Following the same workout routine week after week can get boring fast. Furthermore, repeating the same exercises without variety won’t help you progress in the gym and reach your goals.
Fortunately, you can make your workouts more effective with progressive overload. Using this method, you can challenge your body, build muscle, and reduce the risk of plateauing progress.
In this post, we’ll discuss progressive overload and its benefits. Then, we’ll explain how a personal trainer can help you incorporate this principle into your resistance and cardiovascular training. Let’s get started!
What Is Progressive Overload Load?
Progressive overload is a training principle in which you gradually increase the difficulty of your workouts. This method is fantastic for building strength, speed, and power. That’s because progressively increasing your workout compels your muscles and cardiovascular system to adapt to each exercise. Therefore, you’ll utilize more muscle fibers and work harder to complete your workout. Plus, it can help avoid fitness plateaus on your workout journey.
Progressive overload is typically associated with resistance training. However, it can also be applied to any workout program. The goal is to gradually increase your “load” by 5-10% over time. Emphasis on gradually. Adding too much weight at once can lead to poor form and serious injuries. By slowly increasing the intensity, you can prevent injuries and burnout.
Furthermore, it’s important to dedicate time before and after your workouts for warming up, cooling down, and stretching your muscles. Properly preparing your body for a workout will help you see better results and avoid injuries:
If you’re new to fitness, we recommend sitting down with a personal trainer or strength coach before starting a new plan. A fitness professional will assess your baseline strength and gauge a starting point for your workout. Whether you want to break through a fitness plateau, build muscle, or improve cardiovascular activity, a fitness coach can work with you to design a workout program to help you meet your goals.
How to Incorporate Progressive Overload Training
Everybody is different, which means the rate of progression will vary from one person to the next. Generally, when your exercise becomes easier, it’s time to ramp up the difficulty by adding resistance, volume, or intensity. Nonetheless, adding too much at once can cause compensations in form, leading to injuries. Let’s take a closer look at how you can safely incorporate progressive overload for resistance and cardio training.
Progressive Overload for Strength Training
For strength training, “overload” refers to lifting heavier (or more) to exceed the capacity of muscle fibers, which stimulates growth and boosts hypertrophy. If you can complete your typical session without “feeling a burn,” your muscles have likely adapted to your workout. When this happens, you can incorporate progressive overload by increasing the resistance, number of reps, or volume.
Increase Resistance
Increasing the resistance is the most popular way to incorporate progressive overload into your strength training. For example, if your workout program includes bicep curls a strength coach may design a progressive overload plan like this:
Weeks 1-4: 10-lb dumbbells, three sets of 10 reps
Weeks 5-9: 12-lb dumbbells, three sets of 10 reps
Weeks 10-14: 15-lb dumbbells, three sets of 10 reps
If you can perform 12+ reps in weeks three and four, you’re ready to increase the weight for week five. The same goes for subsequent weeks. This is known as the 2x2 rule. If you can increase your reps by two for two consecutive weeks, your trainer knows it’s time to add more weight:
Maintaining proper form and technique should always come first. You should drop the weight and focus on technique if you cannot complete the required reps without sacrificing form. The best way to be a strong lifter is to be a smart lifter by listening to your body if something is too challenging.
Increase Repetitions
Increasing repetitions is another way to train with progressive overload. With this method, you’ll keep the same weight but challenge yourself by increasing the reps.
Resistance training with drop sets, aka “running the rack,” is a great way to add reps to your workout. With drop sets, you’ll perform an exercise until failure, then drop the weight and do it again without resting. Using bicep curls as an example, a personal trainer might recommend incorporating drop sets like this:
Set 1: 10-lb bicep curls until failure
Set 2: 8-lb bicep curls until failure
Set 3: 5-lb bicep curls until failure
Training until failure aids muscle recruitment and activates more muscles than traditional sets. Thus, you can challenge your muscles and boost hypertrophy. Plus, by eliminating rest periods, you’ll save time and build muscle faster.
Increase Volume
Increasing the volume (aka adding variety) is another way to strength train using progressive overload. You can achieve this by rotating exercises from one week to the next. For instance, if you typically do Romanian deadlifts (RDLs), our strength coaches recommend trying staggered-stance or single-leg RDLs to target the same muscle differently.
Strength training through supersets and compound sets are also ways to overload via volume. Supersets and compound sets are often confused but focus on the same mission, maximizing strength and hypertrophy.
Supersets are two exercises of opposing muscle groups paired back-to-back with minimal rest, such as bicep curls and tricep extensions. Similarly, compound sets involve targeting the same muscle groups back-to-back with minimal rest in between, such as overhead dumbbell presses and shoulder raises:
You can also add volume by increasing the total number of exercises performed. You can easily do this by adding one or two more exercises to your session.
Increasing the volume and variety of your workout allows you to train the same muscle groups in different ways. By diversifying your workout, you can avoid plateaus and build well-rounded muscles.
Progressive Overload for Cardiovascular Training
While progressive overload is most commonly used in resistance training, you can also use it to increase your aerobic capacity and get faster. For cardio training, you can “overload” the body with aerobic exercise to challenge the limits of your cardiovascular system (heart, lungs, blood vessels, etc.).
Our personal trainers recommend increasing the distance or adding intensity if you can comfortably hold a conversation without feeling out of breath during a cardio session. Doing either of these can help challenge your cardiovascular system and help you get faster.
Increase Distance
Adding distance is an easy way to incorporate progressive overload into your cardio routine. If you’re a runner, and you can complete your typical route faster without breaking a sweat, try slowly increasing the distance. For example, your training plan may look like this:
Weeks 1-4: Run 2 miles
Weeks 5-9: Run 2.5 miles
Weeks 10-14: Run 3 miles
You can use the 2x2 method discussed above for adding distance. That is, if you can comfortably push your run .25-.5 miles longer in weeks three and four, try increasing the distance to 2.5 miles for the following four weeks, and so on. The same goes for walking, jogging, cycling, rowing, and virtually any cardio exercise.
Increase Intensity
Increasing the intensity of your cardio training is another way to incorporate progressive overload. Increasing the intensity escalates the amount of energy expended to complete an exercise.
To train with greater intensity, you’ll keep your distance the same, but aim for a faster pace. For example, if you typically run a mile in 9:30 minutes, set a goal for a 9-minute mile, and push yourself to shave off a few seconds with each session:
If you do cardio in intervals, you can achieve this by increasing the activity period while decreasing the recovery period. This is also ideal if you’re just starting and can’t perform long bursts of cardio. If that sounds like you, your progressive overload may look like this:
Weeks 1-4: 30-second jog, one-minute walk, repeat for 20 minutes
Weeks 5-9: 45-second jog, 45-second walk, repeat for 20 minutes
Weeks: 10-14, one-minute jog, 30-second walk, repeat for 20 minutes
Again, you can use the 2x2 rule to gauge if you’re ready to progress. Remember you want to progress gradually, so you shouldn’t give yourself side stitches or shin splints to complete the workout. By slowly adding intensity, you’ll improve your endurance and overall cardiovascular health.
Get a Custom Workout Plan
Progressive overload can help avoid fitness plateaus and make your workout more effective. This training method can enhance performance and add variety to your workout whether you’re trying to build muscle or improve aerobic performance.
Have you noticed your workouts getting easier over time? Our strength coaches can design a custom program using progressive overload to help you crush your goals. Sign up for a free consultation with our personal trainers today!
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