Getting Off Your Fitness Plateau with Progressive Overload
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Hey sister, are you stuck on a fitness plateau?
You know I’m the biggest advocate for honoring your body with movement daily. It’s so great for both your mental and physical health. But if you want to take your results to the next level and change your body composition, it’s going to take a little bit more than just movement. It’s going to take some progressive overload.
A plateau happens with your fitness because you are repeating the same demands week in and week out. When you do this, your body adapts. Progressive overload is this simple principle that involves continually increasing the demands you place on your muscles to ensure you are continually making progress with muscle growth, fat loss, strength, and endurance. Essentially, in order to continually see results and get over your plateau, you must continually make your muscles work harder than they're used to working.
So if you work out regularly, or honor your body with movement regularly, and are stuck on a plateau, this episode is for you!
If you loved this episode, you will also love…
Episode 19: How Much Weight Should You Be Lifting?
And be sure to follow the podcast on the ‘gram, @embraceyourreal, for a daily dose of real talk!
TRANSCRIPT:
Hey there beautiful human. You're listening to Embrace Your Real with me, Julie Ledbetter, a podcast where I empower you to just be you. With each episode, I dish you a dose of real talk and actionable advice for building your confidence, honoring your body and unconditionally loving your authentic self. Stay tuned if you're ready to embrace your real. Let's get in and let's go.
Hello. Hello. Welcome back. I am so excited about this topic. Let's chat about building the body you want and getting over a plateau. You know if you follow me that honoring my body daily is a huge part of my life. But when you have goals and you're wanting to build the body that you want and have serious goals, whether it's strength goals, distance goals, whatever your choice of movement is. At some point, you're going to have to step up the game. Otherwise it's just natural that you will plateau. And I don't know about you, but to me, being stuck on a plateau is literally one of the most annoying things in the world. So if you work out regularly, if you honor your body with movement regularly, and you just feel like you're stuck in a plateau, I want to introduce you to progressive overload, if you've never heard about it. So let's dive into the episode about progressive overload.
Before I do, I have to share this super sweet review of the day. It comes from Chris Marie F. She says, "Love it. So uplifting. I'm new to listening to these podcasts. I started listening to Julie the other day. I was actually recommended on another channel, which brought up Julie's. I thought, what the heck? And I clicked on her podcast and started listening and instantly loved her topics. And she's just so inspirational and uplifting to listen to. I believe I just finished episode 59. It was about the foods you are consuming, if it's helping or hurting. I am on day two of no caffeine due to the way that it makes me feel and this episode just clicked with me. Julie is now my morning inspiration with my cup of tea." This is so awesome. Thank you so much for the review.
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Progressive overload. Okay, so essentially progressive overload is the simple principle that involves continuously increasing the demands that you place on your muscles to ensure that you're continually making progress with muscle growth, fat loss, strength, endurance, et cetera. So essentially in order to continue seeing results and for you to get over your plateau, you must continually make your muscles work harder than they're used to working. So the plateau that you're experiencing typically in fitness plateaus happens because you're repeating the same demands week in and week out. And as a result, your body adapts. And this is the same kind of concept with how our body adapts to macros.
So if you count macros, if you know how much your body needs protein, carbs and fats, you have a goal, whether it's fat loss, maintenance, muscle gain, whatever your goal is, your body, eventually at some point will hit a plateau if you are constantly feeding your body the same amount of protein, carbs, and fats, which is a good thing, showing that you're number one, staying consistent. And two, whatever your macros are, you're going to either need to increase your caloric deficit or decrease your caloric deficit, whatever your goal is.
But this is not about macros. We're talking about workouts, but I just wanted to say like the correlation of our body's adapting and plateauing happens from a bunch of different ways. And this specific way of your body plateauing with your workouts, progressive overload will help you so, so much. Think about it like this. If you were to run a mile every single day for a month, at the first few days, that mile will most likely feel extremely hard. But by the end of the month, you probably won't even break a sweat because your body has been conditioned to run that mile. It made the necessary changes to meet the demands. And once it adapts to the running that mile, it no longer needs to change to meet the demand. So we can repeat the process here. So let's say the next month you run two miles every single day. Again, the first few days, and I'm not saying you need to run one mile every day or two miles. This is just a hypothetical to kind of give you the concept.
So let's say the next month, you run two miles every day. Again, the first few days, those two miles are most likely going to be extremely hard, but by the end of the month, it's going to become easier and you will likely break a very small sweat, and it won't be something that you feel is as difficult as it was on day one. So keep that in mind when it comes to lifting weights or whatever program you're on. This same concept applies when it comes to resistance training or any type of training that you're doing, you need to progressively increase the demands you're putting on your body to ensure that it continues to change so that you don't plateau. Progressive though, is the key word here, progressive meaning developing gradually or in stages like proceeding step by step.
So ask yourself about the workouts that you do. How long have you picked up those two, ten pound dumbbells for dumbbell curls? How long have you done three sets of twelve reps for your squats? When was the last time you changed the demands in your workouts? So for me, if you've been following my Instagram story, we are in week three and four of the Honor Your Body Challenge. And in my challenges, the last two weeks of the challenge, I introduced progressive overload because it's so important for our bodies to break through that plateau and continuously challenging our bodies in these workouts. For example, in week three, we're doing the same workouts that we were doing in week one. So if you've been watching my Instagram stories, I have been telling you like what I've been increasing. So for example, I was doing these two way bicep curls. And the first week I did 2 10 pound dumbbells. So I was doing 20 pounds total, and I just moved up to 2 15 pound dumbbells. So I was doing 30 pounds, total. Same amount of reps, but just increased my weight.
Or for sumo squats, week one, I was doing a 20 pound dumbbell. And on week three, I moved it up to 30 pound dumbbells. So for me, essentially, I am lifting a total volume higher in the same amount of time. So I did not change the reps, I just increased the weight. That's one way, and there's many different ways that you can implement progressive overload into your training. So, like I said, number one, you could increase the resistance. I suggest small jumps to ensure you're maintaining proper form. If you're using 8 pound dumbbells, try using 10 pound dumbbells, or 12.5 pound dumbbells, or if you were using 10 pound dumbbells, try using 12 or 15 pounds, it's increasing the resistance. That's one method of implementing progressive overload into your training. And I'm specifically talking about resistance training now.
The second way that you can introduce progressive overload is increasing the reps. If you can not move up in resistance either you don't have access to the weights or you feel like you can't perform the movement with the proper form at the higher weight, you can always try adding in a few more reps. Keep in mind the muscle building rep range is anywhere from 8 to 12, which applies to most of the compound movement. So for example, if an exercise that you're doing calls for 8 reps or 10 reps, try completing 10 to 12 reps instead of the 8 to 10. That's one way to implement progressive overload is by increasing the reps. Or if for another example, you see AMRAP, as many reps as possible. If you see what you did last time in one minute, try beating that, increasing your reps. Let's say burpees, last time you did eight burpees in one minute, try doing ten burpees. The next time you do that exercise for a minute. That's another way to implement progressive overload.
Another way is to increase the overall volume so you can increase the volume in set. Let's say for example, a movement calls for 12 reps. Since it's not recommended that you go above that for muscle building, if that's your goal, you want to build muscle, you want to become stronger. You could add in another set. For example, if the super set is 2 sets of 12 reps, you could add another set. So you could do 3 sets of 12 reps, and that will overall increase your volume for that exercise. And then another way to implement progressive overload is to decrease your rest time in between sets. So this is a great one if you don't have access to other weights. I know a lot of us are still working out at home. So you're limited in terms of equipment and or you feel like you can't go up in weight and still maintain proper form. You either don't want to, or can't add more sets or reps, decrease the rest time in between sets.
Essentially this will allow you to do the same amount of work in less time. It will allow your body to become more metabolically efficient in regard to anaerobic exercise, AK, weightlifting. So let's say for example, if the rest timer says 30 seconds in between rounds, try resting for 15 seconds or 20 seconds instead. That's another way to implement progressive overload into your training.
And one last way is if you've been doing a certain exercise modified, maybe you tried an exercise and you were like, this is too hard for me to do the modified version. Another way to implement progressive overload is just by doing the normal exercise. A great example is like the walkthrough burpee versus a regular burpee. I know a lot of people are scared of burpees or they just don't feel like natural with it when they first start. I encourage you to try to do the full movement. And I talk about these things in particular, because inside my Movement With Julie program, we do a lot of different types of movements. So for about 95 to 97% of every movement in the app has an alternative movement. I really think that's important because we're a community of all different fitness levels and experiences and access to equipment and things like that. And so there's so many ways that you can implement progressive overload into your training.
These are some specific ways that I was just talking about with my challenge girls, because it's amazing what can happen when you implement progressive overload. And it's been so encouraging to see these women challenging their bodies and feeling stronger day by day, as they blow past the limits that they thought that they had.
One piece of advice that I want to remind you of is that progress does not happen in one big shift. It happens in the little intentional things that we do during our training sessions and outside of our training sessions as well. So when you do start implementing progressive overload into your training, it's so, so important that you prioritize rest and recovery, just as much as you're prioritizing, like trying to increase your overload in your workouts because your body needs that time. I've talked about it before, but rest and recovery is so important.
And then another tip with progressive overload is to not implement all of these things at once. And the reason being is because you want to be able to have options if your body then hits another plateau. You want to be able to then add in another type of progressive overload into your training. You don't want to do all of these things, you don't want to change up every single thing like increase your weight, increase your volume, increase your reps, decrease your rest time. Don't do that all at once. That's an easy, easy way for you to burn out your body and we are looking for longevity here. We want you to become stronger over time. So try to stick to one, if not two things that you can implement into your progressive overload with your training.
For example, for me, I've been really focusing on upping my weight on specific movements. And on the ones that I just feel like I can't maintain proper form, I would maybe add in a few more reps, but I'm not decreasing my rest time and I'm not increasing my volume by adding sets. One way that I'm implementing it is increasing my resistance. And then for some, I'm increasing some reps on two specific things.
So the question that always comes up with progressive overload, and this is okay, that's great, but how much should I be lifting? I actually talk about this in episode 13. So go back and check out the episode. I'll link it in the show notes. I basically talk about how to determine how much weight you should be lifting when you first start out, how to know when you should be lifting more weight and how much weight you should increase at a time and why it's important that you track the weight that you use for each exercise. Basically that is progressive overload in a nutshell. I want to challenge you to incorporate progressive overload into your workouts.
Like I specifically gave examples with resistance training and also the beautiful thing about my workouts inside the app is that I constantly on a regular basis, like on our weekly workouts, that all of my ladies do when they're not doing the challenges, there's new workouts every single week. So I never want you to get bored. And that's one thing that I've found to be super effective is implementing fun and creative and effective workouts weekly. But you'll notice that sprinkled within the workouts weekly, you might see sumo squats last week and you'll see it again the next week. So there's ways to get stronger in the weekly workouts inside my app by implementing progressive overload. There's a really cool feature in my app where it said suggested. So if you logged your weight last time in the app, and let's say you did 20 pounds on a sumo squat and you logged that, the next time you have sumo squats, you'll see suggested. That is going off of what you did last time.
So if you want to implement progressive overload, just know last time you did 20 pounds. So you could either up it to 25 or 30 or whatever, but at least it gives you that benchmark. Like I said, in episode 13, I talk about why it's important to be logging your weight. And that's a perfect example because you have the history so that you know, why am I feeling like I've plateaued? And then you recognize, oh, it's because I'm not increasing my weight or I'm not increasing my reps or whatever.
So this was just kind of an overview on progressive overload. I hope that you found it helpful. I would love to see what you learned from it or how you're adding progressive overload into your workouts. So post it up on your stories. If you're in the challenge, continue to crush it, you are doing amazing. I'm so proud of you. I'm so proud of all of the ladies. We have literally hundreds of ladies who are increasing their weight every single day on their workouts, and they're just crushing it. And so I'm so proud of you. If this was helpful, I would love to know. So be sure to screenshot this, post it up in your story, tag me, Julie Ledbetter. And tell me what your aha moment is, or one thing that you plan to implement into your training moving through forward. I love you so much and I'll talk to you guys in the next episode.
All right sister, that's all I've got for you today. But I have two things that I need you to do. First thing, if you're not already following me on the gram, be sure to do so, Juliealedbetter. Yes, it's with an A in the middle, for that daily post-workout real talk, healthy tips and tricks and honest accountability to keep your mind and heart in check.
The second thing, be sure to subscribe to Apple Podcasts to never miss an episode. Thank you so much for joining me. It means the absolute world. And I'm going to leave you with one last thought. The most beautiful women that I have met in my life are the ones who are completely confident and secure in being authentically themselves. Remember that beauty goes so much deeper than the surface. So go out there and embrace your real because you're worth it.