As a Spokane Personal trainer, I really want to focus on progressions with my exercises. progressions are super important. In fact, the number one factor that you need to have results in your fitness plans is a physiological concept we call progressive overload. Progressive overload means to incrementally over time, increase the amount of challenge that you’re putting on your body. You should have Progressive Exercise in your plan. And you’re gonna put a little bit more challenge than the body can comfortably react to, so that it can make adaptations and changes to meet that demand in the future.
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When it comes back up. We’re going to overload the body’s capabilities just a little bit, not aggressively, not in an extreme way, but gently overload the capacity to stretch your capabilities. Progress and progressive exercise is really important to make because ultimately that’s what we’re all hoping to make. We’re hoping to make progress. So we want to be really progressive with our exercise selection, as well as the metrics that we have with exercise, things like rep sets, time, weight, resistance, speed, all these little factors we want to slowly increase and make more challenging over time.
A great example of how we do that is with the proprietary fitness app that our clients get, our fitness app that we get that we give our clients is custom built with progressive overload and mind. Every time you go to do a new workout, your previous workout information will auto populate. You the workout app will tell you how many sets you did last time, how much weight you used on each set last time and how many reps you did. Each time. That way you can see what you’ve done in the past. And you can create goals on how to slowly increase that over time.
Now we do want to be progressive. We want to take each step between between zero and 10. We want to take each step oftentimes, it’s very common in the fitness industry and it’s common with other Spokane Personal trainers to try to skip steps to try to get to the end of the ladder. But you can’t get to the top of the staircase without taking the first step. You must take each step along the way. Otherwise you risk injury, burnout, or worse things such as quitting and defeat. What we want to do is we want to make sure that the exercise selection starts at a very appropriate if not even a little bit below someone’s capability and someone’s levels.
When working with a Spokane Personal Trainer, We want to start with a level of success and get a little bit better each and every time from there. When we can do that when we can be progressive and overload we can ensure the results stay long term. What we also want to do is we sometimes want to progress the complexity of exercises as well. It’s oftentimes pretty common for personal trainers to try to give their clients something that’s super sexy, super flashy, super fun, but also super complex and super complicated. It may not always be appropriate to give someone the most complicated exercise on day one.
We may want to start with a lower difficult exercise, get mastery of that moment and then add a little bit more complexity. That’s another way to have progressive exercise. A great example of this would be squats. Oftentimes other spokane personal trainers will try to get their clients to start with a barbell back squat when they first start exercising. It’s a very common very basic exercise. However, the movement itself is incredibly complicated and requires a certain level of strength and movement mastery before you can do it safely and effectively. Before getting into a barbell back squat, which, as an aside, I don’t even recommend it’s one of the nine exercises I don’t recommend people do. You can check that list here. But what I would recommend people start at is
we always check to see if they’re capable of doing a bodyweight squat correctly. And then we do a goblet squat we start to add weight with a dumbbell pretty lightweight, pretty small object. Not too much challenge to to control but more challenged than a bodyweight squat. And then we might add a front squat something where the weights the where the position of the weight is helping to facilitate good form and then finally, we might look at the barbell back squats, something that’s a lot more complicated to control something that’s a lot more difficult to do correctly. But after doing the other exercises leading in, we know that they have more more confidence, more capability Same with the deadlift.
Before we get people to do the deadlift, which is a very standard very traditional exercise. We will progress using smaller, less dangerous, less complicated exercises to ensure that the person is ready for the deadlift. As a Spokane Personal trainer, I also need to keep my clients safe and progressions is a great way to ensure that people stay safe when they’re working with me because we’re not asking them to do something they haven’t yet proven that they’re capable of doing. Oftentimes we overreach and ask people to do more than they’re capable of. Because we want to seem like we’re challenging them. Instead of challenging them.
We’re actually putting them at risk and that’s a terrible decision. progressions are really, really important for obviously long term progress, but they’re also important for safety. They’re also important for confidence as well, because as you go through the levels of complexity as you master one level and move up, you gain more confidence in your ability to do stuff. When I was young as a personal trainer, I used to give people more challenging exercises before they were ready. And I could sense the hesitation, the confusion. And once in a while I gave clients exercises that were just really bad decisions as a young Spokane Personal trainer This sometimes happens a lot. luckily, not that young anymore. I wish I still had a head to head full of hair like I did when I was younger. But with the balding comes wisdom, and I no longer give clients exercises that they’re not ready for. Sometimes when I used to give clients exercises that they weren’t ready for, you could see the look of failure when they weren’t able to do it. There was they were dismayed. They were disappointed. And they started to think poorly of themselves because the personal trainer said they could do it the personal trainer made it look so easy, but they couldn’t do it so they felt really bad and really, really inadequate. That’s not a position I want to put clients and you should feel great from exercise. Exercise should help you will feel better about yourself as well as better about your body. So progressions are a really, really crucial step in that progress. Progressive exercise progressions are super important as we try to make exercise more appropriate for the individual
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