How And When To Increase Weights When Lifting
This is one of the most common questions I get asked as a fitness coach, “When should I increase weights when lifting and by how much?”
Lucky for you, you’re in the right place.
Because that’s probably not the only question on your mind.
You probably have other questions like…
“I think I can lift more weight, but how do I actually know?”
“This is feeling pretty light. I want to increase weights, but I also don’t want to overdo it.”
“I don’t want to increase weights too fast because I’m going to get too bulky!”
And that’s probably not even half of them.
This is why I am here to answer all those questions and more.
So don’t skip around, make sure to read every single word because I don’t want you to miss out on anything.
I want you to have a clear-cut idea of exactly how and when to increase your weights when lifting.
So don’t worry, sit down, get some coffee, and let’s dive in.
Why You Need To Increase Weights When Lifting
Firstly, before we even talk about how and when to increase weights when you’re lifting, we should talk about why it’s necessary.
Because you’re probably thinking, “Can’t I just go to the gym, do my exercises, and get a good muscle burn or pump and call it a day?”
Well, of course, you can. No one is saying otherwise. You can do whatever you want (especially if your goal is to just go to the gym and move your body and stay active).
However, if you want your body to change, then we need to talk about making some changes to your workout program.
Especially if you are looking to build a lean and toned body.
And yes, this applies to both whether you want muscle size or muscle definition.
Your muscles simply get bigger or smaller from their current state. How muscular you want to get is going to be completely up to you depending on how consistently you increase weights over the course of months and years.
And the way to get your muscles to grow in size and/or definition is through a simple concept called progressive overload.
I won’t dive into what progressive overload is too much because I already have covered it in detail in my other article HERE.
Simply put, it’s increasingly challenging your muscles over time, which is what will actually change your body.
We’ll cover this in more detail in this next section.
What Actually Changes Your Body
Let me paint a potential scenario you may be experiencing.
You’re looking to build lean muscle, lose fat, get stronger, and all that good stuff.
(And while yes, nutrition is just as important as the training, we’re not going to cover nutrition here today because I’ve already a whole category of articles about that which you can find HERE.)
You started strength training on your own and you were seeing great results when you first started.
Now, the results seemed to have “leveled off.”
You’re not seeing as much change as when you first started and your sessions are feeling much easier than when you first started.
You’re probably thinking, “There must be something wrong. Do I need a new workout plan?”
No, not so fast. The answer to your problems isn’t to hop onto another workout plan.
Your muscles don’t need to be “confused” to keep making progress.
They just simply new to be continually challenged even further with what you’re currently doing.
You’ve probably heard of the saying “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”
And while I’m not saying that you need to make your gym sessions a near-death experience, you do have to do things that feel uncomfortable and stress your body if you want it to change.
If you really think about it, your body doesn’t give a shit about anything other than its own survival.
So really, this is what the adaptation from progressive overload is.
It makes your body go, “Oh shit, that was tough and could have killed us, we need to adapt so that it doesn’t actually kill us next time.”
And we can see this happening when you first started lifting.
You probably had zero experience lifting weights. So you go into the gym and start lifting weights for the first time.
Your body perceives weight lifting as a “stress” because it’s something it has never done before.
The next few days after your workout, you feel tired and fatigued.
So you recover and let your body rest until your next workout.
The next workouts don’t feel as tough. You may feel stronger, the weights move a bit faster, and you don’t feel as fatigued.
This is because your body moved from the ‘starting ability’ line to the next ‘new ability’ line in the graphic.
So if you want your body to keep making progress? Then you need to continue increasing the stress to push your body to adapt.
We’ll go into how to do this in just a second, but I wanted to bring up this quick side note on why your body hates change.
Why Your Body Doesn’t Want You To Increase Weights When Lifting
Here’s the thing.
The human body and brain are hard-wired to hate change.
It’s why so many people struggle to stick with their New Year’s resolutions.
It’s why so many people stay at the same job they hate for years.
It’s why so many people get stuck in the same routine for a big chunk of their life.
We inherently hate change no matter how beneficial change may seem to us.
And it isn’t your fault, it’s a scientific concept called homeostasis.
Simply put, it’s your body maintaining steady processes and routines so that it can keep things at a constant.
Why? Because this is going to be the easiest and most efficient way to keep you alive.
Your body doesn’t care about how strong you want to get, how much muscle you want to build, or how good you want to look on the beach.
It just cares about doing the same thing and doing the bare minimum to keep your body alive and running.
So what do you need to do if you want your body to change?
You need to challenge it and push yourself because your body isn’t going to simply change itself.
And it is going to be uncomfortable, you’re not going to like it at first, but I can promise you what you’ll get out of it is going to be so rewarding.
Now, let’s get into exactly how we do this.
Do These Things Before You Increase Weights When Lifting
So now that I have you 100% on board with why you need to be increasing your weights when lifting, let’s get into the how.
Master Form First
First and foremost, before you even consider adding weights or reps to your lifts, you must master your form first.
This is because if you’re lifting with poor form, you easily lift more weight or do more reps because you’re compensating with poor movement patterns.
In this case, it doesn’t mean you’re lifting more weight because your muscles got stronger, it’s because you’re cheating the weight up by using other muscles you’re not trying to target or momentum.
If you consistently repeat lifting with bad form you are going to:
- Increase your chances of getting injured (whether from an acute, one time injury or getting a chronic injury like a nagging ache or pain months or years down the road).
- Not be using the correct muscles anyway which kind of defeats the purpose if you’re doing specific exercises to target specific muscles.
This is why I make all of my coaching clients send me form checks.
This ensures that they are doing the exercise effectively and safely.
After all, you wouldn’t want to be following a program only to find out you’ve been doing it wrong and not getting results, or worse off, injuring yourself, right?
We’ve all probably seen it (or done it) at some point. Doing biceps curls with some air humping. Nothing necessarily “bad” about this, just that air humping can be useful in the bedroom but not so much to build your biceps.
So leave the ego at the door, do the exercises properly first and then start adding weight.
Once you establish that, the gains will start piling on because you’re actually loading your muscles properly.
Don’t Listen To Your Body
Okay, I know this sounds counter-intuitive, but hear me out.
I’m not saying that you shouldn’t listen to your body at all.
Of course, if you’re lifting weights at the gym and all of a sudden there’s a sharp pain in your lower back, this doesn’t mean you should keep pushing through because “Austin told me to not listen to my body.”
Here’s what I mean when I say don’t listen to your body.
As we discussed before, your body loves homeostasis. It loves staying the same.
This means that when you try to push yourself to change your body, it’s not going to like that. It’s going to make you feel uncomfortable.
It’s going to tell you things like…
“Wow, are you sure you can do this?”
“That feels way too heavy.”
“Alright, stop there, it’s starting to get tough.”
And if there’s anything that I’ve learned from coaching hundreds of people over the past few years, it’s that everyone is a lot stronger than they think they are.
I have lost count of the number of times where I tell a client to do a certain weight for a certain number of reps and they say “there is absolutely no way I’m doing that.”
Next thing you know, they end up doing it without breaking a sweat and busting out way more reps than I asked for.
And then they look at me all puzzled and I go, “told ya so.”
This is because pushing yourself to change and grow is going to be uncomfortable.
Look, don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying you should drag yourself to the gym while running on 3 hours of sleep, feeling nauseous, and with barely any food in your system.
But what I will say is that you are going to have some days where you feel amazing, strong, and pumped to workout. Other days, you’re going to feel weak, lethargic, and stepping foot into the gym is the last thing you want to do.
And it’s these cases basing your gym performance purely on how you “feel” isn’t going to be the most reliable metric.
So it helps to have a system in place to tell you exactly how to increase your weights when lifting.
Which we will cover next.
How To Increase Weights When Lifting
When To Increase Weights
I know I said that you shouldn’t go much by how you feel, but there are certain scenarios where you can and should.
One of them is how the last 3-4 reps of your last set felt.
If after you completed the set and those last few reps felt like you could have done another 3-4 reps? Then it’s time to pump those numbers up.
If you felt like you struggled to finish those last 3-4 reps with proper form, then stick with that weight until you feel better about your form and it gets a bit easier.
Another good indicator is how fast those last few reps move. If the last few reps felt like you had to push really hard to “grind” them out then you’re probably using a good weight. If you’re moving them quickly with ease then, again, pump those numbers up.
We’ll also go over in just a bit some ways specific methods to know when to increase weights without using your feelings.
How Much To Increase Weights By?
A lot of people tend to think that just because you should be increasing weights, it means you should go to the dumbbell rack and grab the heaviest one you can carry and try to lift it by any means necessary.
When in reality, you don’t need to do that. You just need to a weight that’s challenging enough and slowly work your way up from there.
Something I like to think about is, “you don’t get to mile marker #100 without crossing mile markers #2, 3, 4, 5…and so on and so forth.”
The same goes for lifting weights.
You don’t get to lifting the 50 lb. dumbbells without first being able to lift the 10s, 20s, 30s, etc.
If you’re ever unsure on how much to increase by, it’s always a safer bet to increase by a smaller amount than a bigger amount.
100% of the time, it’s always better to leave a workout feeling, “I could have done more” versus “I regret trying to do so much.”
The latter typically increases your chance of injury and overtraining (and it’s much better to make slower and more continuous progress than it is to make a huge jump and then make zero progress while you’re injured or being forced to recover).
And keep in mind, even if you only increase by 2.5 lbs or 5 lbs, or even do 1 more rep with the same weight, this is still progress because any progress, no matter how small, is still progress nonetheless.
For dumbbells, just move up to the next set on the rack.
For machines, there is usually an increment to add an extra 5-10 lbs.
For barbells, throw on an extra 2.5 or 5 lbs plate on each side.
Methods To Increase Weights When Lifting
Now, I’m sure you’re still wondering, “Okay, but how do I exactly apply this to my own lifting program?”
And I’m going to show you exactly how with two popular methods used by my coaching clients and tons of lifters around the world, too.
Linear Progression
The first method is going to be linear progression.
You apply this by literally doing exactly how it sounds.
You are going to be increasing weight in a linear fashion.
For example, let’s say you are doing a barbell deadlift.
In your first week of working out, you find out you’re able to do 65 lbs for 10 reps (nice job!).
Going forward, if you applied linear progression, you would try to add 5-10 lbs more each time you go into workout.
So your training over the weeks would look something like this.
Week 1 – 65 lbs x 10 reps
Week 2 – 70 lbs x 10 reps
Week 3 – 75 lbs x 10 reps
Week 4 – 80 lbs x 10 reps
And so on and so forth.
This method is highly recommended for beginner lifts and for multi-joint, compound movements like:
- Squats
- Deadlifts
- Bench Presses
- Shoulder Presses
- Chin Ups
- Dips
- Lunges/Split Squats
And so on and so forth.
To reiterate, this is assuming your form is on point so that your muscles are actually being trained properly and getting stronger.
The one thing with linear progression you may find your form slipping from time to time because you’re going to find that your progress with lifting won’t continually increase at the same rate from when you first start to a year or two down the line.
Unfortunately, that’s just the way your body works (otherwise all of us would be walking around deadlifting cars).
So this is when it becomes increasingly important to nail your form down.
Admittedly, we all do it from time to time. It may be a little more body English than usual, using a bit more momentum than we’d like, or cutting the range of motion just a tad short.
This is totally fine once in a while, but you should always be objective and keep yourself in check every few weeks so that you are doing your best to train your muscles properly and safely.
Double Progression
The first time I heard about this method was from Eric Helms’s book The Muscle & Strength Pyramids. (Eric Helms is an incredibly accomplished bodybuilder, strength athlete, coach, and researcher by the way, so check out his stuff if you want to learn way more.)
The double progression model is by far my favorite way to progress. It is something you can use regardless of what experience level you are.
This is because you’re able to apply it to any exercise because it utilizes an increase in reps performed with the same weight, increased weights, or a combination of both.
Let’s see how this works in the real world.
For example, let’s say you are doing the dumbbell bench press with 30 lb dumbbells in the 10-12 rep range (notice the rep range here).
Week 1 – 30 lbs for 10 reps
Week 2 – 30 lbs for 11 reps
Week 3 – 30 lbs for 12 reps
Week 4 – 35 lbs for 10 reps
Week 5 – 35 lbs for 11 reps
And so on and so forth.
In the double progression method, you are working within a rep range rather than shooting for a single rep number.
This allows you to progress easier because you can lift the same weight for more reps (which still counts as a form of progression) rather than increasing the amount of weight you lift.
Because at a certain point, it’s going to get really difficult to keep adding 5-10 lbs to your lifts.
So alternatively, you work within a rep range (10-12 in this example).
Say you can do the dumbbell bench press with 30 lbs for 10 reps. The following workout you’re going to shoot for 30 lbs for 11 reps. Then the next workout you hit 30 lbs for 12 reps.
Once you reach the top end of that rep range, you’re going to increase to the next weight up.
And because the weights are now heavier, you likely aren’t going to be able to get the same number of reps.
So now you stay at that weight and build the reps back up to the top end of the rep range.
And that’s it. Rinse and repeat and let the gains roll in.
The Reality Of Increasing Weights
In an imaginary universe with a different version of you, you’re going to increase weights every single week into infinity and become the strongest being in the universe.
In the real world here on Earth, this isn’t how it works.
I know that in these examples, we talked about being able to increase weights and/or reps every single week or every session, but the reality is that this isn’t going to happen all the time.
Can it happen most of the time? Of course especially if you go into the gym with the mindset that you’re going to push yourself to do more than last time even if it is just one more rep. Remember, any progress no matter how small is still progress.
But just like I mentioned earlier, there are going to be some days where your workouts feel amazing and you make a huge jump. There are going to be other days where your workouts feel sucky, you don’t get enough sleep, or life just gets in the way and your performance goes down.
And this is 100% okay.
Remember, no one ever made a significant amount of progress or lost a significant amount of progress in one week.
This fitness thing takes months and years of consistent work for it to take shape.
So while yes, your mindset should always be to try to do more than last time, but you shouldn’t beat yourself up if it doesn’t always happen.
This is why I constantly say consistency is the biggest key to success.
Not a single one of us can make progress every session, but we can all do our best to try and make progress.
And there is literally no shame in trying. You may end up surprising yourself by making progress even if it “feels” like a shitty day.
Other Forms Of Progress
Another thing to keep in mind is that lifting more weight or doing more reps with the same weight aren’t the only forms of progress when lifting.
These are also amazing forms of progression that have nothing to do with how much weight you’re lifting:
- Doing the lift with better form
- Doing the lift with improved range of motion
- Doing the lift with more control
- Being more explosive with the movement
- Doing more sets
However, in the big picture (over the course of months and years), you should still be seeing some increase in weight being lifted (with good form).
Be “That Guy/Gal” – Keep A Logbook
Have you ever seen that guy or gal at the gym who carries around a notebook and writes things down in between sets?
And you probably laughed at them, right?
Well, now they’re the ones laughing because they’re probably making more gains than you.
This is because as the saying goes, “What gets measured get managed.”
It’s the simple philosophy that when you measure or take note of things, they are much more likely to get managed properly.
Whether that’s your finances, nutrition, or workouts.
When you have to track and log something down, you’re going to be much more aware of it and likely to manage it properly.
Think about it, sure you can say that you’re trying your best to save money, but when you actually take time to write down exactly how much you’re spending and saving?
99% of the time you’re going to realize just how much other unnecessary crap you’re spending your money on.
The same goes for your workouts. If you see yourself lifting the same amount of weight for the past 3 months, you’re probably going to realize “Oh, that’s why I’m not seeing any progress.”
So bring that notebook (or just use the notes app on your phone like I do) and write your lifts down.
Sure, people might look at you funny, but there’s also absolutely nothing funny about having a plan and getting strong as hell.
Final Thoughts
That about covers everything!
I know that realistically, you may not be able to push yourself to do more every single session or week, but the goal is that you at least try to do it.
Because the truth is, you are much, much stronger than you think you are. I would not be saying this if I didn’t truly think so after having worked with hundreds of people.
And it’d be such a shame to see you go into the gym day in and day out only to not realize the true potential that you’re capable of.
So get out of your comfort zone, push yourself, and watch your body completely transform.
There is no growth in comfort, and there is no comfort in growth.
So go lift some heavy stuff and get after it.
Until next time,
-Aus
