Progressive Overload: The Essential Principle to Gaining Muscle & Increasing Strength

Progressive overload refers to continually providing a stimulus that is enough to cause an adaptive response. This is required if you want to continue to build muscle and strength. Without it, your body has no reason to grow or get stronger. You can’t use the same weight for the same number of reps for years and expect to get any bigger. A larger muscle has more contractile tissue that can contribute to force production. So for the most part, a bigger muscle is a stronger muscle.

So, your job in the gym is to provide a potent muscle-building stimulus. The variety of exercises you have to work with are your tools for the job. Use these tools wisely by using great technique and training hard. If the stimulus is sufficient, fatigue isn’t too high, and you recover well, your muscles will adapt by becoming larger and stronger to better handle that stress in the future. If your muscles become larger and stronger, you can now lift more weight and complete more reps. This is a sign of a positive adaptation to your training. It’s a sign of progress. What you’re doing is working. To maintain the same relative training stimulus, and continue to get bigger and stronger, you have to add weight or reps. This sums up the principle of progress overload.

There are a handful of other ways to provide a sufficient training stimulus. A few examples are better technique (how you move the weight, range of motion, control), training closer to failure, doing more sets, and switching to exercises or using training techniques that allow you to place more tension on the target muscle group.

But these are choices you can make any time you walk into the gym, not signs of adaptation (progress). Adding a set, using a larger ROM, or improving your technique may increase the stimulus, but no adaptations need to take place to do those things. Eventually you want to be able to lift more weight or complete more reps with the same weight while keeping your technique and range of motion consistent.

Being able to lift more weight or do more reps is not a choice. If it were a choice, then you could decide to add weight or reps every week, and you’d eventually be lifting thousands of pounds for sets of 20 reps, but no one is doing that. You need to provide a stimulus that crosses a certain threshold, recover, and adapt to be able to lift more weight or do more reps.

So these changes in sets, technique, range of motion, exercises, and effort alone without eventually increasing weight lifted or reps completed can be a problem. If years have passed and you’re still using the same weights for the same number of reps and with the same technique for multiple exercises and muscle groups, you’ll probably also be the same size. And this is why it’s so important to track your workouts (body measurements and progress photos are useful too) and make sure your weights and reps are increasing over time. If you go from bench pressing 150 pounds for 8 reps, to bench pressing 250 pounds for 12 reps, I can guarantee you will have more muscle.

But you don’t have to add weight or reps every single week. For some exercises and some people, depending on experience level, not even every month.

Your squats and deadlifts will progress faster than your lateral raises and bicep curls. The more advanced you are, the more time you should allow for increases in weight or reps.

Your training technique will improve over the course of your training career. So there might be times need to drop the weight by 10-20 pounds so you can do the exercise better. Then you work your way back up in weight and reps. If you can work back up to your previous weight and reps, but with your new and improved technique, I have no doubt you’ll have more muscle despite lifting the same weight and reps as before.

So over the course of your training career, there might be fluctuations in your weight lifted and reps completed as you improve how you do each exercise.

If you were to zoom out and look at the big picture over the course of years, you should see your exercise technique, training intensity, weight lifted, and reps completed all trending upwards.

Choose exercises and train with a technique that allow you to place a lot of tension on the target muscle group.

Do a variety of exercises for muscle groups, but keep those exercises consistent week to week to track progress.

Takes sets to at least a few reps short of failure in the 5-20 rep range.

Do about 10-20 sets per muscle group per week.

Log your exercises, sets, reps, and weight lifted and try to beat those numbers while maintaining safe and effective technique and range of motion.

Sleep well, eat enough calories and protein, and manage stress so you can recover from your workouts and continue to train hard.

Do those consistently, and the muscle and strength gains will follow.