When we sign up for a gym membership or undertake a new exercise routine, we are most likely hoping to achieve certain goals. However, if it feels like you are doing everything right but still not seeing results, you might be missing a crucial ingredient – progressive overload.
What is progressive overload?
When I started going to the gym regularly years ago, even though I wasn’t a complete beginner, I had no idea what progressive overload was. Yet, it somehow made sense to me to try lifting a little heavier or pushing out a few extra reps each week. Turns out, I was implementing the progressive overload approach without realising it.
In other words, progressive overload means continuously increasing demand on your musculoskeletal system during weight training. This means, once your body adapts to exercises and a certain weight lifted, it is necessary to create a new stimulus to see progress.
How to achieve it?
There are a lot of different ways to achieve progressive overload. The ones that are best suited for you will depend on your lifting experience and skill level.
Improved technique and increased range of motion
If you are a complete beginner, you can achieve progressive overload by learning to do foundational exercises with good form. It is extremely important to master the technique before adding weight. Alternatively, you are not only risking poor performance, but you are also making yourself more vulnerable to injuries.
For a lot of people, simply working towards achieving an optimal range of motion would mean implementing progressive overload. For example, if you find a squat challenging due to restricted mobility you should start with a box squat. You then want to aim to use a lower box for a higher range of motion. And ultimately you want to aim at performing bodyweight squat with good depth and form.
To summarize, if you are a complete novice you should focus on achieving progressive overload through improving technique and range of motion.
Increased frequency
Increasing the frequency of your sessions is another easy way to understand and implement an approach for beginners. If you have been training once a week for several months and then you start regularly training 2-3 times per week you will be achieving progressive overload.
The frequency of your sessions will depend on your training split. When you choose to adjust your split to increase the frequency, it is important to be realistic in how many extra days you can train. Always remember, that the best exercise regimen is the one you can sustain.
Increased weight
Once you are capable of performing exercises with good form and ROM you can start adding some weight. The key to successfully achieving progressive overload while increasing weight is to maintain good form while you lift heavier. Achieving progressive overload through increasing the weight doesn’t mean you have to do so on every exercise in your session.
You want to increase the weight only when you feel that your body is ready and can do it safely. If you’ve been lifting the same weight and don’t feel like you are capable of lifting heavier, it might be time to use a different approach (e.g. paused reps, eccentric reps) or changing up an exercise/equipment.
Weight increases don’t need to happen every session either. Some days you will just feel stronger than others. Therefore, it would be important to track how much you lift and how many reps/sets. This will help you know when to adjust your routine if you haven’t been able to progress for weeks.
Increased reps/sets
Doing an extra set or a few additional challenging reps at the end of an exercise is another easy to understand way to implement progressive overload. Similarly to lifting heavier, it is important to perform extra sets/reps with good form.
When you increase reps/sets during your session you will be essentially increasing the volume. It is important though to avoid doing too much volume. When you are doing too many exercises or sets per session you might not have the energy to work as hard as you would with lower volume. Furthermore, it may affect your recovery.
Similarly to adding extra weight, you don’t need to add sets/reps on every exercise you do every single session. For example, if you are training legs you can do 3 sets of 12 instead of 3 sets of 10 on a goblet squat and add an extra set on glute bridges. Depending on how your body responds to this increase, you might be too tired to increase sets/reps on other exercises without sacrificing the form.
Increased time under tension
Time under tension essentially means the duration of a repetition. This is particularly applicable during the eccentric (lowering) portion of an exercise. It’s extremely important to perform exercises under control, avoid using momentum and letting the weight drop during the eccentric part. Time under tension is extremely important to achieve progressive overload.
One of the best ways to increase time under tension is to increase the length of the eccentric phase. For example, you would lower into your squat on a count of 3. Next time, you can try lowering into a squat on a count of 5 while using the same weight. You can also increase time under tension by pausing at some stage of a rep (preferably with the most tension, e.g. bottom of a push-up).
Regardless of progressive overload, performing the eccentric part of a rep slowly and under control followed by a pause at the bottom of a rep will help improve mobility and technique.
Increasing time under tension is an excellent way to achieve progressive overload without adding extra weight or volume. Furthermore, it can be very beneficial for a beginner to master the movement.
Rest periods
Rest periods between sets can also be used effectively for implementing progressive overload. One way to utilize rest periods is to perform the same volume (sets and reps) but slightly decrease rest periods. For example, if you normally take 2 minutes rest between 3 sets of 8 pushups, decreasing rest time to 90 seconds will make it more challenging to perform with good form.
At the same time, increasing rest periods between sets would allow you to recover more and to lift heavier in the next set thus achieving progressive overload. Generally, the length of rest you take between the sets will depend on the intensity of the exercise.
If you are doing heavy deadlifts (you can do maximum 6 reps) or chin-ups (you can do only 3 reps at a time) you would need to take longer rest times. However, when you are using lighter weight, performing isolation or bodyweight exercises and can do up to 12+ reps you won’t need rest periods to be as long.
You might consider using the rest period as a tool in achieving progressive overload when you get more experienced in the gym and can better judge when it’s appropriate to implement it.
In conclusion
Without progressive overload, you will not see the results you expect from your training. However, improving the form and range of motion should be the number one priority for beginners before implementing other methods. In fact, even when you become a more experienced lifter, you should never sacrifice your form and technique to lift heavier or do more reps.
Finally, you shouldn’t try applying numerous progressive overload methods at the same time. Working towards progressive overload in your training is an ongoing process. This means you will get the opportunity to use different methods at different stages of your fitness journey.