Episode 55: 7 Ways to Progress Your Resistance Training and Get Stronger
If you want to get stronger, build muscle, or improve your overall fitness, one principle is essential: progressive overload. It’s the key to continually making gains and ensuring your workouts remain effective. Without it, your progress will eventually stall, leaving you frustrated and stuck in a plateau.
In this post, we’ll break down what progressive overload is, why it matters, and how to apply it to your resistance training for long-term results.
What Is Progressive Overload?
Progressive overload is the gradual increase of stress placed on your muscles over time. Your body is highly adaptive—if you consistently challenge it, it will grow stronger and more resilient. However, if you don’t push your limits, your body will maintain the status quo, and your progress will stagnate.
The key is to make small, intentional increases in difficulty to keep stimulating muscle growth, strength gains, and endurance improvements.
Why Is Progressive Overload Important?
Prevents Plateaus – Without increasing the challenge, your body will adapt, and progress will slow down.
Builds Strength and Muscle – Muscle growth (hypertrophy) occurs when your muscles are consistently pushed beyond their current capacity.
Improves Performance – Whether you’re lifting for sport, functional strength, or general fitness, progressive overload ensures continued improvement.
Supports Fat Loss – Gaining muscle increases your metabolism, making it easier to maintain or lose weight.
Keeps Workouts Engaging – Seeing measurable progress can keep you motivated and invested in your training.
How to Apply Progressive Overload
There are multiple ways to implement progressive overload in your training. Here are some of the most effective methods:
1. Increase Repetitions or Sets
If adding weight isn’t an option, try increasing the number of reps or sets. For example, if you’re doing 8 reps of squats, aim for 9 or 10 in your next session.
2. Increase Time Under Tension
Slowing down the eccentric (lowering) phase of an exercise can increase muscle activation and growth. For example, lowering a squat over 3-4 seconds instead of dropping quickly increases the challenge.
3. Increase the Weight
The simplest method is to add more weight to your exercises. A good rule of thumb is to increase weight by about 2.5–5% for upper body movements and 5–10% for lower body movements when you can complete all your sets with good form.
4. Increase Training Volume
Volume refers to the total workload (sets × reps × weight). Gradually increasing this over time can lead to consistent gains.
5. Reduce Rest Time
Shortening your rest periods forces your muscles to recover faster, improving muscular endurance and work capacity.
6. Improve Exercise Form
Quality movement leads to better muscle activation. Refining your form ensures that you’re targeting the right muscles and reducing the risk of injury.
7. Incorporate Advanced Techniques
Once you’ve mastered the basics, techniques like drop sets, supersets, paused reps, and tempo training can add a new level of difficulty to your workouts.
How to Track Your Progress
To ensure you're actually applying progressive overload, keep a workout log. Track:
The weights you lift
The reps and sets you complete
Any changes in tempo or form
How you feel during and after training
This data helps you identify trends, adjust your approach, and stay motivated as you see your progress over time.
The Takeaway
Progressive overload is the foundation of strength training success. By making small, consistent increases in difficulty, you’ll continue to build muscle, gain strength, and improve your overall fitness. Whether you’re a beginner or an experienced lifter, applying this principle will ensure that your hard work translates into real, measurable results.
Want to take your training to the next level? Start tracking your workouts and applying these progressive overload strategies today!
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Jayd (00:00):
Sticking with a consistent workout plan and then progressively overloading within that workout routine. It's a great way to know whether your routine is working or not when you stick to a certain specific routine in order of exercises. This allows you to see your body gets stronger over time as you're able to add more repetitions to the same exercise or do more weight of an exercise over time. Hey there. Welcome to the Coaching Corner podcast. I'm Jayd Harrison, AKA Jaydigains. I'm a personal trainer and I created this podcast that I can share information and tips to help you build muscle, burn fat, and achieve your fitness goals. In today's episode, we're going to talk about seven different ways that you can progress your resistance training to make more gains. As you get stronger, you're going to need to give your muscles more challenge over time.
(01:01)
Sticking with the same amount of weight, the same number of reps and sets, and the same exercises over an extended period of time is going to inevitably lead to a plateau. But if you want to keep your muscles strong and get them to be even stronger, you're going to need to increase that challenge. So we're going to talk about how to do that in today's episode. And before we get into the episode, make sure to like this video if you are watching on YouTube and subscribe to the channel so that you always get the latest videos as soon as they drop. If you're listening to this episode, thank you so much. Make sure that you follow the show so you always get the latest episodes delivered to your device. If you're looking for an online personal trainer, I am taking on new clients from my Body Sculpt coaching program, so you can check out my website Jaydigains.com for more information on how to sign up. That's J-A-Y-D-I-G-A-N s.com. I hope to see you there. Without further ado, let's get into the episode.
(02:00)
Now, it's no secret that resistance training is a crucial piece of any exercise routine. Every week you should be doing resistance training at least one day a week to keep your muscles strong and to keep your bones strong. And resistance training is also the chief way to change your body composition by increasing your lean muscle tissue, which will help you to decrease the amount of your body that is fat mass. Now, many people make the mistake of sticking to a resistance training routine and keeping it exactly the same for weeks and weeks or months and months on end. When I used to work at a big box gym, I'd see it all the time, the same people coming in, doing the same workouts with the same amount of weights, the same number of reps, the same number of sets. Now, doing a specific workout program may initially help you to build muscle when it's new, but eventually your body is going to adapt to whatever routine that you're doing and you're likely going to hit a plateau.
(02:59)
In order to keep your muscles from hitting a plateau and to keep them getting stronger, you'll need to increase the challenge to your muscles over time as you get stronger, you should be able to perform more reps or more weight or be able to do more exercises and workout for longer. That's what you'll need to do in order to keep the stimulus going so you continue to get stronger over time, and we call this principle of increasing the challenge to your muscles little bit by little bit over time progressive overload. You don't need to be crushing yourself every day in the gym and doing super, super hard workouts. Just a little bit extra challenge every time you train goes a long way. It can be something as little as adding on five pounds to the exercise or adding on a few more reps to each set or changing the rate of motion and how slow you're performing the exercise so that you increase the time under tension.
(03:56)
Little tiny tweaks here and there to make each exercise a little bit more challenging. Every time you train will help to keep your muscles from hitting a plateau so you can continue to build muscle, get strong, burn fat, and keep your bones healthy. It also helps to keep your workouts from getting too boring. If you're doing the same thing all the time, it's easy to get bored and then fall off the wagon completely and stop showing up for your workouts. So you do want to add an element of change, something that's different to your workouts every time you train. Now, at the same time, it is important to stick to a workout program for a couple of weeks at a time, sticking with a consistent workout plan and then progressively overloading within that workout routine. It's a great way to know whether your routine is working or not when you stick to a certain specific routine in order of exercises.
(04:51)
This allows you to see your body get stronger over time as you're able to add more repetitions to the same exercise or do more weight of an exercise over time. I usually like to keep my clients on a consistent program where they're doing the same handful of workouts every week for four to six weeks at a time, and then I change up their workout program slightly so that they've got new exercises and a new order. This gives them just the right amount of time to see progression with the routine, but as soon as they start to maybe get a little bit bored of the routine, then we change it up again. Now, some people will stick to the same routine for as much as three months, and that's totally fine as long as you are practicing progressive overload within that period of time. Every time you train, you should be trying to add more challenge to your muscles even if you're doing the same routine.
(05:44)
So there are a couple of ways that we can do this that you can add more challenge to your muscles to progressively overload the exercise to progressively overload your muscles and keep them getting stronger. So let's take a look at how to do that now. Number one, the first way that you can increase the challenge to your muscles within a workout program is to increase the number of repetitions or sets that you do of an exercise. So in many of my workout programs, I start my clients off with a rep range of between eight and 12 repetitions, and I encourage them to start the first week or two of their program with an amount of resistance that is challenging for them to approach muscle failure at about eight, nine or 10 reps. And then over the course of the weeks that they have this training program, I challenge them to try to do one more repetition every time they do that exercise.
(06:36)
So in week one, they might do eight or nine repetitions in each set, and then week 2, 3, 4, they may be doing 9, 10, 11, and even 12 repetitions on the same exercise. Using that weight, you should be trying to push yourself to do more repetitions over time. For many exercises, I'll have my clients do somewhere between 10 and 15, sometimes as many as 20 repetitions depending on the exercise. When it comes to muscle building for your isolation exercises like bicep curls and tricep kickbacks, you really can push yourself to as much as 20 or 25 repetitions because the principle here is you want to keep the muscles under tension and burning that burning sensation as lactic acid builds up in the muscles is a really great way to help them to grow and get stronger. You also can just add another set to the exercise, which is what my coach commonly has me do as well.
(07:32)
Once you reach a point where you have been doing two or three sets for a while with that weight and within that eight to 12 number of repetitions, then you can add on another set to increase your total training volume. Another thing you can do, number two is increase the time under tension for your muscles. Slow your reps down. That is a great way to increase the amount of time that your muscles have to spend under load, especially when you slow down the extension or the eccentric phase of the exercise. This has a great hypertrophic effect on the muscles, which means that it stimulates muscle growth and strength gains. I encourage my clients often to perform each rep at a rate of about four seconds down with a two second pause at the bottom and then one second to come back up. If you've been doing the standard two seconds down, two seconds up rate of motion, slowing down your reps is going to feel like a big challenge, and that's a great way for you to continue to challenge yourself without necessarily having to add on more weight or do more reps.
(08:37)
Now, number three. Another way that you can increase the challenge on your muscles is to increase the amount of resistance that you use, namely the weight. So if you have been using 15 pounds on your goblet squat for a couple of weeks, maybe try the 20 or the 25 pound. You only want to gradually increase the weight in small increments, no more than about 20% of an increase at a time. Try to avoid huge jumps in how much weight you add to the exercise because greatly increasing the amount of weight could lead to injury. And keep in mind that as you increase the weight, you should only be using an amount of weight that you can execute the exercise with good technique and proper form. As soon as your form starts to break down, you should end the set. Don't count reps where you have to be sloppy on your form in order to get the weight to move, and if you find that you have to be sloppy in order to get reps out with that weight, you should not be using that weight.
(09:36)
Okay, we have a whole episode on ego lifting that you should go back and watch or listen to help yourself avoid this error. We never want to train with sloppy form. And number four, you can play with all three of the previous factors we talked about by increasing your total training volume. Training volume is the total workload and refers to the number of sets multiplied by the number of reps multiplied by the amount of weight that you use, and you can play with these variables by adjusting the number of sets, the number of reps, and the amount of weight that you use in order to give your muscles a novel stimulus and progressively overload your training. For example, if you have been practicing a five by 10 with goblet squats at 25 pounds for a couple of weeks, that means that your total training volume is 1,250, and in order to progressively overload this exercise, you could play with the number of sets, reps, and the amount of weight to increase that number to say 1500 or 1,500 to increase the total volume to 1,500.
(10:38)
You could reduce the amount of sets that you do to four and then increase the amount of reps you do to 12 using an increased amount of weight, 30 pounds, and this will come out to about 1,500. So you've played with all of the different variables in order to increase the total amount of volume. Now, another not as common variable to play with for progressively overloading your muscles is you can decrease the amount of time that you spend in your rest periods. This means that you're going into each successive set of every exercise with your muscles less recovered, so as your muscles fatigue, you're going to get more lactic acid building up, more burning happening much sooner in each set, so this increase in the challenge can yield lots of gains. Number six, another way that you can progressively overload your muscles is to improve your exercise form.
(11:29)
If you have been squatting with pretty shallow squats for a while, working on deepening your squats and breaking parallel to improve your squat form will challenge your muscles because you will be making the muscles have to work under a greater range of motion, so practicing your exercises with an increased range of motion is a great way that you can progressively overload and exercise. This also has the added benefit of helping you to reduce your risk of injury. The better your technique gets in an exercise, the less likely you are to hurt yourself doing that exercise even as you increase weight or increase your total training volume. And number seven, another way that you can progressively overload your muscles is to incorporate more advanced training techniques. You can perform variations of an exercise that are more challenging or that involves some kind of a balancing component.
(12:23)
For example, single leg squats, single legg deadlifts or exercises using a BOSU ball or stability ball. Adding a component of instability to an exercise makes the exercise harder, but it also makes your muscles have to work harder, and it also involves more muscles to keep you stable. You can also try other advanced techniques like paused repetitions or super sets. Combining multiple exercises targeting the same muscle group can also incorporate drop sets and more tempo training. You can also add explosivity to your movements like doing plyometric squats, box squats, and other explosive movements like this. All of these are great ways that you can keep the challenge on your muscles. I do have to say when it comes to doing these advanced techniques, the same rule applies to when you are increasing your weight only practice. Good form, we don't want to practice sloppy reps, so make sure that you're performing these exercises with good technique, keeping your body in alignment and keeping yourself safe.
(13:28)
A great way to make sure that you are practicing progressive overload in your training is to track your workouts. Like we said before, it is a good idea to keep a consistent training routine for at least three weeks at a time, and I recommend keeping a fitness journal so that you can write down what you do every time you train. This does a number of things. One, it creates a record for you to keep you motivated so that you can see your progress over time. It also will help you to keep track of what weight, what number of reps, and how many sets you should do, and other variables that you might change in order to progressively overload your muscles. It'll also tell you when it is time to progress your exercises. If you've been doing the same exercises, the same number of reps, same weight, et cetera, for a number of weeks, especially if you've been doing it for two weeks, then it's definitely time to advance.
(14:22)
Using a fitness journal also can help you to track other things around your training, like your readiness to train, how you're feeling before and after the workout, which is going to fluctuate over time. You can also write down how challenging an exercise was. Remember that we always want the exercises to be challenging in some way. If they feel easy, then you need to progress the exercise in some way unless you are doing priming exercises or mobility warmup and cool down exercises. When it comes to the challenge exercises in your workouts, you want to feel challenged. Now, I do have fitness journals that I sell on Amazon. You can find the link to those in the show notes or the description of this video if you're watching on YouTube. Many of my clients use these fitness journals and have found them very helpful. I use them for myself to keep track of my own workouts as well.
(15:12)
They're pretty simple, but very effective. Check out the link for that in the show notes or video description. Many of my personal training clients also use the A BC Trainer Eyes app. This is the app that I use to deliver my clients' workout programs for online training, and it includes not only a way for them to track their workouts, but it saves all of the data of previous workouts and previous times that they've done an exercise, so they always know how much weight, how many reps they should be doing. It also includes links to videos of how to do each exercise. You can find more information on that on my website, Jaydigains.com, and you'll get your workouts delivered to you through the Trainer Eyes app, which you can also use to track your workouts over time. You get a new workout routine every month that progressively overloads your muscles, and you'll be getting my help one-on-one each step of the way. You can find more information on that in the links to my show notes or in this video description. With all that said, the key takeaway here is every time you train, you should be challenging your muscles. You can change up your exercises, change up the number of reps you do, add more weight, change your total training volume in some way. Every time you train, you should be progressively overloading your muscles to keep them challenged and to avoid plateaus.
(16:31)
Thank you so much again for watching this video. Again, my name's Jayd Harrison, AKA Jaydigains. Let me know what questions you have by leaving them in the comments below this video if you're watching on YouTube, and also let me know how you progressively overload your muscles in your training. I'd love to hear how it's going, or you can join me while I'm live on my Twitch channel, Twitch.tv/Jaydigains, and you can chat while I'm live. I will see you in the next episode. In the meantime, take care.
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