Progressive Overload: Why it is the Foundation

What happens when you train hard, prioritize recovery, and still hit a plateau? Sign up for a muscle-building plan based on your body type and the alignment of the stars? Or overanalyze your technique on all your lifts so you never feel like you are moving properly again. If you want to waste your time, by all means, those options will take care of that for you. The answer is actually straightforward: your program lacks one thing: progressive overload. Put more simply: progression. 

If doing the same workouts at the same intensity level with the same weights would forever make you progress, everyone would be jacked. You need to push yourself every workout and perform more than you did in your previous session. This is the basis of the idea of progressive overload. More weight, more reps, more sets, better quality reps, complete the same workout faster, or even shorter rest periods over time. If the training stimulus is not sufficiently large, you will not adapt (build more muscle or get stronger). But overdo it, and you could not recover for the next training session, thinking it's time for red light saunas and cold plunges in alkaline water. It can be a fine balance to master. 

Try this out, given that your workout is 3 sets of 8-10 reps. In Week 1, you achieved 50 pounds for 10, 10, and 8 reps, respectively. In week 2, you know you need to surpass your previous workout somehow to continue pushing and driving growth. You slept well the night before, stress is low, and you have eaten a good amount that day to fuel your workout, so you know you are set up to perform in the gym. In sets 1 and 2, you hit 10 reps again; then, in set 3, you really push yourself and also get 10 reps. You have surpassed your previous workout and are ready to bump the weight up next time you train. This encompasses the main idea of progressive overload. Not every workout will result in personal records with weights or reps. Maybe your favorite dating show had a season finale last night, and there was no way you were missing that. Enter the gym, aiming to reduce your rest periods from 2-3 minutes down to 1-2 minutes. You may not be adding weight to the bar, increasing reps to a set, or working sets into your workout, but you pushed yourself harder than in your previous workout.     

Track your workouts; it will make it much easier to see progress. You can pick up a small notebook at the local grocery store for cheap, and just ask to borrow a pen from a coworker, and conveniently forget to return it, and you are set to start logging your training sessions. Be as detailed as you need so it makes sense in the following training session when you try to decipher the hieroglyphics you transcribed on the sweat-soaked paper. 

Also, be honest with yourself about what actually counts as progress. Sloppy reps, half-depth, bouncing the bar, or cutting the range of motion just so you can write a bigger number in your notebook is fake progression. The bar might go up, but your physique and your strength won’t follow it for long. You cannot keep progressing if you are injured, and lifting sloppily to record a bigger number is a quick way to get injured. Quality reps are the currency that turns progression into real results.

At the end of the day, there is no secret program, supplement stack, or biohacking shortcut that replaces this. Progressive overload is not glamorous; it is repetitive, demanding, and sometimes frustrating. But it is undefeated. If you respect it long enough, it will build more muscle and strength than anything else you could chase.