Consistency is Key — But Only The Right Kind
Consistency is not “just showing up”.
Consistency is Key
What does this actually mean? What aspects of fitness are most important to be consistent with? What happens if consistency gets you nowhere?
This phrase has been a buzzword for fitness influencers everywhere for about as long as I can remember. The truth is, it's 100% accurate. The problem is that it’s clear what this actually means many fitness gurus are really bad at explaining it. The phrase just gets thrown around as a catch-all for why you’re not making progress.
“Consistency is Key”, I mean it sounds simple right? Train every day for an hour a day and you’ll get jacked. Run twice a week for 30 minutes and you’ll become a better runner. Right? — Wrong, well sort of.
This is common in the fitness world, the human body is incredibly complex which means nothing to do with health or fitness is simple black-and-white logic. This notion of consistency is correct in part because doing those repeated actions (training) will help you progress, however, simply showing up and checking boxes is not the type of consistency that leads to desired results.
It’s true that consistency is key to results in the gym, but that means showing up, with the same* intensity, over long periods of time in order to see results. It’s important to not just show up to the gym every day, lift weights for 1 hour, check off each exercise and then go home.
I use “same” intensity with caution, because yet again — this is not entirely true. There is another key concept in fitness called progressive overloading — let’s talk about that next.
Progressive Overloading
There are tonnes of resources online that talk about progressive overloading, many of which claim that this is one of the most important aspects of a workout routine in order to see progress — I strongly agree with this. Simply put, progressive overloading is the method of gradually increasing the amount of stress you place on your muscles over time in order to induce growth.
It’s easiest to understand with an example:
Let’s say you go to the gym on Monday to train your chest, you do 4 sets of 12 reps on the bench press with 100 lbs of weight. The following Monday you do the same weight, for the same number of reps and sets (4 x 12). If you were to repeat this workout, every Monday, forever, you would not make any progress despite being incredibly consistent (with the same intensity).
Your body is smart and incredibly good at being lazy, it will always try to expend the least amount of energy to complete a task. This is why, once you are strong enough to complete this exercise with a certain weight, in the desired rep range, your body will adjust to this new amount of stress and essentially “level off” here. This means that you‘re no longer giving your body a reason to grow any more muscle, you aren’t putting those muscles under enough stress to induce growth.
So, to progressively overload the exercise, you need to add more stress to the exercise. Here are a few examples of how to do this:
- Increase the rep range (do more reps per set)
- Increase the weight (easier said than done)
- Add another stressor such as slowing down the negative of the movement, or adding a superset exercise to the workout.
I think it’s a given that anyone who frequents the gym for weight lifting wants to eventually increase the weight they’re able to lift — progressive overloading is an important tool that must be applied to your training in order to achieve that. If you are able to successfully complete an exercise with the same weight, at a rep range of let’s say 12 reps for all 3–4 of your sets for 2 weeks straight, then I would suggest on that third week you increase your weight slightly. For a bench press, this is easy to do, just add a 2.5 lb plate to either side of the bar!
For movements performed with dumbells, this can prove more difficult if your gym does not have small incremented dumbells. This is the perfect example of when to implement some of the other strategies of progressive overloading. Instead of increasing the weight, try slowing down the movement to increase the amount of time your muscles are under tension, you could also increase the numbers of reps or sets that you perform each week until you grow strong enough to jump up to the next available dumbbell weight.
So, in summary, it’s important for your growth to stay consistent being sure to focus on the right kind of consistency and gradually increase the amount of stress you place your body under.
This whole idea is a key reason why it’s important to keep track of your workouts, I highly recommend writing your workouts down each day, in a simple notepad or one of the many free apps out there. This will help you make sure to continue to apply the method of progressive overloading instead of entering the gym and forgetting all your weights from a week ago!
Happy lifting friends!
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