When you’re looking to increase your physical fitness, you should see duration, intensity, and novelty as the main tools in your kit to improve performance from the gym.
External factors like sleep, nutrition, hydration are also important, but these occur outside of the gym.
If you’re trying to improve your performance in an exercise, the three broad dimensions that make sense correspond with the tools in your kit.
Duration refers to how long or how many of an exercise you can do. Being able to run 4 miles versus 2 miles is an example of this.
Intensity refers to how physically taxing a given exercise is to do. In the case of running, going at 10 mph, or lifting more weight for the same amount of reps would fall into this category.
Novelty refers to previously unexplored combinations. For instance, you can do muscle ups rather than pull ups or cycle through different exercises that are closely related to the muscles you’re trying to hit.
In order to continually progressively overload, you need to be improving on at least one of these dimensions at any given time, but you probably don’t want to be expanding in all areas at once. Running faster and harder might not be as sustainable, and finding the more niche ways you can beat your records is key to continuing on the journey of improvement.
If you’re constantly adjusting these skills and gradually improving, you’ll notice yourself getting stronger, faster, more adaptive, and more durable. What’s not to love about that?
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