Georgia Personal Training
The Principle Of Progressive Overload
The Progressive Overload Principle states that in order for muscle to grow, strength to be gained, performance to increase, or for any similar physical improvement to occur, the human body must be forced to adapt to a stress or tension that is above and beyond what it has previously experienced. The way we explain this to our athletes is “muscle will only grow if you force it to grow, the body will only get stronger if you force it to get stronger”. You have to expose the body to a level of training intensity and stress that it has never experienced, and the body will be forced to adapt to this stress over time. As the body adapts, or gets stronger and stronger, the training intensity must continuously be increased to keep this adaptation process occurring.
The majority of people aren’t aware of, or don’t understand this principle. Which is why you see so many people that have been strength training for years but show little to no visible improvements in either strength or physique. It’s human nature to gravitate to what’s comfortable. Everyone wants a basic routine, with a simple set and rep structure that’s easy to follow and replicate over and over (3 sets of 10, 5 sets of 8, etc). Everyone wants to stick to lighter weights they can comfortably handle so they don’t get “too bulky”. Its an incorrect approach caused by a total lack of understanding of the human body and how it responds to physical training.
In the personal training world, trainers will often choose convenience and financial gain over optimal results for their clients. Instead of working one on one with a client, focusing specifically on their strengths and weaknesses, and personally guiding them through every set and every rep of a session, you’re more likely to see a large group of athletes going through a generic total body workout with limited supervision from 1-2 trainers. These workouts will typically consist of your basic squats, deadlifts, and lunges with light to moderate weight, staple core exercises like planks and crunches, and some sort of “speed” drills using cones, hurdles, or the agility ladder.
This is what most training programs found online, in high school weight rooms, and large group training sessions look like. Generic programs (one size fits all), light to moderate weight (so nobody has to struggle with technique), and a routine that can be easily learned and replicated over and over. This allows a trainer or facility to work with more and more clients at once as less personal attention is required. The end result is always the same. More money for the trainer, but no significant improvement in strength, speed, power, or performance for the athletes.
At GPT, the progressive overload principle guides every aspect of our training. As our athletes get stronger, their workouts get progressively harder. GPT athletes are striving to become as fast, as strong, and as explosive as their genetic potential will allow, and this is only possible when you push an athlete to their limits and beyond. A proper performance based training program should be specific, scientific, and constantly increasing in intensity. Our goal is to train every athlete as hard as possible without sacrificing technique or creating a potential for injury. Athletes from all over Atlanta gravitate to our reputation for intensity and hard work. We take pride in this reputation, but even more pride in the fact that despite the intensity of our sessions, we have never had an athlete suffer an injury during training in over a decade of operation. At GPT, we train harder and smarter than our competition, and our athlete’s results speak for themselves.