Today, I have another great article for you. It is from the Garage Warrior, Tyler. It’s Why you MUST use Progressions. Enjoy the article.
Also, one more thing. Watch for an exciting announcement that I have for you this Saturday. I will have more details on it very soon.
Take it away, Tyler!
Rick Kaselj, MS
Hey there! Tyler here from GarageWarrior.com and CT-50.com. I made this special video for Rick after a recent Skype call. We were talking a lot about progressions, and I wanted to educate you on why progressions are so important regardless of who you are.
Whether you are a man or woman, young or old, you need to use progressions in your workouts. Even if you are a trainer, you need to use these with your clients to accelerate their results. They help you build muscle, tone up and burn fat, all simultaneously because you are challenging the movement pattern, so you recruit more muscle fibers, coordinate more and force your body to adapt and change.
Why You MUST Use Progressions
Let’s get started. I am going to use a lecture format here. It’s only going to take 2 or 3 minutes to show you exactly what movement progressions and regressions are, so you can start using them today in your workouts.
Alright! To start, we have to explain movement progressions and regressions. Let’s start with a simple exercise like the Push-Up. Now, a lot of workouts contain exercises like the push-up in them, but many people out there find push-ups either too easy or too challenging to accomplish with a good form. If it’s too challenging and you start decreasing your range of motion, sacrificing your core integrity, you may get injured, and you will not progress. Suppose they are too easy for you and you are not sophisticating the movement. In that case, you are simply not going to recruit the number of muscle fibers you potentially could, and you are shooting yourself in the foot as far as getting the best results possible.
What do you do if you are currently outside of the spectrum of push-ups?
Let’s say you are too advanced and push-ups are too easy, or conversely, let’s say that they are too hard. You are still a beginner and can’t get through your whole push-up with perfect form. Let’s break this apart and do progressions and regressions for a basic exercise like the push-up.
1. Kneeling Push Up
Let’s start with regressions first. If you can’t do a push-up, the obvious choice to do a perfect push-up with a good form is to decrease the level and do kneeling push-ups. Once you perfect the form of kneeling push-ups, you can escalate yourself back up to doing regular push-ups and building strength.
Kneeling Push Up
But what about the people who might not even be able to do a full chest-to-ground kneeling push-up? Let’s take this regression back even further to ensure you are making the same movement pattern as the push-up, but it’s appropriate for you. Let’s drop the kneeling push-up down to do a wall push-up.
2. Wall Push Up
Wall Push Up
As you can see, the wall push-up is an extremely easy exercise that anybody, even your 90-year-old grandma, can do. The secret is once you start to get good at the wall push-up, once you learn that perfect form, how to move your body properly, how to recruit your chest, your lats, your core, your glutes, your quads while you are doing those wall push-ups, then you can escalate yourself to kneeling push-ups. You can escalate yourself to regular push-ups, and once you get good at the regular push up, then you can progress your push-ups all along the way, recruiting more muscle fibers so you can build muscle tone and reduce fat at the same time by sending loud and clear adaptation signals to your body.
3. Clap Push Up
Clap Push Up
What is a progression to a push-up? A simple one I like to use is the Clap Push Up. Increasing speed, force, timing, and coordination will make this exercise significantly more difficult. The coolest part about this is, let’s say you can do 20 or 30 push-ups well, and you are advanced enough to move on to clap push-ups. Guess what is going to happen. You will only be able to do 15 or 20 of these. But let’s say you get good at clap push-ups, and they become significantly easier. Where can you go from there? We can sophisticate the movement even further.
4. Rings or Lateral Push Up
Rings or Lateral Push Up
We can do push-ups on the Rings or a Lateral Explosive push-up. Both are excellent progressions from the traditional clap push-up that recruit more muscle fibers and make completing this exercise more challenging. This is the way a movement progression works. We start beginners out with the most basic exercise. As they get better, we move them through the line of exercises. Forget about calories in, forget about reps, forget about volume, forget about all that stuff!
- Once you are good at the wall, push up
- Go to the kneeling push up
- Once you are good enough here, go to the push-up
- Once you are good at the push-up, go to the clap push up
- Once you are good at the clap push-up, go to lateral explosive push-up or ring push up
As you can see, each exercise recruits more muscle fibers, which makes it more challenging, and delivers better results.
Instead of thinking to yourself, I have to do volume or intensity or intervals, what you should be focusing on is going from point A to B to C to D to E and so on, and this will send loud and clear fat burning, muscle toning and body transformation signals that you cannot do with any other type of exercise. It’s all about creating progression, and by sophisticating the complexity of the movement, you will get better results than any other exercise method.
Now, if this sounds too complicated for you, I do have a system called CT-50, as you can see on my shirt. And what I did for you is take all the exercise patterns I use with my private clients and segment them into five different movement progression levels just like this, and each level has ten follow-along video workouts. All you have to do is press play and follow along, and you will start getting the body transformation results you can expect from progressive movement training.
I hope you guys enjoyed this video. And I hope you check out CT-50 and start using progressive movement in your workouts. So you can look, feel and perform your best. Thanks for watching!
Tyler Bramlett
