If you’re trying to grow significant muscle in the gym, learning how to progressive overload is a must.
Seriously, implementing progressive overload into your routine is one of the best ways to put maximum stimulus on your muscle. And therefore, maximize muscle growth.
I wrote a previous post on progressive overload and what it is.
In it, I talked a lot about progressive overload and it’s significance for muscle growth.
In this post, I want to dive deeper into some of the best strategies to implement progressive overload into your routine so you can maximize your weightlifting results.
What is progressive overload?
Progressive overload means progressively increasing the amount of stimulus on your muscles during each workout.
As your muscles adapt to this new stimulus, you increase the stimulus again, pushing your muscles to adapt again.
You continue this same cycle over and over, increasing the stimulus and forcing your muscles to grow and adapt before increasing the stimulus yet again.
Below is one of my favorite examples that does a pretty good job illustrating the basic ideas of progressive overload.
Progressive Overload in An Example
Let’s say, one week in the gym, you squat 100 pounds for 8 reps.
And as the weeks go on, you continue squatting this same 100 pounds.
Since your muscles are growing and adapting, each week you’re able to squat one extra rep. After four weeks, you’re now able to squat 100 pounds for 12 reps.
In the fifth week, you increase the weight you’re squatting to a weight where you can only do 8 reps again.
You continue squatting this new weight, pushing yourself to increase the number of reps you do until you’re able to squat 12 reps at this new weight.
After that, the cycle continues.
Notice how you’re progressively increasing your reps until you hit the top of your goal rep range. Then you progressively increase the weight you’re lifting.
Understanding Progressive Overload: Volume Versus Intensity
One crucial aspect of progressive overload is understanding the difference between volume and intensity.
The main ways to actually progressively overload involve increasing the volume or intensity of your lifts. Or both.
This can be done by actually increasing volume and intensity, or by using different strategies to help you do so.
The first step is actually understanding the difference between the two.
Volume is strictly how much you’re doing in the gym.
Things like how many reps, sets, and exercises you do during your workout.
Higher reps and sets means higher volume, lower reps and sets means lower volume.
Whereas defining volume is pretty straight forward, defining intensity is slightly more complicated.
Although intensity is primarily how heavy you lift, there are additional factors that play a role in the intensity of your workouts.
You can use these factors to implement certain strategies into your workouts that help you increase intensity.
I’ll talk more about these strategies later in this post.
For now, the way that I’ll define intensity is how difficult an exercise is to complete.
How much you struggle to complete one rep, each set, and each exercise.
The Best Strategies To Implement Progressive Overload into Your Workouts
In this section, I want to talk about some of the best strategies you can use to implement progressive overload into your own workouts.
If you’ve heard of progressive overload before reading this post, then chances are you’re familiar with some of these strategies.
A couple of them are the most common strategies people use to progressive overload.
In fact, you might already be implementing some of these into your workouts without even knowing.
However, there’s one strategy in particular here that I don’t think gets nearly enough recognition.
And, it just happens to be one of my personal favorite ways to implement progressive overload into my own workouts.
Increase the volume of your workouts
I already talked previously about what it means to increase the volume versus intensity of your workouts.
So naturally, these are our top two progressive overload strategies.
These are also probably two of the most common progressive overload strategies.
If you ask most people what it would mean to progressive overload, they’d most likely tell you it means progressively increasing the sets or reps you do each workout.
And they wouldn’t be wrong.
How to Increase the Volume of Your Workouts to Progressive Overload
We now know that increasing the volume of your workouts means increasing how much you’re doing.
When you’re looking to increase the volume of your workouts, you want to look at the things that you can increase to do more during your workouts.
For example, things like increasing the number of sets, reps, or exercises you do would all allow you to do more during your workout.
Making these some of the best progressive overload strategies to increase the volume of your workouts.
However, this doesn’t mean that you want to constantly be making your exercises longer.
Always tacking on time and exercises in order to do more.
What it really means is that doing more is just one strategy to progressive overload.
But true progressive overload involves strategically increasing aspects of your workouts to increase the stimulus on your muscles.
Increasing Volume As Your Only Progressive Overload Strategies
It’s important to keep in mind that progressive overload works best when you use multiple strategies together.
Let’s look at an example.
For the purpose of this example, let’s say your main goals in the gym are 1) to build muscle and 2) transform your physique.
To achieve these goals, you practice hypertrophy training.
Your ideal rep range is somewhere around 8 to 12 reps.
What Happens When You Constantly Increase Volume
Now, let’s say you decide to implement progressive overload, but only plan to increase the volume of your workouts.
Initially, your first few weeks would allow you to effectively progressively overload, each week slightly increasing volume.
Maybe the first week you do 8 reps of an exercise, the next week you do 10, then 11, and then 12.
Successfully progressively overloading each of these weeks.
At this point, you’ve hit the top of your ideal rep range for your muscle building goals.
If you continue increasing the volume of your workouts each week, eventually you get to 15, 16, maybe even 20 reps.
At this point, you’re no longer training for muscle growth.
Instead, you’re practicing endurance training, no longer correctly stimulating your muscles for hypertrophy.
And, unless your goals have changed, you’d end up pretty disappointed in your muscle growth if you’re only training for endurance.
Combining Strategies is Essential for Successful Progressive Overload
In this post, there are multiple progressive overload strategies I want to share.
These are some of the most effective progressive overload strategies there are.
As you’re reading these, what’s important to keep in mind is that in order to most effectively progressively overload, combining multiple of these strategies into your workouts is key.
So even though I’m sharing all of these strategies separately, they’re meant to be used in combination during each of your workouts.
True progressive overload is about implementing multiple of these strategies into each training session.
Increase the intensity of your workouts
The next progressive overload strategy involves increasing the intensity of your workouts.
I mentioned earlier that the intensity of your workouts is a combination of how heavy you lift, along with some other factors that can contribute to a more intense workout.
I previously wrote a post on how to increase your training intensity in the gym.
In it, I go into more detail on intensity, what it means, it’s role in your workouts, as well as share some in-depth strategies to increase the intensity of your workouts.
The easiest way to increase the intensity of your workouts is to increase the amount of weight you lift each week.
Increasing weight is a simple way to make your workouts more intense and increase the stimulus on your muscles.
Increasing weight in combination with other strategies
So we know that these progressive overload strategies work best when they’re used in combination.
Achieve your goals would be much more difficult if you were to only pick one of these strategies and apply it to your workouts.
We also know that increasing the weight you lift increases the intensity you train at and therefore is an effective progressive overload strategy.
But when we actually think about it, although this is a great strategy, but it’s also slightly unrealistic.
Increasing Weight Every Workout Becomes Unrealistic
Although I’m sure this would be great for some of us, expecting yourself to be able to lift more every workout is most likely unattainable.
Sure, at first this could work out, where your progressive is quick and you can overload easier.
But eventually, progressing in the gym becomes a lot harder.
Requiring more time, consistency, and strategy.
I mean, if we were actually able to get into the gym and lift more every workout, our progress would be insane!
If I could squat more weight every week, I’d be squatting 400 lbs by now!
But the truth is, our bodies simply can’t keep up with and adapt fast enough to this rapid increase in weight.
That’s why it’s so important to use these strategies in combination with one another.
One week, maybe we increase the weight of the exercise.
The next week, maybe we do one extra rep. The week after that, maybe we add in another set. Then, maybe we increase the weight again.
And so on and so on.
That is how you progressive overload.
Additional Strategies to Increase the Intensity of Your Workouts
Although I keep mentioning that there exist more strategies to make your workouts more intense, I haven’t talked about them at all yet.
The main strategies to increase the intensity of your workouts, besides increasing how much weight you lift, are:
1. Increase Your Time Under Tension
2. Include Partial Reps
3. Implement Training to Failure
Focus on the tempo of your workouts to progressive overload
What Is Tempo?
Tempo in the gym refers to how fast you perform an exercise.
When talking about the tempo of your lifts, it’s typically broken up into four numbers: The positive portion of your rep, a hold at the top, the negative portion, and a hold at the bottom.
For example, you might see a sequence of numbers like 2-1-4-1 to describe lifting tempo.
What this specific example would illustrate would be two seconds spent on the positive, concentric portion of your rep.
Followed by a one second hold at the top of your rep.
Four seconds spent on the negative, eccentric portion of your rep.
And finally, a one second isometric hold at the bottom.
Concentric Versus Eccentric Contractions
When talking about the concentric and eccentric portions of a rep, they’re both two different contractions of your muscles.
The concentric is the positive portion of your rep when your muscles are shortening.
Like lifting the weight during a bicep curl.
Whereas the eccentric is the negative portion of your rep, when your muscles are lengthening.
During a bicep curl, this would be when you’re lowering your hands down.
How to Use Tempo to Progressive Overload
Playing around with the tempo of your workouts is one of my all time favorite progressive overload strategies.
You can use tempo to progressive overload by changing up each of the four numbers I talked about earlier.
If you’re training for hypertrophy, or muscle growth, then your reps will typically have a slower eccentric and a faster, more explosive concentric.
To keep this same pattern while progressively overloading, you’re best strategy would be to increase the time you spend during the eccentric portion of your rep.
This is also known as increasing your time spent under tension.
On top of that, you can also implement this like an isometric hold, or a pause at the bottom of your rep.
Implementing an isometric hold into your reps is a great way to increase the intensity of your workouts and progressive overload.
So not only does progressive overload change how you perform your reps, things like the weight you lift and sets you do.
But it also changes how your reps look, how slow or fast you do each portion of your rep.
Why Changing Tempo is Essential For Progressive Overload
I mentioned earlier that increasing weight is an essential progressive overload strategy.
And although progressive overload requires you to increase muscle stimulus progressively, trying to increase the weight you lift every workout would be extremely hard.
The same goes for increasing volume each workout.
Sometimes, if you’re lifting a heavy enough weight, you might not be able to increase your reps from last weeks workout.
As a result, the best way to overcome this is to use additional strategies to increase muscle stimulus.
Keeping Your Reps Slow and Controlled to Stimulate Muscle Growth
One of the best strategies to do this is to play around with your time under tension and speed of your reps.
As well as maybe add pauses at the top or bottom of your reps.
This works great when you get to the point where you really can’t add any additional weight or do any more additional reps.
In times like these when you still want to progressive overload, changing your tempo is game changer.
Focus on making each rep slow and controlled, really feeling the stretch on your muscles.
And remember, improving your form as well as the control you have over an exercise can often be even more effective than adding weight or reps.
Takeaways
Progressive overload is essential for anyone trying to make significant progress in the gym.
It’s one of the best training strategies to make your workouts more effective, and your muscle growth as efficient as possible.
By overloading the volume, intensity, and tempo of your workouts, you can focus on making your reps more and more challenging each week.
Over time, you’ll be able to build muscle and gain strength more than you ever have before.
More of My Posts on Women’s Fitness and Weightlifting:
6 Aspects of Your Life That Exercise Transforms
How to Stay Consistent In Your Fitness Routine [The Key to Success]