Visualizing Lifting Progression

Introduction

A great benefit of meticulously logging your every workout is that you have the hard data of how you have progressed over time. My notation system evolved over time so it was hard to get the data into a standardized format, but it didn’t take me too much technical effort luckily.

Progressive overload is the name of the game with hypertrophy and while I wouldn’t suggest that you plot this out on a daily basis, I think that it is amazing being able to look back over a longer period of time to see how you’ve improved.

In this article I won’t be going through every single one of my lifts because it would make the article too long but also because I have changed a lot of them over time. I have been at my current routine for quite awhile now and don’t see me switching it up much any time soon, but it does make it harder to plot progress over time.

The numbers might not really make sense but Leg Extension and Preacher Curl are the overall weights for Bilateral, while for Lateral Raise is the Unilateral weight.

Leg Extension

I didn’t do any leg exercises for at least the first six months of my lifting journey but since they’re such large muscles and I had a lot of the coordination/recruitment adaptations I felt like I was able to really quickly progress.

I was doing it bilateral until I maxed out the machine and then moved to doing it unilaterally. Same machine just changed form.

That big deload in the middle-ish was after I miscalculated what half of my max was when initially switching from bilateral to unilateral. I did it for awhile as you can see, but I felt like I was never able to be consistent with the rep range. As a result, I wanted to start at actually half of my max and work my way back up. And it worked! Haven’t deloaded on Leg Extensions since.

Preacher Curl

I’ve changed by Preacher Curl form up multiple times between dumbbells and EZ Bar and between unilateral and bilateral. I know unilateral is better for muscle imbalance but I am too lazy and it is more fun to lift higher number.

I have been slowly chipping away at getting better but definitely tend to have longer plateaus than my other lifts. I bought mini plates for microloading which I think has helped my motivation, but not sure how much it has actually helped my training in reality.

Lateral Raise

This is basically the only exercise that isolates your Lateral Deltoid so I always have wanted to do them, but I had to stop for awhile because it hurt my elbow too much. Most early deloads were due to this fact.

It wasn’t until I learned that you could cuff above the elbow to eliminate the joint that I could do them comfortably. Once I could do them comfortable I rapidly progressed but I think I was probably ego lifting toward higher weights. This is why I chose to deload and see if I could build better form, but it doesn’t seem to have really helped that much.

I like lateral raises but I have been consistently hitting a wall. I am not sure if it is a leverages or fatigue thing or what. Maybe exercise sequencing? I switched from standing to kneeling for stability/preventing cheating reasons, but still feel like not that much has improved.