Progressive Overload, and understanding your goals.

My favorite message to my clients is simple , we can’t “trick” muscles. Muscles don’t get used to the workouts. And the workout for the goal of bulking up is the same workout for someone with goals of losing weight and getting lean . One is done with more food for a calorie surplus. The other is done with less. And there are other factors that contribute, being sleep and stress and how they impact our body’s hormonal balance. And of course there’s genetics.

Genetics are absolutely a factor in what makes up our body composition. Some people have naturally skinny leg muscles. Others, may have the gift of super strong looking calves. But ask that individual how is he/ she working to strengthen that weaker muscle, calves in particular, and likely you’d get a laughable reply ( no wonder they’re weak).

Here’s the good news, regardless of genetics, the body adapts. But we have to make it adapt. Focus on the movement patterns that strengthen that muscle. Those movement patterns being generally , squat, hinge, push , and pull with several variations.

First and foremost we must make sure the body’s ligaments and tendons are strong. Ligaments connect bones, tendons connect muscle to bones. So we always start off with a light to moderate resistance level and own the movement fully. Depending on how the individual’s body moves, a 5 to 10% increase could be ideal pending on how much that person is working out .

Before we add resistance lets be sure that we can do more repetitions at our previous level. And as we add resistance, let focus more on our rest periods . This give our body’s energy system ( that gives us energy at the highest of intensity, ATP, adenosine-triphosphate/ more on this in an upcoming blog ) to recover. Now we’re working on progressive overload.

Now let put all this back to how it might apply to your fitness goals. If. You’re looking to get stronger without putting on size, then progressive overload, but eat less. If you’d want to gain size, progressive overload but eat more. If you’re goal is performance base to endurance training, then progressive overload isn’t necessary. For that population, stick the same level of resistance, shorter rest periods.

Long story short, the human body adapts, but we have to make it to do so.