Progressive Overload

This is probably one of the most important reasons why your routine is doomed to fail or why you are making gains while your buddies are left behind. If your workout routine doesn’t contain some type of progressive overload component, you are just spinning your wheels. You are just going through the motions doing the same thing day in and day out and not forcing your body to adapt and grow. Even introducing AAS into the equation here will not make up for a program lacking in progressive overload. So then, what actually is progressive overload? Let’s look at my textbook version first and then I’ll try to break it down into something meaningful.

Text book definition (taken from Makwa’s textbook of life): In order to make your muscle grow or become stronger, the human body must be forced to adapt to a tension that is above and beyond what it has previously experienced.

Let’s break this down into what it really means now and why it is so important to your success or current lack thereof. Your muscles are not going to grow unless you continually force them to. Your body wants to stay exactly where it is, it doesn’t like change. If you keep doing the same exercises with the same weight with the same reps with the same rest periods there is no reason for your body to adapt and grow because the training stimulus is not increasing which would FORCE the body to adapt and simultaneously grow. If you don’t force your body to grow by continually increasing the stimulus, IT WON’T GROW. By continually increasing the demands (we are talking training here) put on your body, your body has no choice but to adapt and grow to meet the new demands.

Ok, I think I have beaten this dead horse enough. Now how can you use this concept of progressive overload in the gym to ensure continued growth? That is what you want to know right? There are many ways that progressive overload can be done. The most common ones you can employ in your program are listed below:

Progressive Overload Methods

What I have to get off my chest here first is that if you are not keeping a detailed training log, there is absolutely no way that you are going to be able to effectively implement progressive overload. So if you are not going to keep a log, you might as well quit reading the rest of this post. I can barely remember what I had for lunch yesterday. How am I supposed to know 3 or 4 days later how much weight and how many reps I did for all of the exercises in my chest workout. It is impossible! You are doomed to fail without a detailed training log. This is why I stress that anyone who is serious about bodybuilding needs to keep a detailed training journal so that you can list your exercises and track the weights that you use for each set and how many reps you completed. You will see why this is so essential in a moment. I have an app on my phone that I use for exactly this purpose and it works real slick. I can also program in the rest time I want between sets and it alerts me when I need to start the next set. I program my whole workout into it and I don’t know what I would do without it. Paper and pen I guess. On to the methods now.

Increase the amount of weight you lift

Pretty obvious. Look back at your log and add on some additional weight. You just need to go up in small increments each work out. If you did 5 sets of bench presses last week with 225lbs for 8 reps, try bumping it up to 230 this week. If you accomplished your rep goals with 230 lbs, bump it up to 235 the next workout.

Here is basically how this increased weight progression would be implemented (this progression would be the same for the other progressive overload techniques also):

1. Crank out and attain your prescribed set and rep goal for whatever exercise you are doing.

2. Increase the weight being lifted for that exercise by the smallest increment possible next workout.

3. Attain your set/rep goal again with this new, slightly heavier weight.

4. Bump up the weight again by the smallest increment possible.

5. Keep doing this process over and over again for as long as possible.
   Obviously this can’t go on forever, otherwise we all would be benching 500,000 lbs and squatting a million. That is when it is time to implement other progressive overload techniques

Increase the number of reps

If you benched 225lbs for 5 sets of 8, next week make it 5 sets of 9 reps with 225 lbs. If you can do all 5 sets with 9 reps, shoot for 10 reps the following workout. Instead of progressively increasing the weight, you are progressively increasing the reps.

Increase the number of sets

Take your bench press again. You have been doing 5 sets of 8 with 225lbs, make it 6 sets next week and so on.

Shorten your rest periods between sets

What you are doing here is increasing the amount of work you are doing in a given time period. Keep your same rep/set/weight routine but shorten the amount of time you rest between the sets. If you normally rest 2-3 minutes between sets, shave 15 seconds off each workout.

Increase the Time under Tension

Are you one of those guys that cranks out your reps and completes your set so fast that it makes your nose bleed? Well then, this is the first tactic you should use incorporate progressive overlaod into your routine. Increasing the time under tension (TUT) places increased demands on your body which will force it to grow as you know already. If you are not keeping track of your tempo when doing your reps, you need to start NOW. As a general guideline, (this will vary based upon what I am trying to accomplish), I like to use a 4010 tempo for all of my sets. What this means is 4 sec negative, 0 second pause at the bottom, push the weight up explosively and no rest at the top. I know that at least 98% of you don't even pay any attention to tempo. Start now. Start out with a 2010 tempo and next week bump it up to 3010 and hopefully by the third or 4th week of your routine all of your reps will be around a 4010 tempo. It WILL be hard but that is the whole point of it. You may not be able to do it for all your exercises at once, but work in controlled tempo as much and as quickly as you can until you are doing it for all of your exercises. You are going to have to drop the weight as you increase the TUT. So here is how I would incorporate this if you aren't currently using a controlled tempo (you are basically going to be implementing the TUT and increasing weight overload principles):

1. Lower the weight accordingly so you can get out your prescribed reps with your new tempo.
2. Keep using that tempo until you are back up to the original weight you were using before you changed the tempo
3. Lower weight and adjust the tempo again
4. Work back up to your previous weight.
5. Continue this process until you are at your desired tempo

As you can see you can also adjust other parts of the tempo now to implement progressive overload. Now that you are slowly lowering the bar (4 sec eccentric) increase the amount of time you raise the bar also (concentric). This worked great for me when I was doing leg presses. Eventually I worked up to a tempo of (6060). Thats' right! A six second negative AND a six second concentric. I have never had my legs screaming at me like they did after doing those sets (I was doing sets of 20). Play around with your tempo, it is an easy way to implement progressive overload.

Micro-progression

You don't have to go up by leaps and bounds from one workout to the next in order to make the body adapt and respond. The whole purpose of your workouts is to continually one-up your last workout. These one-ups don't have have to be big. Even if you just did 1 or 2 extra reps on only 1 set or 5 extra pounds for one of your sets and the rest of the workout was the same, you still did more this workout than the last one. We are talking about micro-progressions here. You need to micro-progress from workout to workout. Whether you added one extra set or one extra rep or shaved two minutes off of your workout time, you are micro-progessing and forcing the body to adapt and grow and that is what progressive overload is all about.

Final Thoughts

Even though this is part 9 of the series, that order does not relate to the importance of the concept. If I had to rate the importance of progressive overload for maximizing your long term gains, I would easily put it in the top 3 and could probably make a case for it as #1. If you are not continually forcing your body to adapt it is not going to grow, end of story. Keep doing what you are doing and you will just keep looking the same like you do know if you are implementing progressive overload. So the moral of the story here is you have to incorporate progressive overload into every workout routine you design if you ever want to continue to make progress in this sport.

I put my workout routine for this month up in a post. I thought it would be good to see a real example of this concept into an actual workout routine. If you read it through to the end, you will see how I incorporated increasing the sets each week of the month for specific exercises. Each week’s workout is designed to be harder than the previous week which will force my body to adapt and grow. I’ll also be increasing weight each week on most exercises also. The more advanced you get in your lifting career; the more of these overload principles you can employ. Here's a link to this month's workout in case you haven't seen it yet:

https://www.eroids.com/forum/training-nutrition-diet/workout-exercise/ge...

That’s all I got, but I know if progressive overload becomes a part of your vocabulary that you will grow by leaps and bounds.

Grow Big

Makwa