Why Progression Matters More Than Intensity

Progression Builds Strength. Intensity Builds Setbacks.

In this episode of Making Muscle Memories, Lauren Eirk shares why progression—not punishment—is the real key to building strength, preventing injury, and maintaining confidence as we age.

Many adults over 50 believe they need to push harder, work longer, or exercise more intensely to stay strong. But what if the secret to longevity isn't intensity at all?

Drawing from 40 years in the fitness industry, Lauren explains how muscles, tendons, ligaments, joints, and the nervous system all adapt at different rates—and why moving too fast often leads to setbacks. She also shares a personal story that profoundly shaped her philosophy of teaching and helping people rebuild trust in their bodies.

In this episode, you'll learn:

• Why progression is more important than intensity after 50
• How muscles, connective tissue, and the nervous system adapt differently
• The role of consistency in long-term strength and mobility
• Why control should come before speed, load, or complexity
• How fear of injury can lead to a cycle of inactivity
• The mindset shift that helps you stay active for life

If you've ever felt like your body is holding you back, this episode will help you see aging through a different lens—and show you why taking the next right step is often more powerful than taking a giant leap.

Timestamps:
00:00 Introduction
01:12 Learning the Hard Way in Group Fitness
04:50 What Progression Really Means
05:51 Adaptation: Muscles vs. Connective Tissue
07:09  Why Recovery Matters More as We Age
09:18  Control Before Complexity
10:44  The Hidden Cost of Doing Too Much Too Soon
11:24  My Grandmother's Story: When Fear Replaces Trust
14:45  Why Consistency Beats Intensity Every Time
16:05  The Exercise Question That Changes Everything
18:21  How I Use Progression in the FIS 5-Step Isometric Method™
19:25  Closing Thoughts

If you’re ready to build strength in a way that supports your joints, reduces pain, and helps you stay active as you age…

You can explore my full training platform, FIS OnDemand, at www.fisondemand.com

WHO IS LAUREN EIRK?
Lauren is a 40-year fitness veteran, MAT-Rx Full-Body Specialist,  specialist,  Certified Yoga Therapist  C-IAYT, and Certified Yoga Instructor E-RYT 500.   She is the founder of FIS OnDemand™, The 5-Step Isometric Method™, and Fitness Integrated Science. She focuses on joint longevity for adults 50+ through science-backed resistance training to help you pinpoint your weak areas, correct strength imbalances, reduce pain and inflammation, and restore mobility.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to Making Muscle Memories, where we talk about strength, pain, and longevity, especially in the second half of life. In today's episode, I'm going to discuss why progression matters more than intensity after the age of 50. Now make sure to listen to the end because I'm going to tell you a little story about my sweet grandmother and how she absolutely shaped the way that I teach today. See you there. After 40 years of work in the fitness industry, I have learned that real strength isn't just built through exercise, but through experience. I will share with you some of the science as well as the stories that have shaped my work. We are all building muscle memories. One rep, one story, and one day at a time. Hi, I'm Lauren Urk, and I'll be your host today for Making Muscle Memories. In this episode, I'm going to talk with you about the idea of a wise progression and how progressing exercise matters way more than being intense, especially when we reach the ages of 50 and up. Now I want to begin this episode by telling you a little bit of a story about where I started in the fitness industry, which was in the field of group fitness. In group fitness, this is where I learned all the lessons about intensity and progression. Now, when I was younger, I was starting at the age of 16, I had this idea that no one would want to come to my class until I gave them a really hard workout. And so I would do all this studying to try to come up with the most intense, difficult moves, and I was ready to go. I had my sheets, I had my music queued up, and I had all my things that I wanted to do. And I would just basically start my class and just throw them all out there because I had practiced them, because I was getting ready for the class. But the people that came to my class had not. And so what I noticed when I would do that is that people would be like confused. I would get these comments that, wow, your class is intense. Uh, gee, I wasn't able to follow all of that. And over time I started to recognize that the class attendance dropped and that I wasn't as successful. People, I got the reputation as having all this complex choreography. And so I started studying with some people in my industry at the time that were really good at teaching. And I also watched some programs on television, and what I came to realize was that I was progressing my movements way too fast. I learned through going through some several trainings that I needed to do so it was called milking my instruction, you know, like you milk a cow, just dripping a little bit at a time. So I would come in with a base move, and then I would add just a little bit of an element. And after I practiced that bass move, got them really good at it, this next element I would add on, I would teach the base move plus the element, and then I would add a second, a second element on. Then I would teach the bass move, the first element, and the second move. And I kept on repeating and repeating and repeating. What I learned at the end of that combination is that I didn't get through as many exercises, but people that came to my classes had the opportunity to practice those exercises over and over and over. And what I saw from a class from an instructor standpoint was that people were enjoying themselves more. Their confidence was up. They were actually getting a better workout. And you know, it's kind of a thing that a lot of us group and fitness instructors realize and personal trainers too. Many times we are bored way before our students are bored. Our students really appreciate repetition because nobody wants to leave an athletic situation feeling awkward and uncoordinated and feeling like you stood out. You want to feel like they were able to accomplish things. The biggest thing I noticed is that when I didn't progress exercise properly, people would get injured. People would tell me they were sore, they couldn't exercise the next day. This greatly affected my profession because my class attendance would go down and people would eventually leave my class. When I started slowing things down and progressing things a little bit more intelligently, man, my class size grew. Now, what I didn't realize with this episode of my life, and this was several decades that I did this, I would say three decades. I taught as many as 30 classes a week all over town. This very much prepared me for the work that I do now, which is a muscle activation technique specialist. I have an app that I work with people one-on-one as well as in groups, where I'm telling them how to progress through an injury all the way through to strength training. And I also am a personal trainer here in Louisville, Kentucky, where I live. Now, I want to talk with you at first about this idea of progression. What is progression? Well, you know, nobody wants to come to an exercise situation and get hurt. But why do they get hurt? A lot of times they get hurt because they didn't progress something properly. So when I think of the word progression, I think, is there something else that I can do before this? It is a wise progression of activities. Now, whether or not you believe in this, I always take it back to the science, and that's sort of my thing. I'm a science girl, and so when you look at the body, the body has a wise progression all on its own. And have you ever done something where you didn't progress things properly? I had an instructor once that used to say, What's the difference between a callus and a blister? Well, force over time, right? So, how do we look at the body and see this idea about how much progression is important? Let's first look at muscle. Muscle is what this podcast is all about, making muscle memories. Muscle is one of the first things to respond to exercise. I usually can see muscle activation very quickly in about two to four weeks. Now, as a muscle activation specialist, I can test a muscle, I can treat a muscle, and I can see that muscle get strong or responsive, I should say, with a strong test in my office in a matter of seconds. I see clients after that two to three, four-week period, they start to notice some strength gains. If they're consistent and their progression is sound, hypertrophy or growth can happen in eight to twelve weeks, maybe longer. And then someone can even overcome severe muscle loss or significant muscle loss in a period of four to six months if they're consistent. So muscle is the first thing to adapt. But what about our connective tissue? When we talk about ligaments and tendons, we don't have this same sort of progression. With tendons and ligaments, they are made up of a material called collagen. They're not designed to stretch and adapt the way that muscles can create more cross fibers or less and contract and release, right? Connective tissue doesn't do that. It works with the muscular system, but as we get older, we don't have the same amount of collagen turnover that we did when we were younger. So when we think about the idea of our ligaments and tendons responding to exercise, this can take as much as three to six weeks. Now, one of the reasons that I've always taught isometrics is because it does help to strengthen those tendons. But if we start to do something that our body is not designed to do, many times it is going to be this connective tissue that's going to be the first thing for us to get injured. So we can improve our collagen strength over time, but again, this is going to take a lot more consistency over time. We're going to see that muscles adapt way faster than connective tissue, not to even think about our joint capsules and then our ability for our nervous system to adapt. And I could sit here and tell you a lot of statistics about it, but the biggest thing that I want you to think about, it's about the individual. What have they done to get here? Or what have they not done to get there? Because if I'm going to introduce something brand new, even if I come up with the best program possible with the most amazing amount of choreography, if that person's nervous system can attach to that, it means nothing to them. It could be just like dropping a bomb into somebody's body and they are never going to have a positive result. We're going to see an injury and then we're going to see a drop-off, which is not what we want to do. So when we think about anatomy and we think about its ability to respond to our exercise for our bone, for our ligament, for our joint capsule, for our muscles to adapt, we also need to take into consideration that when we get older, we need that 24 to 48 hours to even recover from exercise. So this idea of progression is extremely, extremely important. Now, what does progression mean when I think about progression in exercise? And this is something that I have had to learn so many times in my career. Before we start to do anything complex, think about what I was telling you the story about group fitness. I want to teach a really complex exercise to somebody, or I want to try a complex exercise where I'm moving weight in a specific amount of time and multiple joints are being utilized. I can't really do anything complex until I have control first. And this is something that I greatly learned from the 14 years that I studied ballet and then the 25 plus years that I've studied yoga and Pilates. Learning how to deal with the body, learning how to deal with my position, learning how my joints move from right to left is so important before we start to add things like speed or load, right? Control is always going to be the currency that we have to measure whether or not we are able to add some of these things. And when control is still a factor, when the ability to be stable is still a factor, we absolutely do not want to introduce things that are unstable or have a lot of control to deal with or have many joints working at one time, or maybe I have to instill a lot of progress of fast progression going from start to finish. This is where people a lot of times get hurt, and because this happens even more as we age, it becomes even more crucial. If you ever notice that when you see an older person, um I hate to say this like an older person because I'm over 50 now, so I'm one of those people. But when we see an older person do something, you don't see them spring out of a chair quickly. You see them kind of push into the chair and ease their way across the floor. You don't see them getting out of the car and swinging across a parking lot. And I know I've seen people in the winter with the snow and the ice where they have to hang on to things to even think about moving anywhere because they are an unstable surface. So the idea of progression definitely becomes important as we age. Now, as promised, I'd like to tell you a little story about my sweet grandmother. Now, my grandmother is no longer living, God rest her soul, but when I was a young girl, when anything was going on in my life, maybe you can relate to this, I would go and see my grandmother, and she always made me feel better. My grandmother during the day would do so many things around the house while her husband, my grandfather, was at work. And so we would spend a lot of time together. I used to help her garden, I'd watch her, you know, curl her hair, I'd help her with cooking, we'd talk about things. And one thing that I what I noticed with my grandmother over the years is that she was always complaining about her body. The biggest thing that I remember her complaining about was her knees and her back. And I can remember this one day, we were outside, and my grandmother was planting flowers, and she bent over and she grabbed her back quickly. And I was probably, I would say, 12 at the time. I was maybe in grade school somewhere, I don't know, age 12, second grade, third grade. I don't know. I'm gonna, I don't know the answer to that. But I can remember her grabbing her back, and she immediately was just petrified. And we had to stop everything that we were doing. And we had to go back inside and we would sit. And my grandmother got an ice pack and we sat on the couch and we talked for a while, and she was so petrified. And I remember thinking to myself at that age, what is wrong with her? Because to me, I was just, you know, gonna leave my grandmother's house and go play, go get on my bike. I never thought about getting injured. But my grandmother, the thing that really stood out to me was she was always afraid to do things. It was like her body had failed her. She had completely lost trust in her body's ability to perform under any kind of challenge. And I can remember over the years, like as she got older, my grandmother would always need help to do things. Like we always had to help her lift things. She was always asking for help. She was always trying to, you know, make sure that someone could assist her getting in and out of a car. And when she got older, I can remember when my grandfather died, and she was by herself, and she was in a nursing home at the time. And one of the last things that I remember her saying to me was, you know, she was getting ready to go and have lunch with my aunt. And she fell that morning on the way to her lunch, broke her hip, and she had to have a hip replacement. She was in her, she was 92, I believe, and she died soon after that. And my father mentioned this. She said, Well, you know, he said, you know, putting your grandmother in this nursing home was a good thing because she didn't have to have those stairs anymore, but it was a bad thing because she didn't have those stairs anymore. It was like she was so afraid to move that she would oftentimes not do anything. And isn't this true about most people? When the first time that you get injured, but the first time that your body doesn't show up for you, what happens? You start to not trust it. You don't want to do those things anymore. So you're kind of uh just kind of hold back. And what I've seen with a lot of people is that they will just stop exercising, they would rest for a while or they would change to some sort of new activity. And what this does is it makes us less consistent. Consistency is way more important than intensity as a for as a term in terms of progression. And so when we're not consistent, when we don't trust our bodies, when we always think that we're going to get injured, we instill in our body a lack of discipline. And I think for me, exercise is the one thing that has created discipline in my life because it is that consistency that gets you from point A to point B. Now, when I used to own a studio when I was, this is like pandemic time, I can remember. I had a studio, I had a group fitness studio. I was always known as the sneaky tough girl because I have learned over the years that it's really not important that I give somebody a super hard workout. And many times when we start working with someone, I give them very basic exercises and have them hone those exercises slowly and progress things over time. Because what I'm what my major goal is, is I want this workout, whether or not it's intense, is not as important as whether or not this workout gets me to the next workout. And so think about that for a second. If we could take a look at our exercise, whatever it is that we are doing right now, and we thought to ourselves, does this thing, whether I'm doing a walking program, whether I'm strength training, whether I'm doing some sort of a program online, or whether I'm working with a trainer, does this thing that I am doing help me to get to tomorrow and next month and next year? Because if you're doing something right now that is breaking your body down in such a way that you can't get to those things, let me just tell you something. It is not going to be sustainable. Now I am sitting here talking to you, I'm age 56. I started exercising at age 13. I have never stopped. I have changed, and I'm not bragging or anything, I have changed absolutely how I work out. I'm much smarter now. I wish that I could go back when I was 20 and do things differently because I'm way much smarter now, but I have never stopped. I've always stayed consistent and I've still lost muscle. I have still lost some of my fitness, and I've actually gained fitness in other areas. Being on the planet, you are going to lose muscle, you are going to lose bone, you are going to lose your tendon strength, you're going to lose ligament strength. It is going to happen just by being on the planet. But when we don't do anything, the consistency of not doing anything is just as detrimental as the consist the inconsistency of things that are not progressed properly and that are too intense for our bodies. So it's always better to go slower, taking one step at a time to be consistent rather than force yourself to go into something that's really hard, really intense, get injured, set yourself back, not be able to exercise for two and three days in a row, you can't be consistent and your body is not going to build up over time. Now, in my program, FIS on demand, I have used this process so much because, you know, initially when I was creating all kinds of content, I was trying to put together programs for people to, for instance, navigate through an osteoporosis issue or navigate through a neck pain issue or navigate through a hip replacement or a knee replacement or a meniscal tear or whatever it is. And when I look at all my videos that I have, I always try to put them through a wise progression with multiple joints that don't even look like where the injury is located. I might tell somebody that they're going to help their frozen shoulder by getting their core stronger or working on the hip on the opposite side. But what I don't want to do is I don't want to progress people too quickly. In my five-step cycle of isometric method that I use on my platform, I always start people with isometrics, which if you listen to this podcast, you're gonna hear a lot about that. Isometrics go from isolated to integrated isometrics, so it's positional strength. From there, I don't even graduate them into movement until they can learn how to squeeze their muscles. Then it's body weight training before I ever have them load anything. And then it's all kinds of different load progressions before I would ever introduce endurance training, instability training, or even HIIT training. And I always tell my clients because our body is aging, because our body is actually progressing, however, it's going to do that, do so, from our injury history, from our hereditary, from our learning ability, from our motor control, we may misprogress something and have to go back and repeat something else. That is life, my friends. That is how we stay in this game for the long time. As my dad says, you will always age, but you're gonna age a lot slower than most people. So if this episode spoke to you, I want you to sit with that for a minute and think about how you can reframe your body. It is not failing you, it is doing everything that it needs to do given the circumstances that it's in. So we have to give our body a new story. Our muscles have memory, and we need to give them the story of repetition and learning, getting our body ability to adapt and learn over time and be consistent. Now, if you know anybody that can help be helped from this episode, I would love it if you could forward this to them. Otherwise, I thank you so much for being here, and I'll see you next time.