If you ever look into muscle and strength building strategies or programs, you’ll
pretty much universally see one thing repeatedly mentioned being of utmost importance.
So in this video, we’re going to cover just that, and explain what is exactly is progressive
overload.
A quick google search will give you a definition along the lines of:
“a method of strength training that advocates for the gradual increase of the stress placed
upon the musculoskeletal and nervous system.”
This is technically true . Progressive overload does mean making your
exercises gradually more difficult or strenuous over a long period of time, which provides
a stimulus for your muscles, which then creates an environment for adaptation.
Adaptation means improvements in your ability to actually contract and recruit your muscle
fibers, as well as of course increasing your muscle gains.
If you instead just do the same workout every single time without any progressive overload,
your body eventually stops progressing since you’ve adapted to the given stimulus.
That’s why it’s important to keep increasing the stress to always provide your body with
a novel stimulus.
However, where people get lost is knowing what types of stress are involved in progressive
overload.
I’m going to break it down to two parts.
First explaining some basic, fundamental aspects of progressive overload and then talk about
a few extra things that are still critical as well.
Let’s get started.
For basics, by far the most common method of increasing stress for progressive overload
is by increasing the resistance or weight used in any given exercise.
By continuously lifting heavier and heavier weights, you “gradually” increase the
stress on the trained muscle.
Very straightforward and very important way to progressive overload, especially for beginners.
After that, another factor is the amount of reps you do, which is especially important
when you start having trouble with increasing weight.
Reps, short for repetitions, are the number of times you do an exercise in one go.
So, for something like the barbell squat, for 5 reps, you do 5 squats before putting
the bar back down.
More reps means more stress.
Pretty straightforward like weights.
However, based on how many reps you do, you can actually shift your adaptation focus.
Fewer reps but with heavier weights progresses strength more, and more reps but lighter weights
progresses endurance.
Moderate reps, which is around 6 to 12 reps, is often considered the sweet spot.
And the third fundamental piece of progressive overload is the amount of sets you do.
Sets are simply the amount of times you do the chosen amount of reps.
If you see something like 3 sets of 5 in your program, it means you will perform 5 reps
for an exercise and do that3 times, or 3 sets, with some rest time in between each set.
Might sound like a broken record by now, but again, the more and more sets you do for a
given exercise, the more stress you place, and the more you adapt.
Research suggest the sweet spot is around 12 to 20 sets per muscle group per week.
These three, reps, sets, and weight lifted, are the fundamental pieces to progressive
overload.
And, when factored together, you get the quintessential progressive overload formula known as training
volume.
Reason being is that volume, in the fitness literature, has the most consistent positive
relationship between muscle gains.
Strength gains, though, leans a bit more towards simply lifting heavier weights, but since
volume leads to muscle growth, having more muscle can help with moving more weights as
well.
Volume, very important to keep that in mind.
And, now let’s look at a few things beyond just the fundamentals that are also critical
pieces to good progressive overload.
The first is frequency.
Frequency is the amount of times you train a muscle in a given week.
Knowing about volume, it’s no secret why frequency is important.
The more times you train, the more sets and reps you can do, the more volume, the more
overload.
Of course you are limited to the amount of days you actually have in a week, but research
does suggest that 2 times per week per muscle group is often good enough for most.
Next is training to failure.
Training to failure is performing reps on an exercise to the point that you can no longer
do more reps without serious degradation of your technique and form.
This is usually a more intuitive approach to progressive overload since you’re pushing
your muscles to complete fatigue regardless of trying to reach a specific rep count.
However, the downfall of failure training is that it is very hard to do, especially
if you’re new, and more importantly, it will require more recovery.
And recovery is the third and final extra tip of progressive overload.
Although itself is not exactly causing gradual increases in stress, you do need time off
from training to properly adapt and reduce fatigue.
Not doing so can cause long-term fatigue, which will stall your progression since you
cannot perform at your highest level.
So very big piece, recovery, very very important.
And that’s it for this video on explaining progressive overload.
I hoped you guys found it useful!
As far as HOW and the BEST ways to progressive overload, I’ll make sure to cover that in
a future video, so stay tuned.
However, if you need something now, then I highly suggest you check out the video collaboration
that I did, my very first collab ever, with the awesome Jeff Nippard over at Jeff’s
channel.
In that video, we cover how to make gains at every training level, which no doubt includes
progressive overload.
I’ll have a link to that video in the description.
Other than that, if you enjoyed this video please give it a progressive thumbs up and
share it with your overload loving friends.
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As always, thank you for watching and GET YOUR PROTEIN!