Progressive Overload

A mentor of mine, and the first person to give me an opportunity in formal D1 strength & conditioning, once told me “You can’t practice touching the rim if you can’t touch the rim”. Essentially, if you want to dunk a basketball, but can’t jump high enough, then how can you expect to practice dunking?

This is the same man who I saw doing sets of back extensions holding an 80lb dumbbell to his chest and simply said “it’s just progression”.

If you can’t dunk or do repeat back extensions holding a weight heavier than I was in middle school, then it doesn’t mean you’ll never be able to, you just need to both recognize and respect the progression required to achieve these feats of power and strength.

Progressive overload is the foundation of all advancements in athletic performance, and general physical health and fitness. By working above your comfortable limit your body prepares itself for the next round of exercise by devoting resources to building muscle, stiffening tendons, creating capillaries, and developing the central nervous system. When explaining how to create sustainable progression to clients I prefer to give their bodies a voice of their own. For example, if a novice runner starts a dedicated training program, their body is going to say “Ok wow, they KEEP doing this every day, so we really need to prepare because we’re not convinced they’re going to stop, so we need to bulk up our capacity.”

When subjected to chronic exercise (for example, a weekly running or resistance training program) the body is going to incrementally increase its ability to perform the exercises demanded of it. As a result, what the body considers overload is going to keep increasing, and movements or exercises that were once considered strenuous will become easy.

This is a crucial point, because as you get better, you need to either maintain your fitness, or continue to increase it, because the body will only adapt and improve in response to the stress of progressive overload. This is why the top 1% of athletes spend years chasing very incremental increases in performance, because the demands of progressive overload at their level may exceed what is humanly possible. Therefore, they must look into the other pillars of performance, such as advanced nutrition (think the sudden rise of ketone supplementation), sports psychology, or advanced methods of recovery.

Most people, however, tend to live within realms of physical ability that can be manipulated by more simple progression plans. For example, someone preparing for their first marathon will be able to keep getting better by simply increasing the volume and intensity of their weekly mileage and will be able to maintain their fitness with small reductions in training load.

So what does this mean for you?

Train with your head, not your ego.

Methodical, manageable, and most importantly, recoverable training volumes that follow a pattern of progression will yield results.

If you’re just looking to improve your fitness generally this is less of a concern, but if you are training towards any sort of specific goal (race time, bench press PR, etc), large changes in your training from week to week will not guarantee improvement.

For example, if you’re training for a marathon and you’re feeling great so you run 60 miles in a week, but are then so exhausted that you can barely run 15 miles for the next two weeks, the net improvement in your ability will be close to zero.

However, if you follow a clear ramp pattern in your mileage, which culminates in a 60 mile week that leaves you feeling fresh and ready to run the following week, the gains in your performance will be massive.

The “Rocky” style training montages, where dramatic improvements suddenly occur in weeks, don’t correlate to real life increases in performance. Adaptations within the human body can take years to reach their full potential, and hard work is a major part of these improvements, but everything needs to exist in balance with recovery and progression.

Everyone’s road towards a specific goal is going to look a little different, and therefore how they progress will also look different, but the rules for improving stay mostly the same. By working with a coach who can manage your progression from a bird’s eye view, and point out areas for growth, there’s no reason you can’t draw out your full potential.