Get stronger faster, break through plateaus, and make your workouts more effective with this proven training principle.
When you first start lifting, it doesn't take much load to induce changes. However, as you get stronger and your body adapts to lifting, your muscles and nervous system require a stronger stimulus to change.
To get stronger, you must constantly challenge yourself. If you do the same workout week after week with the same weight, those exercises will start to feel easy. Your muscles will no longer be forced to adapt.
This is the idea behind progressive overload, a verified training principle that gets you closer to your goals by increasing the difficulty of your workouts safely and progressively over time.
Here, we'll show you how to incorporate progressive overload into your training so that your workouts are as productive and effective as possible.
What is Progressive Overload?
Progressive overload is the deliberate means of applying a training stimulus that exceeds the kinetic chain's current capabilities to elicit optimal physical, physiological, and performance adaptations. In simple terms: the load of your workouts should be gradually and thoughtfully increased over time.
In strength training, this load can be achieved by increasing intensity through resistance, volume through more sets and reps in a workout, or the frequency with which you lift each week.
The goal of progressive overload in programming is to "increase the load placed on the body to continue stimulating adaptation," according to Jorge Grimbaldi, a certified strength and conditioning specialist and fitness programming expert at Speediance.
Why is Progressive Overload effective? When you learn something new, it makes sense to start with easier tasks and progress to more difficult ones as your skill level increases. Think about running: if your goal is to run a marathon, you wouldn't start by running 20 miles in your first workout. You'd start with a shorter, more challenging distance, then increase the distances as your body adapts.
"Our bodies change through signals from the environment," says Noah Anderson, a certified personal trainer. With weightlifting, the main mechanism for signaling change is tension in the form of resistance, he explains. In response to this signal, receptors within muscle cells activate the production of new muscle tissue. However, to elicit this response, the signal needs to be strong enough to challenge your body's current starting point.
How often should you increase weight with progressive overload? The key to successful progressive overload is to increase the load, whether it's through total volume, resistance, or time, at a sustainable rate that helps you make gains over time without causing injuries.
"You want to expose your body to an increasing load level that will help create adaptation, but not so high that it causes a negative reaction in your body," says Grimbaldi. "This is the difference between progressive overload and overtraining."
The National Academy of Sports Medicine recommends increasing your total volume by no more than 10 percent each week. For example, if you're trying to implement progressive overload in your chest press exercise and are currently lifting 20 kg, try lifting 22 kg next week. If you're doing 3 sets of 10 reps in your chest press (30 total reps), aim for 3 sets of 11 reps (33 total reps) next week.
Because we all respond to training and recovery differently, it's also important to pay attention to how you feel during and after your workouts. Grimbaldi explains that if you experience excessive pain or lose motivation to train, you may be overexerting yourself. Some delayed muscle soreness is normal after an intense workout, but if you experience general fatigue, consider taking a step back or slowing down your pace.
On the other hand, if your workouts start to feel less challenging and you feel you can continue beyond your set number of repetitions, it's likely time to increase the intensity of your workout.
How to track Progressive Overload If you don't record your workouts, you risk choosing the same weights every time and not truly applying progressive overload. Therefore, it's important to record the weights, reps, and sets for each exercise so you know how much you lifted last time and if you're progressing.
Record the resistance, number of reps, and number of sets for each exercise, along with notes on how difficult your workouts feel. While you can do this on paper or on your phone, Speediance makes tracking easy by automatically recording your workout data and continuing to challenge you.
Paired Training Speediance training eliminates the difficulties of progressive overload. As Speediance identifies your range of motion, power output, and movement speed improve, it will automatically increase the resistance to a level more appropriate for your current ability. When you train with free weights, you might only have weights that increase by 5 or 10 kg (often more than a 10 percent increase), but Speediance increases the weight in 1 kg increments so you can gradually progress at your own pace.
At Speediance, multi-week programs incorporate progressive overload so you can focus solely on participation. Depending on the level and goal of the program you choose, reps or sets may increase as the weeks progress, or new and more challenging exercises may be introduced in later weeks. In programs where exercises and rep schemes remain consistent, you will still increase your volume week after week, with Speediance automatically increasing resistance to match your newfound strength. These increases are kept within the safe range of 10 percent per week to set you up for success.
