can add weight to your lifts on a scheduled basis, my advice is to use training thresholds, which are the precision points that are discussed on the basics of PPT page of this website. I you do this, you will gradually be able to add weight to your exercises; maybe not by the end of the week, but within six to twelve weeks you will, and it will add up by the end of the year. Adding weight too quickly will eventually keep you from gaining at all. On the other hand, patience is a key that will lead to long term success. Best of training to you.