The Infinite Progression model: Systemising growth and extending lifecycles transcript

What's up, guys? So, how to maximize muscle growth by structuring your training into life cycles. Now, if you've come to this video from my Instagram, and maybe you're not 100% certain on what a life cycle is or what the IP method is, maybe you've just stumbled across this video on YouTube, I'm going to make the first half of this video my intent to explain these concepts so that you have enough context to carry into the rest of the video and then be able to apply the principles that I go through into your training.

Um, it's going to be a very practical video so that by the end of this you understand exactly what to do daytoday and week to week to make as much progress as possible within your training. This is very much a method that you can apply into your training rather than an actual workout routine to follow. So, just understand that when we go through this video, it's going to be far more beneficial for you to keep in the top of your mind a specific exercise that you are either plateaued on right now, maybe it's an exercise that you simply want to make more progress on or that you're just trying to prioritize because everyone has an exercise they're really trying to trying to work away at.

And as we go through this video, if you keep that exercise top of mind and think how you can apply these principles to that exercise, that's how you're going to get the most out of this. Now, you're probably following some kind of program at the moment that gives you a set of exercises to follow. You've got a training split so you can structure the week. You have an order of execution each day. You've got sets and reps for each exercise.

And honestly, this is enough for the vast majority of beginners. But when you get to a point where that progression starts to slow down and adding more weight to the bar or doing more reps each week becomes way more difficult, you have to really start to organize your training in a way that allows you to apply progressive overload indefinitely. Okay? It's called IP method for a reason. It stands for infinite progression.

And if you take some notes throughout this video, um, which I recommend that you do, and you apply these principles to just one exercise, just one movement pattern, as you apply these principles into your training, every time you go into the gym, you'll know exactly what weight you're lifting. You'll know exactly how many reps you're going to lift that for, and it becomes this very predictable and very reliable method of progression.

Um, that I basically just want to walk you through today. Once you get past this beginner stage of lifting, building muscle continuously and getting stronger continuously relies on so much more than just having a structure to your workouts. And what I want to do is just go through exactly what you need to be doing once these exercises stop progressing. The whole decision-making process that you need to be following to continue that cycle of progression indefinitely.

And I'm telling you now, the solution to this is not a new program. It is not a new set of exercises. You do not need to be chasing dopamine in the gym. What you do need is a model of progression, a logical decision-making process, and a system that actually organizes your training in such a way that allows progressive overload to take place consistently and reliably. And so what you're looking at here is a couple of different examples of life cycles.

I've made some training dedicated to what life cycles are, breaking all of that down, so go and watch that. I' point you in the direction of those videos first. But to very quickly define what life cycles are, this is essentially the duration within which an exercise continues to produce reliable progressive overload and the life cycle will end once progression is no longer possible. So essentially the goal here for everyone in the gym is to be training in the longest and most productive life cycles possible.

Meaning that if you go into the gym and you're doing bench press, for example, you want to be training that bench press, adding weight to it consistently for as long as possible and milking that bench press for all that it is worth. What you don't want on the other end of the spectrum is to be training in these short life cycles where you're only able to apply progressive overload for a few weeks, maybe four weeks in a row before they plateau and you have to move on to something else.

Or alternatively, you end up spending many weeks or even sometimes months training with the same weights and the same reps and never really making progress. Now the consequences of training outside of an exercise's life cycle where you are spending time in this unproductive territory here is that as you can see fatigue builds up massively. The stimulus never even increases and because of that you have nothing to adapt to.

So you're not going to be growing muscle. You're not going to be gaining strength and you have no real tangible ROI from the time that you're spending with that exercise. When you spend time in these longer life cycles where you're able to apply progressive overload far more consistently and over a much longer period of time, you have far more to adapt to. And what we can do within the IP method is stack these life cycles on top of one another to piggyback off the progress that you made within the previous exercise variation.

Um I am going to go into a lot more detail here, but what you have to understand at this point is that there is no utility to becoming loyal to any one exercise. When you understand that exercises are only productive for a period of time, that duration is dependent on the person. It depends on so many different factors which we're not going to go into in this specific video. But when you understand that these exercises, they are productive only for a period of time and you can abandon your loyalty to specific variations, it becomes possible to organize your training in a way that allows you to continue that cycle of progression indefinitely.

Um, so where I mentioned at the beginning of the video to keep an exercise in mind, what I now need you to do is just understand that the objective here is not to progress on that specific exercise, at least not in the long term. In the short term, yes, but not in the long term. objective is to use that exercise as a tool to progress the movement pattern that it corresponds to. So, I can pretty much guarantee that the exercise that you've selected will fall into one of these six categories.

If it doesn't, it's probably because it's an isolation or it's an accessory movement. What we're really talking about here are the big heavy compound exercises. These are the most important exercises, the ones that you really want to be making the most progress on. Everything else in your training is really just there to support your progression on the fundamental movement patterns. So figure out the exact movement pattern that it corresponds to.

If it's a bench press, for example, that will correspond to a horizontal press. If it's a deadlift, it will be a form of hinge. If it is a form of a row, it will be a horizontal pull. And your goal is not to progress with that specific exercise. It's to progress the movement pattern. And every time you make progress on the exercise level, you progress the movement pattern. Because again, we understand that exercises are only going to progress for a period of time before they no longer produce reliable progressive overload.

So, we need to find a way to make indefinite progress. And the way to do that is by really reframing this objective that you have to progress specific exercises. So, I've written some examples out here. You'll see a number of different variations. They all correspond to a specific movement pattern. And what we'll do in this video is take you through exactly what the process will be to progress all six of these. Because ultimately, if you're progressing on all six of these movement patterns, there's really nothing stopping you from developing an elite level physique.

There there's nothing stopping you because all of the muscle groups in your body will correspond to one or more of these movement patterns. So again, if you wanted to grow a bigger back, for example, you need to be focusing on your horizontal pull and your vertical pull and maybe your hinge as well. All of these corresponding to muscles in the back. Because if I zoom in here, essentially the way that we want to structure our training and this is a component of the IP method.

If we know that exercises are only productive for as long as we can apply progressive overload to them and that that process of applying progressive overload eventually slows down or stops, what we can then do is structure our training longterm so that we are training within these life cycles, maximizing the amount of muscle growth and strength we're gaining within them. And then when they come to an end, simply rotating to another variation that still aligns with the same movement pattern, allowing us to carry over the strength that we gained from the first variation over to the second variation and then from the second variation over to the third variation.

And this video here is basically going to be a process of showing you how to make as much progress and as much muscle growth and as much strength gained from the beginning to the end of these life cycles. So once you're going to the next variation, once you're rotating away from the variation that you've plateaued on, you are carrying with you as much strength and as much leverage to then be able to use in the next life cycle.

And so in order to do that, what we need to do is essentially pick six key movements. Right? This is me now presenting to you a concept of a key movement. This will be a movement that corresponds to each one of the six fundamental movement patterns. And I've got some examples here. There's nothing special about these exercises, by the way. They are just examples. I've got bench press, pronated pull-up, seated dumbbell, shoulder press.

These are all just examples of the fundamental movement pattern they correspond to. And our goal is to apply a progression model to each one of these key movements in order to make them stronger to reinforce that movement pattern and carry over the strength that we gain to the next variation. And eventually what you will end up with is a roster of exercises for each of these movement patterns that work really well for you that you know you can rely on to make progress on.

And again, I've written out some more examples. Dumbbell incline press, Smith incline press, they are all forms of horizontal press. And again, these are just examples. There's there's nothing special about these exercises. I don't want you to get distracted by the specific exercises that I've got here. They are just examples of the movement pattern. And what you'll eventually be able to do is structure your training where you move through these variations where each one strengthens a different portion of the movement pattern.

Each one reinforces a a different weak point, therefore strengthening the movement pattern. And so what I want to do on this video is basically just hone in on the six key movements that you're training with and show you how to make as much progress on each of these as possible. So each key movement is going to have a rep range and it's going to have a number of sets that you do. Each set serves a very specific objective.

And what I want to do first of all is break down how you select that rep range. We've got to take into account a few different things. Training age would be the first thing to take into account. Now, if you're someone who's a complete beginner and you don't have much experience with these exercises, if for example, someone had never really trained bench press before, maybe they've only been using machines up to this point, I probably wouldn't want them to be training in the six rep range.

I wouldn't really want them to be lifting weight that heavy because it's a technical movement. It requires skill and therefore someone who's a beginner probably shouldn't be lifting in such low rep ranges. Whereas someone who has more training experience, who can probably handle heavier weights and is more familiar with these exercises, could probably benefit from a slightly lower rep range. The next thing would be the stability demand.

If the exercise itself isn't particularly stable, there is going to be an increased risk of injury. So a dumbbell shoulder press for example, you are probably not going to want to train that exercise for triples, you know, or doubles because it is so unstable. You're also going to expose yourself to increased risk of injury. So that is just another thing that we have to take into account. And the third thing is hypertrophy or strength objectives.

If you are solely focused on gaining strength, then it may make sense to use a lower rep range. And if you are solely focused on building muscle and the hypertrophy side of things, then it might make sense to move closer to the upper end of the rep range. And each of these key movements have three sets. So what I will do now is take you through what the objective is for each of these sets and the actual progression model that we're going to be using week to week.

So the very first set that you do, this is what we are going to refer to as a leading set. This set is what you are going to be adding weight to every single week. This is not based on how you feel. This is a predetermined amount of weight that we're going to figure out in the next section. It's going to be anywhere between 2 and 5 lbs a week, which I believe is about 1 to 2 and a half kilos. And this first set that you do, it's going to be the heaviest and hardest set you do.

It's going to be primarily focused on being as efficient as possible and generating as much power as possible. And if you want to look into the reasoning behind this, go and research post activation potentiation. This first set you do being the heaviest and hardest set being a set that you are simply focused on generating as much power as possible. This is going to prime you for the rest of the sets that you do, and it's going to set you up best for building as much muscle and strength as possible, which is going to then facilitate your ability to overload it in the next session.

Now, the second and third sets you do, these are back off sets. They are simply focused on precision and control. And in order for you to be able to do that and serve those objectives, you're going to need to use less weight. Now, a good ballpark for this is about 80% of the first set you did, but there is a little bit of nuance. It will depend on the exercise. It depends on the person. The more control you have, the less weight you actually need.

And when you go into these back off sets, your objective isn't necessarily to move more weight, although that will happen naturally anyway. The goal on these back offsets is simply to funnel as much tension to the target muscle as possible and yield as much mechanical tension throughout that muscle as you possibly can. And the way to do that is by being very precise and very controlled and making sure that the weight that you're moving is elicited via the muscle rather than through momentum.

And to break this down in a bit more detail for your back offsets, the goal is really just to stimulate the muscle. It is to generate as much tension on the target muscle as you can. It's usually going to be anywhere between 10 to 20% lighter, sometimes as much as 30% lighter. It's very controlled, very precise, localized on the muscle. You're not going to use any momentum at all because this is going to take tension away from that target muscle.

You're going to be focused on pristine target muscle execution. And the point at which you hit failure is where the target muscle has been taken to its complete failure limit. And in order to produce more reps, you would simply have to degrade your form. You are going to fight as much as possible to reduce cheating in those final reps because what will inevitably happen is the supporting muscles will start to take over and you're no longer training the target muscle.

On your leading set, there's a slightly different objective. The goal here is progression and it's force output. It's the heaviest working load of the day. You will be powerful. You will be aggressive and very efficient when you do this set so that it primes you for these back off sets. In terms of momentum, again, this is very nuanced. It depends on the exercise, but it can be used in controlled amounts where appropriate.

As far as the form standard is concerned, you still want to be safe. You still want to be technically proficient. This is not about degrading your form every single week in order to simply move more weight. If that is happening as part of the IP method, then something else is broken. Something else is going wrong. And the failure point for this is where another rep would require unsafe breakdown, excessive compensation, or losing range of motion.

And it is up to you at the beginning of these life cycles to determine what the parameters are for excessive compensation because again it's dependent on the individual and on the exercise itself. And as you add weight to that very first set of the exercise, what will inevitably happen is over time, over many weeks of you doing this, the reps are naturally going to fall down. That is a normal process and it's not something that you should be shying away from.

You do want to fight to avoid that happening for as long as you physically can. When you start a new exercise, there is a skill acquisition phase where the perceived strength that you're gaining week to week isn't necessarily from muscle growth or strength. It's simply you just acquiring more skill with the exercise, being more efficient with it, developing those neural pathways. You should be able to maintain the same number of reps that you were using at the beginning of the life cycle for at least two, three, maybe four weeks into the life cycle if you do this correctly.

And what you'll do is you'll start at the upper end of the rep range. So remember, we chose 6 to 12. So you'll start at 12 reps, for example, and you'll fight to remain at 12 reps for as long as you physically can while you increase the weight on the exercise every single week. And the longer the duration of this life cycle, the more weight you're going to be able to add to the exercise and the more productive this whole process is, if these life cycles only last for 3 or 4 weeks, maybe 5 weeks, well, it's not a very productive life cycle.

But I would say if that's the case, if that's what's happening, then it indicates that something else is broken. Maybe you're adding too much weight each week. And we will in the very next section go through exactly how much weight to be added to these exercises. But essentially the process is you are fighting to maintain the same number of reps that you started with. Inevitably that is going to fall down slowly and gradually over the course of the life cycle.

And once you get to a point where you are no longer able to perform the required number of reps that you agreed to when you started. So that lower end of the rep range. Well, at the end of the video I'll go through what to actually do. But at this point, what we need to know is an appropriate starting load, an appropriate weight to put to that exercise, and an appropriate amount of weight to jump up with every week. So, an appropriate load jump.

Because if you increase the weight too quickly or you add too much to the exercise each week, the duration of the life cycle is going to be very short. And the window of time that you have to progressively overload is simply going to be way too short to actually make any meaningful progress. And if you do it too slowly, then it kind of breaks the system. So, we've still got to be increasing the weight consistently and over enough time to elicit that muscle growth and make as much progress as possible.

So, the method to doing that is simply by finding your starting load through a one rep max calculator. Now, this is just an example. You can Google these things. They um you can search for one rep max calculator on Google and you'll find something very similar to this. And the process of finding what starting load to use is by working up to a challenging amrap set. And if you've got a rep range of 6 to 12, for example, you're going to try and find a weight that allows you to hit failure at 12 reps.

But inevitably, because it's a new exercise and you've never done it before, you're not going to have much data to work with. You're not going to know precisely what that number is. So, you need to employ the use of a one rep max calculator to figure out what that would be. And if you work up to a challenging set and let's say for example, in fact, I have an example here, you managed to do six reps with 93.5 kilos. Okay? and you type this into a one rep max calculator.

And you can see here 93.5 kilos at six reps. Well, not only does this equate to a 110 kilo one rep max, but it also equates to a 77 kilo 12 rep max. And you can use one rep max calculators to uh estimate roughly the appropriate weight to start with in order to reliably hit 12 reps or reliably hit the upper end of the rep range that we're starting with. And so as we go up here and you'll see, you know, bench press, for example, if you were to do a challenging set with a bench press and you ended up getting, I don't know, 15 reps, right?

But you know that the rep range you're training within and the number of reps that you need to start with is 12. Then all you need to do is enter that 15 rep max into a calculator to understand what your 12 rep max would be. You only need to do this once at the beginning of the life cycle. And this will be the weight that you use on that leading set, that first set that you do. Now, coming over here, this is essentially just a low jump calculator.

This is one of the calculators all of my clients get access to on their dashboards. Um, it's not essential for this. All you really need to do is increase the weight on the bar by an appropriate amount each week. But what is worth bearing in mind, and I wanted to demonstrate this here, is that there's going to be some differences between the movement pattern and between the exercises. For example, a dumbbell shoulder press is simply not going to progress at the same rate as a barbell RDL.

It's just simply not going to. Um, the reasons are just too lengthy to really explain in this one video. But the reason I say that you need to increase the weight on the bar or on the exercise by between 1.25 and 2 and a half kilos is because there is going to be some nuance based on the exercise. If you were to increase your seated dumbbell shoulder press by 2 kilos every single week, you're not going to be trained with that exercise very long.

Your reps are going to fall way too quickly and the life cycle is going to be way too short to be able to benefit from it. You're going to be rotating exercises way too quickly and you've got nothing to carry over to the next variation. So, we've got to regulate the amount of weight that we're loading the exercises by each week. Generally speaking, the more weight you're lifting, the bigger these load jumps can be. But this is a really good example.

I've just given you an example of someone who has between one and two years training experience where the rep ranges are pretty, you know, pretty standard. You know, anywhere between 6 and 12, 8 to 14, that kind of thing. Uh, some example exercises. This is a good estimate to follow, but obviously to get really specific with it, you would need one of these calculators. And so just to show you an example of how we would run a barbell RDL life cycle from scratch.

I want to take you through what the entire life cycle would look like. So what we can see here is we're starting with 12 reps because the barbell RDL we're going to use 6 to 12 reps for this one. The estimated one rep max at the beginning of the life cycle based on the AM wrap set that you've done is 110 kilos and the low jump for this is going to be about 2 and a half kilos. So we start off the life cycle and we're doing 12 reps with 79 kilos.

Okay, the next week jump up to 81.5 kilos, which is an an added weight of 2 and a half kilos. And we've been able to maintain the same number of reps, still getting 12 reps. In the third week, it drops down to 11 reps as we go up to 84 kilos. And of course, you'll see over time the load is just increasing very steadily, very predictably. You're not really having to think too much. You're just simply having to bring the intensity and bring the effort that is required into every set that you do to ensure that these reps stay as high as possible for as long as possible.

And over time, the reps naturally fall down. you know, weight's going up, weight's going up. And you eventually get to a point where the reps are now so low that you're at the bottom end of the rep range. Remember, we said six to 12. So, once this person has reached six reps, and if they were to increase the weight on the bar again, the reps would actually fall below the rep range. What we can basically do is conclude that the life cycle of the exercise is over.

It took 12 weeks, which is a pretty decent amount of time, gained a significant amount of strength on this exercise. And we can basically confirm this by again entering this information in to a one rep max calculator. So in the exact same way as you did at the beginning of the life cycle where we figured out that the one rep max was 110 kilos. What we can then do at the end of the life cycle is enter in the same numbers.

So it would be the number of reps that you're now doing with the weight that you have on the bar. So six reps with 106.5 kilos. And entering this into a one rep max calculator. Understanding that the one rep max now is well it's now 13. It's actually 13.7 kilos more. And so we've gone from 110 kilos at the beginning of the life cycle to 123.7 kilos at the end of the life cycle. We've gained 13 kilos over the course of this life cycle.

And all that we now need to do is figure out what variation we are going to rotate to. Again, there is nothing special about these specific exercises. They are just examples of a movement pattern of the hinge movement pattern in this in this case. So, all that we are now going to do is take the 13 kilos that we've gained from this first life cycle, life cycle A, and carry them over to this next variation. And we're going to do the exact same thing.

We're going to start from the upper end of the rep range. We're going to figure out an appropriate weight to use at the beginning of the life cycle. We're going to add weight to the bar every single week. Reps are going to naturally fall down over time. And again, through the parameters that we set, by having a rep range, by having an appropriate load jump each week, what we're able to do is systemize this process of only training in the productive portion of this exercise and then simply carrying over the strength that we've gained from the exercise to the next exercise.

And you can literally repeat this over and over again. I recommend at this point now with the exercise that you've had in your head since the beginning and the movement pattern that that corresponds to, what I recommend that you do is thinking where you are right now in this process. Are you at the start of a life cycle? Are you at the end of a life cycle? Are you now currently training in an unproductive territory? Is now the right time to switch to a new exercise?

Is it more beneficial for you to continue training with the same exercise and just continue progressively overloading it? The decisions that you make at this point are really important because if you do this too prematurely, if you rotate exercises too early, you are now missing out on potential muscle growth, on potential strength that you could then carry over to the next variation. If you do it too late, well, now you're at risk of elevating your fatigue levels to a point that is now unmanageable and that is going to cause your strength to go down or you're just going to waste your time.

Okay? And when you can systemize this process, what you'll eventually be able to do over many, many weeks and months of rotating to new variations and testing their efficacy, what you'll eventually be able to do is start to grade each variation that you train with. And this is an example of what you might hope to end up with where for each movement pattern, you have a list of exercise variations that you have trained with where you have tracked their duration, you have tracked the estimated one rep max that you have gained on each one, and you have graded them based on how productive they were.

And what you will eventually end up with is a list of exercises, some of which are productive and some of which maybe aren't that productive. And what you can then do at this point is only rotate between the exercises that are the most productive. And in this example, we're using stiff leg deadlift. We're using block deadlift. We're using RDL's as a random example, right? And these will be exercises that you have trained with over many months.

You have assessed their validity to remain in this roster. You have graded them based on how productive they are. And because they are the most productive, because stiff leg deadlifts are an elite variation for you, for your specific requirements, because block deadlifts are elite, again, only to you based on the information that you've collected that you have validated yourself. Well, you can now just simply rotate between these three variations continually.

And each time, because you have previously trained with them and validated their productivity because you know that every single time you you rotate between these exercises, you are able to predictably and reliably build strength and reinforce the movement pattern they correspond to. All you need to do now is just rotate between these same three exercises over and over again. And the decision-m process that you use between these exercise variations, that's a whole other video because we can use these to reinforce weak points.

And there's a whole process of understanding how to identify those weak points because simply if there is a weak point in the movement pattern that you are not addressing, then this process doesn't really work that well. But that's a whole other video. Um, and here's the thing. If you do want me to actually set these systems up for you, if you want me to build out this roster of exercise variations and and give you access to the systems that help you to grade these variations properly and take care of this entire process for you, then the first link in the description is going to be a link to book a call with me.

I can take you through this process again, show you where you might be going wrong, show you how we might apply this to your individual circumstance and go from there basically. Um, if you want to do that, like I say, the link for that is in the description and I'll speak to you on the other side. I'm very active on Instagram. So, if you want to send me a message over there, then please do.