variables

The human body is amazing and very resilient. No matter what challenge is thrown its way the human body will adapt to it. This is how the system works, the body is stressed, the body doesnt like that stress so it does whatever it needs to do to so the next time its stressed in the same way its less stressful. Now that the same activity is no longer as stressful, it will not elicit the same response. This is why newbies to lifting make gains more quickly than somebody who has been under the bar for quite some time, they arent as used to the stress. So thats the nature of beast, stress your body and your body will adapt to it, over time the adaptations become smaller as the stress diminishes, eventually leading to a plateau. To put plateaus off we must stay ahead of our adaptations and make said activity continue to be stressful.

This is also known as the overload principle, Vladimir Zatsiorsky and William Kraemer say this of overload-"To bring about positive changes in an athlete's state, an exercise overload must be applied. A training adaptation takes place only if the magnitude of the training load is above the habitual level."

That brings me to my topic, how do you manipulate variables to achieve overload? How do you make tomorrow, next week, next month, next macrocycle, harder than this one? What variable to manipulate to make your workout progressive depends on your goal. Some answers are obvious such as getting stronger, well one obvious variable to manipulate is weight make the next workout heavier. manipulating other variables will elicit other responses.

Volume, how would you manipulate that? more sets? more reps? more exercises in the workout?

Time, this is a fun one to manipulate- longer workouts? (might be counterproductive?), time your set; make yourself last x amount of time, shorter sets; make yourself maintain volume in less and less time or do more reps in the same amount of time

Tempo, slow down the eccentric, speed up the concentric, pause in between to minimize the effect of the stretch-shortening cycle forcing your body recruit more muscle fibers and rely less on stored energy, move a submaximal load as fast as possible.

All these are ideas to play with and I am certain i did not cover all possible variables, adding instability is another variable to play with, I just wanted to get ball rolling here. Lets avoid plateau's, train intelligently and manipulate what we can and want. Let's create a specific stress to produce specific adaptations.

Jorge Unigarro