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Progressive Overload: 5 Ways to Build Muscle & Strength Today



The human body is always adapting to changes. In order to continuously improve performance, training must be modified to increase the acute variables and overload the muscles.

We will be exploring the scientific reasoning behind progressively overloading the neuromuscular system in order to better understand the potential benefits of resistance training and muscle development.

WHAT IS PROGRESSIVE OVERLOAD?

The Principle of Progression states that you should gradually increase the amount of time, weight, or intensity of your workout each week by 10% or less. If you don’t gradually increase your workout, your muscles will stop growing.

If you decrease the amount you work out over a long period of time, you can actually lose muscle mass and strength. However, if you keep up a consistent training schedule, your body will adapt to the progressions and be able to handle the stress you place on it.

WHY DO YOU NEED TO PROGRESSIVELY OVERLOAD?

If the client is finding that the current resistance training program is becoming too easy, the trainer can increase the repetitions, intensity, timing, distance, or introduce new movements. Increasing the load is the most common and effective way to challenge the client and avoid plateauing.

If a client is doing more reps than before, an appropriate action might be to increase the weight by 5-10% to keep them in the Hypertrophy phase.

HOW DOES OVERLOAD WORK IN FITNESS?

Hypertrophy, or the growth of muscle tissue, can be achieved through three mechanisms: metabolic damage, muscle tension, and exercise-induced muscle damage. By progressively increasing the load on the muscle, you can cause the muscle to adapt and increase its force output over time.

The text is saying that adding more stress to the muscles will make the client work harder, which is good for recruiting muscle fibers. It is important to watch the client’s form and intensity to know when to add more stress.

PERIODIZATION AND PROGRAMMING

Different phases of the OPT model will create progressive overload by working through progressions of exercises, weights and intensity. Progressions can be done on a large, medium, or small scale.

Progressive overloading, or gradually increasing the demand on the client, is a common way to continue challenging them within a single workout. The best way to understand when it is time to increase the difficulty is by observing the client’s level of effort and level of focus. Additionally, using feedback from the client allows the trainer to gauge whether or not the client is ready for a more difficult challenge.

Every few weeks, it’s common to increase the load as the client’s body adapts to the training intensity and exercise. The trainer can also modify this by adding additional working sets.

If you gradually increase the number of sets from three to four or five, you will not only improve muscle growth but also the client’s endurance. For example, by the fourth set, the client may not be able to do more than eight to twelve reps, which is more in line with the number of reps necessary for strength and muscle growth.

How To Progressive Overload

#1: Increase Weight Lifted (Load)

ii. The method most people rely on to do progressive overload is increasing the amount of weight lifted. It’s quite straightforward to apply it.

If you can bench press 100lbs for 8 reps, try increasing the load to 110lbs next week to create a new stimulus for your muscles to adapt to and grow from.

If you are new to working out, progressive overload will help you make gains quickly. You will likely be able to add 5-10 lbs to the bar every week – especially on your main lifts like the bench press, squat, and deadlift.

If we continue with our example from before of bench pressing 100lbs in week 1 and then adding 10lbs of weight every week, you should be able to bench 620lbs by the end of the year.

As cool as that would be, the truth is that neither:

  • Myself OR
  • Alex OR
  • Our record-breaking Built With Science coach (who can bench press over twice his body weight!)

This is where people tend to get stuck; when they are too close to the situation to see it clearly.

If someone is only relying on adding more weight as their method of progressive overload, they will eventually hit a plateau because they are not using other methods to stimulate muscle growth.

We need to be more creative with how we challenge our muscles if we want to make progress. This is where the next point comes in handy.

#2: Up The Rep Count

If you’re currently doing 3 sets of 10 reps of an exercise, and you add one more set of that exercise, you’ve just added 30% more work. If you’re currently doing 3 sets of 10 reps of an exercise, and you add one more set of that exercise, you’ve just added 30% more work. This is a great way to force your muscles to grow.

If you can bench press 100lbs for 10 reps one week, you have lifted 1000lbs total across that set. If you lift the same weight for 11 reps the next week, you will have lifted 1100lbs across the set, meaning you have lifted 100lbs more than last week. This is similar to adding more weight to your training, which provides a new stimulus for your muscles to grow.

What’s The “Rep Limit”?

According to the 2017 meta-analysis, as long as you continue to push hard, you can keep the same weight and increase all the way up to 30 reps while still seeing the same growth as if you had added more weight.

This is helpful if you:

  • Only have limited equipment OR
  • A nagging injury – and can’t increase the weight on your lifts even if you wanted to

However, if you do have access to heavier weights, the most effective way to use them – which is what we teach in our Built With Science programs – is a special progressive overload technique called double progression.

This system uses both reps and weight to ensure that your muscles grow week by week.

The way this works is that you gradually increase the number of reps you do each week until you reach the maximum number of reps for that weight. Once you’re able to do the maximum number of reps 3 times, you increase the weight by 10lbs and start again at 8 reps.

Although this method is often successful, it does not last forever. When you cannot lift more weight or do more reps, what do you do? Another form of progressive overload that is often overlooked can help in this situation.

#3: Increase The Number Of Sets You Perform

The next method of progressive overload has to do with the number of sets you perform.

If you are looking to build your biceps, you can add sets by going from 3 sets of 12 to 4 sets of 12 from one week to the next.

The equation we used earlier was for lifting 40lbs in each hand. So, if we add one more set, each of our biceps would be lifting 480 more lbs in the second week.

Adding a lot of volume to your training program can help bring up lagging muscle groups.

Be Mindful Of Diminishing Returns

However, you need to use this method sparingly.

From what we know based on existing literature, if you do at least 10 sets of exercises per muscle group per week, you will see almost double the gains compared to only doing 5 sets per muscle group per week. However, there is a point where additional sets will not result in proportionately large gains, and this occurs when you get into the 20-30 set range. A general guidelines is to only increase your volume (the number of sets) by 10-20% each week.

If you are struggling to lift more weight or do more reps, try adding one extra set to each exercise next week. This will help you continue to progress.

You can return to the original program you started with once you reach the 20-30 set zone or you start to feel very tired.

This method, while it has its benefits, can also be quite taxing on the body and make your workouts considerably longer.

So, that’s where the next two methods of progressive overload come in. Both are ways you can continue forcing your muscles to grow while:

  • Lifting the same weight AND
  • Doing the same number of reps and sets weekly

#4: Slow Down Your Reps (Tempo)

The tempo of a lift is usually just as important as the amount of weight being lifted. Tempo is how fast or slow we lifting weights. The tempo of a lift is usually just as important as the amount of weight being lifted.

If we decrease the speed of our repetitions, we can increase the amount of time that tension is placed on the muscle to stimulate more growth.

Exercises that involve small, weak muscle groups, like lateral raises, are more effective when done slowly. This is because often, just a small amount of extra weight makes the exercise much harder. For bodyweight exercises, like push-ups and pull-ups, slowing down is a good way to make the exercise more difficult, since adding weight may not be possible.

You don’t want to go too slow when working out, as this can actually have a negative effect on muscle growth. Dr. Brad Shoenfeld, who conducted a 2015 meta-analysis of the effects of tempo on muscle growth, found that slowing down reps to a total of six seconds is the best way to maximize growth.

#5: Clean Up Your Form

When people try to lift more weight by adding more weight to their lifts, they often end up compromising their form. Instead, realize that if you do the same workout you did the week before, but you performed your exercises with:

  • Better control
  • Less momentum AND
  • More activation of your target muscles

… Then you would have successfully achieved progressive overload.

If you want to see better results in your muscle growth, you should focus on working the target muscles more. This will result in growth even if everything else stays the same.

Improving your form with your exercises can lead to significant muscle growth.

Even experienced weight lifters take time to improve their form, because they know that any other method of increasing muscle mass will be pointless unless their form is good.

WHO SHOULD OVERLOAD?

The trainer should have a strategy for progressing the client to avoid plateaus. This means adding a ton of weight to each exercise. The demand on the neuromuscular systems should be continuously challenged over time to create the necessary adaptations.

Depending on how you divide up the training schedule, there may be a de-loading phase thrown in to let the client rest and recover completely (or heal from an injury or too much training) before starting the OPT model phases again.

WHEN SHOULD YOU PROGRESSIVELY OVERLOAD?

How frequently a person should work out depends on many factors, such as what type of training they are doing, how their body responds to exercise, and what their goals are. Generally, people should progress in their workouts every 2-4 weeks, although some people may need to progress more frequently than that.

HOW LONG SHOULD YOU DO IT, AND IS OVERLOADING NECESSARY?

Progression is a term used to describe the process of improving performance over time. This is done by making small, incremental changes to training. The goal is to avoid injury while still making progress towards goals. Overloading, or doing more than what is comfortable, is not always necessary, but it can help to create the desired adaptations.


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