How to Use Progressive Overload to Get Stronger
As you get stronger, you can lift all heavy and heavy weights. This is probably obvious. But beginners sometimes overlook the fact that it’s a bit like a chicken and an egg: you get stronger because you lift all the heavy and heavy weights. This is the concept of progressive overload.
How does progressive overload work?
In any area of fitness, such as strength, endurance, or flexibility, you need to challenge your body to adapt and improve. As the National Strength and Conditioning Association explains , it has two parts: the “overload principle” and the “progression principle.”
The principle of overload states that “in order for a person to achieve a certain training adaptation, the body must be stressed by working against a stimulus or load that is greater than what it is accustomed to.” In other words, you have to work harder than your body is used to.
And then the principle of progression allows you to build on this: “In order to consistently achieve the desired training adaptations for a particular activity or skill, the training stimulus must be gradually and continuously increased.”
Or, in simple terms, you will get better if you work harder than usual, and if you want to keep improving, you need to keep working harder than before.
What does it look like in real life?
If you are discouraged by the idea of working harder and harder forever, don’t panic. You will work harder in absolute terms – say, lifting heavier weights – but in relative terms, the difficulty will remain about the same. Your workouts will drop to a level of effort that you might call “hard but doable,” and you will see progress as your performance increases. (The same approach applies to endurance sports. Cyclist Greg Lemond reportedly said, “It doesn’t get any easier, you just go faster.”)
When I started weight training many years ago, the 65 pound bench press was quite a challenge for me. I remember being proud of myself for being able to squeeze out one or two reps with 85 pounds. Now, if I’m going to do a prone workout, I don’t even bother loading that amount onto the barbell. My warm-ups start at 95 pounds and the heavy single is around 150. Those 150 seem to be as hard as they used to be, but it is undoubtedly more weight.
How did I make this progress? Well, I continued to lift weights that seemed heavy to me. Over time, the same weights that were previously difficult began to feel light, and I had to add more and more weight to the bar to get something really heavy. ( We’ve got a guide to find out if you’re lifting “heavy” loads.)
Most of the time, I either followed a program that told me how many pounds to lift, gradually increasing that amount, or a program that told me what level of effort to lift (a concept called RPE) that allowed me to choose the appropriate weight every day. … Following a program usually leads to more progress than simply doing it, but as long as you use the principle of overload and the principle of progression, you will become stronger.
What if I can’t lift more each time?
This is fine! You don’t have to add weight to the bar literally every time you lift.
There is a wide range of weights and repetitions that can be effective for building strength and muscle mass. For example, if I were doing bench press today, I could do sets of 10 reps with 110 pounds, or sets of five reps with 130 pounds, or a few heavy singles at 150 pounds, or any combination of these. If I’m really tired or nervous, I can do 10 rep sets with just 100 pounds. If I feel great, I can do them at 115. That’s what I mean by wide range: This is all hard enough work to get my muscles to adapt and get stronger. (There are reasons why you might choose one of these workouts over others, but we don’t need to go into details at this point.)
What wouldn’t be progressive overload? Well, if I did 10 sets with only the barbell, it wouldn’t help me get stronger. If I had a mini bar set and it peaked at 85 pounds, my strength would stagnate once I got to the point where 85 pounds is no longer a difficult weight.
Even as your strength increases, you don’t need to do more with each workout if you get stronger in the long run and your workouts are still in a range that is challenging for you.
Let’s say you’re doing bicep curls with a 10-pound dumbbell. You can do eight or ten reps with it. Ideally. But the only way to put on weight in the gym is to pick up 15-pound dumbbells. If this weight is too heavy for you, that’s okay. Keep working with the 10-pound cannon and in time you will be ready for the 15-pound.
You can progress on more than one metric
While you probably can’t wait to lift heavier weights, bar weight isn’t the only way to make progress. Sometimes you are unable to put on weight due to equipment problems or simply because your strength is slowly growing. (Even if your progress for newbies was rapid, everyone’s progress slows down at some point.)
But if you’re smart, you probably don’t want to improve on just one particular thing. Many beginners start doing squats, bench presses, and deadlifts in sets of five reps and try to add weight with each workout. But you will become a more versatile athlete if you also know how to lift heavy singles and sets of 10 or 15. Depending on your goals, you can consider barbell squats in addition to back squats, as well as reverse hyper exercises or swings. kettlebells in addition. deadlift. There are ways to improve all of these things, and it is normal for an athlete to simultaneously increase the number of repetitions in additional exercises, increase the weight on the bar in heavy singles, and increase the amount of time he spends in conditioning training.
What is double progression?
One easy way to combine goals is double progression. This means that you are progressing on two things at the same time: repetitions and weight. Here’s what it would look like:
- Your program calls for overhead presses for three sets of “8-12 reps.”
- You choose a weight that you can do 8 reps.
- With each workout, you see if you can add another rep. (Maybe you can do 9, 8 and 8. Then on another day you can do 9, 9 and 9. Soon you will get to 10).
- As soon as you can do sets of 12, 12 and 12 sets with this weight, you move on to a heavier weight.
- Start again with a new weight for sets of 8, 8, and 8 and repeat the process.
A slightly more complex option would be to add sets: after going from 3×8 to 3×12, you can go to 4×12 and 5×12.
In addition to increasing weight, increasing reps or sets, progress can also mean:
- less rest between sets
- do a harder version of the exercise
- increased range of motion (such as deeper squats)
- doing an exercise in slow motion (such as tempo squats where you need three seconds to get down)
The key is to make sure you are moving in a direction that will benefit you. For example, if you can do 20 push-ups, increasing the reps will give you better muscle endurance, while doing fewer reps on heavier exercises (like the bench press) will make you stronger. You can do both, but you should choose the one that means more to you. If your goal in life is to do 100 push-ups, do more reps! But if you want to get stronger, you better put on weight.
Plateau is normal
Finally, now that we’ve discussed what progressive overload looks like. It is important to remember that progression occurs in the long term . Some lifters may not check their 1RM out of competition, which means they only know once or twice a year how much their deadlift has increased. This does not mean that they have not advanced yet. If they execute an effective program, constantly challenging themselves, they still work.
The plateau is a fact of the athlete’s life. Sometimes it takes time to get stronger. Sometimes you need to work on your technique to express your newfound strength. Sometimes factors such as stress, weight loss, or changes in training can make you weaker in the short term, but if you continue to train in a way that challenges you, you will set new PRs pretty soon.