A friend of mine on Twitter, who goes by the name, JHerbert13, is reading "Muscle, Smoke, & Mirrors" (a book I, along with others, recommended).
He made the following observation:
"In 1930, Alan Calvert talked about the "double progressive method".
A slow progression model where you started at 5 reps, added one rep every 3 workouts and added weight when you got to 10 reps.
Yet you panic when you don't progress every session." (End of his post)
I like his take here, and I'll add my own context to his statement by saying that it's amazing how complicated people make progressive overload. Back in the day they basically just took a slow, scheduled double progression route. They stayed pretty sub-maximal early on in a training cycle until the last few sessions, where the effort had to be higher to eek out all reps for all sets.
This also looks an awful lot like what we now call wave periodization – increase intensity progressively until a peak, then add load, back off the reps, and slowly rebuild volume.
Old school physical culturists also loved "step progression." This is where you stick with 1 weight for several sessions for a given rep range, then increase weight after 4-8 sessions. The idea of the "step" is to OWN the weight you're using before adding more load. So it's almost the reverse of wave loading.
Step loading is hardest at the beginning of the cycle (with a relatively heavy weight) while wave loading is hardest at the end of the cycle (when you're working closer to failure with a given weight by getting more reps).
Both stress the idea of not going balls to the wall every session.
It's an interesting contradiction to what we typically do in training now.
If you're frustrated with your training or progress, need the advice of old time lifters. Be patient and take time to really practice reps with a moderate weight until that moderate weight becomes fairly light.
Have a good day!
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