So, we've reach the final chapter in this 3 part blog series and yes, I've saved the best until last. Weeks one and two were all about building a foundational knowledge of how to put workouts together and helping you personalise them. This week I'm going to take you through the stuff that really matters. Progressive overload.
Indeed, without progression a workout is nothing more than a time to move. In order to grow and move towards our goals, we need to make things, harder and more complex each week. Think about it like this, if you were trying to learn a language and you started by learning 5 words. If all you did was practice those 5 words week on week, you would never learn that language. You would know the 5 words really well, but you wouldn't be able to put them into context or have a conversation.
That is the essence of progressive overload. Each week you increase the difficulty and learn 5 new words. You keep practising the first 5 but you become better at finding links between them, stringing them together into sentences with the new words and eventually you are able to speak a new language. It's the same way with training, each week you add a rep to each set, you increase the difficulty of an exercise very slightly, you reduce your rest time and over a longer period of time your body adapts and you make progress!
But, how do you do this? Well, if I still have your attention, lets find out.
As before with all the parts of this series I will split this into 3 sections
1) Progressive overload theory
2) Progressing exercise volume
3) Progressing exercise difficulty
Progressive overload theory will look at a general structure to follow for the best results. We'll talk about how often to progress, when and why regression is necessary and why to get to the top, you've got to go up one stair at a time.
The second two sections will look at practical examples for strength, cardiovascular and other types of training and how to progress our two biggest influences on adaptation, volume and difficulty (intensity).
Progressive overload theory
If you want a more in depth look at this particular topic then check out my previous blog on progressive overload.
A quick Wikipedia search will give you the basic definition of progressive overload "...the gradual increase of the stress placed upon the musculoskeletal and nervous system [to] stimulate muscle growth and strength gain." Essentially in order to adapt and increase your level of fitness you need to keep exposing the body to ever increasing stress.
This idea of progressive overload is underpinned by what is called general adaptation syndrome, which is displayed nicely by Bannister's 1982 model of fitness and fatigue seen below. This shows how each training session creates an initial fatigue which is followed by a recovery and super-compensation.
Every time the body super compensates and adapts, then the magnitude of the stimulus required to fatigue the system on a subsequent occasion is increased. Hench, why we need to progressively overload with training.
However, a word of caution. Progressing every week, relentlessly, forever (like the milo of croton story from earlier), is not the right move. Over training is a very real disorder and can manifest quickly when progressive overload is mismanaged (see below).
Now, as I said before, I'm not going to dive too deeply into this (if you want to you should check out this book). The main point that I'm trying to make here is that we need to periodise (plan) our progression. There are loads of different ways to do this, but for the purposes of simplicity I'm going to give you one option that is the most commonly used and has been proven to be highly effective for everyone from beginners through to high level athletes.
What you want to do is plan your progressions on a 4 week cycle (known as a mesocycle).
1) Weeks 1, 2 and 3 you increase the volume, exercise difficulty, weight lifted etc.
2) Week 4 you reduce the difficulty back to the level of week 2
3) Weeks 5, 6 and 7 you overload
4) Week 8 you de-load back to week 6 difficulty
This helps to prevent over training, gives your body a chance to recover and increases your capacity to improve. Essentially, take your progressions one step at a time.
Progressing exercise volume
So, we've covered why progressive overload is important and how to be sensible with how aggressively you overload. Now, lets get into the sexy stuff, the in's and out's of how to actually overload.
First-up we'll take a look at how you can progress your resistance or body weight training by increasing volume. Now (as with everything) there are a few ways to do this.
1) Increase your reps per set
Lets take an example. You start your program doing 3 rounds of 6 reps. Using our progressive overload structure we talked about before, we can progress this by adding an extra rep each week to every set so that our total volume increases (see example 1).
2) Increase your number of sets
Using the same logic as before, we can be slightly more aggressive with our progression and instead of adding 1 rep to each round, we can instead do an extra round each week (see example 2)
3) Reduce sets and increase reps
This one is great if you've hit the top of a plateau and you can't seem to add any more work each week. What it does, is essentially keep the total volume the same but make each set slightly harder (see example 3).
4) Set a time cap and reduce rest in between rounds
So this is a slightly more complex one for someone with a higher level of training experience. What you're doing here is allowing more room to get more work done by reducing 'time stood still' as rest decreases. This one might be better suited to either more cardiovascular type training or muscle growth training (see example 4).
5) Run further or increase total session volume
I felt I had to throw this one in here for all you runners out there. Put simply, small increases in distance run each week is a very effective way of progressing that sort of training. It can be really small increases, maybe only 0.2 of a mile but every little helps and over 6-8 weeks that could mean running 4 miles at the same pace per mile as you might have run 3 before!
Progressing exercise difficulty
Now, given the current climate, this one is a bit more difficult. In usual circumstances, I might say add more weight to the bar, but lets be honest gym's aren't opening for a while, so we need to get creative!
1) Use progressively more difficult variations of the same exercise for the same volume
This is great when you're trying to perfect a new skill or master a new exercise like a push-up or pistol squat that can often seem too hard or out of reach. By keeping volume the same, we are also making sure that we don't overload the body too aggressively and actually stunt our progress (see example 5).
2) Move from bi-lateral (2 limbs) to uni-lateral variations
This is same, same but different to the above. With this option what you are doing is not only making the exercise harder, but increasing the time under tension of the whole body (3 rounds of 6 on each side = 3 rounds of 12 reps in total so a 50% increase in time-under tension). So while it follows a similar principle, it is targeting something slightly different (see example 6).
3) Add a pause or a longer eccentric phase to the exercise
As mentioned above, time under tension significantly impacts exercise difficulty. So try adding in a pause at the bottom of the movement for 1-3 seconds or increasing your eccentric (lowering) phase and watch as those exercises that seemed easy at the start, begin to challenge you again! (see example 7) .In the example first number = eccentric, 2nd number = bottom of lift, 3rd number = concentric, 4th number = top of lift.
4) Run the same distance at a faster pace
Another one in here for you runners out there, running the same distance faster is a great way to challenge your workout without having to switch up your route every week to try and find more distance.
And that's that. The home workout builder series is over. I hope you've enjoyed this series and that you've taken value from it. If you have, I would be very grateful if you could let me know in the comments or like some of the posts. Equally, if you didn't like it or you feel it could have been better then also let me know. This helps me to target the content I write and provide you guys with more value.
Take care and I'll catch you next week for a whole new topic to write on!
Matt
References
1. Bannister, E. 1991. Modeling elite athletic performance. In: Green, H., Mcdougall, J. & Wenger, H. (eds.) Physiological testing of elite athletes. Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics.
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