The Unnoticed Decline

Your favorite clothes are slowly becoming too small. Your energy levels have been decreasing since you can remember. You used to feel bad after you ate, but now you feel bad all day. Your once vibrant personality has whittled away as your self-confidence has diminished due to years of physical decline.

This is aging- So you’re told.

That slight creep of physical and mental decay that you are told to expect as you get older, no one mentioned how it sneaks up on you. You wake up one day and you're overweight, low energy, and unhappy.

How did this happen?

The Awakening

It didn’t happen overnight. Your daily habits slowly got you to where you are now. You are in a natural state of decay due to actions that lead to a negative response. If you eat slightly more calories than you burn each day, over a year or two, that can compound into significant fat gain. Enough to impact your physical appearance. Combine weight gain with an increasingly more sedentary lifestyle and you also have the ingredients for energy loss. Then, all it takes is one look in the mirror after a few years of neglect to destroy your self-confidence.

Small daily habits add up to how you look and feel.

But there is a cure!

The Power of Progressive Overload

The simple solution to your health decline is to reverse the decay by becoming conscious of the issue and taking control of your health, one small change at a time.

There are only a few steps to follow to set this in motion:

1. Recognize you are in a state of decay and be willing to change.

2. Apply progressive overload in the gym to become more fit gradually, instead of becoming less fit gradually.

3. Apply progressive overload with nutrition, and gradually tweak your diet to a healthier version and become healthier over time, instead of unhealthier over time.

That’s it. Three steps.

Number one is fairly self-explanatory. You must first recognize that without intentional action to reverse decay, you will get unhealthier over time. Also, you must be willing to change before applying principles of progressive overload to improve your life, otherwise, the principles will not work. Knowledge is not action, and action is required in this case.

Progressive overload as a principle is essentially the exact opposite of what most people do as they age. Instead of letting time make you unhealthy through neglect, you can use time to make yourself healthy through intentional action.

Each day spent on the couch makes you slightly weaker over time.

vs.

Each day spent in the gym makes you slightly stronger over time.

Progressive overload is the slight increase in demands of your body, and slight improvement of nutrition, over time, in order to continuously improve your life. The alternative is a decreasing quality of life.

Gym Strategies

At a more micro level, the traditional implementation of progressive overload is used as a form of improvement in the gym. Going to the gym each day is a great start at fighting health decline, but without continuing to improve while in the gym, you will hit a wall in progress. To counter this, you will need to apply progressive overload to your exercise and get a bit more capable each workout.

On day one, you might go to the gym and do a set of squats with the bar as the weight. This is perfectly adequate since going from no exercise to some exercise is progressive overload. If by day seven (or any amount of time later) in the gym, you are still doing just the bar for weight, you are likely no longer challenged by the weight. The weight that was once challenging but will no longer progress you after a short duration of using that specific weight.

That is not to say, that going to the gym is no longer valuable if you don’t improve beyond day one, but the goal should be for continuous improvement. This is the beauty of fitness; you can always improve in some way. Progressive overload is the total combination of the slight improvements you are making toward your goals. In the gym, it comes in many different forms:

• Increasing the weight used for exercises.

• Increasing the number of reps you do.

• Increasing the number of sets you do.

• Increasing the number of exercises you do.

• Increasing the distance or speed at which you do cardio.

Here is a simplified version of what progressive overload would look like with weight as a means of improvement:

Day one squat: 45 lbs for 8 reps.

Day seven squat: 50 lbs for 8 reps.

Day 14 squat: 55 lbs for 8 reps.

By increasing the weight you use for an exercise, the muscles used to move the weight get stronger and larger over time.

There are countless ways to improve in the gym, but these are the most traditional because they are easy to track and are easily incremented. For each workout in the gym, you will attempt to do more weight, reps, sets, exercises, distance, or speed. That’s it!

By doing this you will be reversing the natural state of decay that most people experience as time goes on. You will consistently be getting stronger and more fit instead of weaker and less fit.

Nutritional Tactics

Similar progressive actions can be applied to nutrition:

• Eat slightly fewer calories each day until you begin losing fat.

• Replace a usual unhealthy snack with a nutritious snack.

• Eat an extra serving of vegetables with dinner.

Each one of these small changes matter and will compound into a healthier you.

Say you start eating nuts instead of the usual bags of chips for a snack. The improved nutrition of the nuts may give you more energy later into the day. Having more energy may be just enough to get you to the gym that night after work. You get to the gym and make progress there as well, since the alternative was no gym, and no progress. This is compounding positive change due to a conscious modification of your behavior.

Incremental improvements lead to more improvements!

Again, there are countless ways to improve, and they can all be as slight as the ones mentioned. The idea is to make tiny adjustments over and over again until you are living the healthy, fit life that you dream of. By the time you get there, these improvements will have become your norm, and you will likely not even have to think about it anymore. Much like when you hardly consider your detrimental actions when you are in a state of decay.

Continuous Improvement Drives Change

Maybe you are overwhelmed by the idea of progressive overload. That's okay. It’s a fairly novel idea for many people who haven’t become conscious of the impact of small actions done over a long period. Here is a summary that may help:

1. You are in a constant state of physical and mental decay unless you act to reverse it.

2. You reverse this decay by applying slight positive changes to your fitness and nutrition each day.

3. Over time, you become more fit and healthy, which further drives your ability to continue to improve, leading to compounding positive change in your life.

Where do you start?

1. Choose a routine that fits in your life and consists mostly of compound exercises.

2. Choose a form of progressive overload (slight improvement) and apply it to the exercises in the routine.

3. Each day try to improve your diet in a small way.

Do this over a long period and you will achieve greatness. Just as it takes most people years to even notice their health decline, it will take an extended amount of time to see massive improvements in your health. Fortunately, though, the positive feeling of improving your life will feel good immediately.

Just keep improving.