Latest / Cameron's Conversations: The last weight loss podcast you'll ever need. / Episode 100: Progress overload... What is it and why does it matter?
Transcript
- Cameron: Welcome to the Cameron's Conversations Podcast. And in today's episode, I'm gonna talk all about progressive overload. First off, I'm gonna talk a little bit about what it is, and secondly, I'm gonna talk about how we should think about it in a training context, how we can actually use it, and and kind of where people maybe get a little bit mixed up about what they should expect from their training. So progressive overload is kind of a really nice way of characterizing it. It's bit like the story in kind of Greek mythology of Milo ⁓ of Croton, where he walks or climbs a hill or runs or whatever it is with a bull on his back and it's a calf, I think, at first. And then he does that every single day and that calf grows and therefore it's imperceptibly slightly bigger, slightly heavier each day, and progressively it increases the challenge to him, but he gets stronger at the same time and so on and so forth, right? That's the very classic ⁓ sort of line That kind of gets trotted out when it comes to progressive overload. And it's not a bad way of kind of like thinking about it, it certainly is a starting point. I think that when it comes to training, the reason it matters so much and the reason that coaches and the fitness world harp on about progressive overload so much actually comes from what people don't do, which is what in a lot of cases happens is people will find themselves doing the same thing on repeat for a really extended period of time. Now As an example of this, if I go into the gym and I do a leg press at 100 kilos, and the next week I do a leg press at 100 kilos for the same reps, we'll say three sets of eight, and the next week I do three sets of eight at a hundred kilos, and so on and so forth, and I do that for six months. The reality is I'll have gotten quite a bit stronger by doing that because initially it'll be a really big challenge to me, and then progressively, session by session, the level of challenge I get from it will decrease because I'm getting stronger until such a point where it's actually not challenging me that much at all. And it's not enough challenge for me to continue to get stronger. So the good thing is, is I will maintain strength, which is cool, and there's nothing wrong with that. But it doesn't kick you on. And the issue that a of people have is that they fall into that trap. They find themselves not progressing for really extended periods of time. And this is kind of one of the reasons that classes aren't necessarily the best when it comes to making good progress in terms of your body composition, building muscle, getting in better shape. Is because partially it's quite erratic, but also so you you know, from one instructor to the next, although it's maybe like whatever class it is, ⁓ legs, bums, and tums, you will find that although you're doing some movements in a similar way, it's very hard to know whether you've actually added any reps on it. And yeah, you'll probably, if you're new to it, make some progress, but typically it's not very clear how much progress you're making, and it's quite hard to push yourself to just do one more rep each time. So this is why. it comes up so much, it's because a lot of people hold themselves back and end up making far, far less progress than they could do. Something I always emphasize to new clients coming in the door is a lot of the time what I will work with work on with with clients is I will get them much more consistent, but I'll get them a lot more efficient with their sessions. I think sometimes people come into coaching and expect to suddenly have to train like a whole bunch more than they were before. Now if they weren't training at all before that might be true. They're probably gonna be training two two times a week, which is more than they were doing before. But I have a lot of clients that come to me that are already going to the gym, maybe a little bit more intermittently before coaching, and it gets a lot more consistent within coaching. But generally they're doing something before. It's just that it's not very structured, it's not very consistent, it's not very deliberate. They're not pushing themselves to do one more rep each time. And you can end up in the spot where people will feel like, I've been going to the gym for ages, I've been going for six months, I definitely got stronger at the start. And I've seen nothing really since then. Really marginal, marginal gains, not really much change in body shape, not really much change in strength. And a lot of that stems from that lack of progressive overload. And in essence, what progressive overload is all about is making sure that we've got sufficient stimulus to continue to get stronger and fitter. What it isn't necessarily is it's not the case that we need to progress every single session. And and that might sound like an odd thing to say, but I'm gonna give a bit of context to this. If I was to do that, Three sets of 100 kilos for eight reps, and I did it, and it was unbelievably difficult. It was incredibly challenging that first time I did it. I wouldn't necessarily need to increase my reps or increase the weight the next session because I'm still getting a really good amount of challenge and stimulus from it, right? I'm still going to adapt to that. It's giving my body a pretty bloody good reason to progress, to build some muscle, to get stronger. So that's all still happening, but. At a certain point there is a drop-off, right? Even from the first session onwards, it's a drop-off. It's just that it could be quite minor. So if someone's really stretched themselves, they're really gone for it to hit the these three sets of eight reps at 100 kilos, they might be able to do that for sometimes three sessions, maybe four sessions before they need to make any sort of progression. If they're coming away from their training feeling like they've got a little bit of DOMS or quite sore, that might be an indication, for example, that they could kind of stay the course and not necessarily up it too much. Or if they just don't feel like they could push out another rep at all, that they are really struggling to finish the reps and keep good technique, then you would want to consolidate there for three, four sessions sometimes. So it's important to understand that progressive overload doesn't necessarily mean always progressing every session. And I think people get that a little bit mixed up. Now, if you are very new to training, it is highly likely That you will want to progress almost every session, if not every session, because you are so new to training, we adapt really quickly, you're getting more efficient at doing the movement. There's a little element of actually, if you squat and you're not used to squatting, you get better at the actual movement of squatting, right? You you'll find that if you think back to the first time you maybe did a movement you found a bit awkward, that you maybe do regularly now and have done for some time. You probably would recognize you're obviously stronger at it, but you're also probably better at the skill of it, right? You're better at doing the lap pull down. When you first did it, it was a bit awkward. You weren't quite sure where your position was. That that phase. So initially, sure, we should see that, but it does not mean that you're not progressing if you don't progress every session. And I think that catches people out. And there is an argument here for when someone is training with really, really good intensity, when someone's a little bit more intermediate, and they've been training for six months, let's say. They've been pushing themselves quite hard. They might go into that leg press and they might have just up the weight and they might have just got to eight reps and no more on those second and third sets, right? That might be right at the very, very, very top end of what they can do for now. So it's going to take a little bit of time before they can progress. And there's nothing wrong with that. You're still going to see overall progressive overload. You're going to need to progress things, but maybe not that next session, maybe two sessions or three sessions down the line. So I think this is something I wanted to talk about as well. So where people get mixed up and with sort of progress as such in the gym is they can feel like if they have one session that they don't put the weight up on or the reps up indeed across every single exercise that they're not progressing. That isn't the case. Particularly in the instance where let's say you have a training session where you have a leg press, and I'll make it simple, and we've got a leg extension. So I walk in the gym, I do my leg press, I actually add two reps to that. Great. Pleased with that. That's good progress. Then I do another maybe one or two movements and I've now got a leg extension. Now, in my leg press, I'm using a lot of my quads, right? That's one of the muscle groups that's working particularly hard in a leg press. I'm now doing a leg extension. My quads are also working really hard in it. On my leg extension, I can only match my reps from last time. People will then kind of go, that's really annoying. I've not progressed on that. And it's like, well, hold up a second. You did a movement earlier that session that's really reliant on your quads. And you were able to do two more reps. You've then gone into your leg extension, you've actually matched your reps. So if you think about it, you had a greater challenge at the start of the session to that same muscle group. And then later in the session, you've done that exercise and you've matched it as normal. That is still progress in its own way. It just looks a little bit different and it's normal. That's one of the reasons that something early in your session will tend to see more progress, particularly if you're training the same muscle group twice in a session. So someone does a lap pull down, for example, an upper back movement in their session, well, if they also do a single arm roll in that session, they might find that they make slightly faster progress proportionally on the lap pull down because it's first and we're still using similar muscle groups when we come to do a single arm roll. If that person then swapped them around and went the other way around, they might find their lap pull down progress slows, but their single arm roll progress speeds up. There are other factors as well, including like tiredness and fatigue, because you'll probably have been in a session where You get to your sixth movement or your seventh movement of the session and you maybe don't feel like you've given it quite your all. Whereas at the first and second and third exercises, you really did go for it. That's quite normal. That's sometimes just a reflection of a little bit of kind of general f fatigue. Whereas we're talking about some kind of local fatigue in our quads, because we've hit our leg press, we've hit it hard, done two extra reps, but it really took it out of you. And then you go to that last one. That's still progress. So the mindset we want to be in is that we do want to see our reps going up. We do want to see the weight going up. But we must also remember that things like technique and tempo also matter. So something along the lines of I go in and do three sets of eight at a hundred kilos my leg press, and this is probably something most people have experienced, right? You maybe gone up a weight and you just get your reps and no more, but you're maybe not a hundred percent happy with your technique. It wasn't shocking, you know, you're not doing it completely wrong by any means, but you just felt maybe those last two or three reps, they were a bit rushed. Maybe used a little bit of momentum. maybe weren't quite as controlled as you would like. Maybe the range of motion was a little bit shorter than you would normally have. So you think to yourself, okay, I could go up in weight or go up in reps maybe next time. Probably not wait, but potentially you could go up an extra rep, but you'd have that same problem that the reps aren't controlled enough, etc. Or you could match your reps and make it more controlled. Make it slower. Make sure that you're getting that full range of motion. And actually for most people that's more important. So there's definitely times where clients will put in ⁓ in their true coach, and they'll say to me, like, did the same amount of reps, but felt like it was much more controlled this time, managed to do the reps slower, felt like my range of motion was better, and so on and so forth. And that is progress. That is so important. Progressive overload is not just adding more weight. People get caught up in that. It's and also it's important to remember is if I go up from 100 and go to 110 kilos in my leg press, because my range of motion is much shorter, and I'm doing it as quickly as possible to use some momentum, and I'm kind of cheating myself out of a little bit of it by pushing on my legs. Well yeah, absolutely, I've gone up and wait. Have I actually progressed though? Very hard to tell because actually we've gone from doing the leg press one way to doing it slightly differently just to chase the weight, which is not how we want to train. ⁓ we'll y leave that for the eighteen year old lads in the gym. That's that's their territory of kind of ⁓ you know, doing daft stuff just to lift the heaviest weight possible. We've all been there. Well, I have been there. But ⁓ yeah, we we kind of grow out of that phase and we go on. And I think this is important. So when it comes to progressive overload, that's what I want you to think about. I want you to think about how do I progress this? And sometimes the answer is actually, do you know what? I did really well to increase the weight, but you know what? Next time I do this, I could probably consolidate a bit here. I could get a little bit more control, a bit more range of motion. If you treat your trading like that, you'll often end up making better progress because you don't do that thing of increasing the weight up too quickly, then having to drop the weight back down. getting frustrated at it because you realised your technique's gone to like pieces and then having to repeat that because there's nothing worse than going from a hundred to a hundred and ten and then back down again because you're like, actually my technique wasn't good over the last like few weeks. And I can see it's gotten shorter and shorter because I keep trying to add more reps, but I've not got the control. You're much better to have a good technique, keep things consistent and build from there. But that's the the the kind of mindset you want to be in. But again, I think the thing that's really useful to know is the reason it comes up so much in terms of obviously it's very important progressive overload, but the reason it's talked about so much is because it is what holds so many people back. And I've seen this time after time where I have spoken to someone and I'll sort of ask like how much have you progressed on these things over the last like few months and they're gonna like, probably not at all, I just do the same thing every time. That will hold you back. You cannot go in and do the same thing every single time. I don't mean in terms of the same session, but the same weight, the same reps, the same control and tempo. It needs to be progressed in some way. Otherwise you will just be spinning your wheels. And the great thing is you'll maintain your fitness, you'll maintain your strength, but you will never see the changes you want to. And you're leaving so much on the table. This is a thing that I guess is kind of it's exciting as a coach in a way. ⁓ I can tell my training nerd, right? It comes out when I start to talk about training. ⁓ I can't help it. I can't help it. I've been passionate about it since I was like 13. But one of the things that I'll often say is like the scope and the potential that people have with the two hours of training they do a week, the two hours that are two 45 minute sessions is huge. Most people have actually been held back so much by their approach to it, the lack of structure to it, that they don't realize how much stronger they can get. I have a lot of clients who have worked with me for, let's say, maybe a year or 18 months, who worked with me for a good stint and are kind of at that point where they forget until something comes up how strong they are. And then they'll be kind of reminded and a little bit staggered by the progress they make. So they'll realize how much stronger they once were. you know, they couldn't do any full press ups, they can do full press ups comfortably. They can do they weren't able to do a a chin up, for example, they're able to do a chin up. They're go about daily life and they go to pick something up and they're like, that wasn't even difficult. That's really exciting. And it's not because they're spending hours and hours and hours and hours in the gym. It's just because we're deliberate with our training. So I always think that's the the exciting part of it. And that's why progressive overload matters so much. So hopefully that was helpful. If you are interested in coaching and you want to crack on with your training and make serious progress and also see some changes in the mirror, which is ⁓ no small part of it, then in the show notes there will be a link to my WhatsApp and you can pop me a message to ask about coaching there as well. I will have spaces for coaching available as of July. I'm currently full, but I'll have a couple of spots opening up into early July as well. So if you're interested just click on the link and pop me a Wii message there. Otherwise have a great day.