Progressive overload is a necessary component of gaining strength. Thomas Delorme, a doctor working with rehabilitating soldiers following World War 2, created the term progressive overload. He described it as is the process of gradually increasing the stress placed on the body. Since then, progressive overload has become one of the most important training variables to manipulate in the training process. Below we’ll cover the classic ways to introduce progressive overload, plus some creative ways to make sure you are still progressing.
Intensity – The Key to Strength Gains
This is probably the thing that pops into people’s minds when they think of progressing. Whether it be through strength training or cardio work, increasing the intensity of your exercises will be a way to increase the load.
For strength training, this usually means increasing the weight lifted regardless of the implement used. Increasing the weight lifted can increase strength or hypertrophy.
A training program following linear periodization/progressive overload may look like this:
Front Squat
- Week 1: 5×5 @ 250lbs
- Week 2: 5×5 @ 255lbs
- Week 3: 5×5 @ 260lbs
If you are increasing intensity while doing cardio it may mean changes in heart rate or faster running speed. It’s fairly clear that you are progressing if you run a set route each week and you get faster from week to week.
But tracking your heart rate when working out can also be a way to assess progress. Your heart rate will be increased as the intensity of work increases. This is probably more applicable to interval type work.
As aside:
If you are doing longer efforts (i.e. a 30 minute run or bike) then progress could be shown via a lower heart rate. Although this *technically* isn’t increasing the intensity, it shows progress. Your heart rate is directly related to how hard your exercise is when it comes to aerobic training.
So, if you can perform the same work at a lower heart rate then you are progressing.
Increasing Volume to Pack on Muscle
Increasing the volume done is probably the second most common way to introduce progressive overload into your training. In strength training, volume is a combination of the sets and reps performed.
Personally, I think there is a major issue in the way people look at training volume. Most will look at individual exercises within a single work out and say that is the volume. For instance, volume for a barbell overhead press might be 4 sets of 8 reps, for a total of 32 reps.
However, recent meta-analyses have shown that you should look at volume as the total sets and reps for a muscle group in a given week. If we are using the barbell overhead press example, you would determine the volume for all shoulder work in a week. That includes main lifts and accessory exercises. And it includes all training sessions that hit shoulders in a week.
So, getting back to how to use increased volume to progressively overload. You want to gradually increase total volume for a muscle group week over week. This could mean through increased sets (within the recommended number of sets for your training goal, or increased reps (within the recommendations for your training goal).
On the cardio side, increased volume might mean going for longer (time or distance) runs from week to week. Maybe you run 30 minutes in week 1, 35 minutes in week 2, and 37 minutes in week 3.
Alternatively, for high-intensity interval training, a progression in volume might mean adding an additional interval each week.
Similar thought processes can be used in plyometric work as well. For instance, you may add 5-7 ground contacts (jumps or landings) per week for 3 weeks to build up your body’s tolerance to plyometrics.
However, you want to be smart with your intensity and volume progressions so that you avoid overtraining.
Time Under Tension – The Under-Used Key to Gains
I think the most overlooked strength training variable is time under tension (TUT). TUT is the amount of time that a muscle is strained or loaded in a workout. You can look at TUT at the repetition level, set level or for a full workout.
Increasing the TUT of a muscle typically means that there is greater stress on the muscle, and thus more opportunity for exercise-induced muscle damage to occur. This is the good muscle damage that requires your body to repair itself and come back stronger.
Using varying tempo schemes is how you alter TUT at the repetition level. For instance, a classic strength training tempo scheme popularized by Charles Poliquin is 321. In a bench press, this would mean that you lower the bar to your chest for 3 seconds, hold at (just off) your chest for 2 seconds, and press the bar upwards for 1 second on each rep.
If you were to do this for a set of 5 repetitions, your TUT for the set would be 30 seconds (6 seconds per rep multiplied by 5 reps per set).
You can then add all of your sets together to get a full TUT for the workout.
Let’s take a deeper dive into how tempo and TUT can impact progressive overload. Let’s continue the bench press example and say we are doing sets of 5 at 200lbs.
If you don’t have a set tempo, each set of 5 may take somewhere around 7-10 seconds. This equates to about 1.5 to 2 seconds per repetition (i.e. 1 sec down, no pause, “fast” up). No doubt that you’ll get a good workout with this if it’s a higher percentage of your 1 rep max.
However, the muscles of the upper body are under tension for 30 seconds if we do that same set at a 321 tempo. That is a 3x increase in TUT, just by controlling the movement a bit better.
To incorporate this into your training, you may do something like this:
| Week Number | Weight Lifted | Tempo |
| Week 1 | 200 | 211 |
| Week 2 | 200 | 221 |
| Week 3 | 200 | 321 |
Move Faster to Gain More
This seems like it runs counter to increasing time under tension – which it does, kind of. Moving a set weight faster may be a key part of training depending on what your training goals are. After all, if you want to get faster, you have to move faster.
Typically, when thinking of moving weights faster you will think of the concentric (or muscle shortening) phase of the lift. There is a whole type of training called velocity-based training (VBT) designed around this.
In VBT training, a constant load is used across a period of time and the speed that the weight moves is measured by a device. The goal is to progressively increase the speed (and thus power) of the movement from week to week.
Obviously, when it comes to non-strength or weight training, moving faster is easier to quantify. This might mean longer distance covered in a rowing interval or running a set distance (i.e. 40 yards or 5k) in a shorter period of time.
If you are moving a weight faster or covering distance faster from week to week it means that you are progressing, and thus will see fitness gains.
Read More: Compensatory Acceleration Training is the secret to strength and power gains
Increase the Density of your Workouts
Again, I find workout density oven overlooked in the strength and conditioning community. I consider workout density to be the amount of work (or volume) that is done in a set time. So, workout density is dependent on the volume in the workout, tempo (to a certain extent), and rest intervals.
We saw above that increasing volume is a way to progressively overload. Additionally, increasing time under tension can overload a muscle. However, we’ve yet to touch on rest intervals.
Typically, rest between hypertrophy sets is somewhere in the neighbourhood of 60-150 seconds, while rest between strength sets are usually 3-5 minutes.
That means if you are doing a 5×5 squat workout, you are looking at about 20 minutes of rest worked in. So, let’s say in the first week of training you do your 5×5 at 250lbs and it takes a total of 23 minutes (30 seconds per set, 5 minutes of rest between sets).
In your second week of the program try to do the same weight and volume but drop your rest interval to 4.5 minutes between sets. Then on the third week drop it again to 4 minutes between sets.
Keeping the weight, volume, and tempo the same for 3 weeks is typically not a great way to progress. But if you perform the work in 4 minutes less time (as in the above example) then you definitely are increasing the stress placed on the body.
And for that reason, I think tracking the density of your training sessions is a great way to creatively incorporate progressive overload to your training.
Summary
Sometimes it is nice to progress in training in unconventional ways. We often get so caught up in tracking how much weight we’re lifting or how fast/far we’re running that we forget that progressive overload can be applied in many ways.
I recommend that you take one of the above methods and use that as your way to progressively overload your training for the next 4-6 weeks. You’ll be surprised at how a different focus will influence the fitness gains that you see.
After all, for most of us, we’re simply trying to be healthier and live longer. And part of that is having a consistent and enjoyable fitness routine. Try to mix things up, keep training fresh and continue pushing toward your best self.
Happy Lifting.