The School of Fitness - Lesson 6: The Magic of Progressive Overload
Mr Delia Steele
Progressive Overload. You need this. It might not be linear, it might not always go to plan, but you need this none the less.
PROGRESSIVE OVERLOAD IS...
Do more. If you lift more weight than you are used to, do more reps or do more sets, you are overloading your system. Progressive Overload is simply the process of doing this continuously over time.
Progressive overload is the simplest yet most important principle of fitness:
Do more, adapt, repeat. This is what training is all about.
Every single system of training, is, or at least should be based around intelligently applying and managing progressive overload (if it's aimed at actually getting you better at something that is).
EVERY BODY LOVES SOME STIMULATION
Any type of fitness training needs intelligently applied progressive overload in order for you to get better. You could go to the gym every evening for years, but if you forget to ask your body to get better (increasing the stimulus), it will just get more efficient at doing what is asked of it. If you want your body to continuously adapt and improve, you need to present a new stimulus. You need to ask it to do more work. Remember, change takes change.
Have you stimulated yourself harder today than ever before?
BUT DON'T GET GREEDY. IF YOU DO IT TOO HARD, TOO OFTEN, IT WON'T FEEL AS SPECIAL
Training too often, too hard, too soon can lead to exhaustion, injury and sadness. This is often called overtraining, (although it's significantly less of a problem than under training for most people.) But, if you take your training seriously, overtraining is something you need to be very aware of.
When you give your body a new stimulus - be it more sets, heavier weight, different tempo - it will be most effective the first time you do it.Ever wondered why it's always the first time you do an exercise that you can't walk for a few days?
Once you have pushed yourself in the gym, your muscle fibres will be broken down, your energy stores depleted and your gym clothes sweaty.
You will temporarily be weaker than before until your body has recovered from the experience. This can take anywhere from 24 hours to more than a week depending on the level and focus of the attack and your current fitness levels.
Your body will of course, recover and re-build to cope the best it can with the stressors it encounters. In the pros, the word is supercompensation. Body feels stress, adapts to stimulus, becomes stronger...supercompensation.
Get it right, and the magic will happen. Get greedy and you will be overtraining and will not get stronger/fitter as fast as you would like. Leave it too long and your body will sense it is not efficient to maintain such high levels of prowess and you will lose the capacity that you so briefly had.
The more advanced your fitness levels, the harder it is to force adaptation. This is why rookies should get very fast gains in strength and fitness.
Take home lesson: ask your body to do more work, give it the time and raw materials it needs to adapt, then it will be stronger/fitter for a while. If you repeat the process often enough, you will get better at stuff.
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