How to increase the challenge of an exercise

Is the weight you’ve been using for those bicep curls suddenly feeling a little easier for you? Or maybe you feel like you don’t need as much rest time as you used to between sets? It might be time to increase the stress you are putting on the muscles as they have built up strength!

You may have heard of progressive overload, which is essentially gradually increasing the stress placed on the muscle as it adapts and builds strength. There are a couple different ways you can do this, let’s take a look:

1. Weight

   • This seems like the most obvious way to increase stress on the muscle: simply up the weight. If doing 10lb bicep curls for 8-10 reps for 3 sets (rounds) used to feel really challenging and now you are finding you need less rest time or could complete plenty more than 10 reps, try increasing the weight.

2. Reps

   • Instead of upping the weight you could instead up your reps. Using the same example from above, you could complete 10lb bicep curls for 12-14 reps for 3 sets.

3. Volume

   • Volume is the number of reps x sets that you complete in a workout. To increase volume, you can simply add an additional set. With the above example that would look like 10lb bicep curls for 8-10 reps for 4 sets.

4. Frequency

   • Training biceps once a week? Try adding in a second arm day! Just make sure to have at least one day of rest in between training the same muscle group. So if you do biceps on Monday, wait until Wednesday to train them again!

5. Tempo

   • Slow it down, add a pause, give the muscle more time under tension. If you are currently using a 2:2 tempo (2 counts on the concentric or shortening of the muscle, 2 counts on the eccentric or lengthening of the muscle), you can switch to a 3:3 or even 1:1:3 (1 on the concentric, 1 hold, 1 on the eccentric)

6. Rest

   • Let’s say in the above example that you were taking a 90 second rest in between rounds. You can decrease that by 30 seconds to a 60 second recovery instead.

If you feel like you are no longer seeing results from your workouts, try making one of the adjustments at a time and see/notice the difference.

Have more questions? Interested in 1:1 virtual training? Send an email to jenn@jennpappas.com and let’s chat!