Progressive Overload: How to Keep Getting Stronger

Podcast – Steph Gaudreau

Whether you are new to strength training or a seasoned lifter, progressive overload is two common words you have probably heard before. But what do they really mean, and how can you apply them both as a lifter and as a coach? If you are feeling stuck because you are not seeing the gains you are hoping for in your programming, progressive overload could be the puzzle piece you still need to include.

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Key Takeaways

If you are interested in progressive overload, you should:

1. Work with a coach or find a strength training plan that is custom to you
2. Gradually build up strength and vary your movements to build your adaptation ability
3. Remember that this is a great investment in your health if you are honest with yourself

The Key to Long-Term Strength Gains

You see relatively continuous improvement by gradually tweaking the dials of your training and the demands placed on your body over time. If you fail to challenge your body, you will fail to adapt. One of the hardest and most important things you can do is advance your lifting in a way that makes the most of your time and moves you in the right direction. The key is having a plan for your lifting that saves you time and worry when you get into the gym.

Know Why It Matters

Training, coaching, lifting, and recovering are a science and an art. But to really see results, it takes new challenges and an understanding of one’s motivation behind the movements.

Increasing weights or adding more reps, paying attention to rest time, and utilizing different exercises and tempos are all key components to seeing the results you are hoping for. Patience and repetition are the basis of long-term strength training; all you need is the right program!

What role does progressive overload play in your strength training program? Let me know your thoughts in the comments below.

In This Episode

• What is progressive overload, and what does it mean (2:25)
• Breaking down the science of adaptation and general adaptation syndrome (13:20)
• How to apply progressive overload in your strength training program (20:26)
• Common pitfalls when learning how to manage your progress over time (32:35)
• Best practice advice for those who want to integrate progressive overload into their strength training program (43:05)

Quotes

“When it comes to your strength training, progressive overload is the cornerstone that guides, the guiding principle that steers your training program and training plan.” (2:56)

“To put this into common words, we need a stressor, that’s our training, and we need recovery, which is where we finally experience that adaptation.” (15:56)

“Training is a science and an art. Coaching is a science and an art. Implementing this is a science and an art, and getting to know yourself and/or your clients is really important. (22:37)

“We need to pump the breaks a bit, and find a way to keep you moving forward without accelerating things to the point where you can’t recover.” (34:17)

“If you have been lifting the same weights for months and months and months on end, it is time, my friend, you have got to move up in weight.” (39:25)

Featured on the Show

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Annie Miller Pure Programming

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Progressive Overload: How to Keep Getting Stronger Transcript

Steph Gaudreau

When it comes to strength training programs, it is so common to hear two words, progressive overload. What the heck does that even mean? And how do you apply the concept of progressive overload to either your own training or if you’re working with a coach, to understand what your coach is asking you to do? That’s what we’re going to be covering on this episode of the Fuel Your Strength podcast. Thanks for being with me. I appreciate it so much, and I can’t wait to talk about this concept with you, because we throw this term around a lot, those of us who are coaches or trainers or out there on the interwebs helping you to get stronger, or maybe you’re working with us in one of our programs, but quite frankly, it sounds mysterious, but it shouldn’t be. So let’s break it down on this episode for you today so you feel confident in what you’re doing in the gym.

If you’re an athletic 40-something woman who loves lifting weights, challenging yourself, and doing hard shit. The Fuel Your Strength podcast is for you, you’ll learn how to eat, train, and recover smarter so you build strength and muscle, have more energy, and perform better in and out of the gym. I’m strength nutrition strategist and weight-lifting coach, Steph Gaudreau, the Fuel Your Strength podcast dives into evidence-based strategies for nutrition, training, and recovery and why, once you’re approaching your 40s and beyond, you need to do things a little differently than you did in your 20s. We’re here to challenge the limiting industry narratives about what women can and should do in training and beyond. If that sounds good, hit subscribe on your favorite podcast app. And let’s go!

Now, before we go any further, if you enjoy the content of this podcast, please do me a massive favor. Hit Subscribe on your favorite podcast platform, whether that’s your favorite audio streaming platform or over on YouTube, and while you’re there ringing the bell for more notifications, would be so grateful for you to take that step. Okay? So what is progressive overload? And what does it mean? That’s what we’re going to be talking about first in this episode when it comes to your strength training, and I’m going to going to use strength training here to mean actual strength development, or also muscle hypertrophy or muscle growth.

Just know that I’m going to call both of those things strength training, just to make it as easy as possible when it comes to strength training, progressive over overload is really the cornerstone that guides. It’s like the guiding principle that steers your training program, your training plan, whatever you’re using to get into the gym, to guide you in your pursuit of strength development, maybe you’re working on some power development as well muscle growth, which we also call hypertrophy, as I just mentioned now, a lot of my clients, when they first come to work with me, in strong with staff, have been doing some kind of resistance training in the past, whether they’ve worked out In a gym on their own, or maybe they’re following something like a popular fitness app that has on-demand classes, and inevitably, at some point, they end up hitting a bit of a wall or really experiencing a pretty long plateau.

Oftentimes, this doesn’t happen right away, especially if you’re in the first few months of really picking up some weights and doing some resistance training. Quite often times we have those novice gains, which we all love. Couldn’t we go back to the days of novice gains? Because you just see so much growth so quickly in your strength and in your muscle, but inevitably, if you’re following a program, or you’re kind of making things up as you go along, a program that doesn’t have progressive overload, you might notice that the gains that you were experiencing before start to taper off. So I’m thinking of tons of my clients who are a bit frustrated that they had been doing workouts along with an app, they were seeing some kind of benefit, and inevitably, they’re not seeing much progress anymore.

So they come in and start lifting with Strong With Steph, and we take them through progressive overload without having to plan it themselves and start to see things moving again. Whether they’re adding more weight to the bar, they’re picking up heavier dumbbells after a few months, maybe they’re seeing a little bit more muscle definition and so on and so forth. So that’s really what we want to see, and it’s so common. So if you’re in that bit of a stuck place right now, just know that you’re not alone. So today, what we’re going to dive into a little bit deeper, is what is progressive overload in terms of how you would manipulate it inside of a training program. Am, what is the general adaptation syndrome that this is based on? And then we’ll give you some application points that you can think about and how to really see what your progress is looking like over time.

Okay, so really, what is this concept? All right, what is progressive overload? Essentially, in a nutshell, it means gradually tweaking the knobs, the dials of your training, the demands that are being placed on your body over time to see relatively continuous improvement. Now, why do I say relatively? Because again, if you’re in that beginner, novice phase, it’s like every time you get into the gym, you’re picking up heavier and heavier weights. It seems like at some point you’re going to get to a level of experience where you’re really fighting for those increases, but we still shouldn’t be seeing really long periods of time where you’re plateauing, especially if you’re on a well-designed program. So why this matters is that we have to continue to challenge our bodies, or else we’re going to fail to adapt, and that failure to adapt just means we’re not going to see improvements with strength and or muscle growth.

Now you might be in a period of maintenance, and maybe you’re not pushing super hard in one of these areas. I’m thinking about some of my clients who are fellow jujitsu players, maybe they’re in competition season, much like I just came out of comp season in the summer, and I was getting into the gym really kind of pushing hard, but then right as I got up to competing, I had to back off a little bit. I have some clients who are cyclists, who are triathletes, runners, and depending on if they’re competing or not, especially sometimes we have to pull them back a little bit, and they’re kind of in a season of maintenance. But ultimately, we don’t want you to stay in a period where you’re not seeing improvements.

Everything is kind of level you’re on that plateau. Or what will happen if we’re not applying enough stress to the body, and then you’re recovering from that over time is you can see things start to drop off. Now, exactly what you can get away with in terms of how little you can do and maintain is a little bit personal, and some of it has to do with how long you’ve been training, potentially how hard you’re pushing in those minimal sessions that you might have in the gym throughout your week. It is possible, there’s some really interesting research that kind of hints at what is the most minimal work you can do in the gym and maintain but if you’re in a period of time, which is like a lot of my clients, where you’re realizing you’re in your 40s, or you’re older than that, and time is of the essence because we’re starting to really notice drop offs in strength, in muscle mass, and you know that you’ve got to go into a bit of a building season then really taking a look at progressive overload and how it factors into your program, or is it time to get a program that uses progressive overload could be really important.

In other words, we don’t want you to linger in the season of maintenance for too long, such that you start to see the opposite, because we know if muscle isn’t growing, or we’re kind of maintaining the status quo, then muscle is going to shrink. That’s called atrophy. So as we’re aging, right? We know we could lose three to 8% of our muscle mass more quickly as we start to age into older decades, of course, but that loss can start as early as our 30s, maybe even a little bit sooner, if we’re highly inactive. So the best way to counteract that is to get into the gym and start training. So there’s good news there, but also looking at things like bone density, super, super important bone strength overall, as we are aging through the menopause transition, and we come out the other side, which is where we start to see really quick losses in muscle mass and bone density. So we can start to counteract that.

So if you’re in your 40s, especially now is the time, my friends, I’m right there with you. I’m 45 as of the time of recording this podcast. So now there’s there’s no better time than now. There’s no better time than the present. And of course, you can also use the principle, excuse me, a progressive overload for things like endurance training as well. Even though I’m mentioning them here in the context of strength training. So we want to have progressive overload. Whether you’re a beginner, you’re an intermediate, you’re advanced in your lifting. I know sometimes one of the hardest things to do is to actually get started with lifting. If you’re really a beginner, I recommend my dynamic dumbbells program.

You can check that out, and we’ll put a link for that in the show notes and in the caption on YouTube if you’re just starting out. Sometimes people think, you know, I have to get in shape to get in shape. Why do I need to follow a program? And certainly, we want to sort of lower the barrier to entry here, right? We don’t want to make things too complex, too hard, and we don’t want the workouts to be too long. We want them to be approachable enough where you can execute and build success, especially at the beginning. So. Yeah, even better, can you go and lift with somebody in person? That’s my number one recommendation, which surprises a lot of people because I have online strength programs. But if you can go and lift with somebody in person, even for a few sessions with a trainer in person, you’re going to glean so much from working with that person.

So even if you’re a beginner, I know the tendency is to say, well, I’ll just do whatever, maybe at the first couple weeks. But beyond that, let’s make the most of your time, and let’s keep you moving in the right direction. So even if you’re just starting out, having a plan for your lifting is going to save you a lot of worry or just overwhelm when you get into the gym and think, I don’t know what to do today. So, you know, maybe you don’t do anything, maybe you just kind of walk on the treadmill. Nothing wrong with walking on the treadmill, but if you had intentions to lift having a plan is going to help you make the best use of your time and make sure that you are balancing your training well across your week.

For example, I had somebody on social media who asked me if it was a good idea to do Bulgarian split squats five times a week. And she’s being serious like she just didn’t understand how training works in terms of maybe that unilateral bias lower body exercise we would want to spread out our lower body work, either in a particular split or spread it out across the week. But we need to, we need to give those legs time to rest and recover. So certainly, doing the same exercise five times a week might not be the best way to divvy up your training, and we’re going to go through that in some upcoming podcast episodes where I’m going to talk specifically about different elements of a well-rounded strength training program, especially if you’re over 40, which is most of you listening to this probably.

So whether you’re a beginner, like I said, important intermediate, important whether you’re an advanced lifter, also important, and your progressive overload may get a little bit more sophisticated, especially in terms of how your programming is written, or the type of program that you gravitate toward at the end of the day, though, the concepts still remain, and we’re going to talk about those concepts here in a bit, but first, before we dive in, if you listen to this episode and you’re like, Okay, I am ready to get to work.

I want to take my strength, muscle, energy, and performance and take it up a notch. I want to take it to that next level. I want to feel like a badass, but at the same time, do it in a way that works with my physiology as an athletic woman over 40, with coaching and community support. Then go ahead and check out Strength, Nutrition, Unlocked. This is my group program. We’re going to lay out the framework for you and guide you as you implement and really customize it to all the things that you’re doing, your preferences, your likes, and the places you want to go with it. Then go ahead and get on board. You can start your process by submitting an application at StephGaudreau.com/apply.

We would love to hear from you and see you inside the program. Part two, we’re going to cover the sort of, sort of the size of adaptation. How does this actually work? This tends to be a little bit mystifying for people, and we’re going to break it down in as simple of a way as possible. Now this concept comes from something called general adaptation syndrome, which is really where we start to apply the theory, the concepts, the principles of progressive overload, but really in in terms of what’s going on with the body, we can explain it in three terms.

We’re going to focus on turning this into language that’s a little bit more applicable here in a second. So the first second. So the first stage of the general adaptation syndrome is called the alarm stage. This is sort of when your body is experiencing a new stressor, and this is where things like fatigue and sometimes soreness will come in. You’ve done some kind of exercise, you have stress to your body. Now we know that there are stress on the body. Is stress on the body, but not all stress is negative thing, especially if we provide the right kind of recovery, which happens to be the next link. So stage two is the resistance stage. This is where your body is adapting to that stressor, where you become stronger, you start to grow more muscle fiber, right? So you’re actually starting to grow your muscle tissue.

Experience hypertrophy or you become more efficient cardiovascularly, right? You’re experiencing some kind of adaptation, positive adaptation to the work you have performed in the gym with your training. And then the third stage is called the exhaustion stage. This is what happens where you’re exceeding your over your overload, or so the alarm stage is exceeding the amount of recovery. That you get, if we can put it into more common terms, and something is not being properly managed with your recovery. So there’s a mismatch between sort of stimulus and recovery, or some other elements of recovery that’s not in place.

Sometimes people think, Oh, I’m just doing too much actual work where, yes, okay, that could be possible. But a lot of times we’re looking at things like poor sleep, not supporting the body with enough nutrition, and ending up in an essential a state of low energy availability, and so on and so forth. So there could be multiple factors to consider here. Just know that we really don’t want to tip into the burnout injury over-training stage here. We want to kind of keep riding that wave of a stressor and then a recovery. So if we can put this into common words, we need a stressor, that’s our training, and we need recovery, which is where we we finally experience that adaptation.

And we’re going to cycle between those over and over again, such that over time, we will see that we experience positive increases, gains in the gym, in our training, strength wise, power wise, muscle wise, endurance wise, and so on and so forth. So it’s really important, and this is where you’ll hear people say that the gains that you’re making aren’t actually occurring in the gym itself. Now, of course, without the work that you’re doing, without the quote, unquote stressor on your body, which is where you’re doing, the reps, you’re lifting, the weights you’re doing, the thing you’re doing, the box jumps, you’re, you know, you’re doing the intervals, you’re doing all this stuff that you would do in training. We certainly need to do that right.

We need to expose the body to that stressor, but we also need the recovery from that so that those are sort of the yin and the yang, the two sides of the coin, if you will, that we’re looking at. And so if we think about how this is related to something like progressive overload, we want to continue to expose the body to more and more challenging stressors. Now we don’t do this all in one freaking day. Okay, so this is where a lot of people go wrong, especially when they don’t really have a program, or they’re a bit newer, they’re sort of trying to feel things out. And oftentimes, even if you’re more experienced, that little ego gets in the way.

And you know, maybe you make a bad call with loading on a particular day where you’re not feeling super recovered, you’re feeling kind of slow, you didn’t sleep very well, you’re just really low energy. And sometimes you can have great days on those days, but sometimes you just, you just, you know, you know, when you go in the gym and you’re feeling uncoordinated and maybe a little bit sloppy, and you’re like, ah, but I gotta, you know, gotta keep up with the person next to me, or my training partner, or what I said I was gonna do in my plan. So this is where we have to finesse things sometimes, but we need to continue to slowly, over time, move the variables of our training plan in order to continue to get the body to adapt. If the body for not challenging the body with new stressors that are going to cause adaptation, then we’re going to experience that essentially plateau after a period of time.

That could be very soon. It could take a little bit longer, depending on other factors, and then over time, if we are burnt out because we’re experiencing too much stress and not enough recovery, or where we’re kind of sliding back on some of those other factors that we talked about, sleep, nutrition, etc. This is where we start to see sometimes things will start to taper down. And if we stop training, we’ll have a period where maybe we’re able to maintain and then we start to see some drop off there as well. So if you’ve taken time off of training, this is just my loving gentle nudge to to get back in there right get back in there is really, really important. And as we’re aging, especially if I’m seeing this, even with myself, and I was talking to a very dear friend of mine today about this where we took some time off.

We went on vacation couple weeks. I didn’t lift and I was so sore when I got back in, even though I wasn’t introducing any novel exercises, they were all exercises I had been doing prior to leaving. These loads were very similar to what I had done. And in fact, the reps were a little bit lower when I came back. And I’ll tell you what, single leg RDLs, with plenty of weight, my glutes are sore, and this is two days later. So you know what I’m saying, if we can maintain, if we can even get in one session a week, if we can just kind of crawl back, get it, get back in the gym. Even if we’re reloading, essentially, just get in there. So, so, so important doesn’t have to be perfect. Just do something. It’s so much easier too.

Maintain, and then to kind of build and jump from there, and then to just completely stop. All right, so next section here, we’re going to talk about part three. We talked about, what is progressive overload? How is it related to the general adaptation syndrome, sort of that idea of stressor and recovery. And now, how do we apply it? What are the different ways that you can introduce progressive overload in a strength training programs. And I’ll tell you, it sounds simple in concept, and it really is quite simple in concept. Again, we want to continue to change the variables of our strength training plan over time. Sounds easy, but let me tell you what? When you’ve got a job, a significant other, a family, you’ve got hobbies that you like to do, you’re just trying to manage the stress and chaos of life, there is sometimes not much brain space left over by the time you get into the gym.

Even people who do this for a living, they are coaches or trainers. They are fitness professionals for a living. At the end of the day, they’re done serving their clients with their work. Sometimes get into the gym and just think, Oh my gosh. Was like, What am I going to do today? Or sitting down and having the brain space to plan that out, which is why getting a program that’s already written, whether it’s completely custom for you or it’s a templated program, saves you so much mental real estate, I’m telling you right now so many of my clients in Strong With Steph are like, I would have quit a long time ago with this, but here I am.

You know, six, nine, twelve months, eighteen months later, two years later, still lifting because they didn’t have to think about it, they just opened the app and did the workouts. So if you want to try a sample of Strong With Steph, you can get a seven-day sample over at StephGaudreau.com/workout we’ll make sure that that link also goes in the show notes and in the caption over on YouTube. All right, so how do we apply progressive overload in a program? Again, I said simple in concept, in actual, in actuality, and how we implement it can be a little we need a little finesse, right? We need a little finesse because training is a science and an art.

Coaching is a science and the art of implementing. This is a science and an art, and getting to know yourself and your clients is really important. So here are different ways that we can progressively overload and change the variables of a strength training program number one, this is probably the most obvious, or the one that you’re probably most familiar with, which is gradually increasing the weight, the load, slash the resistance that you are lifting. You are moving against gravity. You’re pushing and pulling. You’re squatting and hinging. You’re lunging and carrying, gradually increasing the weight over time is probably the most common way that people understand to progressively overload. And this gets people a little bit confused, especially when women are coming into work with me.

They’re, you know, 40 plus. Maybe they’ve been athletic previously in their life. They’ve taken some time off. They’re getting back to things, or they’re kind of just rolling on through and they’re like, Okay, so I heard I have to lift heavy, but I don’t know what that means, and of course, we’ll talk about that in a future episode. But it’s suffice to say, you don’t start off day one with a weight that’s absolutely crushing you, and you can’t lift off the ground. We start with something that is approachable, and we continue to build over time. And I will say, depending on what actual season of life that you’re in, what decade of life that you’re in, these things can really fluctuate.

So you might not be lifting as much now as you did before. Maybe you are lifting more now than you did before. I’ll tell you what. I can deadlift more now than I could when I was in my early 30s. However, I’m not squatting four times a week anymore like I was when I was Olympic lifting and competing in that sport, so my squat is not as strong as it was. You know, things will go up and down over time depending on the season. However, we’re still doing challenging weights. That’s kind of the point. The biggest problem here is, and kind of biggest pitfall, I’ll guess, is not challenging yourself with the load.

And I see this a lot, especially with a couple of camps of people, Camp One folks that lift at home. Nothing wrong with lifting at home. And in fact, Strong With Steph comes in a lite version, l, i, t, e, we call it. Was probably not a great name on my part, but it was what I could think of at the time. But the light version is strict down to equipment. It’s as minimal as you can be. And so sometimes people will only. Have a few sets of dumbbells at home. Rapidly, though, especially with lower body people find that they have outgrown those weights. So you have to, you have to, you know, level up, as they say, or find a way to introduce more load.

Oftentimes, I’ll also see people who, again, are coming from more of a self-pace, or you’re making it up on your own, I guess, or they’re following something like an app where you dip in, in and out of classes, but there’s no real progression. And so sometimes the instructor will just say, well, just pick up your medium weights, and you probably didn’t write down what you did the week before or the last time you did this particular class, maybe you forgot, and so sometimes it’s just harder to progress up in terms of load when you’re doing those styles of classes. So number one, gradually increasing the weight.

Very, very important. Number two, adding more reps or sets. Now there’s going to be a limit to what’s really feasible and advisable, and of course, there’s a giant range for things like hypertrophy training. We used to think that this was very discrete and chopped up into very nice, neat little rep ranges. Turns out, with building muscle hypertrophy, there’s more of a sliding scale here with things like reps and sets, to a degree, especially with sets, but replies, we can probably get hypertrophy with a vastly different amount of reps with strength, we’re still working in that sort of, I mean, one rep max, of course, but most people aren’t walking around doing one rep max every week in their training.

So two to six repetitions in that neighborhood, right? And so you might fluctuate, for example, between reps, four reps, five reps, six reps, you might be doing something like a 531, where you’re doing the different reps in a different week, but you’re still working within that range, right? So we can add more reps or sets. Essentially, what we would call that is more volume. But there is going to come a point where just adding more volume for the sake of doing more volume doesn’t make a lot of sense, and it’s taking a lot of fucking time. I’ll say that much. I recently had to bump up my I’ve been working on rehabbing my elbow after a little bit of an injury at master worlds in Jiu Jitsu.

And so right now I’ve got, I’ve got 10-pound dumbbells to use, or fifteens. And the 10-15 were too much for my elbow at the time. So I was saying 10s, and sort of got to about 15. And was thinking, you know, this is still a need. It’s just not hard enough. And so Alex looked at me and said, Go to 20. Let me tell you what. When you’re doing 20 reps plus of something, and you’re used to doing three to 12 on average, depending on what you’re doing, 20 plus reps is a lot of reps. It takes a lot of time. So if you’re a time-crunched individual, you probably aren’t going to spend a lot of time doing a lot of super high repetition stuff, especially if you’re looking for hypertrophy.

But again, we’re going to talk about this in an upcoming episode number three. You can reduce the rest time. This is called density, where you’re resting for a shorter period of time. Again, there’s going to be a certain amount you can push this, I would say, the experience that a lot of people have, especially if you’re doing something like a peloton strength we’ve talked about this. Nikki Levy and I did an entire long-ass episode on this concept and why strength training, as it’s called in a lot of these programs or popular apps, isn’t actually for strength development. But a lot of times you’re familiar with very, very short rest periods, very short, 15 seconds, 45 seconds, tops.

And so depending on what you’re doing now, if you’re doing a heavy set of back squats, RPE, eight or nine sets, sets of three, you’re not gonna rest 15 seconds. It just doesn’t make a lot of sense. So there’s gonna be a certain degree to which you can slide that maybe you’re going to try to introduce a little bit more of a metabolic sort of clearing, clearing metabolites challenge to what you’re doing, and so you’re going to compact that rest period a little bit. Maybe you’re going to superset stuff so that you have less rest overall. It just depends, right? This is where sort of the the magic, the art of strength training, programming comes in, and there’s whole last courses on this. And I’ll mention Annie Miller, not because I am an affiliate of this program or anything.

I personally did her peer programming course, which is for trainers and coaches who want to do long-term programming. I just love her and adore her so much. So I’m just going to shout her out here. I’m not going to teach you how to program on these podcasts, because it’s a whole it’s a whole thing, right? But if you are a coach or trainer, go check out her program. If you want to learn how to program things past three months time, I highly recommend it. Okay, another one could be changing up the exercise. So this is another way to do progressive overload. So commonly. I’ll give you an example in Strong With Steph. If somebody is more of an, you know, late beginner, intermediate lifter, maybe they haven’t done a lot of different variations.

Sometimes we’ll start off with something like a regular split squat, maybe even the front foot elevated. So split squat, then we might move into something like a rear foot, elevated split squat, move to a single leg version of a squat, and so on and so forth. That’s just one quick example of how you could change things up. You might go front foot, elevated split squat. Wow. Say that five times fast, front foot, elevated regular split squat. You might then put the back foot up on a bench and do our favorite love-to-hate Bulgarian split squat, or rear-foot elevated split squat.

You might then move to a deficit rear foot elevated split squat, where you’re increasing the range of motion. So lots of different ways to introduce different variations in exercises, B stance, or kick-stand, is another great one if you’re looking more to transition into a more unilateral-based or sort of split stance work. So that’s just one example of how you might change the exercise selection to accomplish a harder variation or more stress on the body, which then, of course, would lead to adaptation after recovery. Okay, so those are just a few simple ways that you can change progressive overload in your program.

So we covered increasing the weight, adding more reps or sets, reducing your rest time, choosing a different exercise or exercise selection. You get the idea, right? There are others, but those are probably the most common. Oh, tempo. I’ll also just throw in there as a little honorable mention. And in strong with staff, I do program tempo to tell you the speed at which we’d like you to move, generally, especially for hypertrophy. Y’all are moving too fast. We don’t want to use momentum. We want to put that muscle under more tension.

So more time under tension, more mechanical tension. So slowing down your tempo can be super helpful, especially if you’re a beginner as well, or you’re more beginner intermediate, because you’re sort of learning where is end range for your joints as you’re moving through space, getting more comfortable with your movements and movement patterns and better movement quality. Okay, so that was part three here, like, how do we actually change progressive overload in a program? Last, but not least, how do we sort of manage your progress over time? Slash?

What are some of the common pitfalls that people see, it’s important to be patient and to have enough repetition. I still say this is sort of a little bit of a pitfall as well. This is why I stopped writing three-month strength programs. So dynamic dumbbells has been around prior to Strong With Steph coming out. And it’s really, you know, it’s kind of my, hey, if you’re a beginner or you’re like, I literally just need the shortest possible workout I can get while also being effective. That’s what that’s for. But it is only three months long so I recommend that people then transition into Strong With Steph.

But we need time and probably the biggest thing that I see when people start to follow a progressive overload program is they get really anxious about changing things up or wanting to go quicker. And we don’t want to hold you back just for the sake of holding you back or making you go too slow, but we also don’t want to accelerate you at the speed or the rate of change at which your body can’t cope with recovery. Especially when you’re over 40, and I’ll tell you increased joint sensitivity and joint pain, more rough sleep, especially for in the menopause transition, really just dealing with increased life stressors.

Midlife, I say this all the time, midlife is no fucking joke with family challenges, financial stress, the state of the world. You know, adulting hashtag, right? Adulting, it’s just a lot. It’s a lot to cope with. And so sometimes that will spill over into training where it’s like, we need to go a little bit. We just need to kind of pump the brakes a little bit and find a way to keep you moving forward without accelerating things to the point at which you can’t recover.

So patience is so important. And sometimes people want to jump ahead and do the hardest, the hardest variations of an exercise right off the bat, where, you know, maybe stability is a bit lacking, or sort of control at end range is a bit lacking, or they want to just pile on a bunch of load right away, where their form and technique, we know, there’s no such thing as perfect form and technique, but the technique really needs to improve, and is, is actually kind of a self-limiting in a way. And I’m thinking of overhead presses as an example there. But we just need patience. And it’s going to take patience to see improvements.

Normally, when people come into Strong with Steph and they’re sort of like. Looking at the rate of change. So balance work is one of the first things people notice improve. I would say, within the first couple weeks, their balance is getting way better because they’re just practicing it, making sure they’re putting in that time because it’s programs. Next, we tend to see strength come up. You know, as you’re moving through and you’re being as consistent, 70-80% consistency, as you can be, or more, that would be great. But even with 70 or 80% consistency, you can see a lot of improvement.

The third thing, the slowest thing, which is probably the most frustrating for people, is seeing muscle mass, appreciable muscle mass gain, where they’re really noticing, oh my shoulders, or oh my biceps, like, you know, this sort of thing. So the esthetic changes, which I don’t focus on in programming the way I do, but it is oftentimes something that people come in wanting, are oftentimes the slowest things to come around, especially as we’re going getting older and is just taking more time to recover.

So I’m not saying that this stuff should, this shouldn’t take you five years, but also expecting that you’re going to see this massive, dramatic transformation in less than three months, it’s a little bit or just a lot bit unrealistic. So I don’t say that to be a bit of a Debbie Downer, but I do say it to be kind of that, that realistic voice of, we need to have patience, embrace the process you’re going to invest, you need to invest at least a year to really move the needle quite a bit in most cases, unless you come in and you’re kind of in that sweet spot of, like late intermediate kind of lifter or, sorry, late, late beginner to sort of early intermediate lifter.

And you’re sort of, you’ve the pumps, pumps are primed. You’re still experiencing a little bit of that fast improvement. Right linear progression is like, whoo is taken off. It could happen that you’re seeing some pretty dramatic changes in less than a year. But I would say, give it a year. You have got to give it a year at least. It’s a great investment in your health, in your in your quality of life as well. So give it at least a year. Readjust your expectations, and I know that that’s tough when the world around us is all about the quick fix, right? So that’s important.

Next is to sort of recognize, I guess, on the flip side, recognizing when you have adapted to a certain, for example, load and you need to increase the challenge. You got to be honest with yourself. And I will, I’ll give a hat tip to you Alex, who, at this moment in time, coaches me. And Alex probably one of the first times I came in and did dead-lifts in the gym with Alex and said to me, okay, if a news crew rocked up right now and was gonna film you doing this, these deadlifts, how many more could you do? Right? And this is a concept of essentially reps in reserve, or RPE, which is the sister scale to this.

Another question he’s asked me is, okay, so imagine I’m going to give you $10,000 for every rep more that you can do. How many more reps do you have left in the tank? So this is just a quick way to check yourself, for example, with RPE or reps in reserve, and we’ll talk about that in an upcoming episode as well. But note, if you’ve been lifting the same exact weight, especially for your lower body, I’ll give a little bit of an upper body as it can be a bit of a challenge, especially with upper body pressing bench and overhead press. It’s not just you, it’s not just you. It’s hard. It’s very hard. The human body is much better at pulling than it is at pushing.

We are stronger at pulling than we are at pushing. And your upper body are your smaller muscles compared to your lower body, yay. And your shoulder muscles are smaller than your pecs, so your overhead pressing strength can sometimes take a little bit longer. Here, sometimes people need slightly smaller weight, weight divisions in between, so between a 15 and a 20. Sometimes you need a 17 and a half, if we’re talking dumbbells, for example. But if you’ve been lifting the same weights for months and months and months on end, is time, my friend, you’ve got to move up and wait right recently, I also, like to give you all stories from my real life, because I am not a perfect lifter, and I have had my fair share of ups and downs, and I have had my times where I’ve had to really reach in and challenge myself as self-coaching, and also where I’ve had to take coaching from other people.

And recently, I was doing an incline bench. I’ve been doing 35s. I took a couple of weeks off and came back, and then came in the week after that. And I thought, you know, no 35 so. Seemed okay for eight. So I said, I wonder if I could do 40. And so I picked up the 40s and did those just fine. So sometimes you had to give yourself that try it and see what happens. I’m not saying to jump up 25 pounds if you know you’re doing something that’s a an upper body exercise, for example, but try the next set of dumbbells. You might surprise yourself if the weight is moving the same speed the whole time, it doesn’t slow down in the last couple reps, if the last couple reps aren’t harder, it’s time pick up heavier weights, right?

So that’s a that’s a huge challenge that a lot of people run up against, it’s just this. It’s hard to sort of gauge. Sometimes, film yourself. Ask your coach, I’m sure they’ll give you some sound advice there. And if you’re my lifter, I’m going to tell you, you know, how did it feel? How many more reps do you feel like you have in the tank? And I don’t know what would happen if you tried the next heavier weight, another, issue for sort of managing your progress over time is, of course, rest and recovery very important. There you have to keep tabs on that very, very important. Other common pitfalls we mentioned, kind of pushing too hard too fast.

You know, changing too many things all at one time, being too random, wanting too much variety, switching it up too much. And this kind of harkens back to what I talked about with having patience. We need repetition. You need some degree of repetition if you’re going to improve, and if you only ever squat once every four weeks, or once every couple of months, or things like that. You’re always changing it up, always changing it up in terms of what you’re doing is a little bit more applicable, or, I guess, acceptable, if you’re doing something like cardio and you just want a fun challenge, knock yourself out, you know, if you want to do the bike one week, and you know you’re not training for anything in particular, and next week you want to do some swimming, you’re just trying to get your heart rate up.

You know, certainly, there’s probably a little bit more wiggle room there, but this idea of always just making every workout random for strength training means we’re just not getting enough exposure to repetition and improving. So that’s another common issue that we see. So either too random or not or to not changing up enough. I know that sounds a little bit contradictory, but both of those things can happen not tracking your progress. This is a huge one. This is why inside Strong With Steph, we use an app, and in the app, you write in your results, and you can look back at your whole exercise history and see what you were doing six months ago, a year ago.

So that that day you go in the gym and you sleep the best, or life is just lifeing, or you’re just not feeling it, and you’re like, Oh, look at this. I’m never making improvements. And then you go back and actually see that, oh, I put 20 pounds on this lift since I, you know, started a few months ago. Hey, that’s a great indication of progress, right? So another sort of how do we manage progress over time, slash common pitfall, you’ve got to keep track of things.

Unless you don’t you’re not interested in making gains. If you’re in the stage where you just need to get in there and just get the habit of movement, great, that’s okay. But again, we’ve talked about at the top of this episode, why? Having a strategy, having a plan, being as consistent you know, within reason, 70 to 80% of the time, keeping track of your numbers for lifting is super important, having a record can show you where you’re making progress or not. And yes, the feeling matters. Feelings matter, but also having the stats, there is art that’s important. Okay, so in conclusion, let’s wrap this episode up.

We talked about what is progressive overload, the idea the concept of general adaptation syndrome, and what it really means for training. We talked about how to apply progressive overload in a program. What are the variables that we can change in a program? We talked about most of the main ones here in this episode, and then also talked about some common pitfalls/how do we manage progressive overload over time? I guess the final takeaway here is that long term we need to have a long-term view of strength training, especially once we’re getting into this phase of life.

And one time, somebody told me that that was really intimidating or overwhelming, and I respect that opinion, but I am going to counter by saying I don’t agree because when we need this for quality of life, we talk we’ve talked about sarcopenia on this podcast. We’ve talked about osteoporosis on this podcast, etc, etc, right? Longevity, strength, strength training, to some degree, are going to be important if you would like to. To make strides to counteract some of those things. And it’s not to be alarmist or scary or sound negative, but rather to say, hey, having a long-term outlook on your programming is great.

And by the way, having a plan so you don’t have to do this all on your own can really increase your adherence in terms of follow through, I should say consistency. I don’t love the word adherence, but consistency, your follow through, your stick to witness, right, and do so in such a way that we mitigate as much risk of injury as possible. We keep you moving forward. We help you avoid huge plateaus or periods where you’re declining in certain areas, which can ultimately affect things like your motivation to train, and we keep you moving forward.

So I hope this episode has shed some light on, at least from a coaching point of view, why, progressive overload is important, and then from a lifter’s point of view as well. So you can understand, as you’re going through your training program, whether it’s Strong With Steph, or you’re working out at a gym and your coach writes the program for you on a day-to-day, why are they asking you to do what they’re asking you to do? So you understand the rationale that is so important for adult learners to understand, and the more knowledge you have, the better, so you can understand what’s being asked of you and implement and know why it matters.

I think that’s the biggest takeaway of this episode. So stay tuned for future episodes where we’re going to be talking about the elements. Now we’ve talked about progressive overload, but we’ll be talking about the elements that I include in strong with staff, and why these things are important for us, no matter what age we are, but why they’re especially things that we really don’t want to skip out on when we’re 40 plus. So stay tuned for those future episodes, episodes coming on those topics. If you enjoyed this episode and got something from it, please hit subscribe.

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And of course, if you’re ready to check out a seven-day sample of Strong With Steph, this is my 12-month progressive strength training program that is purpose-built for women over 40. You can check that out over at StephGaudreau.com/workout I’ll send you a seven-day sample, and you can see what it’s like. It’s only a snippet, but you can get it. You can get a taster, as they say, and if I can support you with nutrition and recovery and training concepts and how to weave all of it together with very close support, community, weekly coaching calls, check out, Strength, Nutrition, Unlocked. You can learn more about that over at StephGaudreau.com/apply, all right.

Thanks so much for being with me on this episode. I appreciate it so much. I will see you next time when we’re going to dive more into programming and more into the elements that are going to keep you strong and resilient as you go into your 40s and beyond, until then, you guessed it, stay strong.

Progressive Overload: How to Keep Getting Stronger | Steph Gaudreau.