ML Strength Performance - Articles

Many strength coaches, fitness influencers and gym rats rant about progressive overload and how your training needs to be progressive at the gym. Otherwise, you simply are not making progress. In a nutshell, progressive overload (PO) means that your training loads and volume is steadily creeping higher as you train more and more. Either you are doing more reps with same weight or more weight for same reps. But is PO really that important? Many pro bodybuilders claim they don’t care about progressive overload, they rather “train by feel”. They hit the gym. Train each exercise hard, close to failure or to failure, get a massive pump, flex, and bounce. No measured progression from session to session, week to week. Just lifting heavy iron. Yet, they are the most muscular people on the planet. How can this be possible? Are they just lying through their teeth?   Well, training volume is one of the most important drivers of hypertrophy (Sets per muscle group). The more training

  Training volume and work capacity is a cute couple. They go hand in hand pretty much all the time. It’s a pretty toxic relationship to be honest. Work capacity is very controlling of volume, and they are very codependent of each other. If they climb up a mountain, and volume goes up too fast, work capacity can’t keep up and it will start slipping down. On the other hand, if work capacity goes up faster, eventually it will slow down and stale, unless volume catches up. Now, if you are not familiar with these concepts, that little analogy probably made no sense at all. So, lets look into what training volume and work capacity are.   Training volume is the actual amount of work you do within a certain amount of time. Training volume can be measured from a single session, from multiple sessions (usually one training week), or even from longer time periods, but the most practical measures come from single session volumes and weekly volumes. In strength training, volume is comm