Progressive Overload: What is it and How do I do it?

Whether you are training for muscular size or athletic performance, progressive overload is one of the most important strategies to remember. In this article, we will discuss progressive overload and how to add it to your training properly.

What is Progressive Overload?

Progressive overload involves gradually increasing the demands of the system. This can be done by increasing things such as weight, repetitions, sets, height, etc. This is used for measuring progress while also driving body adaptations.

Put simply, as you get bigger and stronger you need to make the exercise harder to make up for the difference. you do this by gradually, and methodically, increasing the difficulty of a movement to force adaptations onto the body.

Why use Progressive Overload?

When performing an exercise, your body adapts to the stimuli creating progress. However, the more you do an exercise the more your body will get used to it resulting in slowed progress.

Therefore, by gradually increasing the difficulty of an exercise your body will have to go through the adaptation process again and again resulting in more progress.

Think of it like building a tower. When you build a floor, you need to go even higher to build the next floor, and so on. The more floors you build the more you need to go up to build the next floor.

How do I Follow Progressive Overload?

There are many ways to follow progressive overload and the path you follow depends on your specific goals. A few common examples include:

1. Increasing the Weight

   1. If an exercise is too easy (below an 8/10 difficulty) add more resistance by 5-10 lbs.

2. Increasing the Volume

   1. Instead of increasing the weight of an exercise, you can also increase the sets/reps to add more difficulty.

   
   

3. Others.

   1. Other applications for progressive overload include training for speed, power, plyometrics, etc. During these training applications, the best way to progressive overload is by trying to beat your personal bests. For example, if you jumped 22 inches the last time, try to jump more this time.