Photo: Jacob Lund (Shutterstock)
As you get stronger, you can lift heavier and heavier weights. That much is probably clear. But what beginners sometimes miss is that it’s kind of a chicken and egg situation: You get stronger because you lift heavier and heavier weights. This is the concept of progressive overload.
How does progressive overload work?
In any area of fitness, such as strength, endurance or flexibility, you need to challenge your body to adapt and improve. As the National Strength and Conditioning Association explained, there are two parts: the “principle of overload” and the “principle of progression”.
The Overload Principle states, “To achieve a particular training adaptation, the body must be stressed by working against a stimulus or load greater than what it is used to.” In other words, you must work harder than Your body is used to it.
And then the progression principle can be used to build on: “In order to consistently achieve the desired training adjustments for a certain activity or skill, the training stimulus must increase gradually and steadily.”
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Or to put it simply: you get fitter if you work harder than usual, and if you want to improve further, you have to work harder than before.
How does it look in real life?
If you are stunned by the idea of working harder and harder forever, don’t panic. You’ll work harder in absolute terms – say, by lifting heavier weights – but the challenge remains relatively the same. Your workouts will drop to what you might describe as “difficult but doable” levels of effort, and you will notice progress as your numbers increase. (The same approach applies to endurance sports. As cyclist Greg Lemond supposedly said, “It never gets easier, you just go faster.”)
When I first started lifting weights many years ago, 65 pounds was a decent bench press challenge for me. I remember taking pride in myself for being able to push out a rep or two with 85 pounds. Now when I do a bank training session, I don’t even bother to load those amounts onto the bar. My warm-up sets start at 95 pounds, and a heavy single would be around 150. Those 150 feel just as hard as 85, but it’s undeniably more weight.
How did I make this progress? Well, I kept lifting the weights that felt heavy to me. Over time, the same weights that used to be a challenge felt light, and I had to keep adding more weight on the bar to get something that actually felt heavy. (We have a guide here to find out if you are lifting “heavy”.)
Most of the time, I either followed a program that told me how many pounds to lift and slowly increased that amount over time, or one that told me what level of exertion to lift (a concept called RPE)which allowed me to choose a suitable weight every day. If you follow a program, you will usually make better progress than just spurring it, but as long as you use the overload principle and the progression principle, you will get stronger.
What if I can’t lift more every time?
That’s okay! You don’t literally have to put weight on the bar every time you lift it.
There is a wide variety of weights as well Rep ranges this can be effective for building strength and muscles. For example, if I do a bank workout today, I might do 10 sets of 110 pounds, or five sets of 130, or some heavy single sets of 150, or any combination of these. If I’m really tired or stressed out, I might decide to do the 10 sets with just 100 pounds. If I’m feeling good, maybe I can do them at 115. That’s what I mean by a broad spectrum: All of these are tough enough to stimulate my muscles to adapt and get stronger. (There are reasons you might choose one of these workouts, but we don’t need to get into those details for now.)
What would not be a progressive overload? Well, doing sets of 10 with just the bar wouldn’t help me get stronger. If I had a mini barbell set and maxed it out at 85 pounds, once I got to the point where 85 pounds is no longer a challenging weight, my strength would stagnate.
Even as your strength improves, you don’t have to do every single workout as long as you get stronger over the long term and your workouts are still in the challenging range for you.
Let’s say you are doing biceps curls with a 10 pound dumbbell. You can do eight or ten repetitions with it. Perfect. But maybe the only way to gain weight in your gym is to take a 15-pound dumbbell. If that weight is too heavy for you, that’s fine. Keep working the 10 pounder and you’ll be ready for the 15th in time.
You can make progress on more than one metric
While you may find itching to lift heavier weights, weight on the bar isn’t the only way to move forward. Sometimes you can’t add weight because of equipment problems or just because your strength is slowly improving. (Even if your beginner gains have been meteoric, any progress will eventually slow down.)
But if you’re smart, you probably don’t want to get better at just one thing. Many beginners start out with the squat, bench press, and deadlift in sets of five, trying to add weight with each workout. But you’ll become a more versatile strength athlete if you can lift heavy single sets and sets of 10 or 15 as well. Depending on your goals, in addition to squats, you can also consider front squats and also reverse hypers or kettlebell swings for deadlifting. There are ways to improve on all of these things, and it is normal for a strength athlete to simultaneously increase their repetitions on extra exercises, increase their weight on the bar for tough individual exercises, and increase the time they spend on conditioning.
What is double progression?
One easy way to combine goals is called double progression. That means you’re making progress on two metrics at the same time: repetitions and weight. It would look like this:
- Your program requires overhead presses for three sets of “8-12 reps.”
- You choose a weight that you can do for 8 reps.
- With each workout, you will see if you can add an additional repetition. (Maybe you can do 9, 8 and 8. Then another day you do 9, 9 and 9. Soon you will be at 10.)
- Once you can do sets of 12, 12, and 12 with that weight, move on to a heavier weight.
- Start again with the new weight in sets of 8, 8, and 8 and repeat the process.
A slightly more complicated version of this would be to add sets as well: after switching from 3×8 to 3×12, you can then move on to 4×12 and 5×12.
In addition to more weight, more repetitions, or more sets, progression can also mean:
- take fewer breaks between sentences
- do a harder version of the exercise
- Increasing your range of motion (e.g. crouching deeper)
- do the exercise in slow motion (for example, tempo squats, which take three seconds to lower yourself)
The key is to make sure you are moving in a direction that will benefit you. For example, if you can do 20 pushups, increasing the repetitions will result in better muscle endurance, while fewer repetitions of a heavier exercise (like the barbell bench press) will make you stronger. You can do both, but you should prioritize the one that means more to you. If your goal in life is to do 100 pushups, do more repetitions! But if you want to get stronger, it is better to gain weight.
Plateaus are normal
One last thing now that we’ve discussed what progressive overload looks like. It is important to remember that development is long term. Some competitive strength athletes test theirs one repetition max. outside of the competition, which means they only find out how much their deadlift has gone up once or twice a year. That’s not to say they haven’t made any progress in the meantime. If you run an effective program and constantly challenge yourself, you are still working.
Plateaus are a fact when you are a lifter. Sometimes it takes a while to get stronger. Sometimes you need to work on your technique to express your newfound strength. Sometimes factors like stress or weight loss or changes in your exercise can make you weaker in the short term, but if you continue to exercise in such a way that it challenges you, you will set new PRs early enough.
