Advanced Methods For Making Infinite Gains

healthierstrongerbigger

Nov 13

Written By Adam Fisher

Takeaway Points:

Most exercisers struggle to progress in the long run because they select exercise progressions which are too fast, and don’t have the right understanding of how to slow down progressions as gains slow down naturally over time.
Linear periodization commonly falls into this group, and is how a lot of exercisers burn out early.
In the long run, any progression can be sustainable, so long as you DO slow down the progression over time.
In this post, I go over 3 advanced methods I use with my own workouts and with my clients to ensure that gains can progress indefinitely with minimal issue - adding volume, adding training sessions, and splitting volume up into more exercises.

Why Progressions Fail

The biggest problem with a lot of exercisers, is that they don’t understand how to effectively progress their programs from week to week. One of the common results of this lack of knowledge, is simply that they will tend to progress either too quickly or too slowly - resulting in either case in suboptimal results.

It’s common for beginners to get into linear progression, for example, then end up progressing way too quickly. Linear progression is typically thought of as the simple act of adding weight on your exercises every single week, while keeping the same reps and sets.

Progress slows down over time due to the normal effect of diminishing returns, so gains happen relatively quickly in the beginning (which is commonly referred to as “beginner gains”), then slow down significantly after the first few months, eventually turning into a very slow but consistent crawl.

Most people get tricked by this early phase into thinking that gains should continue at a similar rate, and thus they hit a wall and get discouraged when they stop seeing a similar rate of progress (often thought of as “hitting a plateau”). This leads to a problem - they want to keep making the same rate of progress with linear progression, adding weight every single week, and this quickly becomes unsustainable. Either they then begin having punishingly hard workouts, failing their lifts, or otherwise failing to progress, and become frustrated and quit or try other workout programs.

Conversely, (though this is less common) there are some people who progress too slowly - unsure of how to meaningfully make their workouts harder, they keep doing roughly the same work again, resulting in little to no progress, and similarly seeing no results.

Slow It Down, Speed It Up

There’s a very simple rule of thumb for what to do when it comes to your programming, based on two simple questions.

Are you seeing progress?
- If yes, GREAT! Everything is going perfectly. Don’t doubt yourself, and keep doing what you’re doing.
- If not, ask yourself the second question.
Are you feeling fresh and energized, or beat up and worn out?
- If you’re feeling fresh and energized, chances are that your workouts are too easy. You need to add more reps, more sets, or more weight, and more aggressively than you have been.
- If you’re feeling beat up and worn out, chances are that your workouts are too hard. You need to pull back a bit, and here are some of your options:
  - Take a deload week and go back at it again. You may have simply temporarily overshot your abilities, and just needed some extra time to recover.
  - Switch up the exercises you’re using. Maybe some of the exercises are no longer a good fit, or don’t scale well at the level of strength and muscularity you’ve achieved.
  - Drop back your weight a bit, and build back up - but this time, with a slower progression than last time.

I’ve found that in most cases, that last solution (build back up, with a slower progression) is easily the most effective tool in my toolkit as a coach. This enables you to keep the progression fast when a lifter is a beginner, then continually adjust the rate of progress each time you hit a wall, continually slowing down the progression to meet the rate of improvement as it also slows down due to diminishing returns.

But There Are Limits…

Unfortunately, there’s only so far that you can slow down a progression. You can progress a workout week over week in a few ways - by adding sets, adding reps, or adding weight. In general, with a linear approach, the smallest possible increment you can adjust is reps - a set involves many reps, and adding weight is often not possible.

Let’s say for example that you train within the 8-12 rep range for 3 sets for a given exercise. Here are examples of progressions you could use, in order of aggressiveness:

Add the smallest possible weight increment every training session - working with the same weight for 1 week
Start off with 3x8, then add 1 rep per set per session (3x9, 3x10, 3x11, 3x12) then add weight and reset back to 3x8 when you hit 3x12 - this would mean working with the same weight for 4 weeks
Start off with 3x8, then add 1 rep per session (1x9 + 2x8, 2x9 + 1x8, 3x9, etc.) then add weight and reset back to 3x8 when you hit 3x12 - this would mean working with the same weight for 12 weeks

BUT! Probably the most incredible thing is that even with a progression this slow, you’ll probably start to hit a wall sooner or later. To be fair, at this point you’re probably a very advanced exerciser who’s very strong to begin with, but more creative approaches can be required.

How To Progress Even Slower

There are a few main strategies that can work at this point.

Adding more sets, splitting the same number of reps up more evenly, then progressing as before
Adding more training sessions, so that you can train more reps overall per week
Splitting your volume up over more exercises

Each has their own strengths and weaknesses, so any of these might work for you, depending on your situation.

Adding More Sets

In this version, you’d add more sets instead. So in the 3x8-12 example from above, if you find that you’re struggling after a certain point, you might add a 4th set, then split it up to something like 4x6 instead, and slowly build back up to 4x10. This equates to more total reps (40 reps vs 36), and makes each individual set a little bit easier to manage. Eventually, you might even be able to build up to 4x12, then add weight, and continue. Or maybe this eventually gets to be tough to progress on, and you add a 5th set instead.

The drawback of this method is that there are definitely limits. You can’t add sets forever, because sooner or later (probably around 5-6 challenging sets/workout) you’re exhausting the muscle group so much that it’s not really giving you much further gains, and you’re barely going to be able to do the work.

Another problem with this approach is that it means that your workouts have to get longer and longer over time. A workout with 5 sets per exercise will roughly take 1.66x as long as a workout with 3 sets per exercise, not to mention all the exhaustion of longer workouts will lead to longer rest times, further extending the length of the workout. Thus, there are certainly limits to what we can tolerate.

Adding More Training Sessions

When you find that the number of sets becomes unmanageable, another approach is to increase the number of training sessions per week. If you’re doing 5 sets per exercise per workout and struggling, for example, then you may not want to increase to 6 sets per exercise per workout. The easiest solution here, is simply to split it into two workouts, each with 3 sets per exercise. In this way, you’re getting in more sets overall, but you’re not nearly as exhausted, and the work is much more tolerable.

The problem with this approach is similar to the above - sooner or later, there are limits. Much like there are limits to how long you can workout in a single session before the quality of your training starts to degrade, there are also limits to how many workouts you can fit into a week before all your time is spent on training. Most busy people can barely fit 3-4 consistent workouts into their week, much less easily fit in a 5th, 6th, 7th, and so on.

This strategy certainly still gets a lot of use! Bodybuilders have often praised the benefits of greater workout frequency, and Arnold Schwarzenegger recommends often training 2x/day in his Encyclopedia of Modern Bodybuilding. However, that level of dedication is often not possible for people with busy schedules, and further you may be limited by your recovery capacities, resulting in an inability to feel completely recovered between workouts, decreasing workout quality.

Splitting Your Volume Up Over More Exercises

One approach which is often underrated is the use of splitting volume into more exercises, rather than simply more sets.

For example, say you’re hitting 5x8-12 on the barbell bench press - maybe you go ahead and split this up into 3x8-12 on the barbell bench press, and 3x8-12 on the dumbbell bench press.

This method is functionally similar to the above 2 methods, in that you’re splitting your volume up over more sets/workouts - but you’re also getting the fun of working with more movements, getting more variety in your training, and covering more potential weaknesses.

This has the same weaknesses as the two above methods, though I find that it also tends to make workouts a bit more enjoyable by giving you more workout variety over time, which helps to offset the monotony of so much training volume.

Your Solution

If you’re an advanced lifter looking to slow down your workout progressions even further, you can use the above methods to ensure that you’re progressing more slowly and consistently on all your work. With the right approach, even a simple “linear” progression can be made to work for quite a long time.

Unfortunately every method for progression will, at some point, involve more training - and at a certain point, this becomes unsustainable regardless, simply because no one has infinite time and energy.

Hopefully you never hit need to hit that point (I’ve rarely ever made it that far with any clients, even my most genetically gifted and consistent ones), but if you do, it may be time to assess what you want to keep getting out of it - at that point, you’re probably a world-class athlete (or at the very least, training like one) and there’s probably not much further to go. At that point, you may prefer instead to draw back and shift to different athletic/dietary goals, or focus instead on longer term health, mobility, and longevity over specifically strength and muscle mass built in the gym.

You may not ever hit that point - but hopefully this should give you the tools to give it a proper try!

About Adam Fisher

Adam is an experienced fitness coach and blogger who's been blogging and coaching since 2012, and lifting since 2006. He's written for numerous major health publications, including Personal Trainer Development Center, T-Nation, Bodybuilding.com, Fitocracy, and Juggernaut Training Systems.

During that time he has coached hundreds of individuals of all levels of fitness, including competitive powerlifters and older exercisers regaining the strength to walk up a flight of stairs. His own training revolves around bodybuilding and powerlifting, in which he’s competed.

Adam writes about fitness, health, science, philosophy, personal finance, self-improvement, productivity, the good life, and everything else that interests him. When he's not writing or lifting, he's usually hanging out with his cats or feeding his video game addiction.

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