Optimizing Muscle Growth – Progressive Overload
What is Progressive Overload?
To achieve muscle growth, muscles need to be constantly challenged with progressively more difficult tasks. This is the concept any tissue follows to adapt: stressor or stimulus, followed by a period of recovery. Our stressor in this case is resistance-based exercise, which you can learn all about here. But a one-off stressor, although having some short-term benefits, doesn’t set the stage for muscle growth, which is a long-term process that can take a year or longer, depending on your goals. Once our muscle adapts after a workout, it will then maintain that level of adaptation with the same challenge, or regress if there is a lack of subsequent stressors/stimuli. Unless the stressor or stimulus gets more challenging, which will cause the muscle to continue to adapt. This principle of progressive overload can be applied through various techniques depending on the training context and goals.
Progressive overload can be applied to multiple training variables:
Balance and Stability Training: For goals like improved proprioception, stability, or balance, progressive overload can be applied by adjusting the base of support (e.g., moving from a wide to a narrow stance) or changing the complexity of the movement.
Plyometric Movements: For explosive, plyometric exercises, progressively increasing the difficulty could involve increasing the height of a depth jump, to progressively overload connective tissue and neuromuscular adaptation.
Endurance and Cardiovascular Training: Runners, for example, often progressively overload by increasing weekly mileage or the duration of training sessions.
However, we are using stable movements like discussed in optimizing muscle growth - exercise selection. So progressive overload is generally done by:
Increasing Weight: Gradually lifting heavier weights.
Increasing Volume: Adding more sets is especially beneficial for beginners.
Increasing Repetitions: Increasing the number of repetitions per set.
Modifying Tempo and Time Under Tension (TUT): Slowing down the movement, particularly in eccentric (lowering) phase, increases time under tension. While TUT should not be the sole means of progressive overload, it can be a valuable addition when combined with increases in weight, volume, or reps to maximize hypertrophy.
Normalizing your form
One of the easiest ways to make a movement more stimulating for muscle growth is to increase the range of motion (ROM) of that movement, especially in the stretched portion.
It can be concluded from the body of evidence that ROM does play a role in stimulating muscle growth (read more). However, this is a bit more nuanced than most would expect.
Some recent evidence has pointed to the stretched portion of a movement being more important for muscle growth and providing similar benefits compared to full ROM training (read more). However, this is most likely movement dependent.
Nevertheless, if you want to build muscle, that stretched portion seems to be key. However, there are plenty of movements that can be limited in their ROM by joint mobility issues.
For example, in the press. If your shoulders roll forward at the bottom of a press you are now compromising the loading on your chest, making the movement sub-optimal for muscle growth by our definition above.
For many gym-goers or bodybuilding athletes, this is a difficult challenge to overcome. The saying “leave your ego at the door” really comes into play here. Because you must be honest with yourself and keep your form both strict and consistent if you want the other variables you are manipulating to be the only thing progressing the exercise.
Increasing Weight and Repetitions
This is by far the most straight-forward way to progressively overload an exercise.
Here’s an example to explain
I bench press 135x10, then in 2 weeks I get to 12 reps and then 2 weeks later 14
I can then add weight and go to 145 for 10 reps until I can get 14 and the cycle continues
Some movements are more “conducive” to progressive overload. These movements are your heaviest movements. This is said because the percentage increments you can make on them are smaller. For example, if your gym has 5lb plates as the smallest increment to increase load, that will be a much lower percentage of your deadlift compared to your bicep curl.
Tempo/Time Under Tension
Increasing time under tension (TUT) specifically focuses on the duration a muscle is under load in each set, often by slowing down the concentric or eccentric phase of a movement.
However, solely increasing TUT without adjusting other factors like load, volume, or intensity may eventually lead to plateaus. While increased TUT can create additional muscular stress, other variables in your training must be adjusted to optimize progressive overload (read more).
In practical application, TUT is valuable when you:
Want to minimize joint stress but still challenge the muscle.
Aim to enhance control and form in certain movement phases (eccentric, isometric holds).
For example, if I bench 135x10, I can slow down the tempo, so each rep takes me longer (more TUT).
Eventually, I’ll plateau, in the sense it’s just not reasonable to slow down the repetitions anymore, so I’ll have to increase the reps.
Volume and Progressive Overload
Progressions in volume have been shown to lead to hormonal, morphological/structural, and functional adaptations in skeletal muscle (read more).
However, this is my last priority when it comes to progressive overload for hypertrophy. Mainly because I am experienced in this type of training.
Volume and intensity (in the form of proximity to failure) co-exist on the same spectrum of stimulus. More intensity generally means you need less volume to stimulate the same amount of growth. If you have less intensity, like when beginning training, you will likely have room to scale your volume.
An example:
If you are at a 20RPE intensity as someone new to training, you may only be reaching 1 or 2 really stimulating repetitions per set. So, more sets will allow you to accumulate more stimulating reps.
If you are at a 20RPE intensity as someone experienced in training, you may be accumulating 4 or 5 stimulating repititions per set. So, you will need less sets to achieve the same total stimulus.
This is not to be confused with volume in the context of reps, which is a primary variable targeted for progressive overload. Volume in the form of additional sets is probably not the best way to progressively overload.
Complications
Plateaus
Look at the other variables in your training, such as sleep and nutrition that could be impacting your progress. If you’ve reached a true training plateau, it might be time to re-orient your goals and pursue other adaptations. This is called periodization.
Overtraining
A great general rule of thumb is to not increase the variable you are progressively overloading by more than 10% a week.
The only time you can leave this is if you are scaling training variables you have comfortability in or are returning too. For example, when I started running, I was able to scale my weekly mileage faster than 10% per week because I had built durability from years of resistance-based exercise. Then, when I returned to resistance training, I was able to scale faster than 10% per week because it’s always easier to build muscle and strength once it’s already been achieved.
I hope this gives you some insight on how to organize and progress your training when it comes to optimizing muscle growth. Training should be fun first and foremost, and building muscle can boost your confidence, improve your health, and bring about positive functional adaptations you can take into life. Consider checking out my previous 3 blogs on the topic of optimizing muscle growth!