In the 1932 book, “The Wisdom of the Body,” Walter Bradford Cannon coined the term “homeostasis” to describe the phenomena in which your body regulates itself in an attempt to maintain a specific body environment. When you get hot, you sweat to cool off. When you get cold, you shiver to warm up. Homeostatic control can influence almost every aspect of your body, including metabolic functions like hormone production, oxygen levels, blood glucose, and your metabolic rate, to name a few.
When you begin strength training, your body begins to shift what it considers "normal." Your mitochondria release more energy in the presence of less oxygen. Your heart function improves. Your muscles, connective tissues, and bones strengthen over time, and your body reduces fat mass while increasing muscle mass. Many of us want to continue changing our homeostatic norms until we reach a specific goal. The best way to do that is with progressive overload.
Progressive overload is the process of increasing the volume (reps/sets), workload (weight), or intensity (+/- time) of a training program over time. If you do not incorporate progressive overload into your training, your body adapts to the stress imposed by a particular training routine and no longer continues to make gains.
The most common stumbling block to maintaining progressive overload is that many of us neglect to record our workouts in a journal or workout log. Very few of us can remember every weight amount and rep scheme from a week ago, which is why logging your workouts is essential to maintaining progressive overload. If you had no idea what you could lift the last time you trained, you would have no way of knowing what you need to lift to increase those amounts.
But logging six different exercises a day, four days a week, with varying rep schemes and weight amounts, after every workout creates a ton of data to keep track of. This was one of the main reasons The Lift League implemented a scoring system.
The Lift League scoring system generates a single numerical value per exercise, allowing you to easily see that you are progressing from one workout to the next. The Lift League uses an average of your individual exercise scores as the score for the entire workout. Every time you increase your workload, your score goes up. When your score goes up, you progressively overload your training.
If you want to see how the scoring system can help your training, create an account and grab your free program.