PLT Lifting Free Plan & Guide

If you’re following the #pltlift program (link to FREE plan), or another weight lifting program, it’s important you push yourself to see progress.
This is never a case of ‘drop and give me 20’ style of training but you have to force your body to change.
For fat loss you need a calorie deficit, to grow muscle (hypertrophy) you need progressive overload. In essence, progressive overload is the process of continually challenging your muscle to force it to adapt and change/grow.
 
This means that you need to always be trying to lift heavier and/or use more reps. Not every day but weekly there should be small increases in total reps over the sets within each movement and/or weight increases (equipment allowing)
 
There are 3 key mechanisms to hypertrophy:

1. Mechanical tension. Lifting heavy enough weights through a full range of motion. A full range of motion with good control to provide sufficient time under tension.
2. Muscle damage. During weight lifting your muscles become damaged through the concentric and eccentric movements. Muscle actually becomes more damaged through the eccentric (negative rep) than the concentric but both are needed. Often we can experience DOMS (Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness) from this but Its not an essential process to grow muscle
3. Metabolic stress. Sometimes this can be ‘the burn’ or ‘the pump’ causes the increase of metabolites, lactate etc which provides an anabolic effect and don’t sling resulting in a hormonal response.

 
When you are lifting during a set the final few reps of the set provide the stimulus. So I’d say you lifted a set of 11 heavy reps. Maybe the first 7 feel ‘ok’ but then 8 onwards things are getting hard. It’s these final hard reps that are the ‘effective’ reps. The reps leading up to them are providing fatigue and are very much needed, but the final reps are where the growth is. It’s therefore important that you push yourself into these harder reps. Picking a weight that’s challenging, every time you hit the top end of your rep range it’s time to choose a heavier weight and push harder.
 
Over a 12 week program your fatigue should increase. Week by week you should feel a little more jaded and weary until the final deload week.
This is by design.
This is how you grow.
In CrossFit Its often said you have to ‘get comfortable with being uncomfortable’ and that’s a fair assessment.
Over time your strength will continue to grow and the weights you lift continue to increase.

tks
Paul