Use Progressive Overload To Get Better Results From Your Exercise Program
No matter your exercise goal: to get stronger, fitter, complete a 5km race, do a pull-up, or build muscle and lose body fat, you need to incorporate progressions into your workouts.
That’s based on a principle of exercise science called progressive overload. After consistency, this is the most important thing you can do to get results from your exercise program.
When clients tell me they've been exercising regularly and haven’t been seeing the results they expected, it’s usually because they haven’t been using the principle of progressive overload.
In this article, I'll explain why progressive overload matters and show you a simple way to apply it to your workouts.
What is Progressive Overload?
Let’s start at the beginning, that’s how important this is!
Exercise, at its core, is a stress on your body. Just like there's good cholesterol and bad cholesterol, there's also good stress and bad stress. Exercise is a type of good stress.
When you exercise, your heart and lungs work harder to get more oxygen to your muscles. That’s why your heart rate goes up and your breathing rate increases.
But that’s not all that happens when you exercise. Your brain, nerves, blood vessels, muscle and fat cells, bones, tendons, and ligaments get a workout too.
The body doesn’t like stress. It likes to keep a constant internal environment, which is called homeostasis. Even when it’s faced with changes in the outside environment, your body will adjust so that things inside stay under control. It’s a safety mechanism.
For example, you always maintain a body temperature of about 98.6 degrees (F), no matter what the temperature is outside. That’s important because if your internal temperature gets too high (like when you run a fever), it can lead to serious problems or even death.
When you exercise, things change inside your body, and your body has to work hard to bring everything back to normal.
So, when you consistently stress your body with exercise, it does something pretty amazing. It adapts so that the next time it experiences that same level of stress, it can handle it more easily.
Teach Your Body New Tricks
Most people think of exercise only as a way of burning calories or building muscle, but that’s short-sighted. If you exercise just to burn calories a few hours each week, you only get a few hours a week’s worth of benefit.
Instead, you should exercise in a way that causes your body to adapt and get better at exercise. This is the difference between just “working out” and “training” your body. When you train your body to adapt to exercise, you get benefits that are with you all the time:
Your brain gets better at sending signals to your muscles.
That improves your coordination and helps you move more freely and easily, whether you’re playing catch with your kids, climbing into a truck, or just getting in and out of your chair at work.
Your muscles get bigger and stronger.
This is an obvious one. When you get stronger through exercise, you’re stronger all the time. You’ll be able to move furniture without help and need less trips to get the groceries into the house. Building muscle also improves metabolism.
Your tendons and ligaments get stronger.
When you accidentally trip over a curb, you’re less likely to sprain an ankle.
Your bone density increases.
That trip and fall is less likely to break your bones.
Your heart gets stronger and more efficient at pumping blood around your body.
That helps you get more oxygen and nutrients to your muscles during exercise, and also reduces your overall risk of cardiovascular disease.
Your blood vessels handle pressure changes better.
When your heart pumps more blood through your veins and arteries, the pressure in those blood vessels increases. They respond by expanding to let more blood through. When your blood vessels don’t expand and contract efficiently, you end up with high blood pressure. When you train your blood vessels to respond better, you decrease your blood pressure, and along with it your risk of a heart attack or stroke.
Your metabolism improves.
Along with the metabolism-boosting effect of adding more muscle, exercise also makes your body better at burning fat. Fat is one of the things your body uses as fuel during exercise, so being able to burn it faster and more efficiently improves your exercise performance. It also helps you burn body fat when you’re not exercising, which can help you improve your body composition.
These are just a few of the many ways your body gets better at exercising if you do it consistently and progressively. When your body adapts in these ways, it improves your overall health, makes you feel and function better, and helps you achieve your goals.
Emergency-Proof Your Body
Even if you’re not active, you can’t avoid physical stress. It’s going to happen to you. One day you might suddenly find yourself sprinting for a bus or having to lift something very heavy.
If your body isn’t trained, something bad could happen. You could strain a muscle or tendon because it’s not used to withstanding a lot of force. You could have a cardiovascular event because your heart or blood vessels are not prepared to handle increased demands.
I’m not saying that any of those things will happen, but personally I’d rather be prepared and confident that my body can handle a sudden stressful situation. I like to think of this as emergency-proofing your body.
I started thinking about that a few years ago when I was training a client who had a young child and was expecting his second. He wanted to increase his strength, and when I asked him why he said that he wanted to be strong enough to carry both of his kids if there was ever an emergency. That’s obviously not the right motivation for everyone, but with that mindset, he sure did get strong.
How Do You Train Your Body?
Making these good adaptations uses energy and resources, and your body doesn’t like to use extra energy unless it has to. Remember, your body likes to keep its internal environment stable, and using extra energy makes that harder. It will only adapt if you force it to.
The first time you do a workout (let’s say it’s a run), your body thinks: “Ok, this is tough. My heart and lungs are working harder than they’re used to, the muscles in my legs aren’t strong and efficient enough, and I’m having a hard time breaking down fat fast enough to make fuel. This hasn’t happened before, though, so let’s just wait and see if it happens again.”
By the time you’ve done several runs over a few weeks, your body realizes that this is going to keep happening. It starts making some changes so it can keep up in the future.
Boom: you’ve gotten fitter and healthier.
Now, your body can handle the stress of your regular run. If you keep doing your runs at that same intensity, speed, or distance, there’s no need to make any more beneficial adjustments. Your body can already handle that level of stress. That’s when you “plateau”.
If you want to keep getting fitter and healthier, you need to keep stressing your body a little more than it’s used to over time. That’s where progressive overload comes in.
Progressive overload just means aiming to increase the difficulty of some aspect of your training. In other words, it means pushing a little harder each time you exercise.
How Do You Use Progressive Overload?
Here’s how simple it can be:
Step 1: Complete a workout.
Step 2: Record what you did (exercises, sets, reps, weights, pace, distance, etc.).
Step 3: Try to do more next time.
Specifically, there are many ways you can incorporate progressive overload:
Lift more weight for the same number of repetitions
Lift the same weight for more repetitions
Increase range of motion so your muscles have to work harder to complete a movement
Increase cardio pace
Increase cardio distance
Decrease rest time between exercises
Increase difficulty by moving to a more challenging exercise variation
But how do you know when to progress? And by how much?
In my own training and with my clients, I use a simple method to guide progression which is based on repetition ranges. The repetition range method gives you a clear, systematic way to incorporate progressions. This works for resistance training, but you can use the same basic strategy for cardio and other types of exercise.
A Quick Explanation of Repetition Ranges
Strength training programs are written in terms of exercises, sets, and repetitions (reps). You might see a program written like this:
Squat, 3 x 8-12 OR 3 sets of 8-12 squats
The squat is the exercise, and you would do 3 sets of between 8 and 12 repetitions of that exercise.
The repetition range you use for your exercises tells you how many quality, high-effort repetitions you should do for each exercise. That means each rep should be done with good form, with a full range of motion, and the last 2-3 reps should feel very challenging. That’s very important for getting the benefits of strength training.
If the program you are following only gives you a single repetition number, make it into a range by adding 2 reps below and above the repetition number. For example:
3 sets of 10 squats becomes a repetition range of 8-12.
Repetition Ranges as a Guide For Progressive Overload
Let’s say the program says you should do 3 sets of 8-12 repetitions of the dumbbell chest press. You would start at the bottom of the range, by figuring out the right weight for you to use for 8 repetitions of this exercise.
Every time you do that exercise again, use the same weight and try to do just one more rep in at least one set. Soon, you’ll be able to do 12 repetitions in all of your sets with that weight, which is the top of your repetition range.
When you can do that comfortably, you’re ready to increase the weight in the next session. That’s proof that you’ve gotten stronger!
Next, figure out the new, heavier weight that takes you back to the bottom end of the range again, and start working your way back up to the top. Simple!
There are a few things to keep in mind here. First, it’s very important to keep track of what you do in each workout so you know which weights to use and how many reps to aim for next time.
Second, make sure you use good form on every exercise. Using good form ensures that when you increase your reps and weights, it’s really because you’ve gotten stronger, not because you “cheated” by using bad form.
Finally, you can see that in order for this system to work, you need to practice the same exercises frequently. There are some people who insist that you should change your workouts all the time, or that you need to “confuse your muscles” with a lot of different exercises to avoid a plateau. That’s just not true. If you don’t do the same exercises regularly, you won’t get a chance to apply your progressions to them.
There are a few primary exercises you should do each week. Those are your push, pull, squat, hinge, and core exercises.
Progressive Overload for Cardio
The same idea (slowly and systematically increasing the difficulty of your workout) can also be applied to cardio. The first step is to find your baseline. Let’s use running as an example. Run for as long as you can, using an app or fitness tracker to record your time/distance and pace. If you run on a treadmill, it will display that information for you.
Then use what I call the “5/2/5” method. For your next 5 runs, maintain the same speed and aim to run for 2 minutes longer each time. If you can accomplish that 5 times in a row, then spend your next 5 runs increasing your speed for that same time or distance. Repeat.
Be Patient and Persistent
Progression doesn’t always happen in a simple, straight line. If you’re a beginner, you’ll probably be able to progress pretty quickly, probably in most sessions.
Enjoy that time, because after a few months, those gains will slow down. Sometimes you’ll stall temporarily, sometimes you may even go backwards, and sometimes you’ll suddenly make a big gain.
That’s totally normal. Be patient, keep aiming to progress, and you will be successful.
If You Need Help
Progressive overload is built right into my Strength Training For Anxiety Program. This 12-week workout program is guided by an app so you can do the workouts on your own, anytime, anywhere. It also has science-based features to help you get the best results, both physically and mentally.