How to keep progressing in the gym 💪

If you’ve been lifting for a while like me, sometimes it’s helpful to remind yourself of all the different ways you can continue to progress in the gym! 💪

Below, you can find a short list of ways to improve your lifts week to week. Sometimes, this can be bumping the weight, but please remember there are many other ways to continuously improve and build strength!

In fact, I find that fairly often when I drop my ego and drop my obsession with constantly pushing the weight to focus on the other strategies, counterintuitively, it often yields the best results, even if that means keeping the same weight and simply adding a rep or two with improved technique or mind-muscle connection, or adding a pulse or a hold, or perhaps ensuring that posture, breathing, & bracing are on point as I go through a fuller range of motion, that can end up both keeping me safer and really moving the needle in terms of improving my outcomes across the board! 📈

While there’s nothing wrong with wanting to improve your work capacity by focusing on quantity of reps, pounds lifted, etc - there’s also a lot of room to improvement the quality of our movement patterns and lifts!

There are SO MANY ways to progress in the gym:

• ✅ increase load
• ✅ add reps
• ✅ increase time under tension (often by adding pulses or holds)
• ✅ improve form & technique
• ✅ improve your mind-muscle connection so that you can contract the target muscles harder (& relax muscles that need not take over)
• ✅ focus on mindful breathing and bracing

Do you tend to focus more on QUANTITY or QUALITY when trying to progress in your workouts? Which of the above strategies do you want to try implementing this week? 🤔

And, what if any other strategies have you tried, to continue to embrace a growth mindset as you work to get stronger?

I’d love to hear - share them with others below or drop me an email 📧➡️ becky@betterwithbecky.com