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-: Now that we've looked at the core principle
of progressive overload and what we're trying to accomplish
with that, in terms of stimulus, let's start looking
at what actually makes up that bell curve.
What is actually filling it in
and driving us up towards that threshold.
First thing we're gonna do is we are going to look
at the volumes of work and what the factors are for that.
So that's gonna be weight, reps, tempo, sets,
understanding the physics of exercise.
So we just get an idea of,
like, okay, how much measurable work can we do?
'Cause this tangible number is gonna be very important
for us to maintain some sort of grasp
beyond just like hard sets.
Because if we just calculate hard sets
and we don't also know the tangible work that we're doing,
it's very easy for us to get misled.
If we only calculate the tangible work,
but we don't qualify the proximity to failure,
we're gonna run into those same problems.
So we'll break these down piece by piece by piece,
but the variables of work are gonna be weight, reps, tempo,
sets, and you can take that all the way down
to looking at the physics, so where we start looking
at resistance curves and things like that.
Volume of stimulus and stress,
that's where we're really gonna look at the proximity
to failure, so that's gonna be the thing
that was driving up the left side
or driving the vertical portion
and the volume of work is going to be more
what was driving the right portion of those bell curves.
So we get into stimulus.
It's proximity to failure, magnitude, multitude,
and the amount of mechanical and physiological stress
that we are able to put into the areas
that actually are going to receive that stimulus
and signal the cascades
that would lead into those adaptations.
That's why we have to talk about what's actually going on
as we approach failure.
What is this whole thing with these effective reps
and what can we extrapolate from that
and maybe even build upon?
Volume of work.
We look at exclusively calculating this kind of outside
of stimulus first and then what we'll do is we'll talk
about how to communicate the two together.
Our goal is to see how all of the variables, reps, sets,
load, et cetera, work in different scenarios
to provide different increases or different magnitudes
or different directions of progression.
Since we use work to achieve a stimulus,
it's very important that we understand what that work is
and how we can measure
and qualify the increases of that work.
Just because work is not necessarily directly correlated,
or it's not equivalent to stimulus,
it's gonna have a high correlation
and it is the tool that we are using
to achieve the stimulus.
Like the volume is a huge component.
It is half of the equation.
So we do need to be very precise with this.
There's a huge interrelationship between the variables
that we can use to increase work.
We talked about tonnage,
which is sets times reps times load.
They're basically in that equation,
they all affect each other as a multiplier,
but based off of how many sets you're doing
or the rep range that you're working in
or how much load this particular exercise happens
to allow you to use, how strong you are,
or how weak you are, et cetera,
is they're not necessarily all going
to have the same impact.
For example, if you add load, well, if you add five pounds,
that's five pounds every rep and every set,
if you added it across, right?
So that progression, that five pounds,
or we'll put it this way, the five pounds applies
to every rep and set that you increase that five pounds for.
For our demonstrations, we're just gonna assume
that if you progress five pounds,
you're progressing it across the board for this example.
What you're gonna see is that's gonna lead
to different degrees of progression,
then if I was to say add a set or add a rep.
So let's look at how this works out
from a tonnage perspective and then we're gonna talk
about some possible solutions to the limitations of tonnage
and how maybe we can start comparing exercises
and calculating volume of work out better.
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