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 in weight and work with it until you hit the top of your rep range again for the required number of sets, move up, and so on.
In this way, your first progress in your reps with a given weight and then progress with the amount of weight you’re lifting. Hence, “double progression.”
Here’s a key question though:
How difficult are these sets supposed to be?
Well, if you want to get the most out of double progression, you want to end your working (heavy) sets one or two reps shy of failure.
In other words, you want your working sets to be pretty damn difficult.
This way of looking at the difficulty of exercise (in this case, weightlifting), brings us to the topic at hand: the RPE scale.
As you’ll soon see, the RPE scale is a simple but powerful tool for workout programming, and especially for strength training, because it can help you gain muscle and strength faster while simultaneously reducing the risk of injury or overtraining.
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Free Worldwide Shipping & Returns
Many companies use shipping and handling fees to increase their profit margins, but here at Legion, we hate profits, so our shipping is free!
Okay, so we do dig on profits, but we also go in for happy customers, and free shipping works like gangbusters. So, if you live in the UK, Canada, Puerto Rico, or Guam, your order ships free when it’s over $99.
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Also, if you don’t absolutely love our stuff for whatever reason, we don’t request you deliver it to a PO box in the Gobi Desert by carrier pigeon.
We just . . . wait for it . . . give you your money back. No returns. No forms. No nonsense. Holy moo cows.
That means you can say “yes” now and decide later. You really have nothing to lose.
Free Worldwide Shipping & Returns
Many companies use shipping and handling fees to increase their profit margins, but here at Legion, we hate profits, so our shipping is free!
Okay, so we do dig on profits, but we also go in for happy customers, and free shipping works like gangbusters. So, if you’re outside the USA, your order ships free when it’s over $199.
Why the restriction on international orders? Unfortunately, shipping abroad is very expensive, and if we didn’t require a minimum order size, we’d lose a lot of money. But! We're also hustling to improve our international logistics and will be passing our savings along to our international customers.
Also, if you don’t absolutely love our stuff for whatever reason, we don’t request you deliver it to a PO box in the Gobi Desert by carrier pigeon.
We just . . . wait for it . . . give you your money back. No returns. No forms. No nonsense. Holy moo cows.
That means you can say “yes” now and decide later. You really have nothing to lose.
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