Episode 83- Why Progressive Overload Is Critical for Muscle Growth
Episode 83 Show Notes
In this conversation, Tiffany Wickes discusses the importance of progressive overload in a fitness routine. She details how progressive overload promotes continuous muscle growth and its various benefits.
Tiffany also discusses various strategies to implement progressive overload techniques into a workout routine in an approachable and effective manner.
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Tiffany Wickes (00:00.92)
Progressive overload might be the key factor that you're missing in your fitness routine and it's keeping you from getting stronger. Let's talk about it. All right, what is progressive overload? It is important to understand what it is and how we're gonna go about it. So basically it's any way that you apply added stress to the muscle and nervous system. So progressive overload principle,
is the most important thing, I think, aside from form and strength training. And the goal is to keep increasing strength and performance and then your muscles will grow. It's called hypertrophy. All right, why is it important? So progressive overload is important when you want to continuously increase your strength. So gradual overload is necessary to constantly achieve strength adaptations. So if you...
don't apply the principle of overload to your strength, then your muscle growth improvements are gonna quickly plateau. With that being said, I will tell you what the benefits of progressive overload are. So the first thing is that the act of putting progressive, like greater than normal stress on your muscles,
has several obvious benefits. It will increase your strength, your muscles will get larger. It will prevent a strength and growth plateau. And it prevents monotony in working out. Like who wants to show up at the gym and do dumbbell curls every single day? So bottom line is you really need progressive overload if you want to continually to increase your weight training and your performance. So how is it applied?
So let's switch from theory to practical stuff. So here's some examples of how to implement progressive overload. So to implement overload training, here are some strategies that can make your workouts gradually harder. So if you're familiar with this, then this will probably make a little bit more sense to you. And by the way, people generally don't add more weight to themselves. I have known plenty of clients
Tiffany Wickes (02:16.344)
who I'm like, hey, I'm noticing when you're posting your weights here in the group that you're still lifting 20 pound dumbbells. I think after five or six weeks you've gotten stronger, have you picked up the 25s? And they're like, no, never even considered it. And then they pick up the 25 and they're like, my gosh, I can totally do these. So it really is not super, maybe it's intuitive, but it's not characteristic of human beings to put themselves under deliberate added stress, like on purpose, right? All right.
So first let's have a look at the strategies that can increasingly overload in your training. So the first one is to increase the load, which means you're going to heavier. Lifting more weight than you should be lifting is an ego issue. You need to be able to increase the load you're lifting, but do it well. All right, so that is one way to apply progressive overload is you simply go up in your weights.
The second way to do this is to increase the volume of work that you're doing. So there's three simple examples of how you can increase training volume. So first you can increase the amount of reps that you're doing per set. Okay, so reps is one, two, three. You know, typically it's between eight and 10 or eight and 12, but it really depends on the weight that you're lifting too. If you're lifting really heavy weights,
you will not be going to 10 reps. And if you are, then it's probably too low for what you're trying to accomplish. So repetitions per set. The next is how many sets you're doing per workout. So if you are used to doing two sets of bicep curls, maybe you don't want to increase the weight yet, but you'll add a whole nother set, like another eight to 10 onto that. And that is a form of progressive overload and increasing volume. Another one is to add additional workouts per week.
I have found this new fascination with wearing my walking vest around the house while I'm cleaning and I'm like bending over, I'm picking up stuff, I'm squatting, I'm playing with the kids outside of just walking. It never really occurred to me to do it until I saw somebody else talk about, I just wear my weight vest around the house. And I thought, huh, well, that's a simple way to add some progressive overload to my training. So I started doing that.
Tiffany Wickes (04:32.214)
Another way is to increase the difficulty. So you can increase difficulty of exercise without increasing weight or volume. So here's what you can do. You can increase the range of motion. All right, so let's talk about it. Deadlift is a good example. You can increase that range of motion by going into a deficit deadlift. So you stand on top of something while keeping the bar on the floor. So it creates a longer range of motion, which increases the travel of the bar. And by doing that,
that is an increased overload by increasing the work you perform. So you may see some people put a couple 45 pound plates on the ground and then they stand on that and then that will increase that rate of travel. There you go, progressive overload. Another one is doing dips. Some people dip down like an inch. If you go to full range, which means your elbows are practically up by your ears and then push all the way back up, that's gonna give you
progressive overload with the push-up. There are so many ways to scale that to make it more difficult. mean, you may be starting off with on your knees, you've got your hands really wide, so you're recruiting a lot more lats and shoulders and back into that movement, then you can get halfway down and then push all the way up. And then progressively, you will go all the way down to the ground and then come back up. You can start moving your arms
closer to the body that will add some progressive overload and some dynamic nature to the pushup. And then do the halfway or do the full down, go all the way up. And eventually you would get on your toes and then you would be going all the way down and all the way up. So there's lots. then even further than that, you could take it another step further and wear your weight vest on your body while you're doing a pushup. And then you can just do more pushups. There's tons of ways to increase your range of motion. And aside from wearing the weight vest, don't actually have
any weight to that motion at all. Alright, so another way is to combine resistance attributes. So instead of increasing the weight per se, you can combine different external resistances to make your workout harder. So let's take a bicep curl for example, since I've talked about that before. When you use a dumbbell, the hardest part of the exercise is somewhere in the middle, like where your elbow's at a 90 degree angle. When you use a resistance band, the hardest part is closer to the end.
Tiffany Wickes (06:53.39)
So if you combine these two resistance attributes, then you can increase overload without adding any additional weight, right? Does that make sense? All right, so if you reduce the momentum, that can help to overcome the challenging parts of the exercise and increase stress load on your body, which will create growth. So you reduce the momentum, you make an exercise more challenging. So for example, you wanna add a pause.
you know, below the knee during a deadlift. So the opposite of reducing momentum during a deadlift would be a touch and go deadlift where you're like, boom, down, up, down, up, down, up. If you go down and you have a pause or, you know, a short bounce, then you come right back up. Another way to do that is to pulse. So if you go down into a squat, you go down and then kind of pulse it up just a little bit and then go back down and then go all the way up. Those are, you know,
you will reduce the amount of momentum if you just aren't going straight down, popping right back up. And same with like if you're doing overhead stuff, a lot of people will do overhead so fast that they'll end up using momentum and the bounce at the bottom to get that weight back up over their head. If you pull that weight down and you hold it in a static position, and it's hard to do, it's hard to talk about weightlifting techniques while on a podcast because you can't see me.
But I mean, follow my Instagram. I show workout stuff all the time there. I may even do a video about progressive overload and show just one exercise. Would that be fun? Would you want to see that? Show one exercise and how you can work with progressive overload with the one exercise. That would be fun. I think I'm gonna do that. Thank you, brain, for that. Anyhow, yeah, there's lots of, so you reduce the momentum, the bounce, the energy in between there. So here are,
A few more. listen, there are lots of studies that increasing reps or weight as it applies to progressive overload is equally effective as other ways to increase stress on your body. So you can increase the rep, you can slow the speed down, you can increase the speed. There's so many different ways to build overload within the exact same programming. And here's the
Tiffany Wickes (09:15.842)
the force velocity curve is you have this starting strength and then you will increase speed of it and then you accelerate the strength of it and then you will have absolute strength in that particular workout, right? So your starting strength is a 10 pound dumbbell and maybe you're doing bicep curls again, all right? You're gonna likely, if 10 pounds is challenging for you, you're gonna go fairly slowly because it's heavy.
So the velocity curve sounds like you start with the strength that you can lift, but it's challenging. Eventually you become faster with that strength and then you will increase the strength and then you become stronger, okay? Or increase the weight rather and then you become stronger. So that's generally what you're looking for is can I do this move now more quickly but with still having proper form?
then it's probably time to move up in weight. All right, does that make sense? All right, here's another way to do it, is you will increase your range of motion. I already talked about that. You can increase the volume, increase the power, or increase the load. Some other ways to apply progressive overload would be to decrease your set, your interrest set time. So if you're resting for two minutes in between sets, maybe reduce that to one minute.
recovery in between actual whole workouts. So if you're on the like, I'm going to work out every other day plan, then maybe work out three days in a row and then take a rest day. You do need rest days. Okay. Another way is to practice exercise momentum. And I know I said at one point is you're going to decrease the momentum of movement, but exercise momentum is using different philosophies of exercise to
create change in your body. So for instance, high intensity interval training, you combine that with weightlifting, there's a momentum effect of when you're, you know, hopping down and doing jump squats, and then you immediately move into a strength training move. It's all synergistic, and it's meant to decrease the amount of body fat and increase the amount of muscle that you're building in a particular workout set, right? Everything that we do over here at The Faster Way is systematic. It's all intentional.
Tiffany Wickes (11:43.192)
and it's all meant to help you get the best results the fastest possible. So there you go, progressive overload in the gym or at home. You definitely should be applying it. If you have any other questions about it, make sure you reach out to me and watch my socials. I'll come up with a video for that soon. All right, ciao guys. Stay strong.