Our Strong and Sculpted functional fitness program is under way and you have powered through our varied workouts- Achieve, Believe, Celebrate and Discover.
You may have noticed that some workouts feel harder and some a bit easier, that is a good thing and here is why…
It’s part of the progressive overload strategy that determines how your program progresses week to week.
Today, I’m going to share how you can expect your Strong & Sculpted functional fitness program to progress over the next 4 weeks.
What is ForeverStrong’s Progressive Overload Strategy?
The Progressive Overload Strategy of the ForeverStrong Method is:
Accelerate ~ Vary ~ Reset.
Let’s see how each one of these periodization principles will play out during the remainder of your program:
Accelerate
Accelerate: Progressive Overload is the fundamental principle of increasing lean body mass and getting stronger.
Your targeted strength goal for the strong & sculpted program is to be able to perform a greater volume of work with a heavier load at the end of this 8-week program cycle.
During Strong & Sculpted, your program accelerates by gradually increasing the number of reps that you are performing during the LIFT.
In our Strong and Sculpted functional fitness program periodization happens primarily in the LIFT, in other programs periodization may occur in the MELT or SCULPT.
Next week, we will take a big leap forward and try to increase the amount of weight we are using for the remainder of the program, while continuously increasing reps.
Vary
Vary: Waving intensity workflows ensures that you never “hit the wall” during the progressive increase phase by changing the perceived intensity of the workouts. The problem with linear progression is, if you keep making every workout “feel” harder, you’ll hit the wall. We hit a physiological or psychological barrier. Some people call this overtraining. So, we vary the load or intensity with each workout so you never get diminishing returns from your efforts.
Our Achieve, Believe, Celebrate and Discover workout days each have a slightly different “feel” some “feel” easier or harder than others.
Following a HMLM pattern: a (H) heavy workout is followed by a (M) medium workout followed by a (L) lighter workout then another (M) medium workout. We keep our clients in the medium zone more than heavy or light, as this is where the most adaptation occurs without risk.
Reset
Reset: After several weeks of progressive overload, a deload phase prevents overtraining through planned ‘backoff’ periods, allowing for complete muscle recovery. This provides rest to the muscles. Muscles only grow when they heal. If we continually break down our muscles without allowing time for them to build back up, we will experience little improvement and increase our risk of repetitive stress injuries and tendonitis. Rest is actually required for continued development. Longer rest periods or deloads, fill the gap where our 24-hour rest and recovery cycles don’t fully hit the mark.
In the final week of the program, you will deload before performing our Max Effort Tests. We will do this by returning to our original number of reps, but keeping the heavier weight.
Max Test: The final week of Strong & Sculpted we will test our improvements by performing as many reps as we can with our final weights. I have a formula to calculate your actual improvement against your original numbers. I look forward to reviewing your progress.
Final thoughts:
I hope you are enjoying the Strong & Sculpted program as much as I enjoyed creating it for you.
Just in case you are wondering, you won’t find the Accelerate, Vary, Reset Progressive Overload Strategy anywhere else. You won’t experience this specific program design at Cross fit, Body Pump, Zumba Strong, Soldier Fit, Orange Theory, Bootcamps or any other Team training environment. You only get the benefits from the AVR – Progressive Overload Strategy at ForeverStrong.
On behalf of your entire ForeverStrong training team, we are thrilled you are with us to experience the benefits of training ForeverStrong. We can’t wait to review your results. Your success is our success!
Posted by, Kelly Scott, Owner and Creator of The ForeverStrong Fitness Method