Progressive overload is a term you’ll hear if you hang around with dedicated gym-goers who lift weights. It’s unlikely you’ll hear it from people who have just started though.
“When you first go to the gym, you get those newbie gains,” says Mark Bohannon, a personal trainer at body-transformation specialist Ultimate Performance. “For the first few weeks, you get stronger and stronger, and then it becomes easy and you realise you’ve hit a plateau.” This is when you need to start using progressive overload techniques, Bohannon says. It’s a simple idea to understand: Gradually increase the stimulus on the muscle to force it to adapt.
