Hey HYBRID community,

Today we will go over the idea of progressive overload and/or stimulus.

This is the idea in resistance training that requires to progressively increasing demands on your muscles to make continual progress to achieve your desired results. 

Where do we start?

To understand this we need to have knowledge of where ones training is currently at, whether beginner, novice or intermediate in terms of how much experience one is the stimulus needed to change will be on a continuum meeting each persons needs. That continuum is defined by different things, such as exercises, intensity, volume, and frequency of training to name a few. 

Resistance: 

The most common stimulus or overload is increasing resistance of the actual weight, for example first two weeks we may be pressing 10 lbs for 12 repetitions rather easily, now to increase the demands on the body to create change we go up to 15. There is a limit to this of course as holding 150 pound dumbbells across your chest isn’t a great idea for most. 

Reps and Sets:

Another form of progressive stimulus may come into play is repetitions of an exercise or even extra sets which will create overload.

Let’s use the same example as above, and say we hit 10 pounds for a chest press for 12 reps for 3 sets – this week we went up to 15 pounds but only got 8 reps for 3 sets. In order to progress, our new focus can now shift from focusing on the amount of weight we are pushing to increasing reps from 8 at 15 pounds to possibly 9, or 10.

This will of course all be logged by your trainers at HYBRID! So don’t worry if this seem like it will get too complicated or overwhelming – this is good information to know how improvement can be tracked in the gym! 

Exercise Selection: 

This last form of progressive overload I’d like to introduce is exercise selection. The same holds true here if there is an exercise that a person is not good at, or if it’s simply a new exercise. As we begin to train that movement, the body must adapt to the demands placed on their body by that exercise. If you are new to training this could be as simple as doing a split squat exercise with no weight. However, as we begin to improve on technique of this exercise we can then use the above methods to add load (increase weight) and continue to progress this exercise through that continuum. 

As trainers at HYBRID we do the best we can in bridging the gap and meeting our clients where they are. We hope that understanding a process like this can be helpful to your fitness goals! 

Stay Strong,

Julio Martinez

PS. Interested in learning more? Get in touch with our team and start unlocking your gains today.