Barbell Shrugged - The Most Effective Use of Progressive Overload - Diesel Dad - Episode 22

Episode Date: July 6, 2021

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Welcome to the Diesel Dad. My name is Anders Varner. In today's episode, we're going to be talking about a concept that is most often used in discussing strength training and how your body can get stronger and how you should be applying it to the rest of your life. Now, for everybody that's just tuning in,

the Diesel Dad, helping busy dads get strong, lean, and athletic without sacrificing family, fatherhood, or fitness. And if you are a busy dad that wants to lose between 20 to 40 pounds you need to join our diesel dad mentorship where you can get one-on-one coaching so you can build a strong lean and athletic body lose 20 to 40 pounds without restricted diets and spending 60 to 90 minutes in the gym and guess what a link to apply to that mentorship is in the description right now. Now, talking about progressive overload, what is that? Well, if you've ever been around any strength communities,

had a trainer, read anything on the internet, the goal of weightlifting is always to be adding weight to the bar. That is the most basic concept. On day one, you're going to do a back squat at 100 pounds. On day seven, next week, when you repeat that workout, you're going to do a back squat at 100 pounds. On day seven next week, when you repeat that workout, you're going to do it at 105 pounds. There's a lot of ways, and we're going to get into about the top three of them and how you can use progressive overload in the gym to make you better. The very first one that we want to talk about is what I just laid out, adding five pounds to the bar each week. And and over time you could do that for four weeks and now all of a sudden we're at 20 additional pounds on the bar and you continually progress

by adding an additional stimulus to the bar. Your muscles have to grow. Your body has to get neurologically more efficient. You're going to squat better. You're going to squat bigger. Everything's going to be great and we're super excited every time we see this happen because it's a very linear approach to gaining strength. This is one of the most fundamental concepts of progressive overload. Slowly add weight to the bar, watch your body adapt to it, you get stronger, you build more muscle, and your body adapts as you go. Another way that you can start to apply this concept is by adding more volume. So say on week one you squat 100 pounds for eight, and next week you squat 100 pounds

for nine, and the following week you squat 100 pounds for 10. You can notice that you're adding an additional stimulus that you are going to have to adapt to. Now, there's multiple ways that you can do this by adding weight to the bar and adding reps. Like if the goal is to get to 10 reps at 100 pounds, well, you can do the first week, 100 pounds by eight, 100 pounds by nine,

100 pounds by 10, then you can go back to the beginning and do 105 all the way up until you get to 10. There's many ways that you can start to tinker with the weight on the bar, as well as the total volume you're gonna be playing with. Now, a third way that you can start to think about progressive overload inside the gym is the amount of time it takes you to do the work.

So say you're going and squatting 100 pounds for five sets of three. The goal next week would be 100 pounds for five sets of three, but instead of doing it with a three minute rest interval in week one, in week two, you're going to do it with a rest interval of two minutes and 45 seconds. Now you're getting a lower amount of rest time in between these sets, which is going to put an increased demand on your physiology requiring adaptation. You're going to get stronger. You're going to be able to do more work in less time. Therefore, we have the idea of progressive overload. We're always trying to increase the difficulty. It is actually the

active, the intent behind what you are doing in the gym is to intentionally create something harder. Now, you can get that information anywhere you want on the internet. There are thousands and thousands of programs. Progressive overload is the most basic thing that you can think about when it comes to lifting weights, getting stronger, and getting a body that you like. This is like the thing that you learn in the first couple of weeks or months of joining a training program, progressive overload.

You're not here for that. The thing that I want you to think about is progressive overload is a lifestyle concept. Now, if you have between 20 and 40 pounds to lose, we need to adopt progressive overload in every aspect of your life. I don't mean this in a way that you need to overhaul everything you've ever done in your life. But we want to start thinking about how we can silo little pieces of our lives to adopt an identity that allows you to understand that you do hard things because doing hard things is fun. Now, going all the way back to the beginning, what I want you to remember is that the general purpose of progressive overload is stimulus, recovery, adaptation, increase complexity or increase difficulty so that you have to recover and adapt to an increasingly more difficult stimulus.

That's the increase in five pounds, that's the increase in reps and total volume, that's the decrease in time so you're doing more work in less time. You can see how we're creating with intent a more difficult environment for your body so that you have to grow and adapt along with that. This happens in every aspect of your life. And when you start to look at maybe the way that you eat or maybe the way that you live, you will start to realize that as most people think and we hear this so often is I'm doing my best and

immediately when I hear someone say I'm doing my best the first thing I want to say is are you like you're telling me right now that you couldn't have put some more vegetables on that plate you're telling me that you couldn't have eaten less sugar last week you're telling me that you couldn't have put some more vegetables on that plate. You're telling me that you couldn't have eaten less sugar last week. You're telling me that you couldn't have tracked your protein. You're telling me that maybe you didn't have to have that snack at night. There was no way throughout that you were literally doing your best. There's absolutely no way that you could do anything else to tip the scales into being a healthier version of yourself. Because what happens if you have 20 to 40 pounds to lose, you've got a slew of things that are out of alignment with the person

that you would like to be. We all are here listening to this channel, listening to this podcast, listening to this video, because you are trying to find a way to get strong, lean, and athletic and align the behaviors that you have in your life to reach that goal. It's totally cool. It's totally cool that you're in a place that you're at right now. Because what I want you to do tomorrow is start to objectively analyze where you are and where you would like to go. If you have a really hard time sleeping eight hours a night, maybe you're somewhere at five. Hell, I have a newborn right now. If I get six hours of sleep,

I'm stoked. I feel like I got the whole sleep in comparison to what's potential of three and a half to four hours with a crying baby. That's hard, right? But check it it out there's always ways that you can try to slightly improve it just like adding five pounds to a barbell there's always ways that you can turn the dial to intentionally create an environment that is slightly more challenging that your body is then going to have to adapt to because i'm struggling with sleep right now, one way that I can use the progressive overload model in my lifestyle choices is by going to sleep 15 minutes earlier. So if I were to come to you and say, well, I'm doing my best to get eight hours of sleep. No, I'm not.

I'm not doing my best because what I'm doing during that 15 minutes where I could be preparing to go to sleep or I could be going to bed and working on some mindfulness where I could be taking some magnesium where I could be taking melatonin to ease myself into sleep a little bit better so I'm getting better sleep. All of those things I could be doing, but I'm not. So I guess I'm not really doing my best.

And what's awesome about this is it is super cool. Wherever you're at right now, it's just a phase of where you could be. If you've gotten to a place where you're butting up against the wall and you don't know how to get past these tricky moments, just think about a way in which you can turn the dial in the same way that you lift five extra pounds in a week.

How do you go and add that five pounds, but more in like a lifestyle direction, go into bed 15 minutes early, maybe take it to magnesium or maybe some melatonin before you go to bed. Maybe it's, it's not watching TV, not having your phone on in the room. Maybe it's just going to bed. Maybe your bedtime isn't the problem. It's the time that you spend in bed where you're scrolling Facebook or Instagram or watching this video right now about telling you to go to sleep better.

You see, the idea of progressive overload can be scaled far outside the gym. If nutrition is something that you struggle with, you don't have to cut all the bad habits at once. In fact, if you cut all the bad habits, you're probably going to leave a gaping hole in your nutrition and not know how to fill it with positivity or with positive things yet. Nobody just goes from eating cookies at night to just eating raw peppers. It doesn't work like that. What you want to do is use the idea of progressive overload and move things in the right

direction. Progressive overload is a really good way to just overall understand the idea of your trajectory. And what that means is the starting point is today. The starting point is exactly where you're at right now. And where you're going is the trajectory. And one of the best parts about being happy is having a trajectory that actually aligns with who you want to be. If you're in a job that you can't stand, you can be along this beautiful trajectory inside the company. But if it's towards an area that you don't want to go, you're likely going to be unhappy. You can be doing all kinds of things that you're progressing at, but if it's not aligned with the person that you want to be, it's pointless, right?

So when we think about where you're at right now, if you have body fat to lose, if you are in a place where you look in the mirror and you're unhealthy look there's there's ways that you can do this without it overhauling your life and making you miserable with and feeling lost in this process if you struggle with nutrition maybe you just don't eat that late-night snack you can use the idea of progressive overload to eat your last meal at 8 p.m. And that's it. You're not overhauling any of the quantity, the quality, the timing. It doesn't have to be so overwhelming where you're just coming in and becoming 100% paleo overnight where you're just outlawing sugar forever. It doesn't need to be that challenging. But the idea of progressive overload, slowly taking smaller steps, getting you in a trajectory

aligned with the person that you would like to be in the future. It allows you to take the steps to get you to the place. And if eating late at night, bad food is the problem, well, we can start to put things in place like don't eat after eight o'clock or don't eat after nine o'clock. Then once you've created the habit and the routine and the system where you no longer eat at nine o'clock, now we can go in and say,

well, maybe I'm gonna have one Oreo instead of three. So you're still getting your fix, but you're also reducing the caloric intake by almost like 200 calories. Oreos are insanely calorically heavy. I actually looked because Oreos are delicious and then you eat four of them and you go, holy crap, how did that happen?

That's so unhealthy. But check it out. I don't need you to eliminate Oreos from your life if that's what you love. I don't need you to just wipe them out, go to the pantry and throw everything out. You're gonna have super crazy sugar cravings. from your life if that's what you love. I don't need you to just wipe them out, go to the pantry and throw everything out. You're gonna have super crazy sugar cravings.

It's probably gonna be unsustainable. What? You like the Oreo. Having one isn't the worst thing in the world. It's not like you just cut yourself off completely. The idea is that you need to have these little steps along the way. You can't overhaul your life immediately. You can't just throw everything out

the window that's unhealthy. You have to take a progressive approach to creating a long-term sustainable solution to your problems. And you do that through progressive overload. It is a lifestyle concept that you can apply to every single aspect of your life. The important part is aligning who you are today, where you want to go, and aligning those steps along the way, along that trajectory to get you to the place that you want to be. I want you to adopt the identity

that you are the type of person that does hard things because doing hard things is fun. That is why we lift weights and that's why we see the success in the weight room. Because we enjoy lifting more weight. We enjoy doing more reps. We enjoy pushing ourselves past places that we were able to go. But for some reason we lose touch of that when it comes to food in the kitchen. We struggle with the lifestyle changes that need to go into radical transformations.

We struggle with these pieces because they don't have these metrics next to them. What I challenge you to do right now is to write down two or three places that you would like to get better. If it's in the kitchen, I would love for you to figure out a way. What's step one that you can start to change your normal routine and tilt the scales in your favor so that it's harder, yet you're the type of person that does hard things because doing hard things is fun, and see how that one change can snowball into a trajectory that you are proud of. In addition to that, if it's lifestyle, if it's sleeping, if you need to go walking more, if it's having better relationships, what is one thing right now that you're unhappy

with that you can change just a little bit? It's a tweak. It's five pounds to the bar. It's not adding a set of 45s. It's five pounds to the bar to make things more difficult, to make things more challenging, to force you to become a better, stronger person aligned with the person you want to be, setting that trajectory for yourself so that you have the ability to recover, adapt, grow, and make yesterday's effort easy. If you've been in the gym for a long time, the weights that you were lifting years ago, those are warm-up weights now. What I want to have you do is realize that if you have weight to lose, I want the meals that you're eating at the beginning of the transformation to be the baseline when you get to the place you want to be.

The plate should be loaded with vegetables. It should be loaded with delicious starchy root vegetables, carbohydrates that are healthy for you and fuel your body, healthy fats, lean proteins. But if right now you're in a place where you're eating pasta every night, adding a little bit of protein to each meal is the first step. That is the progressive overload. You're forcing your body, your routines, your systems, everything needs to move into a place that is slightly healthier. And once you adapt to that routine, add a little more protein, reduce the carbohydrate, get rid of the pasta. Maybe you're going to a potato next,

but you're still always looking for ways to tinker this. And over time, what you're going to realize through this progressive overload model in this concept that you live your life by is that those old things that used to hold you back that you held on to so tight, it's easy to get rid of them. It's easy to push bad habits away. It's easy to eliminate the things that don't love you back and add more positivity, add more positive influences, to add more positive meals, to add that extra five pounds. It becomes easier and easier because as you develop this routine and this characteristic that you're the type of person

that likes to do hard things because doing hard things is fun, because that's you, you look for challenges to improve yourself and you succeed at doing them. That really is the key to understanding transformation is that right now you're unhappy because of an entire structure of circumstances that whether they're in your control or they're not, it's gotten you to this place. And in order to transform to where you want to go, you have to start picking that apart, adding positive things to your lifestyle, to your nutrition, to your training, adding more movement, adding more vegetables, a little bit at a time, and that starts to snowball into these very positive effects that are going to allow you to go from soft, slow, and sluggish to strong, lean, and athletic. My name is Anders Varner. This is the

Diesel Dad. Thank you for hanging out. If you are a busy dad that needs to lose between 20 and 40 pounds without restrictive diets and spending 60 to 90 minutes in the gym. The Diesel Dad Mentorship applications are in the show notes right now. And I would love to hang out with you. We got work to do. We'll see you guys next week.