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Progressive overload is one of the most important elements to make progress with your workouts and your physique. To describe the term progressive overload properly, the term homeostasis must first be briefly explained.
Homeostasis and Progressive Overload
Homeostasis is the ability of an organism to maintain the internal environment as constant as possible in a continuously changing external environment. The optimal state for the human movement system is to be in a physiological balance or homeostasis. An extensive article about
homeostasis can be found on this site.
It is possible to deviate from this physiological balance or homeostasis through training. In this way, you demand more from the body than when you are at rest. The unique quality of the human body to adapt to training stimuli (stress) is the most important concept of training and conditioning. Everyone has a certain goal in mind; many people aim to lose weight, and many guys want to increase muscle mass. These different training goals must be achieved by training in different ways. Adaptation of the body is achieved through the General Adaptation Syndrome (GAS) plus the Specific Adaptation to Imposed Demands (SAID) principle.
General Adaptation Syndrome
The General Adaptation Syndrome consists of three phases and involves the following:
Phase 1: Alarm phase
This is the initial response to stress. For example, training is stress for the body. When you are training, the body enters a fight or flight response mode in which the body prepares itself for physical activities. During exercise, the heart rate increases so that blood supply can increase because the body needs more oxygen. Physiologically untrained people are less able to adapt to the stress that training brings. After several training sessions, you will notice that the body is better able to meet the demand for, for example, more oxygen, allowing you to exercise longer and build better fitness.
Phase 2: Resistance phase
After a number of training sessions, the body will become accustomed to the stress brought about by training. Now it is important to adhere to the term “progressive overload.” This means that the stress you inflict on the body must gradually increase.
For example, strength training can be made heavier by increasing the number of repetitions. You can also choose to do extra sets or even add an exercise. Additionally, you can also increase the weight or decrease the rest time. Another way is to go from one hour to an hour and a half per training session, or you can choose to go from two days to three days a week. Many people often miss the principle of gradually increasing the intensity. Many people continue to train at the same level, resulting in no further progress. On the other hand, many people want to progress too quickly, leading to overtraining. That’s phase three of the General Adaptation Syndrome.
Phase 3: Exhaustion phase
Longer periods of high stress can lead to exhaustion. In these phases, injuries such as stress fractures, muscle tears, joint pain, but also emotional fatigue and even
muscle breakdown often occur. This is why, alongside good nutrition, rest is also very important. The body really needs time to recover and adapt to stress. Periodization is therefore very important. This means that training must be done in a progressive manner with a long-term vision in mind. In addition, rest periods must be planned.
Specific Adaptation to Imposed Demands
The SAID principle: (Specific Adaptation to Imposed Demands). This means that the body specifically adapts to the type of stress you impose. Your training program can have an impact on:
Mechanical specificity
For example, if you always do heavy
chest exercises with few repetitions, you train for maximum strength of the chest muscles. If you want to train muscle endurance of the legs, you will have to use light weights and train with many repetitions.
Neuromuscular specificity
If you want to train for better stability, you can do a Swiss ball Chest Press and perform this unstable exercise with lighter weights slowly. If you mainly want to get stronger, you do a
Bench Press on a stable bench with heavier weights.
If you want to train muscle endurance, you will have to train for longer with many repetitions and few rest periods between sets. If you mainly want to train for strength, you take more rest between sets so that the intensity of the exercise remains high.
In short, the body will only adapt if it has a reason to adapt. It is very important to determine your training goals, as your training program must be built on them. If you want to lose weight and build endurance, your training program will look very different from someone who is training for maximum
muscle strength. Gradually increasing the intensity of training is the way to progress in your training process and to leave injuries and severe fatigue behind.
Despite the fact that many women have found their way to strength training nowadays, desired results often lag behind. The biggest cause: there is not enough progressive overload.
In the Ebook ‘The 5 mistakes women make when training for tight, round buttocks’, a chapter is dedicated to it: You’re not training heavy enough. If you want to make progress in your physique, you will also have to make progress in the gym.
In other words, getting stronger is necessary to get those tight, round buttocks.
Many people train without a plan or train too long with the same plan. In the first case, you don’t even know if you’re making progress, you’re just doing something. In the second case, when you do work with a fitness schedule, do you make sure it is regularly renewed? Depending on your goal and fitness experience, you should use a new schedule every 4 to 6 weeks. There are a lot of factors to consider in the schedule itself. A well-structured schedule ALWAYS pays attention to progressive overload. What does this mean?
Progressive Overload, what is that?
Progressive overload means doing something you haven’t been able to do before. The easiest and most well-known ways are to do more repetitions than last time or to use a heavier weight. Of course, the basis is a correct execution of the movement with a full range of motion.
Overload is necessary for a good workout, without it, your body has no reason to grow. By doing something your body isn’t used to, the progressive overload, you disrupt homeostasis, which can be seen as the physiological balance in which your body is. By disturbing this homeostasis time and time again, the body will have to adapt positively to the demanded effort each time. This is called
supercompensation and is exactly what is needed for good progression.
How do you apply this in practice?
Take the hip thrust as an example. In your schedule, 5-10 reps is your target. This means that you choose a weight with which you do between 5 and 10 repetitions “to failure” (until you can’t anymore). You always train with 100% effort, so choose a weight with which you can perform between 5 and 10 repetitions well. The first time you do this training, for example, you achieve 10, 8, and 7 reps consecutively with the 50 kilos you use. When you start again with the hip thrust next time, you should be able to do more since your body has positively adapted. A logical consequence is that you have become stronger and, for example, with the same 50 kilos, you can now do 11, 10, and 9 repetitions.
The Fitsociety app has a handy feature that allows you to easily see what you did last time in terms of weight and number of repetitions.
Other forms of creating overload
Besides using more weight or doing more repetitions with the same weight, you can also use other methods to create progressive overload.
The most underestimated way is the use and variation in the tempo with which you perform exercises. The tempo, together with the number of repetitions you make, determines how long your muscle is under tension, also known as
Muscle Time Under Tension, and this largely determines the training effect. Apart from that, you can also focus on getting stronger in a specific part of the exercise by adjusting the tempo. An example is holding the hip thrust at the top of the movement, after the concentric contraction, also called the isometric contraction.
Reducing the rest periods between your sets and exercises or doing more sets (volume) or training more frequently (frequency) can also be good ways to create progressive overload.
It is important to keep track of what you are doing. If you are actually training to achieve results, you train with 100% effort and focus on your training instead of what is happening around you. You write down what you do so that you know how many repetitions you have to do next time to improve on the training of the previous time. This way, you ensure progressive overload and your desired results will not be long in coming!
