Progressive Overload Is the Gym Secret You Need to Finally Hit Your Fitness Goals

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Building strength and muscle is a process that involves a healthy dose of consistency, effort, and a plan. If you’re setting goals at the gym but not considering how you’ll continue, well, progressing after you nail that PR, you should know about progressive overload.

If you follow a workout program at the gym—whether that’s one a pro crafted just for you or one you pulled from an app on your phone—chances are there may be some level of it factored in. But no matter whether you follow a set plan or take group classes, understanding how this training tenet works can help you reach your goals safely, especially if you’re looking to get stronger and increase muscle.

We tapped the fitness pros to dive deeper into progressive overload training and help you understand how it works, the benefits, plus how to actually incorporate it into your fitness routine.

What is progressive overload training, anyway?

Whenever you exercise, you’re putting (good) stress on the body. Your body’s smart: It finds ways to adapt to this over time. That’s why doing a Bulgarian split squat for the first time can feel so freaking tough—but the next time you do the same move with the same weight, it seems slightly less challenging.

This is a good thing, but it is also why you can find yourself in a persistent plateau—that frustrating stage where your body remains at the same stage without progressing—after doing the same workout routine for a while. “Your nerves, muscles, and other connective tissue adapt quickly, so it’s important to give them new stimulus,” Noam Tamir, CSCS, founder of TS Fitness in New York City, tells SELF.

Enter, progressive overload training. This technique simply means working out in a way that slowly, but consistently, increases the “load” or stress to your body over time. This allows your body to continue to change in response: The work creates tiny tears in the muscle fibers, which, after they mend and recover, grow back stronger. The goal is to continually challenge your muscles in this way, so that they keep breaking down enough to be able to rebuild with even greater strength. The result: more effective workouts that keep your body getting stronger and better at your chosen activities. Don’t we all want that?

“Progressive overload is the principle of gradually increasing the stress placed on the body during training to create an increase in strength,” Tamir says. “This could mean not just doing heavier weights, but more reps at a certain weight or being able to do more complex movements,” he says.

The benefits of progressive overload training—and how to do it.

Progressive overload training is essentially all about making sure that you continually improve in your workouts. For many of us, this can make your workouts simply feel better, like you’re putting in the work and seeing the results—which can make you more likely to feel motivated to keep going and pleased with the effort you’re putting in.

“The rationale behind it [progressive overload] is that you need a stimulus in order to change, and few of us want to go through the effort of investing time into working on our fitness and not have it change,” Susan Sotir, PhD, CSCS, coach at Breakthrough Performance Coaching, tells SELF.

One of the changes you can expert? You keep getting stronger. Progressive overload training is pretty much the gold-standard method for doing this, per research.

What’s more, because one of the most important concepts in progressive overload is progressing gradually, it also helps you reach your lifting goals while protecting your body. Thanks to the slow, increasing loads over time, you have a better chance of preventing injury. “You must make sure to slightly increase the stress and not push the body past its breaking point,” adds Tamir.

Although there are many ways to vary your training and challenge your body, below are four of the most common ways to use progressive overload training in your fitness routine. You don’t need to—and should not—do all of these variables at once, FYI.

“All of those pieces help add stress, and you don’t need to do all of them—please don’t do all of them [at once],” Sotir says.“But you can choose from these different pieces, and it becomes a really fulfilling and long-term adventure because there’s always something you can choose to get better at.”

1. Increase Weight: Swapping out your dumbbells for their heavier cousins is perhaps the most well-known way to put this tenet into practice. So how much to bump it? Progressive overload ideally involves about a 10% (or less) increase each week, according to the National Academy of Sports Medicine. As Tamir points out, you want to avoid increasing too much too soon since this can put your body at risk for injury.

So if you always use 10-pound dumbbells for a move, you can try to use 11 pounds the next week for the same amount of reps. Of course, it can be tricky to find dumbbells or free weights in these super specific weights: In that case, you might have to go up a little more than 10% in weight—just make sure to drop your reps down in response. For instance, if your gym doesn’t have 11-pounders, but they do have 12s, you can go with them, but instead of doing 10 reps, you may only get 8.

2. Increase Reps: The 10% guideline applies here too. Think: Gradually increase and slowly up your number of reps that you can safely perform with the same weight. So if you’ve been doing sets of 10, you might bump that up to 11—then when that gets easy, you can either go to 12, or try one of the other strategies here to continue adding intensity.

If you’re wondering if increasing reps or weight is “better,” one study published in the International Journal of Sports Medicine found that increasing load and reps had the same effect on research participants’ one-rep max (a.k.a., the heaviest weight someone can lift for one rep). So whatever you prefer—or is more accessible for your training plan—is just fine!

3. Increase Time Under Tension: Every time you do an exercise, like a squat, for example, you’re putting your muscles under tension—that “time” you’re working is known as time under tension (TUT). So another way to apply progressive overload is by increasing the TUT for any given move. If you normally take three seconds to lower down in a squat, slowing down to four to five can add more challenge to your quads, glutes, and hamstrings.

4. Frequency: Frequency can look like increasing the number of days you train, or it can mean bumping up the overall number of training sessions. This can look like adding another day per week that you train (i.e., from three days to four) or increasing the number of sessions overall (say, by adding a second training session in the evening one day when you trained in the morning).

When is it time to use these progressive overload techniques?

According to Tamir, there are a few signs you’re ready to up the intensity. First, you can consider your RPE or rate of perceived exertion. “It’s a rating between 1 and 10, with 1 being the easiest and 10 being the hardest,” says Tamir. When lifting weights, “if you are not getting into those higher numbers around 8, 9, or 10, then you can increase the weight at the reps you have decided to go for.” Ideally, you should feel challenged enough at the end of your rep range where you almost can’t do any more—at least an 8 on the RPE scale. If you don’t feel that you’re quite there, then that’s a sign it’s time to employ one of these progressive overload techniques.

Another method Tamir cites is called reps in reserve (RIR)—basically, how many you have left in the tank until you can’t eke one more out. “If you are able to complete all the reps for the given sets and still feel like you have more than two reps at the end that you can do, you should go up in weight,” he says. Finally, another benchmark for strength training is assessing your rep ranges. If you tell yourself you’re going to work within a range (i.e., six to eight reps) and you can continuously hit eight reps, that’s a sign it’s time to increase your weight, according to Tamir.

Progressive Overload Training Tips

If you’re ready to try progressive overload training in your fitness routine, keep these tips in mind from the pros.

Progress does not have to be linear.

Yes, one of the core tenets of progressive overload is to bring you past fitness plateaus, but it’s important to note that there’s nothing inherently wrong with a plateau. In fact, Sotir says that sometimes it’s actually an important stage in your fitness journey.

“We need a flat stage where we are actually assimilating all of these new gains…. It’s gain, absorb, have it normalize, grow, then stabilize, normalize, own it, and then grow and then stabilize, normalize, own it,” she says. “That period of staying at a level and becoming really good at it is good for the muscular tissue, it’s good for the bones, it’s good for the connective tissue, but it’s also something that we’ve labeled as negative very often.” It can be thought of as being “stuck,” but she says it can also be seen as developing mastery. Then, once you’ve dialed in there, you can work on busting past it!

Proper form is key.

Form should always be a priority in your workouts, and it’s no different with progressive overload. “Don’t get caught up too much in wanting to increase weights all the time or increase quickly,” says Tamir. “This can lead to overtraining and injury.”

Make time for recovery.

Recovery is one of the most important things to prioritize in your routine, no matter your goals. “The things outside the weight room, including sleep, nutrition, and other recovery methods have a big impact on improving strength,” says Tamir. So if progressive overload is a goal for you, it’s even more important you’re taking rest days—you want at least 48 hours or two days off before working the same muscle groups again—and eating enough protein, carbs, and other important nutrients.

Trust yourself and your body—but don’t be afraid to push a little.

Sometimes it’s easy to get caught up in blindly following a training plan or comparing yourself to the person next to you at the gym. But Sotir advises trusting your own body and instincts, and only pushing yourself when you feel ready—definitely do not ignore your body if it’s screaming at you to drop your weight or take a break.

“Trusting your perception of your own experiences is really important. We are often compared against people who are bigger, taller, stronger, have been doing this for longer. But the reality is we know how we feel. We know if we feel weaker, we know if we feel stronger,” she says. “Trust what you think, but don’t lose sight of the fact that you are not just there to go through the motions. If you are trying to progress, you need to make choices that advance the ball a little tiny bit when you’re ready to do it.”