What is Progressive Overload?
If you had to take everything there is to know about fitness and boil it down to one simple concept, it would be progressive overload. This principle of regularly increasing the demands you place on your body is what training adaptations are all about. This is also what results are about. If you never push your body to do more, you will never get a positive adaptation. This can be in terms of strength, muscle, cardiovascular fitness or anything else.
For as simple of a concept as it is, progressive overload often goes overlooked. After all, programs designed to “keep your body guessing” often sacrifice progressions in favour of novelty. And while cycling, TRX and yoga are all great ways to get fit, bopping from one exercise class to the next can mean that you never will give your body the chance to adapt to any given workout. The result: The benefits of your workouts end when you leave the gym.
By simply planning your workouts with progressive overload in mind, you can ensure that every workout spurs your body to adapt, getting you stronger, faster, and able to hit new heights.
How to incorporate Progressive Overload to your routine
In basic terms, when the exercise becomes easy, make it harder. The three main variables that determine an exercise’s level of difficulty are:
Depending on your exercise of choice, volume could be the number of miles you log per week or how often you hit the gym. When performing strength exercises, volume is generally defined as the amount of weight lifted multiplied by the number of sets multiplied by the number of reps. Intensity equals how hard you’re working. Common measures include your mile time, dumbbell’s weight, or how advanced your chosen exercise variation is, he says. Density refers to your workout volume divided by the time you did it in. Take a shorter rest break between sets, and you’re upping your density.
Exactly how you manipulate volume, intensity and density to overload your workouts largely depends on what you’re doing in the gym.
You can watch the video bellow for a better understanding of this concept.