Written by Rita Catolino, B.A. Health and Fitness Expert, Certified Trainer & Best-Selling Author
Photography by Paul Buceta
Hair & Makeup by Monica Kalra
Although group fitness classes and intense bootcamps with box jumps and burpees are a great way to ignite your interest in fitness and create accountability, long-lasting, proven results happen by doing the basics and increasing load or changing tempo over time; aka Progressive Overload.
Understanding the principle of progressive overload is essential if you're on a journey to build lean muscle and enhance your overall strength. This method, which gradually increases the stress on your muscles during workouts, is the cornerstone of effective weightlifting. By systematically challenging your muscles, you create pathways for continuous improvement and adaptation, ensuring your efforts lead to true results!
Progressive overload involves incrementally increasing the weight, volume, or intensity of your workouts. This principle is grounded in the concept of muscle adaptation—when demands on your muscles exceed what they are used to, they respond by growing and strengthening. Essentially, if you continuously lift the same weight with the same number of repetitions, your muscles will adapt and stop growing, as they will no longer perceive it as a challenge. Progressively overloading your muscles stimulates growth, develops strength, and enhances overall performance.
"Your body must be pushed beyond its comfort zone to consistently gain strength and muscle mass."
For example, if you are used to executing 3 sets of 12 reps with 20 pounds on a dumbbell chest press, you can either increase the load to 25 pounds, or lower reps to 8-10 reps for 4 sets for a few weeks, until you can increase that 25-pound weight up to the 12 reps. Then you repeat by going up to 30 pounds, etc. If varying dumbbell sizes are not available to you, then changing tempo and rest times are also successful approaches in progressive overload. For example, if you are doing that same chest press at 12 reps with 20 pounds, try changing tempo—lower the weight in the eccentric for 3 seconds, holding the weight at the lowest part for 2 seconds under tension, and then pushing up with force for 1 second. These changes in tempo create new stimulus for your muscles, and help them adapt and create change instead of always doing the same thing and knowing “what to expect.”
Your body must be pushed beyond its comfort zone to consistently gain strength and muscle mass. Progressive overload ensures that you regularly increase the demands of your workouts, leading to measurable results over time.
This method is also great for pushing through plateaus.
Lean muscle gain heavily depends on the mechanical tension placed on your muscles. Gradual increases in weight or intensity cause micro-tears in muscle fibres, which, when repaired, lead to larger and stronger muscles.
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