Range Is Load

Why progressing range of motion is secretly progressing load, and why so many coaches get stuck

Most coaches scale mobility movements through distance. The amount of elevation to regress a split squat. The amount of elevation to progress a step up. The depth of the torso in a Romanian deadlift, starting at a 45 degree angle and working toward parallel to the floor. The bar position and torso angle in a seated good morning, getting more horizontal over time.

On the surface this looks like one variable: range. You are simply helping the client move through more of it.

But that is not the whole picture, and missing the rest is where progress quietly falls apart.

The hidden variable: range progression is also load progression

When you progress range on most of these movements, you are usually progressing load at the same time, whether you intended to or not.

The reason is the moment arm. The moment arm is the resistance lever the joint has to fight against. As you move into deeper range, the moment arm on the working joints tends to get longer, and a longer lever means more force through the joint for the exact same external weight.

Go deeper in a Romanian deadlift and the lever against your hips and lower back grows. Get more horizontal in a seated good morning and the same bar suddenly demands far more. Raise the step on a step up and you load the knee harder before adding a single dumbbell. The number on the dumbbell did not change, but the effective demand did.

The second factor: deeper range is often weaker range

There is more going on underneath this.

Many mobility movements take you into a more lengthened muscle position as you go deeper, and a more lengthened muscle is generally weaker than the same muscle in its mid range. (The step up is an exception here, but the Romanian deadlift, the seated good morning, and most deep mobility work are not.)

So as you progress depth, two things stack at once:

The muscle is working in a weaker, more lengthened position.
The leverage against it is getting harder because of the growing moment arm.

Why this is where athletes hit a wall

This is the part most coaches and athletes never account for.

If you think of scaling purely as "progressing range," you forget that you are also progressing load in the background. And the two compound.

For every inch deeper you go, you might make the movement roughly 10% harder from the increased range, and another 10% harder from the increased moment arm. A small jump in depth can produce a large jump in actual challenge.

That gap is exactly what leads to:

Compensations, because the body finds a way around a demand it is not ready for.
Jumps that are too quick, which over time feed overuse injuries.
Getting stuck, where the mobility simply stops progressing.

It is why so many people plateau on how deep they can go with clean technique and an extended back in a seated good morning, or how low they can take the torso in a Romanian deadlift. They are not just fighting range. They are fighting a hidden load increase that was never programmed for.

The fix: progress range and load on separate tracks

Once you see that range and load are tied together, the solution becomes clear. You stop letting them increase at the same time.

The strategic pattern is to reintroduce assistance or scale external load every time you go deeper, so the client only faces the new range, not the new range and a load spike at once.

In practice it looks like this:

Build up load at the current range first. For example, work up to 10 to 20% bodyweight at the depth the client already owns.
When you move to the next depth, intentionally scale the load back down.
Rebuild the load in the new range over time.

That deliberate drop in load offsets the load increase that comes baked into the deeper range. The client meets the increased range on its own, without also absorbing the moment arm spike that normally rides along with it. Then you rebuild from there, and repeat.

This is a common and reliable alternate progression: build load, step deeper, scale load back, rebuild, step deeper again.

How this shows up in ATG progressions

This is why you will see ATG split squat progressions taught not just as deeper and deeper elevations, but as deeper elevations with assistance reintroduced at every new level, or with range built up first before going deeper.

It is one of the core mechanisms behind why the system works. Movements are progressed with an understanding of functional biomechanics, so range and load are handled as the linked variables they actually are, rather than treated as one.

The biggest takeaway in a nutshell:

Progressing or scaling range is almost always tied to a connected increase in load. So to progress safely, you strategically reintroduce assistance, or you build load even on the regression first, get comfortable there, let the structures adapt, and only then go deeper.

Coaches who program this way get cleaner, safer, more consistent progress. And athletes applying it to their own training stop hitting the same walls.

Where we go deeper on this

These mechanisms are part of the ATG certification. We cover them regularly on certification calls, and they are built directly into how the movement progressions are taught. The exercise library upgrade releasing in July expands on this further.

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