Muscle for Life

One of the most important aspects of weightlifting is progression. This is the difference between exercise (moving your body to burn calories and improve health) and training (exercising according to a plan designed to produce specific long-term outcomes). This is the key to avoiding stagnation in muscle and strength gain, and to breaking through the many plateaus that will occur throughout your fitness journey. There are a number of ways to progress in your weightlifting workouts, but many of the most practical and effective ones share this in common: They involve prescribed levels of difficulty in individual sets. In other words, some sets are supposed to be moderately challenging, while others are supposed to involve near-maximum effort. For example, one of my favorite progression models is known as double progression, and it works like this: You work with a given weight in a given rep range, and once you hit the top of that rep range for one, two, or three sets (depending on the programming), you move up