By Jordan McGinnis, Personal Trainer and Fitness & Wellness Coordinator, JCC South Hills
It’s common nowadays, when I talk to clients, members or just scroll through social media, that I see preaching about Progressive overload. “The only way to get stronger is to progressive overload and add more weight.” Yes, progressive overload is a core principle for resistance training, but it contains more nuance than what is often times portrayed.
What is progressive overload? Progressive overload is the idea that introducing a stimulus that elicits a muscular adaptation requires the stimulus to contain a form of progression or novelty over time. Weight is the most commonly used example of this and arguably the easiest example to grasp this concept. However, simply adding 5 lbs every week sets up individuals for failure because you will hit a ceiling where it is no longer realistic or beneficial to add additional weight to the exercise. Remember – technique and weight are often inversely related so if our technique is not sound, adding weight rashly can lead to a breakdown of technique. I also want to take this opportunity to stress that good technique is not to mitigate risk of injury, although it does have that effect. We use good technique is to maximize the efficiency of an exercise and movement pattern so we can produce the most force possible, which also happens to be a safe position to produce said force.
To properly understand how to use progressive overload, we need to have a strong understanding of acute training variables. Remember that acute training variables include sets performed on an exercise or muscle group, repetitions per set, weight used, tempo of the repetitions, rest time between sets, and so on. Any of these variables can be progressively overloaded. For beginners, I recommend picking one variable and experimenting with progressing that variable.
Personally, my favorite variable to progress with clients is the number of sets of exercise we do. I have found this an effective way to encourage practice of technique while still seeing improvement in muscular strength and development. An easy way to think about it is that if I do 3 sets of 10 reps on squats, I practice the movement 30 times and perform a set amount of work (weight X sets X reps = work). Adding a 4th set without changing weight adds 10 more reps for a total for 40 repetitions, increasing the amount of work I have done and providing 10 more opportunities to improve technique.
I hope you have enjoyed this explanation of progressive overload and are able to walk away with new ideas of how to improve your training. If you have any questions or are interested in personal training, please feel free to reach out to me at [email protected].
