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Overload

Bryce March 7, 2024

An indispensable aspect of progression comes via infusing the Overload principle into every nook and cranny of your training.

In order to stimulate muscle and strength gains, your training must gradually become more difficult over time. This seems intuitive — but in practice, many things can push-and-pull the focus of the program away from overloading. Often, a trainee will be completely oblivious to this as well, even as it’s happening. What’s crucial to understand is that training really hard ≠ overloading; and this fact makes the seemingly intuitive much less practically intuitive.

While this principle is commonly associated with increases in training load (i.e. weight on the bar), there exist other routes to achieving overload…

Adding Reps:

Ultimately, increases in volume load (through the product of sets x reps x load) across many sessions should serve as the bread-and-butter of your overloading stimuli for muscle growth. Most trainees immediately go for the lowest hanging fruit: adding weight to a given exercise week over week. This is a perfectly viable approach to progressive overload, but in some cases, it may not be realistic.

What about lifts in which the incremental jumps in weight are less feasible? For example, think about something like a DB Lateral Raise. Since dumbbells tend to spaced by a minimum of 2.5lbs (in many gyms, the jump is actually 5lbs), adding five total pounds every week is a huge percentage increase for most people. And even if this can be achieved temporarily, sustaining it with perfect technique while matching reps, for months on end, is unrealistic. More realistically, reps can simply be added as a means of progressive overload. In instances like this, the trainee can continue to push reps up with the same weight until they’re about +5 from where they started. Then they can bump the weight up, drop the reps back down to the bottom of their target rep range, and once again begin working their way through the progression. 

Improving Specificity of Technique:

Ensuring the actual programming and the stated program goals are always in alignment is paramount. Consistently assessing and iterating on your technique to improve this alignment is actually a form of overload as well. (See how specificity+overload are intimately intertwined?)

The optimal stimulus is delivered to the muscle through optimal technique. This includes variables like ROM, controlled tempo, stance/grip, and even being able to avoid breakdown of this collection of variables as failure approaches. So anytime technique can be progressed over time, the overload principle can be adhered to independent of loading and volume.

Rate of Progression:

Progression can only happen so fast even under ideal circumstances. When applying the overload principle, it’s important to consider the rate of practical improvement compared to the accompanying rate of fatigue generation. Frivolously adding an excessive amount of load, sets, and/or reps to a given exercise week over week — along with maintaining a high level of relative intensity — is a recipe for stagnation. Counterintuitively, doing too much too fast actually lowers your ceiling for the rate in which progress can be made. When the program’s progression model calls for superhuman rates of improvement, overload cannot keep pace, which is why we recommend gradual titrations that allow for some cushion. In the short-term, intentionally placing restrictions on your program may feel like you’re leaving gains on the table — if you’re capable of doing more volume or more weight, intuition says you probably should cover that gap. But in due time, this strategy of delayed-gratification — of purposefully keeping some gas in the tank — will always come out ahead.


Progressive overloading (in any capacity) will also be progressively fatiguing. This is always the least sexy topic when it comes to training/programming/periodization, but it’s a necessary evil to understand. As we force adaptations to occur by pushing our limits further and further, our bodies begin to fight back. Throwing in the occasional rest day isn’t enough. Eating more, sleeping better, and taking more supplemental aids won’t solve the issue either. As the predictable negative impacts of specific/overloading training start to present themselves, proper fatigue management (our next principle of training) becomes required for sustainable progress. 

Overload-

A post shared by @progressiveperformancep2

Overload Discussion- https://www.instagram.com/tv/CQlsCKMHLQu/ 

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