6 Keys to Consistent Progress

 Whether You’re After Strength, Size, or Looking to Get Shredded, You MUST Follow These 6 Keys to Progress

     Many lifters become frustrated because they can’t seem to make consistent progress.  It doesn’t matter what their goals may be, either, whether they want to get massive, build incredible strength, or just lose some bodyfat.  In this essay, we will look at what I believe are some of the major keys to ensuring you progress consistently, regardless of your specific goal.

     Before we get around to these keys, let me say one thing that sometimes gets missed when pursuing a lifting/bodybuilding goal: gains are rarely, if ever, linear.  The truth is that gains are almost always non-linear.  There do seem to be a small segment of trainees who achieve linearity in their progress, but they are always the exception rather than the rule.  You see this misunderstanding most notably among the general population when it comes to losing weight.  (“Losing weight” should rarely be anyone’s goal, by the way, but I’ll save that rant for another time.)  Most people will have a goal of losing such-and-such amount of pounds each week, and become frustrated when, after a couple of weeks, this stops.  Sometimes, folks will even gain weight for a week or two.  But the thing is, that’s perfectly natural.  Same goes for building muscle or gaining strength.  If you manage to gain, say, twenty pounds of muscle in a year, you will gain a few pounds here and there, then your progress may stop for weeks at a time, but if you stay at it, the gains will return.  That’s just the nature of the human body.  Which brings us around to our first key for consistent gains…

Key #1: Train, and Eat, Consistently

     I know, I know.  This first key seems a bit oxymoronic.  Or, perhaps, so downright obvious that there’s no need for me to mention it.  But it’s been my observation over the years of working with lifters that we often miss the most obvious thing.  It’s the thing hiding in plain sight, and because it’s so right there a lot of trainees just fail to see it.

     A lot of lifters will start a training program, stick with it for a few weeks, not see any results, then stop training for a little bit—maybe several days, maybe several weeks—and just wonder what in the world went wrong with their training.  Nothing.  I mean, sure, maybe they could have been on a better program (we’ll get around to that shortly), but they simply should have stayed at it.

     Some lifters, of course, start off on a training program and experience the so-called “newbie gains” that come with just beginning lifting.  But after a few months, their gains stop—sometimes they even come to an absolute grinding halt—and the lifter can’t figure out what the hell happened, so he stops training.  Once again, that’s a mistake.

     So no matter what, make sure that you stick with it.  As said, your gains are not going to be linear anyway, so don’t get frustrated when you seem to not be making progress.  I mean, yeah, you may need to make some changes, but keep up the training.  And if you follow the remainder of these keys, then the gains will come.

     Along these same lines, make sure that you are eating consistently.  You need to track the amount of calories you are consuming each day, along with your percentage of macronutrients that those calories come from.  If you don’t track carbs and fat, then you need to, at the very least, track protein, so that you can ensure that you’re getting at least one gram of protein per pound of lean body mass.  There are plenty of lifters who don’t miss days in the gym, but they don’t get consistent results because they don’t eat in a consistent manner to go along with their training.  This is doubly true if you’re a “hardgainer” who has difficulty gaining weight in the first place.  So don’t neglect being consistent in both the gym and in the kitchen.

Key #2: Train in a Manner That You Enjoy

     I’m a big fan of things such as full-body workouts, high-frequency training, lots of squatting, lots of training in the quick lifts, a plethora of overhead lifts, and utilizing plenty of loaded carries in your training.  But here’s the rub: if you don’t enjoy that kind of training, you’re not going to stick with it, so make sure you’re training in a manner that you enjoy.

     Don’t get me wrong.  If you haven’t tried the sort of workouts that I’m always pushing, then you don’t know if you’ll enjoy them or not.  In fact, I find that most lifters quickly come to enjoy the training that produces the best results, and I firmly believe that the sort of workouts that I write about will produce the quickest results for the majority of lifters.  And don’t neglect heavy leg and back work just because you “don’t enjoy it.”  I’m not talking about that, either.  But if you love to train one-bodypart-per-week using multiple sets of multiple reps with plenty of machine and/or cable movements—not typically the training that I recommend—then that’s how you should spend the majority of your time in the gym, because if you love it, you’ll stick with it, and that’s what how you should train, my typical recommendations be damned.

     Joseph Campbell, that famed mythologist of comparative religion, was well-known for his saying, “follow your bliss.”  Later in his life, he said that what he should have recommended was, “follow your blisters.”  Those two things should actually be one and the same, and, in fact, must be if you are to achieve consistent progress.

Key #3: Train in a Manner That Suits Your Body Type.

     Yes, you need to train in a manner that you enjoy, but, if at all possible, try to find a manner of training that you both enjoy and one that suits your body type and your level of strength-fitness.  If you’re a relative beginner—or if you have been training for I-don’t-care-how-long and have yet to make any appreciable gains—then you need to follow a full-body, relatively abbreviated routine 2 or 3 days-per-week.  That’s just the sort of program that will suit your body type.  Once you’ve gained quite a bit of muscle, at that point, you can switch over to machines or whatever it is that you find you enjoy doing the most.

     I generally put lifters in one of three different categories.  Most lifters respond best to either volume, frequency, or intensity; one of the 3 training variables.  If you know what kind of training that you respond best to, then that’s the sort of training you should do the majority of the time.  When you first start out, this doesn’t matter so much.  In fact, a basic 3-days-per-week full-body program has (or, at least, should have) you training all of the variables moderately, so don’t worry about this part if you’re just starting your strength-gaining, mass-building journey.  But as you advance in your training, pay attention to how well you gain when you train more, or less, frequently, or when you do more, or less, sets; and, of course, pay attention to whether you do well by training with heavier (intensity here is a % of your one-rep maximum, not how close you are training to momentary muscular failure) or lighter weights.  Which brings us around to our next key…

Key #4: Keep a Training Journal

      Even lifters who are on a specific program sometimes fail to follow this key.  A training journal is a must.  And it’s not necessarily for the reason you may be thinking.  Some lifters don’t keep a training journal because they’re good at remembering what they did in the past workout or two, and, therefore, they know what they need to do at their next training session.  Oh, a journal is good for that, and I think that’s one reason that you might want to utilize one, but the primary reason that I recommend keeping a journal is so that you’ll know exactly what you did the past few weeks and months, not just days.  As I’ve written elsewhere, it’s not what you’re doing now that has brought you to your current muscle and strength levels (or lack thereof), but it’s those things you did in the past.

     There may come a time when you can, indeed, stop using a training journal.  Once you’ve trained for years on end, and once you are highly attuned with your body’s needs and its internal cues, then, at that point you may stop using a training journal.  But you’re probably not there now, so do your best to keep a meticulous log of your workouts.

     If you’re a bodybuilder, then you should also keep a dietary journal to ensure you’re getting adequate calories and macronutrients, but you should also keep one for the same reason that I’m recommending you keep a training journal.  When your physique looks especially good, for instance, you need to go back and look studiously over what you had been eating for the past few weeks.  You may think you know, but our memories can often prove incorrect, or at least inconsistent, and it is consistency, obviously, that we are striving towards.

Key #5: Set Specific, Measurable Goals, Both Long-Term and Short-Term

     Anytime that I help a lifter, the first thing that I ask is: What is your goal?  Sometimes, the questioner does have specific goals.  They are getting ready for an upcoming powerlifting meet and attempting to hit certain numbers in their lifts, or they have a beach trip coming up and they know exactly how much weight/bodyfat they are trying to lose by a specific time.  But more often than not, the goals are decidedly less specific.  “I want to get in good shape,” or “I want to get big and ripped,” are NOT specific goals.  Don’t misunderstand me, you can want to be big and ripped—whatever exactly that means to you—but to achieve that, you need specific, measurable goals, for both the long-term and the short-term.

     Let’s say you’re a football player who needs to bulk up in the off-season, and the coach wants another 20 pounds added to your frame.  Twenty pounds should be your long-term goal, the goal of your off-season training.  Twenty pounds is specific.  It’s measurable.  But to achieve that goal, you need to set short-term goals, such as, say, gaining 2.5 pounds each week over the next 8 weeks.  And in order to gain that 2 and ½ pounds each and every week, you need to set measurable goals in the weightroom and with your nutrition.  You need to ensure that you’re getting stronger on the core lifts for your legs and back muscles, so set goals each week for those lifts when you’re at the gym.  At the same time, make sure you’re eating a specific amount of calories each day—15 times your bodyweight in calories daily will probably suffice.  If you do all this, then your short-term goal will naturally turn into your long-term goal.

Key #6: Make Sure That Your Training and Nutrition Reflect Your Goal(s)

     If you want to make consistent progress towards your goal, then you need to make sure that your training is geared toward reaching that goal.  This is another key that seems obvious, yet a lot of lifters make the mistake of using the inappropriate training for the goal(s) they’re after.  As I write in the description of my Ultimate Mass and Power book, a lot of guys go to the gym to “get big” but then spend most of their time attempting to max out on a lift. Or, conversely, a guy wants to be massively strong but spends too much of his time training for a pump or doing a lot of repetitions in his training.  Your training must reflect your goals.

     A lot of times trainees actually don’t figure this out because, when they first go to the gym, at least, crappy training actually works for them because it’s a new stimulus.  They want to look like Mr. Olympia, but they max out on the bench press, the curl, maybe the squat (if they’re lucky) each time that they go to the gym.  And you know what?  That actually works because it’s so new.  But it won’t work for long, and if they continue training in such a manner, then they will, to put it simply, never achieve the goal they really want.

     If you’re after strength, train on a strength program.  If you want to look good naked—and if that’s your goal, then there’s nothing wrong with it—then get on a strictly hypertrophy program.  And if you want a combination of both muscle mass and unreal strength, make sure you get on a program that can achieve both.  (Not to keep shamelessly promoting it, but my book Ultimate Mass and Power is for lifters who are after just that combination of mass and the strength to go along with it.)

     Your nutrition must reflect your goal(s) as well.  If you’re trying to get incredibly big, then you have no business, for instance, going on an intermittent fasting diet.  You need calories, and lots of them.  And, yep, conversely, if you’re trying to get as lean as possible, then maybe those 6-meals-a-day aren’t exactly doing the trick.  Let’s put this as simply as possible: if you’re trying to get big, then you need to eat big; if you’re trying to get lean, then you need to eat lean.

     I hope you find these 6 keys for consistent gains to be helpful in your training (and eating) journey.  If you want to achieve your goals, whatever they may be, consistency is the most important thing of all.