Want to push through any plateau and take your training to the next level? Progressive overload will get you there, but there’s more to the concept beloved by PTs than lifting heavier ow rogre
Here’s a quiz question for you: what do Gal Gadot, Kate Upton and the Sugababes have in common? The answer: progressive overload. But while the 2000s banger that lives on in karaoke booths was musically ahead of its time, progressive overload is practised by Gal and Kate in a rather more literal sense. Both stars are fans of the method favoured by PTs that allows you to push through a plateau and progress in your strength training.
‘One of the key tenets of my programme is progressive overload,’ Upton’s personal trainer Ben Bruno told People magazine. ‘We do slow increases over time, so you build gradually. It’s important to always strive to be better, whether that’s with more weights, reps or moving to a harder exercise. With Kate, we do all three at different points, so we’ve gradually built up.’ The proof is in the pudding; Kate can deadlift more than 90kg, do sled pushes with 225kg and complete bear crawls loaded with 135kg.
In a nutshell, progressive overload is about increasing the intensity of your workouts in order to teach your body to adapt. ‘When you exercise, you place a stress on the body,’ says Andy Vincent, a strength and conditioning coach who uses the concept with his clients. ‘Your body then recovers and adapts to this stressor, so when that same stressor returns you can do it with much less effort. Progressive overload is the focus of laying a slight incremental increase in training stress on top of another, session after session, week after week, so you continue to improve.’ While the technique is associated with strength training, he adds, the concept can just as easily be applied to other forms of exercise, such as running and cycling, with duration being the variable that you’d progressively overload. ‘The human body has a borderline limitless capacity to adapt to training, meaning you can achieve anything you want if you get progressive overload right.
If each exercise is gradually progressed, the body has a chance to adapt fully.’
Don’t just take our word for it. The opinion that progressive overload can make you stronger, better able to recover and adapt to exercise stressors is rooted in a growing body of research. A study published in the European Journal Of Applied Physiology observed 83 participants over a 12-week period as they practised progressive overload on a series of arm-strengthening exercises — gradually increasing the weight and number of repetitions each time. The results showed that
