As you get stronger, you become able to lift heavier and heavier weights. That’s the idea at the heart of an often-misunderstood fitness concept: progressive overload. Unfortuantely, there are a lot of myths and misunderstandings about this principle, so here’s how to use it to plan your own workouts or judge whether a program you’re following will keep you on track.
What is progressive overload?
Progressive overload is the increase, over time, in the amount of work or stress you ask your body to handle. The term is used two different ways: as a principle of how the human body works, and as a description of how a workout program changes over time. If you want to know how to “do progressive overload,” you’re thinking of the second one—how to design a workout program.
The simplest way to implement this is to just do a little more each time you’re in the gym. More weight, or more reps, or making the workout harder in some other way. You can still take some easier “deload” workouts (or weeks) from time to time, but over the long term you want to see a trend of the workouts getting harder. They won’t necessarily feel harder, because you’ll be getting stronger. It’s more like the workouts are keeping up with you.
In other words, progressive overload is a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation. As you get stronger, your workouts need to get harder to keep up. But in a sense you are also becoming stronger because you’re challenging yourself with harder workouts.
What does progressive overload look like in real life?
If you’re bummed out by the idea of working harder and harder forever, don’t panic. You’ll work harder in absolute terms—by lifting heavier weights, let’s say—but the challenge stays about the same in relative terms. Your workouts will fall into an effort level you might call “hard, but doable,” and you’ll notice progress because your numbers are going up. (A similar approach applies to endurance sports. As cyclist Greg Lemond reportedly said: “It never gets any easier, you just go faster.”)
When I started lifting weights many years ago, 65 pounds was a decently challenging bench press for me. I remember being proud of myself for being able to squeeze out a rep or two at 85 pounds. Now, if I’m going to do a bench workout, I don’t even bother loading those amounts onto the bar. My warmup sets start at 95 pounds, and a heavy single might be around 135. That 135 feels just as hard as 85 used to, but it’s undeniably more weight.
How did I make that progress? Well, I kept lifting the weights that felt heavy for me. Over time, the same weights that used to be challenging started to feel easy, and I needed to add more and more weight to the bar to get something that actually felt heavy. (I have a guide here to figuring out whether you’re lifting “heavy.”)
Most of the time, I either followed a program that told me how many pounds to lift, increasing that amount slowly over time, or one that told me what effort level to lift at (a concept called RPE), which allowed me to choose an appropriate weight each day. Following a program will usually net you better progress than just winging it, but as long as you’re using the overload principle and the progression principle, you will get stronger.
Workout routines that use progressive overload
Here are some examples of workout routines that use progressive overload:
Double progression. Let’s say you’re aiming for three sets of eight to 12 reps of dumbbell shoulder press. You choose a weight that you can handle for 3 sets of 8 reps. The next time you do shoulder press, try to add at least one rep. If you can’t, that’s fine—just do your three sets of eight. One day maybe you’ll get 10 reps on the first set, then only eight on the next two. Another time maybe you get 12, 10, and eight. After a few weeks you manage three full sets of 12. That means it’s time to increase the weight! The next time you do the exercise, you’ll use a heavier set of dumbbells and start again at three sets of eight. It’s called “double” progression because first you increase the reps, and then you increase the weight.
Linear progression. This is a common progression for barbell exercises for beginners. You do the same number of reps every time (say, five sets of five reps) but add a small amount of weight every workout. Often the program will have instructions for what to do if you can’t complete the five sets of five reps at the new weight. These workouts aren’t usually realistic for experienced lifters, since you can’t keep increasing the weight forever, but they’re great for people who are learning an exercise for the first time or returning to the gym after a break.
Set progression. This may be used along with double progression, or may be its own thing. You start with just a few sets of an exercise per workout, say two or three, and then add a set each week. Once you’re doing, say, five sets, you’ll start over with heavier weight. If you’re using it with double progression, you’ll increase sets, and then reps, and then weight.
Density progression. This is commonly used in timed sets, like Crossfit WODs (“workout of the day”) or for accessory lifts. Set a timer for several minutes and do as many reps as possible in the given time, resting as needed. The next time you do the workout, try to do more reps in the same amount of time. Once you can do the lifts with little to no rest, you’ll either add weight or find another way to make the exercises harder (for example, doing dips instead of pushups).
As you can see, weight isn’t the only variable that progresses. You can increase reps, or sets, or increase the amount of work you do in a given time by decreasing rest. You can increase the difficulty by choosing a harder exercise (like progressing from dips to pushups). As long as things get harder over time, you’re doing progressive overload.
How to use progressive overload even if you can’t add more weight
Adding weight is part of most progressive overload schemes, but you don’t have to add weight to the bar literally every time you lift. There’s a wide range of weights and rep ranges that can be effective for building strength and muscle. For example, if I did a bench workout today, I might do sets of 10 at 100 pounds, or sets of five at 120, or some heavy singles at 140, or any combination of these. If I’m really tired or stressed, I might decide to do the sets of 10 at just 90 pounds. If I’m feeling great, I might be able to do them at 105. This is what I mean by a wide range: All of these are hard enough work to spur my muscles to adapt and get stronger. (There are reasons you might choose one of these workouts over the others, but we don’t need to get into those details at the moment.)
What wouldn’t be progressive overload? Well, if I did sets of 10 with just the bar, that wouldn’t help me get stronger. If I had a mini barbell set, and it maxed out at 85 pounds, my strength would stagnate once I got to the point where 85 pounds isn’t a challenging weight anymore.
Even as your strength improves, you don’t have to do more every single workout, as long as you’re getting stronger in the long term, and your workouts are still in the range that is challenging to you.
So let’s say you’re doing bicep curls with a 10-pound dumbbell. You can do eight or 10 reps with it. Perfect. But the only way to add weight, at your gym, might be to pick up a 15-pound dumbbell. If that weight is too heavy for you, that’s okay. Keep working with the 10-pounder, and in time you’ll be ready for the 15.
You can progress on more than one metric
While you’re probably itching to lift heavier weights, weight on the bar is not the only way to progress. Sometimes you can’t add weight because of equipment issues, or just because your strength is improving slowly. (Even if your beginner gains were meteoric, everybody’s progress slows down at some point.)
But if you’re smart, you probably don’t want to only get better at one specific thing. A lot of beginners start off doing squat, bench, and deadlift in sets of five reps, and trying to add weight each workout. But you’ll be a more well-rounded lifter if you also know how to lift heavy singles and sets of 10 or 15. Depending on your goals you might consider front squats in addition to back squats, and reverse hypers or kettlebell swings in addition to deadlifts. There are ways to improve at all of these things, and it’s normal for a lifter to be simultaneously increasing their reps in accessory lifts, increasing their weight on the bar for heavy singles, and increasing the amount of time they spend on conditioning workouts.
How to spot workouts that don’t use progressive overload
Not every workout or routine will have progressive overload built in. For example, if you have a favorite workout that you do every day, but you never make it any harder (say, it’s always three sets of ten pushups), you won’t make progress over time. That’s OK if you enjoy the workout for another reason, like if you’re just trying to get the mental health benefits of a little exercise boost in the morning. But if you want to get better at pushups, you need to find a way to do more of them over time, or make them harder in some way (like elevating your feet, or doing them with a backpack on).
Workouts with progressive overload tend to be personalized to you. If the workout tells you exactly what to do, down to the exact weight of dumbbell to pick up, it’s not giving you room to choose the weight that matches your current strength level. The 12-3-30 treadmill workout, for example, is the same for everyone every time. If it’s one-size-fits-all, there’s no way to progress.
That said, some workouts have a sneaky progression built in. If you jog for 30 minutes each day, chances are you’ll get a little faster over time even if you don’t realize it, and then you’re doing more work within the same amount of time. Or if you do “three sets of 10” of an exercise, but each day you pick up whatever dumbbells feel appropriate for that level, you’ll probably end up using heavier ones over time. Just make sure you don’t get stuck doing the exact same thing month in and month out.
The limits of progressive overload
One last thing, now that we’ve discussed what progressive overload looks like. It’s important to remember that progression happens in the long term. Some competitive lifters might not test their one-rep max outside of competition, which means they’ll only find out once or twice a year how much their deadlift has gone up. That doesn’t mean they haven’t progressed in the meantime. If they’re doing an effective program, consistently challenging themselves, they’re still working.
Plateaus are a fact of life when you’re a lifter. Sometimes it takes a while to get stronger. Sometimes you need to work on your technique to be able to express your newfound strength. Sometimes factors like stress or weight loss or changes in your training can make you weaker in the short term, but if you keep training in a way that challenges you, you’ll set new PRs soon enough.
