Hypertrophy Progression 101: Get Stronger, Get Jacked

This week's topic will be all about progression in the weight room. Sure, lifting hard and putting in effort is important, but if you don't have a solid progression plan to execute you can't expect to make optimal progress. Last week's topic is a good introduction to the concepts of progression. Understanding volume, intensity, and frequency is important to understanding progression as those concepts are tools in the toolbox that must be effectively controlled when designing a program or method of progression. If you have a solid grasp on these concepts already, perfect you can start reading right here. However, if you're not completely caught up on all that, then I suggest checking out my second blog post discussing volume, intensity, and frequency.

Want a chest that pops? train with progression

The progression methods discussed here will mainly be for hypertrophy purposes. In other words gaining muscle, getting jacked, yoked, or whatever you want to call it. So we know from last weeks blog that most people should be doing roughly 10-20 hard working sets per week for each muscle group in order to gain muscle. Volume is king when it comes to muscle growth. If you can get in more volume, you can get more muscle growth. So if you use the same weights all them time and do the same amount of sets, your not increasing volume at all. On the other hand, if you increase your weight, sets, or reps performed with a given weight, that increases your volume. Remember from last week the methods of counting volumes? You can mathematically add up your volume by calculating weight x reps x sets. If you increase any of these numbers from their baseline, you will get an increase in volume which should contribute to the growth of muscle. This is progressive overload. Progressive overload is extremely important to your overall training, without it you won't make gains. So how do you do this? Well there's several effective methods.

Progressing through intensity is the most obvious form of progression and it will be the main focus for this post. If you want to check out more forms of progression, Renaissance Periodization is a great place to look. Intensity progression can be thought of as simply adding weight to the bar. You increase the weight in that volume equation and overall volume goes up. With this method it's key to remember that volume is still king and you shouldn't be sacrificing volume for intensity if your main goal is to build muscle. Getting stronger is beneficial growing muscle because it will continually increase the volume of your total workload which in turn will increase the mechanical tension being forced upon the muscle leading to hypertrophy. The most simple way of adding weight to the bar is linear progression. Add weight whenever you can. Make small incremental increases in weight whenever possible and volume goes up. This is extremely simple, but you can't expect it to work very long unless you are a complete beginner. Unless you are an absolute freak of nature, you're progress is gonna stall out. When that stops working you can utilize double progression and or wave loading progression.

Double progression implies two variables. Linear progression just has one variable and that's weight. You simply manipulate that variable by increasing the weight. Double progression keeps that variable of the weight and adds a second variable. The second variable is reps. Lets say you can bench press 225 for 6 reps in a working set. Let's say that in a given training session, you perform 4 sets of bench press with 225 and you hit 6 reps on every set while maintaining an RPE within 8 or 9. Next session you hit 7 reps on the first set and 6 on the last three. It may not seem like much but you've got an increase in volume with that. Now the following session you hit 7 reps across the board on all sets. Even more volume added. Eventually you work your weigh up 8 reps on all 4 sets. Now you have hit the end range of 6-8 reps. This means you can bump the weight up by 5 pounds to 230 and start the rep scheme over. Now in the next session you can hit 230 for 6. Work with that until you hit 8 across the board again and up the weight. Now you are increasing volume by modifying weight and reps. This is double progression. Note that you can decide to up the weight as soon as you hit that top end of the rep range for one set. But if you fail to reach the bottom end of your desired rep range with the next weight increment, bump it back down to the previous weight. This tweak to the method is referred to as dynamic double progression

Sean Nalewanyj does a great job explaining dynamic double progression

Chart demonstrating double progression

Wave loading is somewhat similar in that it involves incremental increases in weight each week. Let's start with an example. You can bench 225 for 4 sets of 10 reps. You do this one week and the next week you up the weight. This time you up the weight to 230 and perform 8 reps. The following week you increase again to 235 and hit 6 reps. The next week you deload and use week 1 weight at the bottom end of the rep range which would be 6 in this case. After that, start the process over again except this time you will start with 230 for 10 reps. You might be thinking, wait isn't that decreasing volume sine the weight is barely going up and the reps are decreasing? Well yes and no, it's a wave. The wave refers to the progression. You lower volume in the short term but raise volume in the long term as intensity increases over time. In fact if you were to plot the volume intensity relationship on a graph, you would see a wave like progression that goes up and slightly down over time but continues to trend upwards.

Visual representation of how wave loading gets its name

Both of these are viable intermediate to advanced methods for building muscle. I recommend using both and seeing what works best for you on different movements. Both can be used for anything but wave loading is generally better suited towards large heavy compounds. That being said, double progression is still a great choice for heavy compounds. Both are great, but not everyone is the same so play around with it a bit and monitor your progress.

Next week I'll be covering structuring a deload week. This is one more important building block in constructing a program.