Progressive Overload Training

Most people who have been doing strength training for a decent period of time have heard of a concept called Progressive Overload Training. What is it? It is essentially the principle that if you continue to workout in a certain way or doing the same exercises without changing weights or reps, your body will adapt to your training and stop growing.

When you see someone in the gym that has been doing the same workout for a year, using the same weight for the same reps, and they haven't gained made any gains, it's because their muscles have adapted to their training. There are a few ways that you can progressively overload your muscles so that they are forced to get bigger, stronger, and have more endurance.

The first way, and my favorite way is to simply increase the resistance for the exercise that your body has adapted to. By doing this you will increase strength and size effectively.

Another way is to increase the number of reps for the given exercise. This will help increase muscular endurance and force your muscles to more effectively fight fatigue.

Other ways that you can use progressive overload training is to increase the number of sets you do, increase your rest periods to allow your muscles more recovery, and you can also increase the intensity to help your body push harder.

Progressive Overload is a concept that is essential to your growth in fitness. Whether your goal is to gain muscle, increase strength, or lose fat, it is imperative that you confuse your body when it has adapted.

I'm assuming you have seen the commercials for P90x, where Tony Horton talks about "muscle confusion." Muscle confusion is basically the same concept. He tricks your body into growing every 30 days by making your body workout differently. Most people seem to get pretty good results from his program simply because they are changing their workouts - something most people don't do if they don't have a specific training regimen laid out for them.

I'm not saying that you need to order some expensive training program to get in good shape, but it is important that you keep your body guessing so that it doesn't adapt to your training.

The moral of the story here is that you need to continuously change your resistance, sets, reps, and volume in order to achieve continuous positive change.