Hey guys, today I wanted to share with you a page from my new Muscle Gain Ebook, I hope that you enjoy it! In this small exerpt from the book, I define some of the technical bodybuilding terms that we come across in fitness literature.

Let us start by defining a few important bodybuilding principles. What do terms like progressive overload, principle of reversibility or principle of specificity mean?

• Progressive overload
• Principle of reversibility
• Principle of specificity

1) Progressive overload

Firstly, progressive overload is a principle that describes the increase in training input over time required for muscular hypertrophy.

What that means is that the more stimulus one can handle over time (through increasing variables like weight, repetitions or sets), the stronger their body will be and thus better suited towards becoming developed.

Why is it important to know about progressive overload?

It is important for the reason that most fitness programs utilize the principle in order to create the program that we may be planning on following. It is thus, in any view, important to understand how we will be developing our physiques.

It is not just consistency that will get us fit, it is consistency with an emphasis on handling more weight over time.

We cannot get results by doing random things at the gym nor can we plan on developing our bodies by staying stagnant with the amount of effort (measured by variables like intensity, volume, reps in a given set) that we put into our daily workouts.

2) Principle of reversibility

Let us move onto another important principle, let us discuss the principle of reversibility. The principle of reversibility describes the body’s adaptation to loss of training stimulus.

What it specifically denotes is that once we stop training, our bodies will reverse back to it’s original pre-training baseline (in terms of physique/strength).

This is largely attributed to the lack of stimulus on the muscles resulting in a regression in muscle development.

3) Principle of specificity

The principle of specificity describes the body’s ability to adapt to the type of training that one is performing.

For instance, if one performs several glutes-focussed exercises, one’s body will adapt by growing the glutes muscle and they will also develop strength.

I hope that you enjoyed this read on a few of the key principles of bodybuilding, let me know what you thought of it in the comments below!