A term you may hear and see often within the wonderful world of the fitness industry is progressive overload.
But the real question is, why should we all be using progressive overload? 🤷🏼♀️ In this post, I'm going to give you a brief outline of what it is and why it is a crucial consideration for any training programme!
As you continue along the length of a training programme [or as some will call it, a mesocycle] your body begins to adapt and things hopefully start to feel easier.
This is your bodies natural reaction, as it adapts to deal with the stress of the exercise and learns how to better recover so as to perform better in the future. Essentially, your body working out how to improve.
How clever.
This is why what may have felt hard a few weeks ago, now feels relatively easier, or your max weight from 3 weeks ago now feels far less challenging and you can perform more reps at it. One of the most important training principles, is that a 'stimulus' must be applied for adaptation to occur and as our bodies adapt, we must make the 'stimulus' more challenging. In order to continue progressing, it's necessary to gradually modify and progressively overload your sessions, lifts or the training you chose to do.
You can do this in a number of ways including-
1. Increasing the weight or resistance band strength.
2. Increasing the number of reps completed. Essentially increasing volume. 3. Increasing the number of working sets.
4. Reducing the time spent recovering between sets.
5. Increasing the tempo, adding in pause reps or use training techniques like partial reps. 6. Increasing the length of working time in something like a circuit/cardio.
BE WARNED; these increases should be implemented gradually and as a properly periodised programme. If done too quickly, you could risk injury. Ain't nobody got time for that! It's also important to track your workouts and increases in intensity so you can see how your effort is translating to results!
Be smart, train smart and you’ll see smart results! 🤜🏻🤛🏻
Comments