Well it happens every 4 years or so. Here we have today to decide who is going to determine our fate, and it’s based on votes. Now today being election day, your mind is probably already racing to try to either refute or support my opinion…but I’m not actually talking about that either.

I’m talking about you.

Yesterday morning, I was chatting with one of my personal training clients during her workout. Her initial goal was simply to look better in a bikini for a Caribbean vacation she has coming up last week of November. Knowing this, I set a course to be able to progress her strength in the rep ranges associated with muscle development in the lifts that would make the biggest difference to how her physique would look in a bikini and the progress needed to be incremental but at the same time rapid.

Why? Because small increments are least likely to set off the governing mechanisms that limit progress.

Now during the conversation, I was pointing out how far her lifts have come in the short time she’s been with me. She started in September and had a goal to maximize her results by the end of November. In the hip thrust (the most direct way of loading the glutes through the longest range of motion while the max contraction is in the shortened position). She started with a calculated 1 rep max of 193lbs, and I had a goal of getting to 300lbs for at least 10 consecutive reps. Yesterday she was only 15lbs away from that goal and she’s doing it for submaximal sets of 15. She’s on track, ahead of schedule actually.

When we were reviewing how much progress she made across the lifts…bench pressing over her starting max for 102 reps in 10mins, squatting with 32lbs over her starting max submaximal sets of 15, overhead pressing with starting 1rep max + 12lbs for 98 reps in 10mins and set to romanian deadlift with her starting max for submaximal reps soon. Let’s just say that is a remarkable amount of progress for a short period of time and there is no way to get those kinds of results without dramatically improving your physique.

So during this conversation, she had joked that it felt just as challenging each time. I don’t think she realized it at the time, but that is a loaded statement that reveals a lot about effective program design.

See the thing is, we all have these governing mechanisms in our body that senses that the load is too much and thus shut the processes down. When you can progress the load, volume and density without tripping up those threat mechanisms, progress can be made not only rapidly, like hers was thus far, but also sustainably. The trick though is that it has to be in that sweet spot of challenging, but not too challenging.

In other words if you can raise the programmatic variables of volume, density and load without a proportional increase of the “discomfort” of the lift, dramatic and sustainable progress is yours for the taking. And the kicker is to work your way up incrementally. Those small changes lead up to big results in a surprisingly short period of time.

And those incremental changes, like habits can be thought of like votes. Every tiny little improvement can be thought of like a vote for your future self. Now the question I have is in 4 years regardless of which presidential candidate we end up with…will you be better than you are today?

If you need help with this, I offer a free trial at my personal training studio on Main Street in Boonton. Just text me at 973 476 5328.

Eric Moss is a personal trainer in Boonton and moonlights as a world-record-holding modern-day professional performing strongman, author, and motivational speaker. In the tradition of the strength performers more common during the turn of the century, he performs feats of strength such as bending steel and breaking chains as part of a live show and travels across the country doing presentations on goal achievement for conferences, corporations, associations, nonprofits, and government entities as well as for schools and universities. His personal training studio is located on Main Street in Boonton New Jersey and is close to Mountain Lakes, Denville, Montville, Butler, and Parsippany New Jersey.