The Progressive Overload Principle & the Truth About Overtraining

Buakaw Banchameck, a champion muay thai kickboxer with an unbelievable record of 249- 24. frequently kicked over banana trees to strengthen his shins and strikes

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In Thailand, muay thai kickboxing is a lifetime commitment for its practitioners. From a young age, practitioners wake up early in the morning and undergo a rigorous routine that involves kicking heavy bags, banana trees, even metal poles, deliberately damaging the shins so that they will heal, becoming denser, stronger, and harder over time. And the shins, miraculously, do! Also, the nerves in the shins deaden, causing them to hurt less over time (although pain never fully subsides). Furthermore, motor patterns and “muscle memory” are acquired and retained. This is all done for one purpose: to be able to kick hard enough and kick long enough to win one fight after the next fight after the next fight.

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Dina Averina, who has dominated rhythmic gymnastics with three world championships, was trained from a young age along with her twin sister, Arina, to maximize her extreme genetic potential in the realm of mobility and flexibility

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The same can be said for rhythmic gymnasts in Russia who endure grueling stretching sessions from a very young age to make their joints and muscles pliable enough to contort their bodies into superhuman positions. The goal each session is to stretch farther and hold these positions longer until they become second-nature to the individual. Screaming and crying are not uncommon during these sessions, and many in the United States would consider this child abuse. 

These are extreme examples of the progressive overload principle: doing more and more each day so that you can achieve more and more each day.

Milo of Croton was a pseudo-mythological historical wrestler in Greece who lived during the 6th century. He is said to have carried a baby calf until it grew up with him until it was a full-grown bull, by which point he had achieved unrivaled strength and musculature.

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The progressive overload principle is crucial to your success as an athlete. Human beings have a remarkable, God-given, evolutionary advantage to adapt to different stresses by becoming stronger and faster, increasing their stamina, and becoming more resistant to injury among other things. We acquire these adaptations through the course of our training, by doing more and more progressively over time. “More and more” to a strength athlete can mean more weight lifted (intensity increase), or weight lifted for more reps (volume increase), or the same weight lifted for the same reps but with less rest between sets (endurance increase). It can mean running faster or for a longer period of time for an endurance athlete.

The human body is capable of several incredible adaptations including increasing muscle size, increasing bone density, accessing more and different muscle fibers (I, IIA, IIX), increasing Vo2 max (the ability to use oxygen), increasing tendon and ligament strength, and much more.

This sounds absolutely amazing, doesn’t it? It almost reminds you of a little Japanese fight anime called Dragon Ball. In Dragon Ball, a humanoid alien race known as the Saiyans possess the ability to recover from hard training and near-death experiences by becoming exponentially stronger (like, able to destroy planets, stars, and galaxies stronger). This “zenkai boost” (as it’s known) gives them an advantage over other beings who may start off powerful but whose power levels generally stay the same unless the plot calls for it to change. Afterwards, the Saiyans sleep a lot and eat a lot, so much so that it’s comical. It’s compelling and all, but you are not a Saiyan and this isn’t Dragon Ball. You don’t recover and become exponentially stronger overnight, and if you truly pushed yourself that hard you’d either regress (begin to lose your gains because your body’s recovery mechanisms can’t keep up) or you’d actually die, and there are no Dragon Balls to wish your sorry carcass back to life. Seek Jesus.

Saiyans in the Dragon Ball franchise train a lot, eat a lot, and sleep a lot.

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If it makes you feel better, you’re more like 3% Saiyan. We take much longer to recover as human beings than these fictitious characters do. However, we DO recover, and we are capable of an incredible adaptation known to the former Soviet Olympic athletes and coaches as “supercompensation” (“super” as in “a lot” and “compensation” as in “making up for”). Supercompensation means that your performance capacity after training is higher than your performance capacity before it. Your body makes up for struggling with a stress (i.e. running, lifting, stretching) by adapting to it so that it doesn’t struggle with it as much the next time. From an evolutionary perspective, your body only does this to give you a better chance at survival--meaning, giving you a better chance of killing & eating prey, outperforming your peers, getting mates, and reproducing. It doesn’t really know that you’re trying to lift more, run faster, kick harder, throw farther, and so on. Those are more like bi-products (side-effects) of the process. 


THE TRUTH ABOUT OVERTRAINING

One thing I want to emphasize is that you can and will lose these increases in performance if you don’t continue to train them or if you overtrain them. Overtraining does exist, it does occur, and--regardless of what the bodybuilders and YouTube fitness “gurus” tell you--YOU ARE NOT IMMUNE TO OVERTRAINING! 

The body can only adapt to so much and for so long. Time is of the essence: time to rest and time to rebuild. Imagine if I contracted you at 5 PM in the afternoon to build a 50-story tower by TOMORROW because I really, really, really want a 50-story tower by TOMORROW. 

It’s not going to happen. It just doesn’t work that way. It doesn’t matter how I feel, how much I want it, how motivated I am, how much I’m willing to pay, how many people I have working for me, etc.. There is a process to building a tower that can’t be skimped over--things like getting the land and building rights, letting the cement harden, installing steel beams, and so many other things that need to be done in order to execute the project. Imagine if, after every floor you’ve built, you then took a sledgehammer and smashed a chunk of it. How can it ever be finished? Imagine if you had a wound and you kept picking at it over and over again. How can it ever heal? This is the same thing you have to keep in mind when trying to avoid overtraining. Your muscles, your bones, your joints, and your central nervous system need time to recover. 

You have a maximum recoverable volume that you must stay in to avoid sabotaging your own progress by overtraining. In short: you can’t go 110% 110% of the time, just like you can’t all-out sprint forever and you can’t perform your true one-rep max forever. It would be ideal in an ideal world, but we don’t live in an ideal world. You have work, you may have kids, you may have pets, you have chores, you have other things that require your time and energy.

The Bulgarian weightlifters who popularized the Bulgarian method (essentially doing max clean & jerks and snatches nearly every day) had the advantage of that being their only job. Everything would be provided for them. They would be taken care of by the government so long as they didn’t get seriously injured or start to suck. You don’t have that luxury. You also don’t legally have access to the performance-enhancing drugs and pain-killers they were possibly on and blood-doping they possibly did to keep up with that level of wear & tear.

According to Louie Simmons and Chris McGrail, you require 72 hours between heavy and dynamic upper and lower body days. In simpler terms, you have to wait three days to hit the lower body again after a lower-body heavy or speed day, and the same thing applies to upper body. In the in-between time you can do core, cardio, stretching, yoga, dancing, and a range of other activities as long as they don’t over-tax the system.


HOW TO USE PROGRESSIVE OVERLOAD

    Mark Rippetoe of Starting Strength and Practical Programming fame recommends adding 5 lbs. to each of your foundational lifts every workout session (48-72 hours) until this is no longer possible and very small micro-loading (0.25-3 lbs.) may have to be used instead, usually for late-intermediate to advanced lifters. This is actually very good advice and fundamentally sound for beginners and early intermediates, however it does highlight an all too painful reality: you’ll plateau eventually (duh). Rippetoe is not shy about this fact. Beginners can recover faster and make more progress faster than an intermediate or advanced person.

Louie Simmons of Westside Barbell explained that more advanced training should be done in three-week cycles, alternating lifts and exercises as well as reps and sets from week to week for three weeks so that the body cannot accommodate to it (get so used to the stimulus that it feels it no longer needs to get better). Simmons goes on to say that this is because the training effect in relation to performance acts in what he calls a three-week “pendulum wave.” Pendulums swing and sway, neither gaining or losing energy unless a new stimulus is introduced into the system. That is actually a decent analogy for what actually happens. The magnitude to which your training will effect your performance will peak around the three week mark at the end of each cycle and then either stagnate or decline afterward if you don’t change things up (introduce a different stimulus).

What I personally recommend, as you’ll see in my workouts plans, is that we alternate between different variations of lifts (squat, bench, deadlift, overhead press, push-press, rows, etc.) and rep schemes (8x1, 5x5, 4x4, 3x5, 9x3, 3x10, 4x8) to avoid suffering a drop in performance after each three-week wave or stagnating, seeking and working up to a maximum bench, squat, and/or deadlift at the end of it.