Progressive overload

So muscle growth happens when you repeatedly expose your muscles to enough resistance and give them time to recover and adapt.

And this is where the concept of progressive overload comes in, which I know I have mentioned multiple times before on this podcast, but it's been a minute, so I'm gonna put in a reminder.

Progressive overload means that over time, you increase the demand you put on your muscles.

And you do that by increasing your weight, increasing the reps you do with that weight, or increasing the number of sets you do.

And it all adds up to an increased load on your muscles, which is exactly what you want if your goal is to build muscle.

So what matters the most is training frequency.

Can we hit our muscle groups twice per week to elicit the most We want to elicit hard sets and progressive overload, which I'm going to get into in a bit.

But that is how I would look to structure your workouts.

In an ideal world, you guys would give me three workouts a week and you would do full body.

You just simply aren't training hard enough.

And I think I mentioned that in the podcast a few weeks ago on how to build your chest.

You need to make sure you are implementing progressive overload.

Your muscles need a sufficiently challenging stimulus to train.

Yeah.

And so if you've been lifting... those same light dumbbells in your workouts whether it's in a class or whether it's at home with the videos that you're doing if you're doing that and your body isn't really changing it's because of that it's because you're using those same light dumbbells you're never challenging yourself enough you're almost certainly not applying progressive overload You're not tracking your workouts.

You're not doing an extra rep each week.

You're not increasing the weight because you're still using those same dumbbells.

death taxes and progressive overload in order to make gains are three of the absolute so-called certainties in life and while certainly death and taxes are surely coming for us all the question now poses on whether or not progressive overload as we've long associated with is really all that necessary And the possibility that directly seeking progressive overload might actually be compromising the satisfaction, safety, and effectiveness of your workouts for helping you to build muscle so you can look and feel great.

So welcome back again, my friend, to another episode here, the Red Delta Project podcast, home of the Beautiful Strength Program, which uses the power of grind style calisthenics to help you look and feel your best.

I'm your host, Matt Schifferle, and progressive overload has long been the golden compass, as I call it, the golden compass needle directing you towards that which you want, that whenever you went into your workouts and you're like, I want to build muscle and Also, if you want to build some strength and stuff, but particularly muscle, then the rhetoric for many years has been get some progressive overload.

You have to keep pushing your muscles progressively harder over time, which means you have to be lifting harder.

more resistance, more weight, or using progressive technique and calisthenics, and you have to be getting more repetitions with the exercises that you're doing.

And if you're not doing that, then you are in a plateau because you're effectively telling your body the same instructions time after time.

And if there's no progressive overload, you have no chance of ever making any sort of progress.

I've echoed that sentiment.

Okay, next question.

How should I approach progressive overload in a full body training program? Should I be trying to increase weight every week or are there other ways to measure progress?

Man, these are great questions.

As a beginner, you could probably get away with trying to progress weight a little bit at least every other week because you'll normally get faster in a hurry because of the neurological changes that go on there.

I always hear that you need to lift super heavy, 300 bench, 400 squat, 500 deadlift.

But is that something that I should be working toward at my age? Or should I find and keep a good split of progressive overload? How did he word that again?

Could he be

focusing on those heavy weights or progressive good split with progressive overload?

He just said the same thing in different ways.

Yeah, that's what

i have no room for it i tell clients because i'll see my clients do that they're like i'll just see on their instagram yeah i decided to do this for one and i'll send them a text i'm like knock that shit off

yeah

But many women are never really taught how to get stronger.

And one of the biggest pieces of that is progressive overload.

Progressive overload sounds so much more complicated than it is.

So let's just break it down so that we understand.

Basically, your body adapts to whatever you ask it to do.

So once something becomes easy, your body needs a new reason to change.

And I want to make something really clear here.

Progressive overload does not always mean adding more weight.