Progressive Overload -> The Way To Long Term Change

I'm sure some of you have heard of this term "Progressive Overload" and are wondering what it really means and how to apply it to yourself.. well I'm here to help!

Progressive Overload in simpler terms really just means making things more difficult, sounds fun right?

We've talked about plateau's before and certain ways to avoid them, the general term for keeping yourself from hitting a plateau is just Progressive Overload. We constantly have to be challenging ourselves for our body to improve. The stress we put on our body during a workout must be harder than the stress we have previously put on it to adapt and "super compensate". This is what happens when our muscles get bigger and stronger.

We talked about periodization too and this is also just a form of progressive overload. To keep challenging your body and make sure it adapts to the stress we put on it, we must change that modality of stress. So how do we make sure we are progressively overloading? There are a few different ways, being 5 that we commonly tend to see the most.

Increasing Frequency -> This is one of the simplest ways to increase the overload by increasing the amount of what you're doing. This can be done by simply adding another day of exercise altogether to your week, the recommended being at-least 3 days a week when starting, just don't forget to have at least one rest day! Another different example would be if you have a certain area that is lacking you will want to "overload' or train this area slightly more to create a balance.

Increasing Volume -> This is also another fairly simple way to ensure we are overloading, just add another few sets! If you've been sticking to the 3 sets of 12 for a while do a 4th and 5th set for your big beginning exercises. It may not seem like much of a difference but this is still added stress to your muscles that they didn't do before, which will make them adapt. This will work more on our muscular strength and overall output.

Increasing Reps -> If again you've been sticking to the 3 sets of 12 for a while now, try and do a few more! Instead of increasing the weights we can also keep that same weight and try to do it a few more times than before. This will work more on improving our muscular endurance and toning.

Increasing Resistance -> Probably the most commonly practised way of overload without even realizing, increasing the weight! Adding 5-10 lb each week to your lifts while still trying to produce the same amount of reps will help strengthen our muscle and work on our muscular hypertrophy (growth). If you can't do the same amount of reps that's okay, keep repeating the cycle with a deload week included and the results will come.

Decreasing Rest Time -> Depending on what time of workout program you're doing, we need certain amount of rests between sets. Heavy lifting requires a good 2-3 minutes sometimes, decreasing the rest time on a program like this may not be as beneficial. However on a circuit style workout, doing each exercise for a minute each and taking 20 seconds between each exercise instead of 30 can make it much more challenging! This will work on improving our cardiovascular fitness and shed body fat.

I hope this helps you implement Progressive Overload into your training, and maybe you already have been! There are many different ways to do so rather than just increasing the weights, if thats the way you've been doing it this whole time spice it up a bit! Sometimes doing less exercise's and the bigger compound movements for more sets can also make us work harder at the end than trying to do a ton of different exercise's. How you change your training is dependant on your goals, find whatever of the 5 aligns best with yours and have fun with it!