Progressive Overload: Why it’s Important and How it Can be Applied to Your Training Program.
If you follow even one semi-educated coach or influencer on social media, it’s likely that you have stumbled across the term “progressive overload” and how important it is for building muscle and changing the shape of your body.
Which is 100000% true.
So, what IS progressive overload and how can it be applied in your training program so YOU can successfully build muscle for a strong, sexy, toned shape?
Let’s dive right in!
Progressive Overload - What is it?
In short, progressive overload is the process of gradually and consistently increasing the demand put on your muscles to force them to adapt and grow. It is this adaptation that helps to improve muscle strength, endurance, and size.
If you don’t increase the demand placed on your muscles, they have absolutely no reason to grow/adapt/strengthen. These adaptations do not happen overnight, and you won’t be able to drastically progress every single workout. It often takes weeks to get your muscles acclimated to what you’re currently asking them to do, and only then can you increase the demands and keep going.
This is why, when looking for (or writing) a training program, you should ensure the format is the same for 4-6 weeks at a time. If you switch up your training week to week, your muscles never have the chance to adapt to and overcome the challenges from the previous week. That and you constantly have to re-familiarize yourself with different movement patterns, rep schemes, rest times etc.
Your muscles DO NOT need to be “confused” and if you get bored easily, it is likely that you are not pushing yourself hard enough in your lifts.
Which is why, despite showing up and training consistently, you may not be seeing the desired changes in your physique.
Every time you step in the gym you should be aiming to improve upon what you did the week before.
It’s you vs. you - always.
Go into each session with that mindset and you’ll start making progress towards the strong, sexy, capable, badass body you’ve been longing to achieve.
What Does Progressive Overload Look Like in Training?
Increasing Resistance
One of the most commonly used approaches is to simply focus on increasing the resistance you are using week to week. The increase in resistance places a larger demand on your muscles, requiring them to adapt and overcome the new challenge being placed on them. It is through this adaptation that you will build additional muscle tissue and continue to get stronger.
For example, if you squat 80 lbs for 3 sets of 8 during week one of your program and 90 lbs for 3 sets of 8 during week two, you have successfully applied the principle of progressive overload through increasing the resistance used.
HOWEVER, it is important to remember that as you get stronger and begin to use heavier resistances more frequently, it will become increasingly harder for you to continue to add even more resistance over time.
In the first 6 - 12 months of following a structured program and learning to lift intentionally you will likely see more drastic increases in resistance than you will in the years that follow.
This is due to the fact that as a beginner your body is not yet used to recruiting the maximal range of muscle fibers you have available. The more consistently you lift, the better your body becomes at recruiting more of those muscle fibers, which is why you’ll experience pretty significant strength increases early on.
As you become more consistent and advanced in training and your body becomes more capable of recruiting as many fibers as possible in each lift, you start to reach an upper limit of strength for those fibers and it will take longer to see increases in resistance.
Think of it like working on a project yourself vs. with a group. As you initially add more members to the group you’ll be able to get more done at a faster rate than before. However, once your group reaches its max amount of participants the pace at which your group can work levels off and will require more time, effort, and nuance to see even small increases in progress over time.
So, what can you do to progressively overload if you are struggling to increase resistance?
Increasing Volume
In addition to increasing resistance, increasing volume is another extremely common way to progressively overload in training.
This technique involves increasing the total load lifted by utilizing the same resistance for an additional amount of sets or reps.
For example, if you were to squat the same 3 sets for 8 reps at 80 lbs during week one of your program and bump up to 3 sets for 10 reps at 80 lbs during week two, then you’ll have progressively overloaded through increasing the total volume of load used in those three sets.
Week 1: 80 x 8 x 3 = 1920
Week 2: 80 x 10 x 3 = 2400
The same would be true if you were to instead bump up to 4 sets of 8 at 80 lbs vs. the initial 3 sets of 8.
Week 1: 80 x 8 x 3 = 1920
Week 2: 80 x 8 x 4 = 2560
When choosing to manipulate volume it is important to take into consideration the stimulus you are wanting to achieve, the amount of time you have available, and what you are able to recover from.
If aiming for hypertrophy where reps generally range from 8-12, it would not necessarily be beneficial to the stimulus to continue to increase reps if you’ve already been performing sets of 12 to 15 or beyond as you would be dipping into a more metabolic stimulus.
If you do not have an endless amount of time to dedicate to training then increasing sets from 3 to 4 to 5 as you progress may not be the best option as your training sessions will get significantly longer with adequate rest periods.
And if you are already struggling to recover between training sessions, increasing the volume will actually do more harm than good in that you are not going to be able to progress what you cannot recover from.
So, while increasing volume is a solid tactic to use, there is such a thing as JUNK VOLUME and continuing to simply do MORE can end up hurting progress more than helping.
Which is why there are quite a few more tools we can use to progressively overload.
Improving Execution
Improving your execution of an exercise is one of the most under celebrated ways to progressively overload; a result of not being able to quantify and share this information.
However, it is one of, if not the, most important ways in which you CAN progressively overload SAFELY and EFFECTIVELY.
Because it does not matter how much you can lift if you get hurt or are not executing an exercise in a way that creates the desired amount of tension in the target muscle group.
Like training your lower back instead of your glutes in an RDL or building your traps instead of your delts with a lateral raise.
Improving your execution so that you are creating and maintaining tension where desired is how you will recruit the appropriate muscle fibers required to adapt and grow THAT muscle.
So, before you start stacking weight on the bar or adding reps to your sets, make sure you have execution down FIRST.
Increasing Time Under Tension
Another great tool to use if you are stuck between resistances or simply don’t have a heavier resistance available to you is to manipulate tempo and increase time under tension.
This looks like spending more time where the exercise is hardest.
Some common examples of this in practice are:
Pausing at the bottom of a squat
Pausing at the top of a leg extension
Extending the amount of time it takes to lower DB’s in a curl
Extension the amount of time it take to return to the top of a seated leg extension
In each of those examples, you would be spending more time where you are creating the most tension in the target muscle group which will increase fatigue and motor unit recruitment without having to increase resistance.
Which is why this is a great technique for those who have limited resistance available to them or are unable to make the jump from one to the next (ex. from 5 to 10 lbs in lateral raises) just yet.
Decreasing Rest Times
Another way to progressively overload is to keep sets, reps, and resistance the same while decreasing the rest taken between sets.
This gives your muscles less opportunity to recover, and increases fatigue set to set.
For example, you can program 3 sets of 8 shoulder presses with 90 seconds rest between sets for 4-6 weeks then decrease rest to 60-75 seconds and aim to continue to use the same resistance with increased fatigue.
This again, can be a great tool to use for those who may not have access to heavier resistances, are stuck between resistances, or simply do not have a lot of time to dedicate to training and increasing the number of sets would not be practical.
However, similar to that of increasing reps beyond that of a hypertrophy stimulus, you can also decrease rest so much that you dip into more metabolic styles of training as well. Which is important to keep in mind when manipulating this variable. A general rule of thumb to use would be no less than 45 - 60 seconds for accessories and 60-75 seconds for compound exercises.
Adding Intensifiers
The last tool for progressive overload we’ll cover is the use of intensifiers in your training program. While the options for this are quite vast some of the most common are:
Supersets & Trisets
Drop sets
Partial reps
Pre and Post Exhaust Methods
Each of these methods could use a post of their own as they can get quite complex in design.
However, they can be used for anyone regardless of training experience so long as they are programmed correctly.
Some examples include:
A superset of the heel elevated goblet squat and leg extension to target both the short and lengthened position of the quads at once.
A lateral raise drop set in which you are completing 10 reps of a challenging resistance and immediately dropping to a lighter resistance and taking reps to failure.
Adding a ¼ rep in at the bottom of a leg press to spend more time where that exercise is the hardest.
Programming a lateral raise before a shoulder press to pre exhaust the delts for those training at home who may not have a resistance challenging enough for the shoulder press at full strength.
Bringing it All Together
All of these tools can be used in combination with each other to help you establish progressive overload in your program.
Just remember that it is important to take into consideration the stimulus you are trying to achieve, the time you have available for training, the equipment you have access to, and what your body is able to recover from.
And if you have someone (like myself) writing your programs for you, you don’t have to worry about anything other than perfecting your execution of the exercises and doing what you can to push yourself and improve week to week!
If you can do that, then you’ll always be taking steps towards building the strong, sexy, toned, badass body of your dreams!
