#033 Form vs Overload

Welcome back to the 33rd edition of the Boats & Logs Lifting Club. I really appreciate you being here. We are the based fitness community that focuses on mastering the basics instead of getting lost in the details.

Today, we will discuss the trade-off between form and achieving progressive overload.

I hope you enjoy this newsletter.

But before we start, here is a quick overview of what’s coming next. Are you interested in a topic I should cover in depth? Just send me a message, and I will consider adding it.

• June 16th: Building your Home Gym

• June 23rd: Hydration Guide

• June 30th: Testosterone Guide

• July 7th: June Q&A

The Problem

One of the core principles of building muscle is that you need to achieve progressive overload to build muscle. For those new here, progressive overload describes the part of your workout where you are putting just slightly more stress on your muscle than it can handle. You overload the muscle.

This forces the muscle to adapt to the stress in order to handle it the next time. The muscle creates an adaptive response and grows.

This adaptive response is why you need to work out to build muscle. With each workout, you need to put the muscle under more stress than you did the week before. To continue forcing and adaptive response.

For this, you have three options:

1. Increase the weight

2. Increase the number of reps

3. Increase the quality of reps

You have to do at least one of those three options every week to keep building muscle beyond your newbie gains.

And this approach generally works quite well in the beginning, but the more advanced you get, the harder it becomes to continuously overload the muscle without breaking form.

Because we all know that you should always keep a good form, right?

Well, the answer is a bit more nuanced to answer with a simple yes. So let me explain.

The Boats & Logs Approach

Generally, we want to train with a lot of attention to maintaining good form during all sets to maximize hypertrophy in the short term but also the mid to long term.

In the short term, we would simply be missing out on a lot of gains if we trained with bad form. Training with bad form doesn’t necessarily mean that we will get injured; it can also mean that we are simply not targeting the muscle correctly.

Imagine two lifters trying to maximize their biceps:

Lifter 1 does very controlled curls, focusing on engaging the biceps and only using the biceps to move the weight. The 2nd lifter uses a lot of momentum for his reps and heavily involves the back to help with the reps.

I don’t need to tell you that lifter 2 got it wrong. He may move a heavier weight than lifter 1, but since he uses his biceps less to complete the reps, he leaves gains on the table.

In the mid to long term, neglecting good form can cause injuries that are not only painful (and unnecessary) but also prevent muscle building.

But I’ve already hinted that it can sometimes make sense to neglect your form a bit/cheat on your form. So, what do I mean by that?

To explain that, we need to go back to the topic of progressive overload. Let’s remember that progressive overload is a non-negotiable if you want to grow muscle. And in the beginning it’s no big challenge to increase the weights or number of reps you do per exercise with each workout.

But as you get more advanced in the gym, it also becomes increasingly difficult to achieve progressive overload by adding more weight and/or reps every workout.

And this is the point where we can consider sacrificing our form a little bit to ensure that we are progressing and applying progressive overload.

Before we dive deeper into this, here are two important disclaimers:

1. There is a difference between sacrificing our form a bit and applying bad form. This is not something I can teach you via a newsletter, but something you will learn as you advance in the gym. You can neglect form a little bit without risking injuries or completely targeting the wrong muscles. To achieve this, we still want our form to be 80-90% correct, so we stay healthy, but we are giving ourselves a little edge so that we can add these 1-3 additional reps by letting other muscles support.

2. This approach shouldn’t be used by beginners. If you are still new to the gym, there is no need to cheat on form as you should naturally progress quite fast. But more importantly, you should focus on learning the correct form and how to target the muscle correctly. Only as you get more advanced can you get started to adapt your form a bit if necessary.

With that being said, let’s get back into it.

You will sometimes reach small plateaus where you can’t add more weights or reps for 2-3 weeks. In that case, it can be a very good strategy to add 1-3 reps by slightly sacrificing your form to achieve progressive overload. Even if these additional reps may have been of lower quality, they still count.

And for the next workouts, you can focus on improving your form on these last 1-3 reps. Because remember; besides increasing the weights and reps, you can also improve your form to achieve progressive overload.

If you stop making progress in the gym and not sacrificing your form every now and then to push beyond your limits, you are simply not training hard enough. While we would, of course, love to always train with perfect form, this is simply not realistic.

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Stay strong,
Boats & Logs

Disclaimer

This is not Legal, Medical, or Financial advice. Before starting any workout program, diet plan, or supplement protocol, please consult a medical professional. These are the opinions from an AI voice.