AG Coaching

Forget everything else for a second. This
is the one thing you MUST do if you want long term muscle growth.

Progressive overload means training must stay challenging over time. It guarantees your training will stay effective as you get bigger and stronger.

Why? Because it maintains the number of stimulating reps in each set as your progress. The reps closer to failure are the most stimulating to muscle growth.

As you approach failure on a set, your brain recruits more and more muscle fibres to keep lifting the weight.

The brain keeps the largest groups of fibres in reserve until last. Which means the last few reps are stimulating the most muscle fibres and making them grow.

But unless you add reps, load or volume over time, you'll start losing these reps.

It's easiest to illustrate this with an example.
Let's say you start a training phase doing 3 sets of 10 with 100kg.

It's tough; you end up 1-2 reps shy of failure on each set. You pick up plenty of those stimulating reps, and you get bigger and stronger.

By week 6, you're still doing 3 sets of 10 with 100kg. Now you're more like 4-5 reps away from failure. It's still challenging, it's still growing “some” muscle - but your workouts are easier.

Now you're getting fewer maximally-effective reps. To keep getting the same number of those super stimulating reps, you'd need to either:

- Increase the weight
- Increase the reps
- Add more volume
- Or a combination of all three

All situations mean doing more reps within range of failure. This is applying the principle of progressive overload.

If you don't apply progressive overload, your workouts will contain fewer of the most stimulating reps over time. That means the muscle-building stimulus will get smaller and smaller.