Beyond Adding Weight: Three Smarter Ways to Progress Your Strength Training

Today we’re talking about one of the most important parts of strength training: how to keep making progress without wrecking your body in the process.

It’s all about finding that sweet spot: pushing yourself enough so your body adapts and gets stronger, but not so much that you hit a wall with injuries or fatigue.

A few ways to think about it:

• Reps in reserve: Stop when you could still get 2–3 good reps. That’s where the magic happens.
• Small wins add up: Your body doesn’t need huge jumps in weight—just consistent, small increases over time.
• Add reps before weight: Going from 10 to 12 to 15 reps is often smarter than slapping on 5 extra pounds right away.
• Play with tempo: Slow the lowering, add a pause—same weight, brand new challenge.
• Change stability: Two legs to one leg, stable to unstable—it forces your body to work in a new way.
• Adjust range of motion: Go a little deeper or a little further for a different kind of challenge.

Progress should feel tough, but doable. If you’re always crushed after a workout, you’re probably overdoing it.

Keep stacking those small wins—1% better, a little bit stronger, a little bit better every day.

If you know someone who’s been stuck with their training, share this episode with them. You might help them break through their plateau.

Transcript

Introduction to Safe Strength Progressions

Speaker 1 0:02

Well, hello and welcome to another episode of the 1% Better Podcast with your host, josh Williams. Today I want to talk about safe progressions to continue your strength training. So this is one of the more common questions that we get asked is you know, how do I know when it's time to increase weights? How do I know when to progress safely? You know, working with folks, you know we have people that are very gung-ho and want to push, push, push. You know, kind of thinking back to how they used to lift, maybe 10,20 years ago. Or people that have never lifted or maybe are more timid and don't know what heavy or challenging feels like and rightfully so going at a slower pace, not knowing what all this means, how the body is going to react, and so we really want to meet somewhere in the middle for both of those sides where understand, my body doesn't recover as fast as it did, you know, 10, 20 years ago. So making the jumps isn't as advised. And as the other end, you know, are your bodies more capable than you give it credit for? I remember when we opened up our Scarborough facility uh, now, going over a month ago, um, you know, a lot of people started with 10 pound weights and, like I, can never lift 10 pound weights, and now they're lifting 15s and 20s and and yes, there's a time where 10 pounds is definitely appropriate, but it's also, you know, it feels heavy, you have to get used to it, you have to understand what the body can do, how it adapts, so on and so forth, and so you kind of balance those two edges as we go through. So what we're going to learn today in this episode is at the end of this, you'll know when to increase, what to increase and then why. Why do we want to increase that? To build that confidence, to know that you can increase it and when to go up. At the end of the day, why we want to keep on doing this is because progression is going to get us stronger. We need to keep challenging the body.

Understanding Recovery and Progressive Training

Speaker 1 2:17

The body responds to small doses of stress. The has caused micro tears in the muscle fiber, which then allows the body to recover, come back stronger. When we pick the right dose of challenge, it's enough to. The body says I don't want this to happen again. I'm going to become stronger, more resilient. So the next time I face this, I am prepared for it.

Speaker 1 2:43

What we don't want to do is cause something that is so stressful, where we're super sore, maybe potential injury, where it is just such a big event that the body cannot respond appropriately. And you could say it more on the trauma side. It's just so much recovery that it's not not necessarily beneficial. And that's why we like this progressive, overall approach because it's safe, effective and you're going to get stronger and no one workout is going to get you to that result. It's the stacking of workouts over and over, and over again. So what is safe? So what, understandingly, where we're coming from is, you know the body takes a little bit longer to recover recovery. We'll probably do a whole episode on this, but you know that's how you're feeling. So what you're eating and that's going to be, you know how you're sleeping.

Speaker 1 3:35

Overall stressors in our life there's a lot of little things that go into overall recovery. That could be history of health histories. There is a lot. But the goal at the end of the day is not to max out your lifts, it's not to push it to the limit, but it's to get strong progressively, safely and consistently over the long haul and, again, not putting all our eggs in one basket into one workout. So progression is really the key to building strength, steady progress over time. And what this does is it voids plateauing. So plateauing is, you know, hitting that spot where we're just kind of stuck at the same weight or same spot, and then also it helps us to see results. So breeds motivation. We need those little wins to. You know, keep us going on. We got to see progress somewhere. So there's a bunch of different ways to do that and to keep progressing.

Reps in Reserve Training Approach

Speaker 1 4:31

So one of the big rules that we use at Sperling is what we call reps in reserve, and what this is is um, you know how many more reps you could do before you break, before the form breaks down and hit true failure. So understand that there's a couple different things. So there's failure. Failure would be you're doing a rep 8, 10, and then you go down and say we're doing like a bench press or squat. You go down to the bottom and you can't get back up. That is true, true failure. We don't want to get there. There's really not a time where you need to get there for most of our goals, nor should, and there's all different things like mental blah, blah, blah.

Speaker 1 5:12

The other one is what we call volitional fatigue. Volitional fatigue is where you could keep getting reps. It's just your form is no longer perfect, it's no longer quality. You're using slightly different form to get to the outcome that you want, and we don't necessarily want that either, especially when we're trying to go for quality and safety and trying to get the body to feel better. And so what the reps are in reserve is essentially saying is I want to do uh, lift to a point where I could mentally get two or three more quality reps before I hit that volitional fatigue. And so we're not going right to the max. Where our form breaks, we're stopping, you know, two or three reps, um, before that, and what this allows us to do is one. It challenges us. So we're pushing to a point where the body is actually going to adapt to that. It's also going to keep us safe, so you're not going to overstress the tendon. So if I'm pushing to volitional fatigue or absolute failure, I'm going to end up using other structures that are not muscle. I I might end up using my joints and ligaments, locking out bone on bone to create the stability to move that weight, and that's not the point. The point is to use the muscle to move, move the weight. The other thing is it's not going to over fatigue you. It's not going to burn out what we call your nervous system, as we're, as we're going through this. So you're going to feel challenged, you're going to burn out what we call your nervous system as we're, as we're going through this. So you're going to feel challenged, you're going to progress and, ideally, overall, you're going to feel fresher.

Speaker 1 6:52

So typically, again, with the reps of reserve, you want to pick a weight that you know. Again, if we're doing 10, the goal would be, when we get to 10 reps, mentally we could have done, you know, two or three more. Or again the same rule If I'm doing five reps, I should feel like I could have done two or three more. Or if I was doing 15 reps, you know it's just I'm going to stop there Now if mentally I'm feeling like, oh, I could just easily keep going, that's where the progress will come. And so I want to go over kind of the three smart ways to progress.

Speaker 1 7:30

A lot of times we think of progression, we go right to adding of weight and that's not always the best case and I would actually argue it's the one I go to least, unless it's just so easy. But the first one I typically will go to is actually adding reps, and this is often better because it's going to, it's going to be lower stress on the joints, it's going to encourage, you know, increased endurance and then control and stability of the movement, um as well. And so an example might be going from you know, increased endurance and then control and stability of the movement, um as well. And so an example might be going from, you know, 10 reps at 20 pounds to 12 reps at 20 pounds. And so, again, if we're doing, you know, three sets of 10, you know the goal would be, in the beginning we're doing all three sets of 10. And then next week it might be, you know, that felt pretty good. So I might do one set of 10 and then two sets of 12. And then the next week, you know, maybe we're doing, you know, instead of 12, 12, and then we hit a 15.

Speaker 1 8:34

At that point we're probably going to be looking to increasing weight. So again, the first one I'm going to do is can I increase the reps and maintain that good form? Now, that's not breaking the reps in reserve, because when I hit 12 reps I should still say, okay, I probably could have done, you know, two to three more quality reps At that point. If we're, you know, if the original goal was 10 reps and now we're doing 15 reps, that's where we want to increase the weight. And so another way to know this would be I'm getting 12 reps and I could say, hey, I could probably easily get four to five more quality reps in.

Speaker 1 9:15

Well, this is where we would then want to increase the load and it's not gonna be anything huge. We're going up about five pounds. You know, two and a half five pounds is is kind of that sweet spot to increase in reps. And so in this case, if we were using that 10 rep range this is a common rep range then realistically, if I was doing, you know, three sets of uh 10, I worked my way up to a couple sets of 15. You know, when I go up five pounds, I'm mostly going to drop back down closer to the eight to ten reps. So I have to drop that weight, I mean drop the reps down as the weight increases, and so this is, I would say, the smarter way to go about things Now.

Speaker 1 9:58

So we want to go reps first, make sure we still own the movement and then weight and then with the weight, again, our form should not drastically change. It should stay the same. If it does, we're going to want to manipulate some other things. So other things we might want to manipulate, if our form is changing as we go up, is going to be something that we call time retention. So this is going to be maybe playing around with how long we're holding the load, and so this could be doing something like a slower lower as we go down into like a squat pattern. We might do like a three, second, like one, two, three and then coming up. Then we might add a pause. So we go down into squat, pause one, two, three and then come up. We can do that with, you know, rows, any, any movement as well. So now we're manipulating how long you have to stabilize that exercise and in that case, after that becomes, you know, not as challenging, the form is quality, then we'll go back to adding weight. So again, there's a bunch of different ways that we can manipulate and get stronger and own the pattern before having to just go to weight. From that. You know if, if we're doing more reps hey, we went up in weight and the weight's feeling good, we're feeling stable. Maybe we manipulated time at this point.

Manipulating Stability and Complexity

Speaker 1 11:09

Uh, the last one is really going to be, you know, playing around with the complexity of the movement and the stability of the movement, and typically we'll I'll go more towards stable stability, so you can use stability to make an, a movement you know, easier, in the sense I don't have to worry about falling over, and I can. You know, the more stable movement is, the more I can lift, so I could use it as a progression or or a stepping back, um, but I could also progress by making it less stable. So an example of this would be doing a squat with two legs versus doing a squat with one leg. One's much more stable in that. And so, again, another example again, we can go squat, we can go do a split squat and then a single leg squat to box.

Speaker 1 11:57

So in each, each case, we are decreasing the stability of your base of support to increase strength, um, from that end. And then we can also manipulate, um, things such as, like I mentioned before you know, tempos and pauses and then also ranges of motion. So can I increase the range of motion safely? So, if your body has access to the range of motion. Uh, is that going a little bit deeper? Is that? Um, you know we don't do them a whole lot, but maybe that is doing a split squat with the front foot elevated, so we can go a little bit deeper, get a little bit more stretch out of that muscle before increasing and weight.

Speaker 1 12:37

And then sometimes, like especially for upper body movements, we can't just linear keep going up five pounds, five pounds, month after month, because we hit a, a breaking point. Whether that's just being five pounds is too big of a jump, or sometimes the lower body lifts, other things become a factor, such as our grip strength, and so in that case we do definitely want to manipulate certain things. So, whether that is you know doing, maybe it's a dumbbell bench press, but for a little while we're going to do a single arm bench press to work on core strength and stability, some of the other accessory muscles to help progressing on that lift, and so sometimes the progression is actually a change, not necessarily in the movement pattern but in how we go about that movement pattern from that end. So, just as a recap, the big three is going to be, you know, progress with reps first, then look at increasing the weight, then we can also using that back pocket for for fun and flavor is increasing or decreasing stability, as well as manipulating time. So tempo and pauses and then finally, ranges of motion, I would say is probably the least common one, but also a great one to go to as well. And so the big thing is safely progress, use that reps in reserve.

Recap and Final Thoughts

Speaker 1 13:57

If I'm getting, um, feel like I can get two or three more quality ones, that's probably a really good place to be. If you're like, huh, I could probably go five or six more reps, I'm gonna have you increase those reps. Once that's feeling good, everything's stable, then we'll try to increase the weight. If everything looks good still, then we're going to manipulate some time. We might manipulate again. As long as your balance and stability is good, manipulate that as well. And so that is all I have for you today, y'all. Hopefully that was helpful, beneficial. If there's any of this that would resonate with someone else, please share it. That definitely helps us as well, and I look forward to talking to you all soon. And again, thank you for listening. You have a fantastic day. Keep getting 1% better, a little bit stronger, a little bit better each day, and I look forward to seeing you all either in person or getting to talk to you through this microphone again soon.