Progressive Overloads: How to Progress In the Gym to Attain Your Goals
The phrase progressive overload has become a bit of a buzzword lately. It’s always great when the general public starts talking about training because it will eventually lead to a better understanding of what truly works. But, as with everything training-related that reaches the general public, there seems to be a lot of misinformation/misunderstanding of what a progressive overload actually is.
Today, we’ll talk about what a progressive overload is and the many different ways that you can utilize a progressive overload. So, what is a progressive overload?
What is a Progressive Overload?
A progressive overload is a principle of training that involves increases in the training stimulus over time. Whether your goal is to increase your speed, strength, hypertrophy, endurance, speed endurance, strength endurance, or any other adaptation, a progressive overload will increase the likelihood that you are successful. A progressive overload should really always be the goal of any program.
Describing it as a method is a bit misleading since there isn’t a particular layout of x sets and x amount of reps over time. There is no specific progression. It’s not like a 5/3/1 or a Westside Influenced program, it’s just a way to describe how you’re going to progress over time.
Think of a progressive overload as more of a description of how a program operates, as opposed to a program in and of itself.
Progression
The goal of every single program should be progression in some manner. That being said, it doesn’t always work that way, as demonstrated by the popularity of both CrossFit and at-home programs like P90X.
Goals look different for everyone, and the training stimulus should reflect that. The progression within your training should also look different and needs to reflect those goals as well. You might be training to get stronger, or faster, or to just look better when you take your shirt off, and your progression should reflect each of those goals.
For example, if your goal is to gain muscle, your progression shouldn’t be to run one more mile every week. If your goal is cardiovascular endurance, then the top stimulus shouldn’t really be increasing your one rep max. On the flip side, if your goal is to increase your muscle mass then added volume over time can be a good goal, or even more weight with the same volumes. If you’re looking to increase your cardiovascular endurance, then running one more mile every week wouldn’t be the worst approach.
You can manipulate many variables in an effort to progress. Here are some ways to progress in your training sessions:
Increased volume
Both in sets and/or reps
Increased load
More weight on the bar
Decreased rest periods
Increased bar speed
Decreased run/sprint times
Decreased calories
Increased time under tension
There are many more, but these are a few of the more common ways to progress in your training. We’re going to break down various ways to progress per your goals in the next few sections. Just know the progression is specific to your needs to drive you towards your goals. As you get deeper into your training and your training age gets higher, you may have to start thinking outside of the box. We’ll go over all of that as well.
Progressive Overload for Strength
Now this one seems pretty easy, the goal is more weight on the bar so our progression should involve putting more weight on the bar. But strength is pretty complicated, and the path to increased strength can be a convoluted one.
For starters, there are different kinds of strength:
Base levels of strength
Absolute strength
Relative strength
Base-level strength is really just you learning how to control your body and an external load. This is the minimal level of strength you’ll need to possess in order to benefit from a legitimate training program. The best way to attain base-level strength is to get on a program like 5x5, where the goal is to start at basically zero and slowly add 5-10 lbs per week to your main lifts. When you’re no longer able to add weight every week onto the bar, your base levels of strength are sound enough to get on a proper program.
Absolute strength is the amount of force you can produce, regardless of your body weight. On the flip side, relative strength is how much force you can produce relative to your body weight. A good way to think about this is offensive linemen typically have high absolute strength but poor relative strength, while running backs have high relative strength and poor absolute strength. A typical offensive lineman weighs 300+ pounds and squats 500+ lbs, whereas your average running back weighs around 200 pounds and squats 350-400ish pounds. When considering these three different kinds of strength, the progression looks different.
Ways to Increase Base Level Strength
As mentioned earlier, a basic progressive overload is the best way to progress here. The 5x5 program will have you start with the bar for five sets of 5 reps, and every week, you’ll add 5-10 pounds onto the bar. In five weeks, you’ll be lifting 95 pounds for five sets of 5 reps. In ten weeks, you’ll be lifting 145 pounds for five sets of 5 reps. This won’t work in perpetuity because if it did, then everyone would squat/bench press/deadlift 1000+ pounds. You’ll eventually hit a wall, and when you do, you’ll need to start manipulating other variables within your training.
You can progress in other ways, but they’re unnecessary early on in your training. Save the complex training programs for when you need them, and just enjoy the newbie gains early on.
Ways to Progress Absolute and Relative Strength
The ways to progress these two are mostly the same. The biggest difference between the two is that with absolute strength you can throw in more volume and eat more food to gain weight. Mass moves mass and if making weight isn’t an issue, then getting bigger is a sure-fire way to increase your absolute strength.
There are quite a few ways to get stronger, but they all boil down to putting more weight on the bar over time. When your training age is higher (4-5+ years), it may take increasing your speed, increasing your strength endurance, heavy isometrics, overloaded slow eccentric training, increasing your work capacity, etc.
One of the best ways to increase your strength potential early on in your training is to increase your strength ceiling by increasing your work capacity. Louie Simmons of Westside Barbell used to always say that a pyramid can only go as high as its base. If you want high levels of strength, your work capacity “base” needs to be incredibly wide. This is accomplished by high-volume accessory work and special workouts filled with sled work, loaded carries, etc.
Another way to increase your strength is to work on getting faster in the lifts. The thought process here is that if you can get faster by teaching your body to recruit maximal muscle fibers quickly, then you can almost “speed” your way through your sticking points. This is a less accepted way of increasing the amount of weight on the bar, but I’ve seen it work.
There are a million ways to skin that cat, but it needs to be a focused progression involving planned loads that increase over time. Below are a few programs that are pretty easy to implement into your training once you’ve gotten your base levels of strength to a good place.
Good programs for increasing your strength:
The Maximal Effort Method - Westside Barbell
Progressive Overload for Muscle Growth
The vast majority of gym goers are going to the gym in an effort to get bigger muscles. The scientific term for this is hypertrophy, and there are two different kinds of hypertrophy:
Sarcoplasmic Hypertrophy
An increase in the size of the muscle cell due to increased water, mitochondria, and energy substrates. We also refer to this muscle growth as nonfunctional hypertrophy due to the added growth not contributing to strength.
Myofibril Hypertrophy
An increase in the size of the muscle cell due to the increased size of the protein structures within the cell. We also refer to this muscle growth as functional hypertrophy because the increased size of the protein structures contributes to the strength of the muscle.
The vast majority of our muscle growth comes from sarcoplasmic hypertrophy, but we still want to dedicate some time to making sure we also increase myofibril hypertrophy because, over time, this will also help to increase sarcoplasmic hypertrophy.
The way that we progress within our training typically dictates the kind of muscle growth that we attain, not the other way around. Your typical program will probably start on the higher volume side of things between 12-15 reps and, over time, decrease down to 6-8 reps. As the volume decreases, the goal is to handle heavier weights. For instance, if you’re performing an incline dumbbell press with 40-pound dumbbells for 15, you’d hope that once you get to 6 reps, the load is much heavier. This is the most common way to progressively overload.
This typical muscle growth driven training program layout starts us off with more sarcoplasmic hypertrophy and slowly pushes us toward myofibril hypertrophy. Sarcoplasmic hypertrophy thrives in higher-volume environments (10-20 reps). When you do a lot of reps, your body is forced to adapt by putting more energy substrates and mitochondria into the muscle cell so that the next time it gets pushed to this limit, it’s prepared to get through it. Myofibril hypertrophy thrives with load and tension. The heavier the load, the more tension is created. The more tension we create, the more damage there is to the muscle cells. The body will adapt to this by increasing the size of the protein structures within the muscle cells, so the next time you handle this weight, the body is prepared to get through it.
This is the most common way to progressively overload, however it’s far from the only way. We’re going to go over a few ways now.
Increased Time Under Tension
This is a very loaded term because this can be done in a few ways. You can increase the amount of reps, or you can slow down the reps. The driving principle behind the HIT Method is time under tension. The load is low, and the time under tension (TUT) is 45 seconds or so. This type of training will increase sarcoplasmic hypertrophy due to the amount of time you’re performing the exercises. Mike Mentzer made this type of training incredibly popular (along with Arthur Jones, creator of the Nautilus Exercise Machines), and it really does work for general body composition and health.
You can also slow down the reps. German Volume Training exploded in popularity in the late 2000s and early twenty-teens thanks to Charles Poliquin. There were two different ways to program this work, one geared toward sarcoplasmic hypertrophy and one towards myofibril hypertrophy. I’ll break those down below.
Low Load - more sarcoplasim hypertrophy
50% of 1RM
10 sets of 10 reps
5 second eccentric (negative portion) contraction
Each set is about 60 seconds long, with 90-second rest periods
Moderate Load - more myofibril hypertrophy
75% of 1RM
10 sets of 5 reps
5 second eccentric (negative portion) contraction
Each set is about 30-40 seconds, with 90-second rest periods
This increased TUT creates a lot more damage to the muscle cell. The body is forced to adapt by increasing its size. The 75% loading scheme will create more tension though, which is why you’ll see more myofibril hypertrophy in the long run. Side note here, the 75% loading scheme is also pretty solid for strength gain with moderate training aged lifters.
In either of these instances, you’ll increase the weight of the bar as you move forward through the weeks. The progression here is load, but the overall driver of adaptation is time under tension. Most time under tension based programs really rely on load increases over time to progress. You can’t really increase your TUT past a certain point. Forty-five seconds seems to be the mark where we switch from muscle growth to cardiovascular endurance. This is because, for anything above 45 seconds, the load is no longer heavy enough to elicit hypertrophy adaptations.
There are many other ways that we can increase muscle growth, and volume is one that we’ll talk about next.
Increased Volume
One way to increase time under tension is to just increase your overall volume. More reps means the muscle is under tension for longer throughout the course of the entire training session. This added volume can be in the form of more reps per set, more sets per training session, or even adding more movements into your training sessions. There are benefits and drawbacks to each one, so you might have to play around with these variables to see what works best for you.
Increased Tension
This is really just another way to say load increases. Tension is the driving factor of myofibril hypertrophy because the more tension is created, the more damage is created. This is how we grow. Now, there seems to be a sweet spot when it comes to load, meaning that you’re more likely to grow (depending on the literature that you read) with moderate volume and moderate load. For example, a heavy set of 8 is going to create more damage than a heavy set of one. For what it’s worth, I’ve seen the best functional muscle growth fall somewhere between 5-10 reps, with the sweet spot being 6-8 reps. This is true for both main movements and accessory movements.
Rest Periods
Decreasing your rest periods can have a similar effect to increasing the time under tension. Shorter rest periods will force your body to create more energy substrates and mitochondria in an effort to be able to get through the work. Just like tension, there’s a sweet spot for adaptation and that sweet spot is somewhere between 60 and 150 seconds with shorter rest periods towards the lighter weight/higher volume (12-20 reps) work, and longer rest periods towards the moderate weight/lower volume work.
Cluster Sets/Rest-Pause Training
These have made a comeback in recent years, but they’ve always been a staple in many programs. Some call it a cluster set; some call it rest-pause training. This is really just a way to increase the intraset volume in your training. Cluster sets allow you to achieve more volume per set at a heavier intensity/load. For example, 85% of your one-rep max (1RM) is typically your six-rep max. This means that on a good day, you should be able to get 85% of your 1RM for six solid reps. This should more than likely wear you out to the point of not being able to produce that effort again, as the muscle fibers will all have been exhausted in that one set. The way we get around this is cluster sets.
Cluster sets work by allowing the body to reclaim some of the energy lost during the set so we can perform more volume, while keeping the rest periods short enough to benefit the same as if those reps were all performed in one set. That probably sounds confusing, but basically it allows you to get more reps at a higher intensity. You’ll perform x amount of reps, rest for 7-12 seconds and perform another rep or two. Repeat that 2-3 times and now you’ve gotten the benefits of higher intraset volume, where we otherwise would have been unable to. Here is an example:
We’ll go back to the 85% example here. You could probably squeeze out 6 solid reps, and then be spent and have to move on to the next movement. The way we usually combat this is to decrease the reps per set, and increase the total sets. At my gym we’ll do 5 sets of 3 reps, which will yield 15 total reps. This gives us a great strength benefit, but the downside here is that we don’t get the same muscle growth benefit.
Here is where cluster sets come in. We can do 3-4 reps, rest for 12 seconds, and do another 1-2 reps. We’ll do that until we hit our target reps for this set of 8-10 reps. Now we’ve created 2-4 extra reps worth of damage to the structures within the muscle cell, which means we’ll see more growth. This 2-4 reps might not seem like much, but extrapolate that out over a year and it’s thousands of pounds of workload.
Cluster sets can be progressed with volume, intensity, rest periods, etc. The world is really your oyster here.
Good Programs for Increasing Hypertrophy
Progressive Overload for Speed
This is one that gets fumbled by a lot of coaches and athletes. Many times they think that if they want to get faster, then they need to run faster more often. This is a total exercise in futility unless the goal here is speed endurance. Volume is possibly the worst way to adapt and progress speed.
If you want to get faster you can do two things:
Get stronger
Train speed of movement
Become more powerful (a combination of speed and strength, it’s more complicated than that but this is the jist of it)
Volume progressions for things like speed don’t work. It doesn’t matter how many times you can repeat an effort if the output isn’t high enough to begin with. This means that running more won’t contribute to you getting any faster unless your training age is zero because then, anything works. When it comes to speed, think of the part-whole method. You have to work on the parts in order to increase the whole. Putting more force in the ground, increasing movement elasticity, and increasing speed of movement are what will get you to where you want to be.
Good Programs for Speed
The Dynamic Effort Method for Athletes
Progressive Overload for Everything Else - The SAID Principle
The progression for most variables and stimuli within your training is going to revolve around four things: rest, speed, volume, and load. The SAID Principle is going to dictate how you want to tackle each specific progression. The SAID Principle stands for Specific Adaptations to Imposed Demands. It’s just a fancy way of saying that you’re going to adapt to the demands that you place on your body. If I want to adapt a certain way (my goals), then I have put my body into a position to adapt that way and achieve my goals. We went over the more complicated progressions above (strength, hypertrophy, and speed), but when it comes to just about everything else you should be able to deduce the progression based on your goals.
If you want to run a mile in a shorter time, then you need to get faster at running the mile. Enter speed training. If you want to lean out (gain muscle and lose fat), then you need to couple hypertrophy training with eating smarter/healthier (more than likely enter into a caloric deficit). Over time, you can increase your training load to progress or change parts of your diet. If you want to gain weight (gain muscle, probably some fat), then you need to increase your calories and probably volume within the gym. Training, at its core, isn’t super complicated. Although you wouldn’t know this watching or listening to many of the fitness influencers today. If you want to get stronger, you have to overload the body over time with weight. Do you want to get bigger? You’ve gotta create more damaga to the muscle so that it can grow. Do you want more endurance? You’ll have to put your body in a position to have to endure. It isn’t simple, but it isn’t really all that complicated either.
Each individual is going to have their own goals, and even if you and someone else share the same goals, your circumstances are more than likely incredibly different. Knowing why to progress is how you’ll know when and how to progress.
Progressive Overloads Simplified
If you’ve made it this far then God bless you, I assume I lost most everyone somewhere around paragraph four or five. If you skimmed all the way here to see the conclusion then here’s a cheat sheet for ways to progressively overload.
Muscle Growth
Increase time under tension
Increase intra and interset volume
Increase the load
Strength
Increase the load
Increase work capacity
Increase speed of movement in the lift
Speed
Get stronger
Work on speed of movement
Work on movement elasticity
Become more powerful
Everything Else
Go back to the SAID Principle and base your progressions on this!
