What is Progressive Overload & Why is it Helpful?

amberlynwellbeing
Feb 22, 2023
2 min read

Have you been training for something and hit a plateau? You seem to try everything but you just aren't improving and you don't know why?

Well, progressive overload is a helpful tool that can get you get past a plateau.

Progressive overload is a slow and gradual increase of intensity/difficulty of workouts over time, by the manipulation of variables within your training. It can promote increases in muscle mass, strength, as well as muscular endurance.

Your body gets used to the stress you put on it. In this case, stress being your workouts. Things become easier that were once difficult, it’s important to challenge yourself in order to see progression.

A common mistake when it comes to progressive overload is going too hard too fast. If you increase the intensity of your workout too substantially too quickly you open yourself to injury which will set you back longer than just using slow progression.

We can’t talk about progressive overload without mentioning periodization. Periodization is a method of training that cycles progression within a certain amount of time. Periodization is the structure of a plan you follow and progressive overload is a component within that plan.

There are several different ways to incorporate progressive overload.

On the macro level you can change intensity over on workout or over several weeks of a program (1-4), increases should be kept within 10% or less each week for a gradual adaptation.

On a micro level there are several factors you can manipulate:

weight being lifted
duration of workout
amount of rest between sets
reps and/or sets
distance
type of movement - you can be accustomed to one movement, try another that works the same overall muscles (Ex. swap squats to walking lunges).

More often than not progressive overload is used in a strength training setting, but it can be applied to any type of exercise.

This is away to alter your training, it is not something you should be constantly doing. Deloading is important to do as well, it entails lowering the intensity of your workouts for a short period of time, it help prevent injury and overtraining.

It's important to push yourself in order to progress and it's important to do it safely.