How to Get Big and Strong (JUST DO THIS!)
If you want to get big and strong you must do one thing in your workouts. You have to remember to make progressive overload the guiding principle of your training. You simply cannot force your body to build muscle if you are keeping the status quo on the effort you are putting into your workouts. In
What’s up, guys? Jeff Cavaliere. Athleanx. com. So you want to get bigger and stronger.
It’s actually really, really simple. There’s only way to do it, and I suggest you go talk to this guy. Listen, dude, I got some goodies in here right here for you. This is what I use. I got some farm school grade HDH low dose.
And dude, best of all, low grade beaver tranquilizer. You want any? I’m good, man. What do you mean you’re good? I’m good.
Bro, these are gains! Do you want gains? You don’t want gains?! This is where your gains are! In this bag!
Actually, he might make you think that that’s the only way for you to get bigger and stronger. But there’s a hell of a lot more ways to do this, especially if you apply a science to what it is that you’re doing. And, guys, that’s what I want to make sure I do here for you today. Because it’s as simple as two words— progressive overload— but how we define that and the ways we get there is what matters. And a lot of people will make you believe that the only way to progressively overload and get stronger and bigger is to just simply add weight to the bar.
That is not all the options you have here. I’m going to show you guys so many more ways to do this that will help you to have a better understanding, and therefore have a better game plan for getting there faster. All right, so the first thing you need to do is you need to be willing to define your specific goals. Right, don’t just lump them together— strength and size— because we know that they are different. Creating muscle growth can take us down different paths.
We can introduce light weights and do them for much higher reps and still get muscle growth whereas it wouldn’t really affect our strength levels. And likewise, we can pursue strength, which might limit the number of progressive overload options we have, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that we’re going to get size increases, especially if we’re past the stage of newbie gains. So be willing to define what it is you’re trying to chase. And it’s okay if we’re trying to chase both. Just understand that there might be different ways to get to each of them more efficiently.
And on that note, guys, step two here is to realize that not all the techniques that I’m going to show you here are going to work optimally for every exercise. And for that reason, I’m going to pit two entirely different exercises against each other to showcase the strengths and weaknesses. We’ll take a simple exercise here like the dumbbell curl, and we’ll put it head-to-head up with, let’s say, a heavy compound movement like the dead lift. And realize that each of those is going to provide us with a lot of similarities in how we can create progressive overload, but also some important unique differences. All right, so with lots to cover here, guys, let’s get started right off with the most obvious way to create progressive overload, and that is simply adding more weight to the exercise that you’re performing.
So if it’s the curl, increasing the weight of the dumbbells that you’re curling is going to increase the strength of your biceps on that exercise. Ad we know, again, that it doesn’t just apply to this variation of the curl, a lot of times strength is generalized. It will occur through other variations. Even if we broke out a bar bell we would see some increases in strength that carry over. But the principle itself also applies here to our compound lift.
Right, simply adding more weight to the end of this bar bell, and performing a dead lift is going to increase my strength. As I am able to do heavier and heavier weights, my strength is increasing. It’s important to note here, guys, that it’s not just relative to your one-rep max. Matter of fact, a lot of guys won’t even ever touch their one-rep max unless they’re competing. It can apply to a three-rep, a four-rep, a five-rep, even higher rep levels.
As you’re able to do more weight at those levels you are getting stronger. The important point is that you’re progressively adding more weight to the bar at any given rep range, therefore increasing your strength. All right, so the next one here is actually a bit controversial because I feel like people throw this word around as if it’s the holy grail of training, and that’s volume. Simply increasing volume doesn’t necessarily need progressive overload. Because I could just increase a bunch of junk volume, low effort, low intensity volume and not necessarily see any increase in gains in strength or muscle mass.
That being said, if we’re going to take an example like this where we have five sets of three done with a sufficient intensity of 85%, you would see that I will have lifted a certain amount of weight by the time that workout is over. And if instead we increased the number of sets we did with the same exercise, and the same weight, at the same intensity level, here we look at it increase in the number of pounds that we lift by the time the workout’s over. That is a form of progressive overload. But again, it’s dependent upon the intensity at which we’re training. With that being said, guys, I got more to say on that in point number three.
And that point is in the realm of strength training prescription. When we’re talking about intensity we’re talking about a percentage of the lift that we’re performing. That being said, I also like to make sure that we point out simply effort level. How hard are you trying? If you’re looking to create a progressive overload, take whatever effort you provided last time, and do more the next time.
In other words, look at this curl. If you look like this when you’re curling, I’m sorry, but there is no opportunity here for you to really push yourself and create any substantial growth. Certainly not in any significant way when it comes to progressive overload. What you need to do is you need to start pushing more. You need to start putting more effort to what you do.
This is an example of what it would look like. There’s more effort being performed here. I think if you did nothing else but simply up the effort level of the exercises you’re performing, you would find an amazing opportunity to add both more strength, because you’d be more focused on the thing you’re doing, and more size because you’ll be putting more into what you’re doing, and in both cases, see gains. All right, so the next one here actually doesn’t have anything to do with the weight that you’re lifting, but more so the time that you’re resting in between sets. You see, your inter-set rest period can actually be a great opportunity for you to create overload by simply decreasing it.
See, if you took protocol one here, you just did a five by three, at a certain level of intensity, that is going to remain consistent between protocols. And you added four minutes of rest between sets. This total workout would take you 18 and a half minutes. If, on the other hand, in protocol two here you decrease that inter-set rest period by just one minute to three minutes, you see that that total time of the workout would be just 14 and a half minutes. You save four minutes.
However, your output was the same. For you create that same output in a shorter period of time is going to be a heightened demand on the muscles that created that output. There is more stress being applied to you and your body, and therefore a progressive overload, and we didn’t even have to touch the weights that were on the bar. We just had to manipulate how long we were resting in between those sets. All right, method number five we’re creating