The Motor Unit

Progressive overload. Sounds like a computer system warning from a sci-fi movie when you say it out loud. But what does such a term have to do with strength and conditioning? Everything!

Our bodies hate change. They somehow manage to adapt to it or around it. So, when our bodies are consistently exposed to a stimulus, there is a limit up to which they can adapt to it after which using the same stimulus to make your body adapt to it isn’t going to be of much use. This is called the law of accommodation.

So, in the context of strength and conditioning, if I’m training back squat 3 times a week as part of my full-body training program, and I’m able to squat 100 kgs for 3 sets of 5 repetitions consistently, my body would adapt to this stimulus through an increase in strength and muscle mass in my legs over a period of time. If I continue to use the same scheme of 100 kgs for 3 sets of 5 repetitions of back squats even after this period, the stimulus isn’t novel enough to, well, stimulate. My body is now accommodating the stimulus and it is just not stimulating enough to induce further growth in muscle and strength.

How do we circumvent this? Progressive overload! At least, that is the simplest way to go about overcoming this accommodation.

What is progressive overload? You overload one of the training variables ever so slightly to stimulate more strength/muscle increases.

In the context of the back squat example above or any weight-lifting exercise, training variables would be the load, the sets, and the repetitions. So, to stimulate further strength/muscle increases, you can either

1. increase the load by 5% to 10% (even less if required) and perform fewer repetitions of the lift

2. add one more set of x repetitions

3. add a few more repetitions to a set.

When you implement either of the above ways of progressive overload, you increase something called the volume load.

Volume load is nothing but load (kgs/lbs) sets repetitions. 

The volume load in the back squat example is 100 × 3 × 5 = 1500 kgs. Increasing any one of the variables of load, sets, or repetitions is going to increase the volume load. If I increase repetitions to 6, then the volume load is 1800 kgs. There is a 300 kg increase in the volume load through a repetition increase of just 1. This is progressive overload. The key word is “progressive”. This means the overload (increase) has to be meaningful and practical enough to induce progression. Overloading all three variables or overloading any one variable by too much isn’t practical nor safe so, sticking to overloading one variable at a time ever so slightly is the right way to implement progressive overload.

In the realm of conditioning, the progressive overload principles remain the same. As an example, if my conditioning routine is a steady state low intensity run for 30 minutes at 10 km/hour speed on the treadmill, I can implement progressive overload by increasing either the time or the speed by 5 to 10% to stimulate further increases in cardiovascular endurance.

When do you overload? It depends on the trainee’s response to the stimulus. Some adapt quickly while others take a longer time to adapt. Another factor is the trainee’s experience. Someone who has been training for several years might require a different sort of stimulus like periodically rotating exercise variations (more on that in upcoming posts).

I, personally, like to program 5 to 10% increases every week for three weeks straight before implementing a deload on the fourth week to allow for recovery. So, if I’m lifting 100 kgs on the back squat this week, I’ll try to lift 110 kgs on the second week, 120 kgs on the third week, and then use much lighter loads on the fourth week for recovery. The cycle then repeats but with a higher load. This is called periodization and it’s going to take a whole series of posts dedicated to it. But for now, I’ll leave you to think about progressive overload if you’re not making progress at the gym.