Hey, what’s up, guys? Today I wanted to talk about progressive overload, what it is, why it’s important, and different ways we can use it. So what is progressive overload? Progressive overload is continually and gradually increasing the demands on our musculoskeletal system over time or simply just doing more over time so that we can continue to make gains in the size of our muscles, the strength of our muscles, and even the endurance that we’re able to sustain.
So why is it important that our body adapts quickly to stimuli we put upon it? Let us say you’re coming to the gym, and you’re doing the same amount of sets, the same amount of reps, the same weight for the same exercises, day in and day out, your body is going to adapt to that stimulus, and then you will stop making gains from it. So we want to stress the system over time so that we can get better over time.
There are a few different ways that we could do this. We could change the exercise’s resistance to add more weight. Each time we come into the gym, we can change the number of sets and reps we’re doing. If we add sets and reps, we can keep the weight the same, but the volume is increasing. So are we are changing that stress on the muscle, we could change the number of times the frequency that we’re exercising so we could exercise more in a certain amount of time. Or we could increase the intensity again, add reps, add weight or volume to that, or simply cut that rest time down to make exercise a little more intense. So on how to end it.
If you’re stagnating, maybe take some time to talk to your coach and go for your programming, and they can make the appropriate changes to help you stay on track for your goals in 2022.
So we’ll start again here. So if you notice that you are starting to find a plateau in your exercise, you’re not noticing gains in size, strength, or endurance. When you talk to a coach, assess some goals, and then we can kind of go over how we can use this progressive overload to continue to make gains in size, strength, or endurance.
