I want more from my Dumbbell Gain journey

[AF88]

Hi everyone, I have been using Freeletics for 3 years and I’m very happy with it.
I started with bodyweight journey, then as soon as dumbells journey became available, I switched to it with the goal to increase the muscle mass.
Today I’m running my 5th Dumbell Gain journey. I think my body responded very well and I’ve seen good muscle gain so far. I set the app to train 4 days a week, and I can use many weights - up to 40Kg per dumbell.

My goal is to continue increasing muscle mass for at least another year, but now I’m starting to have some doubts. Being at the 5th Journey, with always the same exercises, I have the feeling that I’m reaching a point were my workout sessions are “too easy” and the progression is slowing down.

There are two reasons:

• My average sessions is composed by warmup + 2 or 3 exercise groups + abs + cooldown. Many times, the exercises have no more than 2 or 3 sets. I started feeling them too short and sometimes I even add 1 more set simply because… “I can do it”.
• Speaking about time: the average duration of my workout sessions goes around 45 minutes. I did went to the gym in the past 5-6 years, still doing bodybuilding, and I remember my sessions lasted up to 1 hours and half. The feeling is that, in those gym years, my progresses were faster compared to now.

So, it is not a matter of weights, they are fine for the single set. The problem is the short number of total sets and the general duration of the training session. I’m feeling I need to push harder in order to continue to gain mass.

Is there a way to tell this to the app?
Do you have some suggestions?
Should I go back to a real gym?

Thanks!

[Ben]

Hey @AF88

Sounds like you’ve made great progress over your many iterations of this Journey so a big to you.

I think it’s important to:

1. Consider that an average 45 minute session duration is really within the expected session length of this Training Journey (45-60 minutes).
2. Remember that you should indeed feel, after some sessions that it was relatively “easy”. The Coach does not expect you to reach failure after every session.

That being said, there is probably a point where training with really much larger weights is more appropriate if you wish to continue lifting increasingly heavy weights, and something like Barbell Gain may be more suitable.