It’s no secret that you want the best results possible with your training program. Am I right? You don’t want to spend your wheels doing bench press after bench press and getting nowhere. If you do, you’re in the wrong place.
Sometime in my second year of college I happened to look in the mirror one day. I did so every day, but for some reason on this day, I said to myself, “you look horrible. You need to go workout.” And after I berated myself like that for a few minutes, I skipped class and went to the local gym and joined.
Now when I was 20, I had no clue what to do. I mean, I had seen people doing curls and bench presses on TV. But that was the extent of my weight training knowledge. I hadn’t even seen Pumping Iron, yet. As a result, I did what any sane and rational person would do.
I hired a trainer.
And if you’ve ever been in a commercial gym and witnessed how these particular trainers operate, you can predict how my results turned out. They weren’t good. They weren’t bad, since I was a raw beginner, but they weren’t the best they could have been. Finally, I asked my trainer “How come my bench press hasn’t gotten heavier?” It was then that he referred me out to someone else.
And this other guy was legit. His name was Louie and he trained at a place called Westside. This guy Louie seemed to know quite a bit about lifting and making people strong.
And that’s when it started to make sense.
Once my new coach started talking about this thing called progressive overload, getting strong and building muscle was a hell of a lot easier than it had been before. Soon, I was benching more than my usual 135lbs. I was squatting 225lbs to a box. And I was deadlifting 315 pounds for the first time ever.
What exactly is progressive overload?
Progressive overload is the gradual increase in certain measurable metrics of a given exercise.
There are three metrics that are vital to your success in the weight room and those are:
- Volume
- Density
- And Intensity
In easy terms, your volume is the amount of weight you lift in a given workout. For example, if you deadlift 300lbs for ten total reps, your workout volume is 3000lbs. Add that to your other lifts, and that’s your total workout volume. So you simply multiply the weight of a lift by the amount of total reps you do in all of your sets, and there you have it.
Workout density is the amount of volume you do in a given amount of time. For the previous example, if you deadlift 300lbs for ten reps total in eight minutes in week one, but the following week it takes five minutes, you have increased your workout density. To figure it out, simply divide the volume by the time. The higher the number, the greater the density.
Intensity is simply how much weight you lift in a balls to the wall effort. Should you deadlift 450lbs for one rep, and that’s all you got, you have effectively reached 100% intensity.
Why is progressive overload important?
There’s an old adage that says that what gets measured gets managed. Now in terms of science, this is extremely important. And lifting is a scientific endeavor. So you have to measure what you’re doing for proper growth. Measuring your progressive overload is a sure fire way to know that what you are doing is working in the way that it should. If your lifts are going up in all three of these metrics overtime, you will not fail.
In an effort to streamline the process of tracking this, we at Biolayne.com have been working at a fever pitch to develop the tools you will need to do exactly that.
Which is we have revamped our entire membership site.
One of the latest additions to the Biolayne is our workout builder. The workout builder is like nothing you have ever seen before and it’s available to you 44 cents a day. Good luck getting coach at your local gym for that price (much less one who knows what they’re talking about).
With the workout builder you get:
- A custom workout plan based on your goals so you don’t have to guess what to do next time you go to the gym
- The ability to customize your workout so that you can grow your lagging shoulders or strengthen your posterior chain
- The option to tailor it to your level, so you aren’t doing a workout you physically aren’t ready for
- Options for choosing the exercises you want to specialize in based on what’s available at your gym. If you’re travelling and don’t have access to a reverse hyper machine? No problem. Go into your workout and swap it out for a comparable exercise
- A steady increase in the previously mentioned metrics of progressive overload so that you can see your efforts aren’t in vain
- In addition to that, you’ll get access to Layne demonstrating how to perform the various lifts so you can ensure proper form every time you set foot in the gym
- And, you’ll get access to the members Q&A so that you can talk with your coach, Layne Norton
All you have to do is ditch one chipotle burrito a month to get access to the Gold Membership Workout Builder option.
But don’t just take it from me, take it from everyone else who has followed Layne over the years:
“Throughout my prep for my first figure show & powerlifting meet, Layne guided me with a scientific approach to training & nutrition. Not only was I able to lose a significant amount of body fat over the course of my prep and completely change my physique, but I also gained strength in the process. Layne customized my training to fulfill both my desire to compete in powerlifting & figure.”
— Katie Rutherford
“Layne allows heavy lifting, deads, squats, Pendlay rows, etc. The type of lifting I enjoy. He is such a supportive coach. He helped me bring my best to the stage and led me through the best prep I have ever had.”
— Kelly Hater
“I cannot thank Layne enough for everything he has taught me. Layne’s version of preparing for a show or photo shoot is completely different than anything I have done before. His guidance landed me my first Oxygen Magazine cover photo.”
— Rachel Davis
“I took a leap of faith and made one of the best decisions of my life and hired Dr. Layne Norton. After thoroughly assessing my situation, he put me on the Reverse Diet path with Flexible Dieting as my nutrition foundation (and introduced me to Powerlifting as the core of my workouts.) What has happened since then is better than anything I could have imagined.”
– Chet Nichols
