Progressive Overload
What is Progressive Overload?
Progressive overload is the principle of gradually increasing your workout stimulus over time to force your body to adapt and grow.
What does Progressive Overload look like in a training program?
While adding weight is one of the most common forms of progressive overload, there are numerous ways to make your training more challenging:
More sets
More reps
More work in less time
Greater ranges of motion
More time under tension
It’s important to note that progressive overload isn’t necessarily going to be a linear process. Stay patient!
Analogy
Think about Progressive Overload like learning math in school.
When you’re 8, you don’t start out with calculus. You start with simple addition and subtraction. At first it’s a hard concept to grasp but then you learn and practice it and it starts to feel easy. The following year you learn multiplication and division. That also feels hard at first, then you practice and learn it and it feels easy. This continues year after year, the content you are learning gets progressively more complex, but YOU also get smarter in response to this progressively challenging stimulus.
It’s the same for weight lifting. We progressively increase the training stimulus over time as your body adapts and gets stronger.
How often should I be increasing weights if I’m trying to implement progressive overload?
There is no strict formula for this. Rates of strength gains will vary based on many factors, so there isn’t a cookie-cutter approach to how frequently you should increase weights.
If you are a beginner and you have mastered your form, you will experience what we call “newbie gains.” You will probably be able to increase weights every week. This is more-so due to neurological adaptations & learning to recruit the muscle fibers that you already have. This is one of the reasons why we describe strength training as a skill.
If you are an intermediate or advanced lifter, your body may take longer to adapt to new training stimulus, or your increases may need to be smaller. Instead of going up 10 lbs, maybe you’re increasing 2.5 lbs. Have patience. Maybe it happens every other week. Maybe it happens a month into your program. The goal here is to try and to make sure it happens EVENTUALLY. As long as you are truly pushing and working towards progressive overload then your body will progress with you to build muscle and increase strength.
Read more about Progressive Overload in these LWL articles
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