If you want to build muscle and get stronger, there is one key term you should definitely know: progressive overload. Understanding progressive overload and how to achieve it is critical to your ability to reach your fitness goals.
Honestly, it’s not very complicated, and you likely incorporate elements of this philosophy into your training already. However, by explicitly defining it and acknowledging it’s importance, it’ll ensure that you continue to consciously implement it into your routine.
What Is Progressive Overload?
Progressive overload is the concept of gradually increasing the difficulty of your training. This is a fundamental principle behind how your muscles get bigger and how your body gets stronger.
Like I said, it’s pretty simple to understand: you need to continue increasing the intensity of your workouts if you want to continue making progress. But just how important is it, and can you attain muscle growth without it? Well frankly, if you aren’t implementing progressive overload in some way, your progression will eventually come to a halt.
Muscle growth occurs when the body is placed under external stress that it’s not used to handling. Weightlifting and other forms of resistance training are some of the best ways to create this kind of stress. However, if you always continue to do the exact same thing in the gym, your body will eventually build itself up to the point at which it can comfortably execute the necessary movements, but it won’t have any reason to continue getting stronger.
Therefore, as your muscles develop and are capable of greater exertion, you need to keep challenging them to continue stimulating them.
How to Achieve Progressive Overload
Now that we understand the significance of constantly progressing our workouts, what does that mean in practice? As I’ve said, it’s all about increasing the amount of stress on your muscles so they’re forced into greater exertion. To do this, there are quite a few methods you can implement.
Increase the Weight
One of the most obvious ways to achieve progressive overload is to gradually increase the weight and resistance you train with. Continuing to lift heavier weights will certainly induce increasing levels of tension and stress in your muscles.
However, this will only happen if you do it correctly. When you try to increase weight too quickly and prioritize it too much, you might start to sacrifice other aspects of the exercise, such as form and technique. This is a mistake known as ego lifting, and should be avoided as it can end up hurting your long-term progress.
Do More Reps
If you want to intensify your workouts without being at risk of ego lifting, another approach is to do more reps within a set of an exercise. This will allow you to exert your muscles to a greater degree with every set without changing how much weight you’re lifting. Even if you go for an additional rep but aren’t able to fully complete it, the effort you put into attempting it is still going to increase the amount of stress you place on your body.
Do More Sets
If doing more reps per set is an effective method, it only makes sense that doing more sets per exercise is as well. For the best results, this assumes that you were previously already training to or close to failure with every set, so pushing yourself to do another set after your muscles are already thoroughly depleted is a great way to put additional stress on your body, even if you can’t do as many reps as you were doing in your previous sets.
It should be noted, though, that your goal shouldn’t be to endlessly increase the number of sets you do for a single exercise. For a given muscle, you should be doing between 10-25 total working sets per week for that muscle to grow. Once you’re past that, the work you do begins to turn into “junk volume”. This means it won’t contribute much to further growth, and will instead just increase soreness and delay recovery.
Other Ways to Achieve Progressive Overload
All the methods I’ve described above achieve progressive overload by increasing total training volume, In other words, you exert your muscles more by doing more work throughout the course of a training session. There are, however, also ways to make your workout more challenging without increasing the amount of lifting you need to do.
Increase Time under Tension
As the name suggests, this is how long your muscles are placed under stress during a rep of an exercise, and is a measure of the amount of time it takes to complete a full rep. You can increase the intensity of an exercise by increasing time under tension. This usually involves using a slower, more controlled pace throughout the entire movement and including a brief pause at the peak of the rep.
Decrease Rest between Sets
Typically, 2-3 minutes of rest between sets is enough for people to regain their energy. However, you can increase the difficulty of an exercise by decreasing the amount of rest you take between sets. Each successive set becomes harder because you end up carrying some amount of fatigue into it while still trying to perform the same number of reps.
“Good Enough” Isn’t Enough
Every time you go to the gym, you should be striving to do more than you could the last time, and that’s exactly what progressive overload is all about. To be fair, incremental progress won’t actually happen on a daily basis, and the fact is that the more experienced you are as a lifter, the longer it’s going to take to see these kinds of marginal improvements. Nevertheless, that’s the kind of mentality you need to have if you want to build muscle and gain strength over time.
While this might sound intimidating, the good news is that progressive overload doesn’t have to come in the form of anything drastic or significant. Even if you’re just able to do one additional rep on your last set or slightly increase the weight on only your first set, that’s more than you were previously able to do, and as a result, that’s progress that you should be very proud of.
