Progressive Overload: Why You Need It in Your Fitness Program ⋆ Fitwitchery

Progressive overload is the most important principle to include in your fitness program.

Whether you’re training for strength, size, endurance, or for a specific skill or event, you’ll need to employ the progressive overload principle in your program if you want to get anywhere.

What is the definition of progressive overload?

“Progressive overload” is fancy-speak for making your workout harder over time. Or, in more correct terms, gradually increasing the stress placed on the body.

The body is adaptive, which is a really helpful thing. If you need to build a stone wall by hand and you can barely lift and carry the stones, on day one, you’ll struggle. A week later, it will be easier, and a week later, easier still. And building the wall will go easier and faster over time. After a month or so, you’ll be a wall-building pro.

But because you’re putting the same stress on the body every day, and the body is adapting to that stress, it will get easier and easier. From a wall-building perspective, this is great.

From a fitness perspective, it sucks. Or, to clarify, it means you need to keep building bigger walls.

Why you need progressive overload in your training.

This post may contain affiliate links. Please see my full disclosure here.

tattooed woman using progressive overload on barbell squats

You won’t improve your fitness, be it strength, size, endurance, if you don’t continually increase the stress on the body. Period. End of story. Turn out the lights, the party’s over. Done.

The good news is that the difficulty you feel will be generally the same as you progress. The bad news is that it doesn’t get easier.

But it is pretty cool when it’s easier to accomplish what you’ve set out to accomplish.

For example:

When you want to accomplish a pull-up and you finally succeed in completing one.
When you want to increase muscle size and you can see the results in the mirror.
When you want to get stronger and can finally lift heavier weight.
When you want to run a marathon and you can finally run a longer distance.

Progressive overload is not just for strength training.

And you might have noticed that progressive overload is something you can use on any fitness program. While the term is used mostly in strength training, it’s something you can (and should) include on any fitness program you’re following, whether it’s deliberate or not.

How the concept of progressive overload works.

Let’s use building muscle as an example. If you put the muscle under stress, it gets harder and harder to do the exercise, until you get to failure, or closer to it. The muscle breaks down, then repairs itself to do that motion better. So you do the exercise again, increasing the resistance, and repeat the process over and over so the muscle grows in size and strength.

What’s happening is that the muscle fibers are breaking down. When you rest, the muscles rebuild. And just Voldemort, broken bones or coronovirus, when they have a chance to repair themselves, they get stronger.

So you do the exercise again, increasing the resistance, and repeat the process over and over so the muscle grows in size and strength.

What about when you’re not looking to improve on anything?

There are two instances I can think of where you don’t need to actively include progressive overload in your fitness program—but you probably still should.

Maintaining fitness.

The first is if you are looking to only maintain your current level of fitness. If you are at a level that you are happy with, and are exercising just to get it over with and keep your health at a certain level, then you are probably fine not using the progressive overload principle in your fitness plan.

But honestly… do you really want to do that? Here’s the thing: It’s probably easier to include progressive overload in your fitness routine without even knowing it, than it is to not include it at all.

If you like to run and you do the same run every time you exercise, it will eventually get easier, and you will eventually decrease the time and effort it takes to do it. That’s progressive overload in action, folks.

Losing fat only.

The second instance where not including progressive overload might work for you is if your exercise is extremely passive and you’re going for fat loss only.

If your only goal is fat loss, you can walk that all off rather easily, and while progressive overload might sneak in there, it’s not really the point. You’ll still lose fat from walking and not trying to improve in any way.

But again—do you really want that? Hear me out…

Why you should include progressive overload—regardless of your goals.

woman doing aerial silk with sky in background

If your goal is fat loss, you will lose much more fat by incorporating progressive overload. Period. Progressive overload means adding stress, and stress burns calories. If you’re building muscle, it builds muscle which also burns calories.

Plus, while you can walk for six hours a day and that will still burn fat, you’re not getting fit.

And if your goal is maintaining fitness, if you do the same routine every workout, with the same exercises, weight, etc., it will naturally get easier and you will plateau, or even reverse your current fitness levels.

However, you might naturally respond in kind by adding progressive overload without even knowing it. You might run faster, lift weights faster, expand range of motion, decrease rest periods, and so on.

If you’re not growing (i.e., improving), you’re dying.

But the best reason is this: it is way, way, way more engaging to be improving at something and/or working toward a goal.

Doing the same routine and never changing it is a recipe for boredom, and boredom leads to poor form, laziness and procrastination. In other words, you’re less likely to continue your fitness routine if you do not include progressive overload in some way.

Perhaps just think of it as improving, little by little. It’s way more fun and engaging to improve at something.

How to apply progressive overload in your fitness program.

woman doing barbell squats in mirror using progressive overload in her fitness program

There are several ways to apply progressive overload in your workout or fitness routine. The most commonly used ones for strength training are

Increase weight or resistance. With weighted workouts, this is straightforward. With bodyweight or calisthenics workouts, you can achieve this by changing the exercise to one-arm or one-leg or changing the angle of the exercise.
Increase the number of reps. This is pretty straightforward: Increase the number of reps in a set.
Increase the number of sets. Also pretty straightforward. Instead of three sets of 12 reps, you do four sets, for example. If you’re doing a circuit, add a round, increasing the sets for all exercises.
Increase the frequency of workouts. Work out more times per week. However, never work out more than six days a week. You need your rest!
Increase time under tension. This can be achieved in a variety of ways. You can add a pause or a pulse into a movement, or perform it more slowly. The goal is to increase the time the muscle is under stress. I mention this in my post on calisthenics progressions.
Decrease rest periods. Rest less between sets. The less time you have to rest, the less time your muscles have to recover and the more fatigued they’ll be. Depending on how your workout is structured, this can increase cardiovascular capacity or strength.
Increase distance or range of motion. Increase the distance you’re carrying weight or the range of motion you’re covering. For instance, instead of floor bridges, do hip thrusts with shoulders and feet elevated.
Increase rep speed. Lift the weights faster. This type of overload is used a lot in HIIT. However, be careful to not sacrifice form for number of reps.

How often should you apply the progressive overload principle?

Always increase gradually and incrementally, and only after the current circumstances with the current movement in perfect form aren’t challenging you.

For instance, let’s say your current routine has you doing dumbbell curls with five pound weights for three sets of 10 reps. You used to get fatigued at the end of 10 reps, and by the end of the three sets, you almost couldn’t do any more. Now, after all three sets of 10, you feel like you could do more reps easily.

The most obvious options are to add more reps, add another set or two (or three), or add more weight. If this is part of a standard strength training routine, adding weight is the most common solution, as it keeps this exercise within the same time confines so you’re not lengthening your workout. If so, make sure that you’re executing the exercise with perfect form, and go up to the next available weight. In this example, you’ll want to go up to 7.5 pounds and try that.

However, adding more reps and sets isn’t a bad idea. Research shows that exercises with high reps can also be beneficial in building muscle, and definitely in building muscle endurance. It’s always a good idea to pepper your workout with different types of workout structures to engage your muscles, your cardiovascular system and your attention span.

What about a calisthenics program? How do you increase stress?

Ah, the challenges of progressive overload in a calisthenics program. This is a big and interesting topic, and there isn’t one correct answer. The rules above still apply to calisthenics, but they will be executed differently at times. You can’t add weight, but you can do an exercise on one leg, or change the angle from horizontal to vertical (like with a push-up).

The wonderful thing about calisthenics is that the progressions have to be a bit creative. For example, check out my posts on pistol squat (one-legged squat) progressions or how to do a pull-up.

For more specific ways to make all exercises more challenging, check out my post on adding difficulty to exercises without adding weight.

Final thoughts on progressive overload.

Humans are naturally progressive, even incrementally. We like to improve. We like to learn. So if you’re worried that you haven’t been implementing this principle, stand down. You probably already are.

But if you’re doing the same exercises and the same workout week after week with no improvement and you’re wondering why, this might be your answer.

Set a goal, track your workouts and your progress, and push yourself to new heights. You’ll not only gain new levels of fitness, but new levels of confidence as well.