Incremental Loading

Understanding Incremental Loading

By James Swift | Strength Coach Training

The typical advice about strength training is garbage. "Muscle confusion," "feeling the burn," and "mixing up your routine" are marketing terms created by people who either don't understand or deliberately ignore the fundamental principles of human adaptation to stress to prolong your training, rinsing you of not only money but precious time

The Basic Truth

Strength is the production of force against external resistance. It's measured in kilograms or pounds. The more weight you can lift, the stronger you are. Everything else – pump, soreness, exhaustion, complexity – is irrelevant to this basic fact. If you want to get stronger, you must lift progressively heavier weights.

This isn't opinion or tradition. It's physics and biology. Your body adapts to stress when forced to do so. This is perhaps the primary function of your DNA since life began. Present stress, allow adaptation, and increase the stress. This is the first principle of strength training, and everything else flows from it.

The Mechanical Reality

When lifting weights, we work against gravity. This seems obvious, yet most training programs ignore this basic fact. Gravity operates in one direction. Therefore, the most efficient way to move a weight is in the opposite direction. Any deviation from this path represents inefficiency.

With light weights, you can get away with inefficiency. With heavy weights, you cannot. This is why form breaks down as weights get heavier – not because the lifter is doing something wrong, but because the weight is revealing the inefficiencies that were always present.

The middle of your foot is your balance point t's physics. For any movement done while standing, the combined centre of mass of your body and the barbell must stay over mid-foot, or you'll fall over. The heavier the weight relative to your body weight, the more this matters.

What Works

Here's what this means in practice:

1. You must lift weights that challenge you but allow proper form
2. You must add weight to the bar regularly
3. You must use exercises that allow progressive loading
4. You must track your progress

This is why we use:

• Squats instead of leg extensions
• Deadlifts instead of back machines
• Presses instead of lateral raises

These movements allow you to lift the most weight safely and efficiently while involving the most muscle mass over the longest effective range of motion.

Programming Reality

Initial loading should be conservative enough to allow perfect technique but heavy enough to stimulate adaptation. For most untrained men, this means:

• Squat: 40-65kg
• Bench Press: 30-50kg
• Deadlift: 50-80kg

For untrained women it will be roughly half these values, yes there will be outliers that's why we have athletes.

Add weight Incremental loading every session because that's how adaptation works. When you can no longer add weight every session, you add it every week. When you can no longer add it every week, you adjust the variables. But the principle never changes.

The weight increases should be:

• Lower body: 2.5-5kg per session initially
• Upper body: 1-2.5kg per session initially

These aren't arbitrary numbers. They represent the minimum stimulus needed for adaptation while staying within recoverable limits.

Why Most Programs Fail

Most training programs fail because they violate these basic principles. They:

1. Prioritize variety over the progression
2. Focus on fatigue instead of force production
3. Ignore mechanical efficiency
4. Substitute complexity for intensity

You don't need variety. You need progressive overload. You don't need to feel destroyed after every workout. You need to lift more weight than last time.

The Path Forward

The solution is simple:

1. Start with weights you can lift with perfect form
2. Add weight every session
3. When you can't add weight every session, add it every week
4. Keep doing this

Everything else – exercise selection, set and rep schemes, rest periods – should support this basic progression. If it doesn't, it's wrong.

You'll know you're doing it right when:

1. Your form stays consistent
2. The weights go up regularly
3. You're stronger than last month

You'll know you're doing it wrong when:

1. You're not tracking weights
2. You're not adding weight
3. You're the same strength as last year

For those ready to implement these principles contact me

or if you feel shy grab my Free guide

This isn't easy. But it is simple. And it works, not because I say so, but because it follows the basic principles of human adaptation and physics. Everything else is just fluff.