Progress Without Progression

For the vast majority of people who train, there is probably some goal in mind.  Some adaptation, improvement, or progression that is the purpose of that training.  Leaving out the other benefits that can be derived from some form of exercise or physical training (e.g. psychological, social, professional, etc.), we can probably agree that the idea is often to make the body better over time.

That’s where the concept of “progressive overload” comes in.  You’ve probably heard this term, and there’s a decent chance that you can define it.  This might sound familiar: “The incremental addition of load as a means of continuing to stress the body and provoke an adaptive response.”  That’s what it is… right?

Yeah, actually.  That definition isn't wrong.  But it’s vague, and it may help for us to unpack it and expand our notion of what progressive overload might actually be in practical terms.

I particularly want to focus on the idea of “load” and how it can be used in this context.  To many people, the word means “the weight you’re moving” or something along those lines, and we’re selling ourselves short if that’s as far as we go with it.  The body doesn’t know what weight is on the bar; the body simply responds to some kind of disruption in homeostasis, and when that disruption is applied appropriately, the response eventually leads to a chronic adaptation.  Examples of this adaptation include an increase in muscle fiber size, an improvement in the maximal rate of glycolysis, a more mechanically efficient motor recruitment strategy for a complex movement, and countless others.

The nature of the there are all manner of variables that CAN be progressed or somehow adjusted to create a different stimulus.  Here is a list of a handful of aspects of an exercise that you can adjust, depending on what kind of stimulus you're trying to give to the body:

• weight (obviously)
• range of motion
• tempo/speed of the rep
• co-contraction (relating to conscious and unconscious effort)
• volume (in this case, I’m meaning number of reps or sets, and we can examine those terms more another time)

Any of these things can be considered a “load” in the sense that they provide a challenge to the body (mechanically, metabolically, neurologically, etc.) that the body may then adapt to.  However, we are missing a key point here.  The real kicker, and a major point I wanted to make with this post:

You don’t necessarily have to increase the load at all to provoke an adaptive response.

Let me say that another way: You can perform the same exercise multiple times and continue to drive adaptations (I came SO close to putting the way-overused "what if I told you" Morpheus meme in here).  This is something that eludes people when progressive overload comes up.  We may be inclined to think that it means “progressively increase load each time so the body keeps adapting,” but it can also mean “keep applying an overload, and the body will progressively adapt.”  In other words, the body has no idea what weight is on the bar or what you have programmed for the next week.  It simply responds to the stimulus – to the disruption in homeostasis.

It's NOT just about the weight.

So what does that mean?  Well, it means that as long as the stimulus is something that the body is unaccustomed to, the body should continue to adapt.  If you start training with a stimulus that’s fairly disruptive – that is, it’s well outside the range of what the body is “comfortable” with – it might take quite a while (several weeks or even longer) for the body to stop adapting to that stimulus.  If this doesn't quite make sense yet, think about the following scenario:

You start lifting a given weight (say, 50 lbs for the sake of this example).  You lift that weight for 12 reps per set, and at the end of that set, you can BARELY finish the last rep.

Come back the following week, and you do the same exact number of sets and reps of the same weight.  You might notice, however, that things aren’t quite as hard.  You’re not quite as fatigued at the end, and maybe you didn’t have to fight quite so much to get that last rep up.

You return the next week, and you notice the same thing; you lift the weight more easily, and you actually notice that you have more in the tank.  You could squeeze out another rep or two at the end if you had to, and the previous repetitions all felt "cleaner" to you.  You could probably increase the weight a bit at this point and still get the same volume that you used on your first day.  Based on how this feels, you might now be able to handle 50 lbs for 14-15 reps, or maybe you can do 60 lbs for the original 12 reps.  (As a fun aside, this also speaks to how many adaptations, like strength and muscular/strength-endurance, can occur together).  You've gotten stronger and improved your muscular endurance despite only doing the exact same external work for 2 or 3 weeks in a row.

This is because adaptation isn’t binary!  You aren’t “not adapted” for several weeks and then “totally adapted” one day without warning.  That isn’t how the body works.  You might have ups and downs so that you feel rough one day and then feel awesome the next day, but the gains that you achieve have been building over time.

So we don’t have to worry about increasing the weight, volume, intensity, etc. every workout (or every week, or few weeks, or longer, even).  It’s okay to find a comfortable spot and train there for a while.  

Because you’re probably still improving in some way.

Keep training, friends, and stay tuned for more discussions on this subject.  There is a LOT that can be said about this.  As always, be sure to ask questions in the forum as well if we don't address something that you're curious about.

- G

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