80% more strongness

For the past six months or so I have been doing the same workout regimen.  In March I realized that I had been adding too much to my routine and it was really starting to cause damage so I stopped increasing weights and reps and just did the same thing over and over.  I acclimatized, and eventually it became easy, but I never got back into the pattern of constantly pushing myself to do more.  After coming back from WBC this year it hurt to get back into my routine because 10 days off caused me to lose some strength.

I have realized that the hurt and soreness I was feeling back in August as I built myself back up is something I miss.  Probably not the pain itself, but the sense of improvement, of becoming more through suffering and difficulty, has a lot of appeal. 

I decided that I need a new goal, and that goal is to increase my lifts by 80% by the end of the year.  I am not trying to increase my strength 80% in that timeframe (if that were even possible, which I doubt, it would require massive amounts of steriods); rather, I want to increase the total number of reps per day by 80%.  That should naturally lead to strength increases, but I don't know how much.

Even then 80% sounds like a ton considering I already put in 40 minutes a day of lifting.  However, the first thing I am doing is going up from doing a three day routine where I do 1 hour of lifting for 2 days then rest the third day, to just lifting every single day for an hour.  That is a flat 50% increase, so I will only need to raise my actual reps by 20% over current values in order to achieve an overall 80% increase.  Hopefully by next summer I can get up to a full 100% increase over the previous year.

Over the past couple weeks I have put this No Rest Ever theory to the test and it has actually been a lot easier than I ever expected.  I even find that the individual sessions are easier than before for some reason.  It sure eats up a lot of my time but my body seems perfectly capable of sustaining this level of output.  I am feeling that background pain in my muscles though, which tells me I am getting closer to my limits.

It seems weird but I think that low level pain is a big motivator.  If my routine is easy it hardly seems worth doing; somehow knowing that I am really going to the maximum makes putting in the time feel worthwhile.  It isn't how strong I am - because honestly, my life is barely any different - but rather the process of improvement and the struggle therein that is the thing I want.

Time to get HUGE!