It will take you twice as long to hit the wall, but you will end up roughly at the same place. For that method to have a chance of working well, IMHO you need to give the chance to your body to adapt to the load. And that requires about 5-8 workouts with the same weight. So if you do that 5 days a week (but that means that you will have to reduce the volume for exercises for the pressing muscles) and keeping the same weight for the 5 sessions, then increasing it, it might work to give you much better results. It might be even better to do 4 weekly sessions per week and sticking with the same weight for 2 weeks (8 sessions), or 3 weekly sessions for 3 weeks.
JUST BECAUSE YOU DID ONE WORKOUT WITH A WEIGHT DOESN’T MEAN THAT YOUR BODY IS FULLY ADAPTATED TO IT.
The 8 sets of 2-3 reps in the article used the Doug Hepburn progression model.
WORKOUT 1: 1 x 3, 7 x 2
WORKOUT 2: 2 x 3, 6 x 2
WORKOUT 3: 3 X 3, 5 X 2
WORKOUT 4: 4 X 3, 4 X 2
WORKOUT 5: 5 X 3, 3 X 2
WORKOUT 6: 6 X 3, 2 X 2
WORKOUT 7: 7 X 3, 1 X 2
WORKOUT 8: 8 X 3
THEN you can add weight and go back to 1 x 2, 7 x 3
For linear progression to work, the progression needs to be gradual enough that your body adapts to the load before being asked to progress again. And it’s not just a matter of making small jumps but of doing a lot of sessions with the same weight for the body to adapt to it (not only muscles but tendons, nervous system, etc.)
I’ll try to explain it simply:
At the moment your body has a certain strength potential. But it can’t yet fulfill it because your body wont let you use it (your protective mechanisms like the Golgi Tendon Organs are not allowing you to, for your own “safety”). So if you max is currently 300lbs your potential might be 320lbs (just an example).
Now, regardless of what progression model you use, provided that you do not do idiotic things you’ll get to 320, because you already have the potential to do it… it’s just a matter of training your body to let you use the strength you have.
So simply adding 2.5obs per week (or even 5lbs per week) will work to get you to around 255lbs for 3 reps, which would be 80% of 320lbs, but not much more than that.
To reach a much higher level you must “raise your potential”.
This is done either by adding a lot of muscle mass or by allowing your body to fully adapt to a load, by sticking to the same weight for many sessions.
If at every session you add weight you never give your body a chance to acclimate. As such your “potential” doesn’t really go up… only your capacity to use a greater amount of that potential.
To raise your potential you need acclimatation, and that requires asking your body to do a certain task many time; 6-8 workouts. Not that this is true mostly with neural based training (lower reps)… training based on intermediate or higher reps require different adaptations and do not respond to the same model.
I’ll use an analogy. Just because you sparred one time with an amateur boxer and survived doesn’t mean that you are ready to go in the ring with a pro. You need to do many sparring sessions, until you always kick the amateur’s ass before thinking about graduating to a better opponent.
Each workout with a weight is preparation for the next weight; the more you dominate a weight, the easier the transition will be. Of course by using 2.5lbs jumps you might not actually realize that with every workout you are less and less prepared for the next weight, until you finally hit the wall.
