I had a client a little disheartened recently, about his progress in the gym.
We had just started working together on his nutrition and training and after a couple weeks, he mentioned he was feeling alright in the gym, but his strength wasn’t really increasing and that he was only getting an extra 1 or 2 reps on most exercises, each week.
Getting an extra 1 or 2 reps, on most of your exercises, every week?
Sounds pretty average to me.
Or does it?
Let’s just expand that out over a 12 month period.
Let’s say you are currently bench pressing 100kg/225lbs for 6 reps.
Let’s also say that you cycle this exercise throughout a 6-12 repetition range and that everytime you hit 12 (or more) reps on a given weight, that you chuck an extra 2.5kg plate on each end of the barbell the following week and that then takes you back down to 6 reps, at which point you work your way, 1 rep per week, back upto 12.
Sticking to the conservative end of the 1-2 increases in reps each week, Let’s say we gain just 1 extra rep on the bench press, every week.
Thats 52 reps over the course of the year, but obviously we don’t just keep repping out on the same weight, we need to increase load also.
Gaining 1 rep per week, it takes us 7 weeks, to go from a 6 rep set to a 12 rep set, on any given exercise, at which point we then increase the weight on the bar by 5kg.
We have 52 weeks to work with, so lets divide 52 by 7 and that will give us the number of times we have cycled through the repetition continuum and added an extra 5kg to our bench press. 52 divided by 7 equals 7.43. We will round that down to 7, as we only deal with whole numbers here, so that’s 7 times that we have cycled through the 6 to 12 repetition cycle and added an extra 5kg to the bar.
Now let me explain what all these little numbers represent in a real life gym setting.
52 weeks ago you benched 100kg for 6 reps. Every week you trained, you gained only 1 rep on the bench press. Everytime you reached 12 reps on that given weight, you added 5kg to the bar and performed 6 repetitions on that new weight the following week. You then worked your way back upto 12 reps on that new weight, over the next 7 weeks, at which point you increased the load by 5kg again and the cycle continues!
After 52 weeks of apparently very average strength gains (one extra rep per week), you have now gone from bench pressing 100kg/225lbs for 6 reps, to 135kg/297lbs for 6 reps.
For those of you who aren’t too savvy on what’s good and bad, in regards to progress in the gym, for any intermediate or advanced trainer to gain 35kg/72lbs on their 6 rep max bench press, in a 12 month period, is absolutely, fucking amazing.
So, your crappy, little, 1 rep extra per week gains in strength, were in the end, perhaps not so crappy.
Eat at a calorie surplus, progressively overload in the gym, get plenty of sleep and you will grow muscle tissue.
One extra rep, in isolation, means almost nothing. No one develops a great physique with only one more rep. But, extend that little extra rep each week, out over the course of a whole year, or even many years and then that crappy, little, extra rep, means everything.
Progressive overload.
It’s a beautiful thing. <3
Train hard, eat well and sleep lots.
