We all hear about progressive overload in all our fitness efforts but why does everyone talk about it? Put simply, it’s a way of knowing you are improving by essentially analysing your data.
Progressive overload is the act of putting more stress on your muscles over time to increase their strength. A lot of people plateau with their strength over time. Their muscles react quickly when first training and then find they become stagnant on certain weights as they don’t apply the art of progressive overload in varying factors.
A lot of people do it by adding more reps or adding weight, but it’s not quite as straightforward as chucking on another plate or another 2 reps every set - there are many ways of doing this, so start thinking take a moment to think about your current strength training exercises and think how to apply the following methods to them.
One and a Quarter Reps
No we’re not suggesting half reps as you see in some of those gym videos of ego lifters. We’re talking about putting more time under tension under your muscles throughout a set and training them differently. This technique means you add 0.25 reps for every rep. Let’s say you normally do 4 sets with 8 reps at 15kg. Keep the same number of sets and reps, but every rep is slightly harder if you do it this way. Taking a squat is a good example for this. What you would do is start at the top of the exercise, squat all the way down, squat up 25% of the way, back down to the bottom, then all the way back to the top. So that’s 1.25 of a rep. It means you’re training your muscles at the lower point of the movement for longer, putting more stress on them at that point with the same weight. If you do this 8 times you’ve actually done 12 reps of the equivalent amount, put more stress under your muscles, and kept the same weight. And there you have it, progressive overload.
This technique is a very good way of testing your control under the weight as well. After doing this for a few weeks, you should expect to go back to the normal way you used to do each rep and find it easier so you can move up the weight.
Slow Eccentric Reps
A quick definition here: a concentric contraction occurs when a muscle shortens, and is used to generate motion. An eccentric contraction occurs when a muscle lengthens, and is used to resist or slow motion. So in a bicep curl, when you curl your fist toward your shoulder (as you bend your arm) that is concentric, when it goes back down (as you straighten your arm) that’s eccentric.
One way to apply progressive overload is changing the time under tension on the eccentric. Let’s take the bicep curl as an example. You can do a 1:3 rep - this means 1 second for the concentric movement and 3 seconds for the eccentric movement. As your muscle is lengthened you are controlling the movement slowly and putting tension under it. The same amount of reps and same weight can be done as normal here, but just complete the rep at a slow time.
As with 1.25 reps, this another way of applying progressive overload to your workout without having to change the weight, but also not having to change the number of reps. It’s a very good way of stabilising your muscles in exercises and breaking through plateau barriers of weight. This method is often used when recovering from an injury, which we cover in our blog about who should be strength training and can easily be done with the Unitree PUMP and you can track this with real-time data on the lifting curve within the free app.
More Reps, More Sets
This is the easiest and most common way of applying progressive overload to your workout. It’s pretty straightforward - either increase the weight or increase the amount of reps you do per set.
Recording your Progressive Overload
You want to know you're improving right? You want to track your progressive in the gym so you should have a good understanding of how your resistance is changing. We’re not saying you should record every set in a massive dataset - you can and some people like to do this. But your strength journey won’t be a linear line unfortunately and doing this can often be demoralising to people as some days you won’t lift as much as the week before (for a variety of uncontrollable reasons - sleep, muscle recovery etc.) but as a whole there should be an upward trend.
For most, we’d suggest tracking your progress at certain points by going through testing phases. For example, record how much weight you put on a certain exercise for your normal reps and sets and your rate of perceived exertion (RPE), then do 2 - 3 weeks of progressive overload and do the same weight as before on your normal exercise and your RPE should be lower. You’ll notice you’ll be able to increase the resistance from 2 - 3 weeks ago and feel you are putting in the same effort as before, but lifting more weight!
Following this thinking should help you push through those strength plateaus and take your strength training to the next level. Be sure to check out the Unitree PUMP and how you can apply progressive overload for this in a guide for strength training.