When should you increase the weight? Great question and as I am out with a #leg injury, I might as well try to tackle it.
You talk to anyone in the #fitness world and everyone agrees that you need to make progress in some form in order develop a better #physique.
The most common answer is : use more #weight, bro!
But is that a good idea? Meh. The constant pressure to adding more weight leads to micro #injuries and micro cheating.
What do I mean by this? I will use a story of my sad training career to illustrate.
Many many moons ago I followed a #workout that went like this
2 weeks 4×15 of each exercise,
2weeks 4×10
2 weeks 4×5
All exercises were compounds such as #squats, #deadlifts, presses, pulls, #rows ,overhead #presses etc.
The logic was : you #lift heavy ,you get huge.
What did happened?
I crashed. The whole body was inflamed and watery, looked like garbage.
Worse, the constant stress to lift more weight made me hate training.
So what to do instead?
1. Perfect your execution on each #rep. Once you can deliver high quality reps on each set, you can do one of the following.
2. Increase the volume by adding another #set.
3. Add another #exercise for the same movement pattern, master that as well. Example: you got the decline press down, add the incline.
4. Change the distance which the muscle has to work. Think going from chest press to #chest fly, #lat pulldown to pullover, leg press to lunge etc.
5. Add time by slowing down the motion.
6. Make the set more complex by making it a mechanical dropset.
7 Increase the weight is actually my last option because I feel adding weight creates great mental stress on the trainee which is counterproductive to gains.
I will make a video about this once I am back on my feet so stay tuned!
Maik