#17: Can You Pack On Muscle With The Same Exercises?
For muscles to grow, they need to be challenged on the regular. And what better way to do this than by progressively overloading the muscle? With that said, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t pack on those gains using the same exercises.
Progressive overload can be done either by increasing weight, frequency or number of repetitions in the routine. Doing so will ‘force’ your muscles to get stronger. Because they need to be better adapted to deal with the extra stress.
If you follow a fixed workout routine, all the more reason to have your muscles become more adapted to the activity you put them through. For this reason, it’s definitely worth tracking your progress with a workout journal (or a mobile app).
Take bench press, for instance. Say your ‘day 1’ max was 10 reps with 50kg. By max, I mean that you failed (or came close to failure) at 10 reps.
By resting, repeating, resting and repeating and packing on the plates along the way, you will either end up performing more reps with 50kg, the same reps with more weight, or even more reps with more weight down the line.
That means your muscles have adapted to the stress that came with performing bench press (the most complete upper body exercise) regularly. The muscle fibers were left with no choice but to react to that stress.
One could argue that mixing it up with different workout styles week-in week-out may be more beneficial for muscle growth. And there is some truth to this, because muscles in the body have different types of muscle fibers, recruited for various reasons.
But this ‘mixing-it-up’ can, and should only be done once your current workout cycle is complete, or once you have plateaued.
What are the take-away points?
Create a workout routine and hit that same routine religiously for 6-8 weeks, at which point, you can take a week break (or at the very least, a de-load week).
Evaluate your progress. Have a look at your logs. But after your ‘rest week’, spice things up with some new challenges in your workout, and repeat the process.
Don’t confuse the level of difficulty of an exercise with its effectiveness; one is not necessarily indicative of the other.
The principle of progressive overload is often seen in a strength training context. But this can be extended to other forms of training - including cardio (think about it as continuously trying to run longer or faster).
