Weight progression for gaining muscle and increasing strength

• You should plan a progression in weight to accompany the increase in sets to increase volume.
• In fact, for strength gains, it is essential to continuously increase weight.
• In order to be able to increase the weight from session to session, the degree of effort should be changed in a targeted manner.
• The division of training into training cycles allows for a periodic increase of weights.

Increase in volume per set through weight progression

To continuously build muscle, the training volume must be increased over a training cycle. In the last article, we presented the most important adjusting screw for increasing the training volume: the number of sets.

However, to achieve optimal results, you should increase the training volume not only per exercise, but also per set. This is done by increasing the weight used from training week to training week.

It should be noted that the training volume naturally increases through an increase in weight only if the reps are kept constant or at most decrease minimally.

Effort level as a key to continuous weight progression

Apart from extreme beginners, however, hardly anyone will be able to continuously get stronger from week to week.

Therefore, it requires a special strategy to be able to increase the weight steadily and at the same time not suffer a rapid drop in reps: the degree of effort with which a set is performed must be specifically changed over a training cycle of approximately 5 weeks.

The "effort level per set" means the number of reps still in the tank at the end of a set, assuming you are lifting with good technique.

An effort level of 0 reps in reserve (RIR) therefore means that the last rep of the set was still performed with clean technique, but the next rep would have been completely impossible or only possible with poor technique.

Do not constantly train to muscular failure!

Training beyond this point, i.e. to the point where the last rep can no longer be performed completely under one's own power, should generally be avoided for safety reasons.

Many studies show that concentric muscle failure at the end of a set is by no means necessary to effectively build muscle (1, 2, 3, 4).

At the beginning of a training cycle, the level of exertion should initially be kept as low as possible. This leaves room for progression and prevents exhaustion from rising too quickly.

Training close to muscular failure (i.e. with a very high level of exertion) causes the exhaustion level to rise disproportionately. If you train at too high a level of exertion at the beginning of a training cycle, the result is that the body will no longer be able to cope with the necessary high load at the end of the cycle.

In the first week of the training cycle, the effort level of each set should be accordingly low. We recommend leaving about 3-4 reps per set in the tank. Therefore, beginners should leave 4 RIR to learn proper technique, since even a low effort level is a high training stimulus for them.

However, you should not leave more than 4 reps in the tank - except during the deload phase - because otherwise the training stimulus will be too low. In addition, the estimate of reps in reserve becomes increasingly inaccurate at high values.

Example weight progression for squats

	Week 1	Week 2	Week 3	Week 4	Week 5
Weight	160 lbs	165 lbs	170 lbs	175 lbs	160 lbs
Reps	8	8	8	8	5
Maximum reps	11	10	9	8	11
RIR	3	2	1	0	6

As an example, let's consider a weight progression in squats: in week 1 of the training cycle, 11 reps could be performed with 160 lbs until muscle failure. However, since we want to train with 3 RIR in week 1, only 8 reps are performed.

In week 2, the weight now increases to 165 lbs. Now only 10 reps are possible instead of 11 - but only 8 reps are still performed. The RIR has thus dropped to 2.

At the end of the training cycle in week 4, the weight is increased to 175 lbs. This will achieve the target effort level of 0 RIR with our 8 reps. Beginners should leave at least 1 RIR in the last week of training.

Deload to resensitize the body to lower weights

In training week 5, a deload follows, in which only 5 reps with 6 RIR are performed with the initial weight from week 1, in this case 80kg.

So in the deload, not only is the volume per week reduced over the sets, but the volume of each set is also reduced by lowering the weight, the reps, and therefore the effort level.

This relieves the fatigue accumulated over the cycle and resensitizes the body so that it responds strongly to a lower load in the next cycle.

Accordingly, the effort level can be set again to 3 RIR in week 1 of the new training cycle and the progression starts again.

This results in more weight being lifted from cycle to cycle with the same number of reps and the same level of effort, allowing for significant increases over several training cycles.

And since a stronger muscle is known to be a larger muscle, this weight progression leads to continuous muscle growth.