What Is Progressive Overloading? The Missing Link to Building A Great Physique

As a fitness professional, I see and hear a lot of things that make me cringe or question my life choices. But the one that really takes the cake is when I see people at the gym who come in every single day of the week and often for hours at a time and does the same exact full-body workout with the same exact weight, sets, repetitions, and effort for years and years. And unsurprisingly, their workouts stay the exact same along with their physique. What are they missing? Progressive overload. You might be wondering, “What is progressive overloading?” Don’t worry I’m here to answer that.

Personally, I live and breathe for self-development, getting better, and improving at what I do. I simply can’t imagine anything more discouraging and time-wasting than doing the same thing over and over again and not getting better, not making gains, or not seeing any progress. Call me insane, but I actually don’t want to be average or maintain my current state, I want to be better. (If it sounds like we would get along, be sure to check out my online coaching program here!)

And if you’re one of these people doing the same thing over and over again and not seeing the results you want, here’s probably why. You likely aren’t bringing enough intensity into your workouts or applying too much intensity in the wrong places.

Here’s the thing, your body loves staying the same. Staying the same means it doesn’t have to change its metabolic processes, adapt to anything new, or step out of its comfort zone. The simple fact is, if you don’t push yourself out of that comfort zone while working out, you’re going to plateau and stop seeing progress.

What Is Progressive Overloading (Tension)?

Here’s the long, sciency, nerdy version: Progressive overload is continuously increasing the demands on your body’s physiological systems in order to force it to adapt, change, and progress by increasing muscle size, muscle strength, and/or muscle endurance (along with the structures the muscles attach to like bones, tendons, and ligaments).

And then here’s the simplified version: Progressive overload is simply doing more work over time during your workouts. Doing more work will force your muscles to work harder and signal to them that they need to change by getting bigger, stronger, and/or have more endurance.

What Is Progressive Overloading And How Does It Relate To Muscle Hypertrophy

If you’ve recently gotten into the fitness world, you’ll likely have heard the term “hypertrophy” being thrown around a lot especially with bodybuilders. This simply means “the enlargement of an organ or tissue from the increase in size of its cells.” While this can mean any organ or tissue in the body, people usually refer to muscle when they use this term.

There are three mechanisms that can cause muscle hypertrophy:

1. Mechanical Tension – The work, the exercise, the physical lifting of the weight, the movement. Whatever it is you’re moving, it has to be difficult enough to produce cause some kind of mechanical tension onto your muscles, connective tissue (tendons and ligaments), and bones. But also, you don’t want it to be too difficult resulting in immediate or eventual injury. And when you gradually increase the mechanical tension and the work that your muscles have to produce, your body adapts and reacts by increasing their size and strength (along with your connective tissue and bones).
2. Muscular Damage – If a workout is challenging enough, it will result in microtrauma (microscopic tears/damage) to your muscle fibers. This is completely fine and encouraged in most cases. This causes the muscle cells to react by signaling to repair cells to repair the broken muscle tissue and even grow them to become bigger and stronger.
3. Metabolic Stress – This is usually more in relation to higher repetition (with lighter weight) training. More so in the range of 12-30 reps and/or shorter rest periods than your typical heavier strength training. An important point to note, the higher the repetition range you are lifting at (with lighter weights), the closer to failure you should/are able to push yourself to muscle exhaustion. By doing this, you aim to trigger a hormonal response to induce hypertrophy.

Let’s dive in a bit more into each of these mechanisms.

Mechanical Tension

Mechanical tension is simply the amount of resistance your muscles have to contract against. This might sound like fancy science talk, but you might already some of these concepts. You just need to put the face to a name, that’s all. Mechanical tension includes all of the following factors:

• Load/Intensity – how heavy the weight you are lifting relative to your one rep max (1RM). For example, your 1RM is 200 lbs. 90% of your 1RM (180 lbs) is heavier than 50% of your 1RM (100 lbs).
• Total Volume – the weight multiplied by the number of sets and number of repetitions performed for a given workout. For example, you squat 100 lbs for 3 sets of 10 reps. Your total volume lifted was 100x3x10=3000 lbs.
• Form, range of motion, and lifting technique
• Tempo – the duration and control of the eccentric (the part of the lift where you’re slowly resisting against the weight), concentric (the part of the lift where you’re forcefully exerting against the weight), and potential isometric (pauses with the weight lifted) during any part of the lift
• Isometric holds – exercises where the muscle length and joint angle doesn’t change during the contraction

Is Muscle Damage the Goal?

The goal of any well-designed workout program should be to focus on mechanical tension. While some muscle damage is needed to induce muscle growth, you don’t necessarily need to feel pain or soreness to know that muscle damage has occurred and the goal of any workout should never be to chase muscle pain or soreness. Muscle damage will naturally occur with progressively overloading your workouts. Therefore, the goal of a good workout program should properly manage muscle damage (and repair) in order to achieve progressive overload. (I teach you exactly how to design your strength training workout program here!)

So how exactly do you manage the right amount of muscle damage?

Just keep these few things in mind and you’ll be good to go. Control your form and make sure it is as pristine as possible, most specifically, the eccentric or resisting part of the lift. By doing controlled eccentrics, but not excessively “slow,” this can create more favorable muscle recruitment and damage rather than swinging weights or letting gravity take over the eccentric. And as you lift heavier weights along more volume over time (which happens naturally as you are progressively overloading), you’ll go through these cycles of muscle damage and repair.

A final note is that overall training volume also has a huge effect on muscle damage just as mechanical tension does.

Metabolic Stress (and Pump Training)

When you do moderate to high rep training, and/or use shorter rest periods, this leads to you feeling “the pump” when you’re training. Simply put, it’s muscle cells “swelling up” due to blood being trapped inside the working muscles along with a decreased oxygen supply to the muscles (because of the trapped blood). This further leads hormonal release which influences anabolic signaling and increases hypertrophy.

If you are relatively new to training, “the pump” might feel unusual. It’s best described as your muscles feeling enlarged, tight, and on the verge of exploding. “The pump” isn’t necessarily a bad thing. (Arnold describes this perfectly lol.) It can be a good sign that you’re targeting specific muscles correctly and temporarily make you look much bigger and more defined. Many bodybuilders, fitness models, and maybe even someone you know often pump up before getting on stage or taking photos in order to achieve a fuller, more aesthetic look.

However, many people also put too much emphasis and focus on “the pump.” Getting a pump is great, but that should not be the goal of training. The fact of the matter is that you can get a pump if you lift a pencil enough times, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re making gains lifting a pencil. Many make the mistake of going to the gym, lifting weights without tracking their progress, and simply chasing “the pump.” Which is fine for staying in shape. But not ideal if you’re trying to gain muscle and especially not ideal if you want to gain muscle AND strength.

Not to say that lifting “light” weight (think 10-20 reps) weight is bad. You can make similar hypertrophy gains with a wide variety of rep ranges if volume is equal. Whether that’s 4-6 reps, 8-10 reps, 10-12 reps, or even 15-20 reps. The main method to building significant muscle mass requires a structured approach – one that relies on trackable metrics. So regardless of what rep range you decide to train with, you must track your weight lifted and strive to improve on them over time if you want to increase your muscle and strength. Simply lifting for the pump will not cut it.

While metabolic stress training is great for the reasons mentioned above, it often emphasizes shorter rest periods along with higher rep ranges. This leads to less than ideal performance and decreases our ability to focus on progressive mechanical tension overload – the primary driver of growth and change.

“It is well established that using very short rest intervals can reduce the number of repetitions that can be performed on subsequent sets. Thus, if you restrict rest periods for the purpose of increasing metabolic fatigue to the point where you perform less total repetitions, or have to use lighter loads on subsequent sets, you are essentially “throwing the baby out with the bathwater”. Meaning, you have sacrificed total volume for metabolic fatigue.  – Eric Helms”

Getting a pump can look and feel great. It makes sense if you have an injury that is preventing you from lifting heavy. Using high reps and lighter weight can help you get a good workout along with a solid pump. But if you have the ability to train properly while implementing progressive overload and your goal is to get bigger and stronger, never settle for training just for a pump.

What Is Progressive Overloading – Ways To Produce It

In order to bring about progressive overload, you have to stress a muscle with a bigger stimulus than it normally goes under. For example, say Susan is squatting 50 lbs for 3 sets of 8, once a week, every week. And sadly, although this is something I commonly see at the gym, Susan won’t see any growth or changes in her legs doing the same weight/reps/sets every single week. Her never-changing workout, given that her form and tempo are also the same every time, isn’t providing enough stimulus for further growth and change.

If Susan wants to see growth and change, she would have to apply any combination of the following progressive overload methods:

1. Increasing the weight lifted (with equal sets & reps and the same form)
2. Increasing total number of sets lifted (with equal reps and weight lifted)
3. Increasing the number of reps per set lifted (with equal weight and number of sets)
4. Improving Range of Motion (ROM) with equal weight, sets, and reps
5. Improving form and technique with equal weight, sets, and reps
6. Increasing Time Under Tension (TUT) by varying the tempo of the concentric and eccentric parts of the lifts
7. Frequency – training the lift more often per week (by either maintaining or increasing total weekly volume
8. Efficiency – being able to complete a workout while requiring less rest time between sets and exercises
9. Increasing relative strength – being able to maintain and/or increase strength while maintaining or decreasing body weight
10. Less effort required – maintaining the same weight lifted/sets/reps but having a lower Rate of Perceived Exertion (RPE), resulting in the workout feel “easier” than before

It doesn’t necessarily matter which of these methods you decide to use as a measure of progress. So long as you are staying consistent with your chosen method and maintaining proper form in order to minimize the risk of injury. Because the less time you spend being injured, the more time you can spend actually working out and making gains.

Whichever you choose, this will lead to bodily adaptation so that your body can become more resilient and stronger to new demands in the future. The process goes as follows: stimulate, recover, adapt. If you want growth and change, you must keep repeating this cycle.

*READ THIS* if you want to Save Time, Stay Injury-Free, and Make More Gains

If you look back at one of the first several paragraphs, you’ll notice I wrote “Progressive (Tension) Overload.” The reason for this is because growth is stimulated by tension experienced by the muscles, not what the number on the weight says. Although the numbers on paper are very important for record-keeping and accountability’s sake, your muscles don’t know how much they lifted. They just know if there was tension present and how difficult it felt.

That being said, if you saw person A squatting 315 lbs with pristine, solid form versus person B quarter-squatting 315 lbs, knees caving in, and the bar tilted to one side, you’d be most definitely more impressed with person A. However, on paper, both persons could have recorded that they hit a new PR of 315 lbs that day.

Here’s my point: Progressive overload should begin with improvements on form, tempo, and range of motion first. Only when your form is clean (works the intended muscle properly), smooth (establishes your ideal tempo and movement pattern), and minimizes injury (properly loads the muscles rather than other passive tissue), should you start adding more volume (weight, sets, reps). And I understand, this takes humility and patience. It’s not quite as fun as throwing on as much weight as you can to boost your ego and get everyone to look at you in the gym.

But if your goal is to maximize muscle and strength as soon as possible, then sacrificing form, tempo, and range of motion will definitely hinder your ability to do so.

By perfecting your technique first, before adding further progressive overload, you allow yourself to more potential short-term and long-term gains because you decrease your risk of injury, both now and later down the road.

Improving your technique will allow you to build the proper “muscle memory” motor pathways to generate maximal strength while using the intended muscles that you want to strengthen and grow. Whereas with bad form, you aren’t lifting as efficiently, you won’t be as strong, you won’t be stimulating the desired muscles as much, and you book yourself a one-way ticket to plateauing or worse, injuring yourself.

With all that said, focus on technique and form before applying overload.

Now then, after your technique and form is pristine and checks all the boxes, you can start adding more weight and more total volume over time (the weight lifted, sets, and reps). And again, you don’t want your numbers to be increasing over time while your form is increasingly getting worse.

For example, we’ve all seen those guys at the gym doing bicep curls with terrible form, swinging their entire body just to get the weight up, and then proceeding to slap on more weight.

And let’s face it, do those curls provide the same stimulus as performing the same exercise, sets, and reps, but using controlled form and no swinging?

Absolutely not.

Are quarter squats with knees caving in and the body bending sideways the same as squats where you go as deep as you comfortably can while controlling the weight on the way down, with your knees tracking over your toes, and possibly even throwing a pause in there?

Absolutely not.

There are obviously huge differences.

One method will supply the proper tension and stimulus and the other will not.

Even though on paper they can look identical, you would never say they were identical if it happened in front of your own eyes.

The bottom line:

Never sacrifice proper form and technique for the sake of increasing your numbers on paper. Do NOT ego lift.

It might feel good to increase the weight at that moment, but you’re only taking away potential gains from your future self.

The single most important skill you need to succeed in your fitness journey…

Personally, if I find that I’m lifting with less control, with a faster tempo than usual, or if my form just didn’t “feel right,” I’ll actually make note of it in my training log and at least make a mental note of it being the bare minimum. That way, I ensure that I keep myself accountable to lift with standard form and tempo for the following workout(s).

When the following workout(s) come around, I make slight tweaks such as repeating the same weight/sets/reps with my standard (or better) form/tempo, or even decrease the weight so that I can solely focus on technique before progressing back up.

Most importantly, this allows me to acknowledge the fact that my performance of an exercise with worse (than normal) form does not mean I progressed. In fact, it is a sign that I am regressing (moving backwards). Any time this comes up whichever day of the week and whichever exercise I perform, I do not lie to myself thinking I set a new PR or crushed a workout knowing deep down that my form wasn’t up to par.

And don’t get me wrong, effort is awesome. Effort is necessary for progressing and seeing results. But the guy lifting an impressive amount of weight is with great form is working just as hard, if not harder, than the other guy lifting impressive weight with shit form, not to mention much smarter. If my form ever feels shit or “off,” which it rare nowadays because I take proper form very seriously (after having made some stupid mistakes in my younger lifting years), I always make note of it. I write it down. I record my sets, I humble myself, I don’t brush it under the rug. I face it head-on and seek to improve on it. I have made far too many mistakes and now hold myself to a much higher standard to settle for anything less.

This single most important skill is what will allow you to succeed in your fitness journey (as well as all other areas of life) – self-awareness.

If you want to properly progressive overload, you must set a technique standard for all of your lifts.

Because if you don’t assess your form regularly, it can easily lead down a slippery slope of degrading to shit. It might start off with a little bit of momentum, bounce, or less range of motion. It usually starts with a little more of a bounce off your chest when benching or a slightly more rounded back doing deadlifts. While yes, your numbers will still increase, others will be impressed with your strength, your ego gets a nice boost, but ask yourself, what are you really progressing? The “gains” might come today, but at what cost? When you do this, you’re robbing your future self of his/her gains. And every workout you do this, it gets increasingly worse.

Don’t be “that person” who ends up saying squats are bad for your knees, hips, back, etc. because you decided to not do an exercise properly and injure yourself. Or the person who says bench pressing with full ROM is “bad for the shoulders” because you never practiced good technique. The truth is, you won’t be able to make gains or PRs if/when you get injured. And if you want to get to an advanced level of lifting, 80-90% of the journey is about not getting injured.

So I want you to truly ask yourself this…

What’s more important to you? Being able to set more new PRs today at the cost of injuring yourself? Or being able to set the ultimate PR of being able to lift heavy and lift safely 30 years from now and onward?

Form and Tempo

Progressive overload takes into account your form and tempo. There is a huge difference the tension generated between bench pressing and letting gravity drop the bar on your chest before you bouncing it back up versus controlling the weight down for a 2 second count, pausing, and pressing the bar back up. That being said, this doesn’t mean you should take it to the opposite extreme of overemphasizing Time Under Tension (TUT) or thinking TUT is the only thing that matters and doing light weight with 10 second counts between reps.

On one end we have those who live by the motto of “anything it takes” who are obsessed with progressive overloading and will lift the heaviest weight they can no matter the circumstances. On the other end, we have those who are solely focused on “feeling the muscle and/or pump” to gauge the effectiveness of their workout while completely disregarding progressive overload. Some people on the latter end might literally time the TUT of their sets and aim for 45-60 seconds per set. Not knocking on the way they want to train. That’s fine by me, but if you actually want to maximize progressive overload, we have to use a different approach.

The truth is, if we want to take tension into account of our workouts, we should be focusing on the TOTAL TENSION of all of our working sets. However, there’s one little snag: The total tension of a workout is extremely hard, nearly impossible in fact, to measure since it factors in so many variables like range of motion, form, technique, and tempo. This is why, to keep things simple, when we keep these variables constant between workouts, we can focus on manipulating other variables to increase tension such as weight lifted, sets, and reps.

This way, when you keep your form and tempo consistent for every workout, you can ensure that these variables won’t be affecting your progress and focus on manipulating weight lifted, sets, and reps as measures of progress.

In fact, striving for better and better form over time can be a form of progressive overload (while keeping all other variables constant). Even if your progress on paper doesn’t change, you can at least be rest assured that you’re minimizing your risk of injury and maximizing performance and muscle recruitment. The best time to get your form down is at the beginning of your lifting journey, but if you haven’t already started, the next best time is starting today.

What Is Progressive Overloading – Example Method (Double Progression)

A simple and easy method of progressive overload that I use with myself and clients all the time is called ‘double progression.’

Let’s say you have to do 3 sets of 8-12 reps for a given exercise.

The first week you’re able to lift 50 lbs for 12 reps the first set, 10 reps the second set, and 8 reps the third set.

Next week you’re able to lift 50 lbs for 12 reps in the first set, 12 reps in the second set, and 10 reps in the third set.

And then you’ll stick with 50 lbs and keep lifting that weight until you can hit 12 reps for all three sets.

Then you’ll move up to 55 lbs and work in that 8-12 rep range.

You likely won’t be able to push 12 reps for all three sets with that new weight but that’s okay.

Keep lifting that weight until you work your way up to the top end of that rep range for all your sets.

Rinse and repeat and make some gains.

Final Thoughts On What Is Progressive Overloading

The idea of progressive overload, simplified, is all about doing more work. The idea of gradually increasing your level of performance from workout to workout.

Generally, we want to focus on manipulating weight, sets, reps, and frequency while holding all other variables constant. This makes progressive overload much simpler and easier to track, measure, and standardize.

You should never sacrifice things like form and tempo for the sake of progressing on paper in order to lift heavier weights and/or do more reps. That being said, this is much easier said than done. We all do this from time to time (myself included on multiple occasions) for many reasons such as hitting a new PR (personal record), having an off day, or overestimating our abilities. However, do not use it as an excuse to keep doing it. Accept it, move on, and get back to your regular, standardized lifting technique the following workouts.

The most important traits to possess if you want to be successful on your fitness journey both short term and long term is to be self-aware, objective, and critical. You might get frustrated from time to time either by the lack of progress or having an off day and want to compensate, but being able to reel yourself away from your emotional responses can only benefit you. Being able to recognize when you’ve used or are using form or a tempo that isn’t considered your standard and then catching and correcting yourself as soon as possible is extremely beneficial. This way, you prevent the slippery slope of giving your form leeway to slowly deteriorate into absolute shit just for the sake of writing a new number down and/or impressing random strangers at the gym.

But ultimately, if you want your body to grow and change, you have to force it to do so.

It will be hard, it will be uncomfortable, and you will want to quit at times, but nothing worth having will ever come easy.

You have to work for it. But, I know for a fact that you got this.

Hope this helps you take your workouts to the next level!

Until next time,

-Aus

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