In college, I used to go to the gym and have a muscle group in mind for that workout. I would hop around from machine to machine and exercise to exercise until I was satisfied. I never wrote anything down and I tried to rely on my memory and “feel” to make sure I was pushing myself to get a solid workout in.
The only problem with this was that I made very little progress over the few years I was lifting in college…
To be fair, I don’t think my goals were very clear, and I didn’t have enough drive to want to do any more than I was already doing.
This approach to exercising is very common among gym-goers, but if we are all going to be spending hours in the gym each week, it would make a whole lot of sense to approach our workouts more methodically so that we can maximize our performance and growth.
So how do we do this?
What Is Progressive Overload?
Essentially, progressive overload is the act of continually increasing the demands on our muscles to accrue growth in muscle strength, size, and endurance.
To state it even more simply, in order to get bigger or stronger from your exercises, you have to challenge your muscles more and more over time.
This is generally done through adding weight, reps, or sets on a session to session basis.
And, while people generally apply this principle to resistance training, this principle can also be easily applied to a long distance running program, biking, or even swimming.
At IVRY, we believe strongly in this principle and apply it to all of our individualized programs because we understand that without it we would be leaving too many gains on the table for our hard-working clients.
An Example of Progressive Overload
Let’s say that you can perform 1 set of bench press at 135 pounds for 10 reps on the first week of your exercise plan.
If you continually go back to that exercise week after week and repeat the same performance of 10 reps at that same load, you probably shouldn’t expect to see optimal growth.
To apply the concept of progressive overload appropriately, the week after you pushed 135 pounds for 10 reps, you would look to improve in a couple of possible ways: slightly increasing the weight on the bar, or adding some more reps at that same weight.
Maybe the second week you go to perform your 1 set of bench press, you aim to move 135 pounds for 11 reps. And, this works!
If you continued with this trend, you might be able to accomplish the following progression.
Sample Progression
Week 1: 135x10
Week 2: 135x11
Week 3: 135x12
Week 4: 135x13
While it may not seem like a huge increase, if you continue to push yourself through modest increments week by week over the course of a month, I would expect you to see a respectable amount of growth relative to that initial week of training.
I think it’s also important to note now that you don’t need monumental weekly increases in the volume or resistance to see growth. Oftentimes progressive overload is a slow process that manifests itself as strength, size, and endurance growth in the long run.
Before we see progressive overload in action, there are some stubborn ideas about exercise that we may have to adjust from.
Some Habits You May Need To Ditch
1. Trying to Aim for an EXACT Number of Reps
One of the biggest inhibitors of progressive overload is this idea that you need to hit the same number of reps EXACTLY as your workout program has laid them out for you.
The reason this can be a problem is because a majority of workouts you see on the internet have something like “3 sets of 10” written next to an exercise.
Here’s the deal.
If you are performing an exercise, say hamstring curls, and you keep the resistance the same for all 3 sets, your hamstrings will fatigue naturally over the course of those sets.
If our body gets fatigued over time, and we are within a few reps of failure on each set, we should be able to complete more reps on our first set than on our second (and certainly on our third).
To eliminate this common programming error, Andrew and I program and train all of our clients to work in a specific rep range for each exercise to allow for that fatigue build-up so that our clients are never leaving unnecessary reps on the table for their first set or trying to push way past what is realistically achievable with immaculate technique on their last set.
How to Get Your Reps Descending Across Your Sets
Here is a quick example of what this might look like when applied to a spreadsheet.
You can see here that the rep range listed is 8-12, and the number of reps performed on each set was 13, 12, and 10.
Although 13 is technically outside of the prescribed rep range, it’s not worth being nonsensically pedantic about it - especially since the optimal rep range for hypertrophy is largely considered to be between 5-30 reps.
2. “Using the 2.5 Pound and 5 Pound Plates is a Waste of Time”
As I mentioned above, progressive overload is a slow process week to week, and the growth is best seen over longer periods of time.
No one said the physique of your dreams was going to happen in a month, ya know?
There is a stigma attached to the smaller measurements of plates hanging out on the gym floor, and I’m here to try and tell you that those smaller plates can be your best friend when it comes to making gains over the long-term.
If the smallest plate size you ever use is a 10 pound plate, that means that for any exercise involving a barbell, the minimum increase from one week to the next would be 20 pounds.
That’s bananalands!
If it takes a huge amount of effort in a week to perform 3 sets of an exercise to within 1-2 reps of failure, then adding 20 pounds to that movement the next week will most likely see an enormous drop-off in performance.
In fact, I use those smaller plates almost every single day I’m in the gym because I know that slowly progressing in resistance over time is the key to adding big weight to a single exercise in the long run.
3. Not Using a Logbook to Track Performance
Your exercise logbook is like your fitness bible.
Without the data to inform us of what we’ve done in the past, we can’t really intelligently progress in future workouts.
As I mentioned in the introduction, I was the guy for years who chose not to log my workouts. By making that decision (likely due to laziness and a lack of understanding), I severely limited the growth I could’ve seen in the gym.
If you want to be consistent in your training with each passing week, it is vital to start tracking your exercises in some form.
This tracking becomes especially important if you are practicing progressive overload by using rep ranges. It is highly unlikely that someone can remember the number of reps performed with a certain weight for every exercise every week.
Some people choose to log their workouts in a notebook that they tote around with them at the gym, and that is a great way to begin practicing the logging of your workouts.
However, we think that using a spreadsheet on the free app Google Sheets is the best way to log your exercises, and this is what we give to each of our clients.
There is a little bit of work to create the spreadsheet in Google Sheets before starting your workout cycle, but since we are all carrying our phones around with us anyways, it makes sense to use them to log our exercises as well.
But enough with the bad habits. Let’s get an even more in-depth look at how to apply progressive overload.
Working Within a Rep Range
For the sake of the rest of this article being coherent, we are going to be under the assumption that we are using a set rep range (i.e. 3 sets for 8-12 reps) for each exercise as opposed to a specific number of reps (i.e. 3 sets for 10 reps).
At the most basic level, the idea is to set a weight that you can perform in the given rep range.
Once you find that weight, the goal is to push for more reps on as many sets as possible (it is totally okay for those first couple of sets to be MORE than the upper end of that rep range) until all of the sets for that exercise are above or at the upper end of the given rep range.
Once you reach this point, it would be time to increase the resistance or load for that exercise and then repeat the process.
Let’s get a closer look at how to actually apply this with some spreadsheet examples.
Methods for Applying Progressive Overload
1. Increase the Resistance
This is the most common way that people naturally apply the idea of progressive overload, and that’s likely because most people are using a workout guide where the number of reps is set at a specific number, so the only thing to increase is the weight on the bar.
We want to only increase the resistance on the bar once we have reached the upper end of our rep range.
In this example, the given rep range was 12-16. In each set you can see that we outperformed or were right at the upper end of the rep range. In this case, it would make sense to add a few pounds to the bar the following week.
Going back to those 2.5 pound and 5 pound plates, it’s probably a good idea to only slightly increase the load on the bar so that you can stay in that rep range for the following week.
I would likely suggest moving up to 95 pounds. or 100 pounds. for this exercise the following week, and here is an example of what the following week might look like:
You can see that there might (and should) be a drop-off in reps once you increase the resistance, but as long as you can get close to that rep range, everything will be fine.
The last thing I will say is that when you increase the resistance for an exercise, it is completely fine if you don’t quite hit the given rep range with your last set as seen here. After a couple more weeks of working at this weight, your reps should continue to increase and place you in that rep range.
2. Increase the Number of Reps
When working in a given rep range, this is another common way to progressively overload. It is also pretty easy to regulate!
If you aren’t quite ready to increase the resistance because you haven’t reached the upper end of your rep range with nearly every set, then your goal should be to aim for at least one extra rep in at least one of your sets.
As you can see in this example, I wasn’t quite hitting the number of reps I would like before increasing the resistance. So when I see this, I know that I need to try and aim for at least one more rep in at least one of my sets.
This could look like only adding one rep to that first set (when I’m the most fresh), or adding a rep or two to each set. Either situation is an example of overloading, and the only difference is how fast I might be able to overload.
For a logbook reference, here is what I did the following week:
I was able to add a few reps over the course of a couple of the sets, and I was very happy with even this seemingly small amount of progress.
3. Increase the Number of Sets
While the first two applications of progressive overload are relatively easy to monitor and apply, another tool for progressive overload is adding an entire set.
The idea of adding an entire set is more nuanced and a little bit more challenging to self-regulate over the course of multiple cycles, but it can be a great tool for overloading.
As it can be hard to gauge when to add another set to a specific exercise in your program, it makes more sense to plan out beforehand where you might add sets over the course of your workout cycle.
If my goal over the course of a mesocycle is to hammer my back, I may plan out ahead of time a few exercises for my back where I would add some sets.
Example
If my mesocycle is 5 weeks and I know I really want to work on building some strength and size in my vertical pulling movements, I may structure the number of sets for each week like so:
Week 1: 3 sets
Week 2: 3 sets
Week 3: 4 sets
Week 4: 4 sets
Week 5: 5 sets
The reason that this can be more nuanced is that if I’m still trying to work in a specific rep range, the number of reps I can perform on that added set might drop off to be outside of the given rep range.
In my opinion, this is 100% okay.
You should do your best to try and keep that added set in the given rep range, but don’t be alarmed if you can’t quite get there.
Adding an entire set to your program is a fantastic way to greatly increase the workload for a specific muscle group because you are able to add a lot more reps for that exercise.
4. Decreasing Rest Times
This is probably the least common way people apply progressive overload because most people likely don’t measure their rest times between sets.
By decreasing the rest time, the idea is that you are doing the same amount of work (or even more if you can add reps to a set) in less time.
We generally don’t advocate for using this method in our own programming for our clients because it’s more of a fitness-based strategy for improvement, but it is definitely another tool that you can use to challenge yourself in some fashion.
Time to Make Progressive Overload Work for You
After reading this very in depth guide to progressive overload, hopefully you see the benefits and process that we personally use at IVRY to help our clients succeed.
You may need to start small at first and practice using only one of those applications to add progressive overload to your exercise program, but I encourage you to think about reorganizing your workout plan to follow this process so that you can see better results!