Improvement The Easy Way
The Surprising Effect Of Intentional Overload
I’ve been interested in training principles ever since I was a high schooler. When I first did a workout that resulted in significant strength gains, I was not only shocked and amazed, but I was hooked for life. In college, I dove deep into exercise science, and after graduating continued to read book after book, attend conference after conference, and dive deep into the research, all in a hope of finding just that small percentage for myself or for one of the athletes I was coaching.
I went deep into periodization, looked closely at what the optimum pre-workout supplement mix might be, and have been fascinated by all of the recent discoveries in athlete recovery. In the world of high-performance sports training, we get into the weeds pretty quick, and there are some really amazing and interesting things we see from human bodies being pushed to their limits.
It’s easy sometimes to look at the complexity of all this work and the cool spreadsheets you can come up with and start to get overwhelmed with what to do next. There are so many cool and interesting workouts and so many fun ways to put exercises together that it’s not hard to understand why group exercise programs like CrossFit and Zumba have become so popular. Add to that the fact that our attention spans are dropping precipitously, and it’s easy to understand how we can move away from the simple principles that consistently lead to athletic performance.
I have to remind my athletes constantly that soreness, fatigue, and sweat are side effects of training and not actual desired results. There is one desired result of training, and that is improved performance. If there is a downside to training, it’s probably that we need to do the same general things over and over again in order to teach our bodies to be better. I only say downside because that can be a little bit boring. Truth be told, I think all of us can use a little more boring in our lives.
My daughter is a high school Nordic ski racer and has been doing endurance-style ski training all winter long. Now that the season is wrapping up, she is moving into the gym to start training for next year because she is really excited about the possibility of improving. As we planned out some of her strength training, I reminded her that with each and every workout she needed to try to increase the difficulty of the exercises. If she did that consistently over this entire training cycle, there is no way she would not get stronger.
“Really? Seriously? That’s how it works?”
I think she thought there was something magical to the exercises, or that somehow doing the same exercises at the same loads over and over again would somehow make her just a little bit stronger. We talked through the way that her cross-country skiing season had progressed from shorter days at slower paces, working close to race pace in almost every practice toward the end of the season. I explained that strength training works the same way.
The magical two-way street of overload is easy enough to understand but hard to stay on. If we overload the system consistently over time, we cannot help but get stronger. The flip side is that if we don’t overload the system, we aren’t going to get any stronger.
It wasn’t long after the conversation about strength training with my daughter that I was reflecting on my own training and realizing that so often this past season I had forgotten that. That no matter what, in every single session there would be a way to advance. When I say something like this, it’s easy for people to dig for exceptionalism. By exceptionalism, I don’t mean extraordinary performance, but I mean trying to find their own exception to this rule.
“It is harder for me because…”
“I don’t have time/tools/money to…”
“I have _______ injury so I can’t…”
Here is the formula:
Pick one or two exercises that you know how to do and start to do them regularly. I like to see an athlete’s first three or four workouts be “too easy.” If you’re the kind of guy that likes to max out on the bench every Monday, you’ve got a long way to go.
If you’re really interested in getting stronger, keep the reps under about eight per set and maybe start with three or four sets of each exercise.
Next workout: add load. Obviously, you should only do this if you can do the exercise well and only add load by fractional amounts.
Any athlete of any age that is staying with it consistently should be able to continually add load for several weeks. Once you start to plateau and can’t add load in a subsequent workout, simply add another set at the same load.
Stick with this workout for 10 to 15 sessions, and you will have gotten stronger.
Next, pick a couple more exercises and work on those for the following 10 to 15 sessions.
We can periodize, we can do circuits, we can participate in fitness classes, we can follow workouts of the day, we can look at our wearable devices and ask for guidance, but at the end of the day, no other intervention compares to progressive overload when it comes to improving fitness. Your training should not be your entertainment. If you are like the vast majority of Americans, you are not lacking for things that will entertain you. Training is about teaching your body to become better. The sessions are not intended to be fun. The fun comes when you are out there in the world doing cool stuff and you realize how much the training helped you.